Not of This Earth (1957) 3 of 4

not of this earth 

** spoiler warning **

In a society based on assimilation, infiltrators need only learn language and behaviors, but terror unfulfilled eventually yields to laughter.  As the paranoid decade cracked a smile, Hollywood sci-fi enjoyed its first golden age: 1956's Forbidden Planet and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man, and 1958's The Blob, The Fly, and I Married a Monster From Outer Space.

Garland posing for Corman's Gunslinger

Roger Corman's original version of Not of This Earth (1957) is overtly comic.  Like so many in midcentury, an alien vampire is drawn to Southern California, where his predatory habits escape the notice of suburbanites working their own angles.  These include teens, with their insistent slang, a new phenomenon meriting notice.  Charles Griffith and Mark Hanna's script is witty and inventive, yielding a hybrid of The Outer Limits ("The Duplicate Man," maybe) and Mad Magazine.

Setting the tone for a subgenre (Planet of the Vampires, Lifeforce), the space-vampire (Paul Birch) has the power to cloud men's minds.  Passing as businessman "Paul Johnson," his first meals are easy: a 40ish blood-bank doctor, a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman (Dick Miller).  As paperbacks and magazines then warned, aging and/or white collar men are at risk for dehumanization.  This is America, so stalwart resistance comes from the humble margins: a free-spirit chaffeur (Jonathan Haze), a motorcycle cop and his love interest, nurse-with-moxie Nadine Storey (Beverly Garland).

Garland was a pistol, and she's the droll center of Not of This Earth.  Ephraim Katz's The Film Encyclopedia notes a career "hampered by frequent confrontations with producers and the press."  Collating with her persona: she had a backbone before fashionable.  Garland is more alive than anyone else in the film (there's a pall over Johnson), and credible as alien-fighter: a well-turned blonde is expert around predators.

Beauty also sparks humor, like an anthropomorphized road runner chased by a coyote.  Perhaps the only thing worse than an old man's advances is one, as here, who refrains completely.  As Paul's private-duty nurse, Nadine's task is merely "seeing to it I do not expire."  (He always talks that way.)

Old-weird-Johnson is from the troubled planet Davanna; like the ottoman Dick Van Dyke tripped over, "divan" suggests a xenophobia of objects.  As in The Invaders a decade later, these aliens are collectivists, as they literalize pejoratives: anemic, bloodless, dead-eyed, death-warmed-over.  Their quasi-vampirism has scientific causes, as in I Am Legend (published 1954).  Finally, like the Vidians of Star Trek: Voyager, the Davannans sacrifice others to survive disease. 

Johnson's mission is evaluating humans for "pasturing," i.e. as livestock (compare Daybreakers), with transport to Davanna, evidently, through a mirror, frame festooned with ping-pong balls.  Enthralled, Nadine is set as the beta-test, but the hero cop runs Johnson into a ravine and fiery death.  The tag teases a never-made sequel.  This low-budget lark was cheaply remade in 1988 (with slinky Traci Lords) and 1995 (Elizabeth Barondes and Michael York).  It's past time for another.