An Old Testament opening of black and white clouds with lightning breaking. Phantom From Space. “It began after sundown…” The warning, then the leap into stock footage. An unidentified object is traced by time above Alaska, flying across British Columbia on to California, disappearing in L.A. Mobile units set out, a couple of thick cars with antler antennas, in and out of shadows. Flushed from the night, a woman runs up from the water’s edge, “This man he just kept coming at us, it was awful.” “Who?” “I don’t know! He was wearing a suit like a diver.”
W. Lee Wilder directed this opening in 1953, eight years after arriving in Hollywood. Soon, he would make two more films, Killers From Space and The Snow Creature in 1954. In an endless night sky, this trilogy will survive the trials of planet Earth as his everlasting memory.
Before he landed at Republic Studios, among the fabled Poverty Row horrors, Willie Wilder had emigrated from across the Atlantic ocean to grow in New York city. The years passed there as he directed the Manhattan everyday workings of Wm. Wilder Co, Inc., Original Handbags. From the broken poverty of a Europe after war, he seemed to have found his way in to the American dream. In such spirits, in 1935 he sent for his younger brother to join him in the new world.
Billy Wilder recalls the day, “My memories of my brother are like
old faded photographs from a long time ago when we were children in the
Astro-Hungarian Empire, which was in the Dark Age . . . I remember him in his place on Long Island when he met me at the ship—-when America was new for me and when the snow was white and fresh.” (1)
A man with a bandaged head is grilled at the police station, snapping,
“How would you feel if somebody with a crazy helmet with pipes sticking out of it came at you in the dark? Look, I know this sounds crazy but there wasn’t any head in that helmet.” Searching for a lost signal, a “mysterious interference” the sedans mounted with gigantic kitchen whisks continue to scour the muddy night sky. There’s so many day for night shots jarring with such sincere narrated effort to pin down shifting time and place that by now the film has dropped into the surreal. More weird witnesses testify. Burning oil fields, trailing a disturbance, Theremin, cigarettes, coffee. A crazy reporter with a pipe and a photo of the Moon: “If you want to know how things turned out, read The Chronicle in the morning.” Chased around pallets, catwalks, hunted by Geiger counter, the Phantom finally removes its helmet and suit, escaping invisibly. It may be free, but it is trapped in the Griffith Institute labyrinth without its radioactive, magnetic, indestructible suit and its breathing apparatus helmet. The Phantom’s one chance for survival in a strange land comes when it tries vainly to communicate with a human named Barbara.
Likewise, Billy Wilder admits, “My brother and I never talked much. We were never close in anything except age…We never had much to say to each other.” (2)
“A code…” Barbara observes as the invisible being taps scissors on the table. “1 . . . 1,2 . . . 1 . . . 1,2,3 . . .” but when she happens to reveal the Phantom’s hand with an ultra-violet lamp, she lets out a shriek, and the chase is on again. “Too bad he got wise to us and took off his uniform or we’d have been able to catch up with him by now.” “But if he was trying to tell us something, why did he run away?” The minds of scientists and police devise a simple plan. Yet it is a barking housepet named Venus that finally hunts the Phantom down.
Phantom From Space introduces itself as “the story of a handful of people who in the course of one desperate night held back a wave of panic and pandemonium.” Hardly. Most of the time it drifts like a slow pale kite. The Phantom, who can’t even be seen, poses no danger except accidentally. This is simply the tragic tale of an astronaut doomed to wander a hostile planet as long as his one air tank holds out.
Movies like this live in another realm altogether, especially when viewed in context of the big budget films of the day. It’s no wonder that one such Hollywood director Billy Wilder would observe: “My brother went to America. He had a good business in New York. He was in leather, but he sold his company to make movies. They weren’t anything that interested me, so I didn’t see them. I saw one. I didn’t expect much of it, and it didn’t let me down. It wasn’t even bad, which is worse. He should have stuck with leather purses.” (3)
But W. Lee Wilder, in his rather tedious and heavy crafted fashion, created a work of recognition—matched by the gray light and gloomy shadows of dawn—it is filmed insomnia. Who would want to go to this world unless you already know it for what it is: the place in between dreams.
Next page: "Mayday! Mayday!"
