It’s still one of the most uniquely sober and intelligent genre films of its era, in its meditation on a conflict between alien arrivals and humans where the humans are the most dangerous, but the aliens aren’t necessarily all peace and love either. The script is brittle in places, especially close to the start – ‘Holy cow!’ Carlson remarks dramatically when confronted with a gigantic smoking meteor crater – and the acting less than intergalactic. The insistence of so many films of the period in having square-jaw dullards like Carlson playing nerds is always amusing. But director Jack Arnold, as became his trademark in the handful of strong genre films he made at this time, achieves a kind of terse, noir-sodden poetry, aided by a story laced with Ray Bradbury’s dexterity of imagination, as the seemingly barren desert becomes a spine-tingling space full of alien life, both large and small, newly arrived and primeval.
Unlike Arnold’s slicker Creature from the Black Lagoon, it doesn’t subvert its more incisive interests for a monster hunt. It’s the first of the alien-possession films too, and though not as driven as Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it’s also more probing and more morally complex. There’s a breath of real mystery to sequences like when the aliens take possession of people, and quiescent eroticism when Carlson pursues one alien who has taken on the illusory form of his girlfriend (Barbara Rush), changed from eager suburban miss to a black-draped femme fatale, who tries to assassinate him. It presents an intergalactic culture clash, where the aliens are cleverly shaded opposites of the humans they encounter.
Carlson’s John Putnam is defined as a intellectual misfit, resented for his curiosity and difference, and he becomes the ideal catalyst then for first contact, to the point where Carlson finally confronts their leader who has taken on his own form, reflecting his own yearning and probing imagination, but also his own limitations and paranoia, back at him. It could be called a companion piece to another ’53 film, The Wild One, which is also about a group of disturbing “invaders” who provoke equally disturbing reactions from the “normal”, whilst commenting on the difficulty of communication between creatures of vastly divergent experience, revealing the hidden faultlines in the consciousness of the decade we have come to remember as a settled, conformist, and optimstic period. It Came From Outer Space is the superior film, not merely for being less sensational, but for the acute way it entwines both the ambitions of its time, its sense of limitless horizons, and also its deeper troubles, the fear of the unknown both within and without.
