The Beast with a Million Eyes (

1955

)

After surveying a few reviews, essays, and books on 1950s sci-fi it occurs to me that I may be the only person in the world with generally positive feelings about The Beast with a Million Eyes. The film received a mostly scornful reception upon release, though it did manage to make money (how could it fail to with a measly budget of $20,000). That in and of itself is nothing special, plenty of 1950s sci-fi classics were maligned at release, but it seems that the power of hindsight hasn't improved the film's reputation much either. Genre fans to this day tend to regard this film with contemptuous disdain. Paul Blaisdell's biographer Randy Palmer holds the whole film in contempt except for, of course, the nifty monster Blaisdell made, and this is a guy who had genuinely positive feelings about Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)! Bill Warren in his encyclopedic survey, Keep Watching the Skies, is more positive than most and even he confesses “it's pretty rough going.”

It's not that I don't understand where the vast majority of the criticism is coming from either: This movie is extremely slow and any viewer will have to prepare themselves to slog through huge stretches where the closest thing to action is a tedious dialogue scene inside a shabby farmhouse. Other slow films from the era could rely a bit on their goofy monster costumes (The Voodoo Woman (1958) and The She-Creature (1956) spring readily to mind), but the only monster in The Beast with a Million Eyes shows up for about thirty seconds at the end of the movie! Worst still, you can barely see the thing because the only footage of the creature is partially hidden behind a transparent overlay of a gigantic eye (which is a real shame because many of the monster's more charming details like its bat wings and the chains around its feet are obscured).

I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that we even got that, the original plan was to have no monster at all. It was only after film distributors revolted at the idea of screening a film called The Beast with a Million Eyes that had no beast in it, that director/producer Roger Corman hired Paul Blaisdell (his first job as special effects artist in the movies) to make a monster puppet for a pitifully small price. The monster looks very little like the creature promised by the film's lurid poster, which is somewhat disappointing given the fact that it's a rather nifty design. Worse still, the babe in her underwear also doesn't turn up anywhere in the film's proceedings, and you would assume that this would be easier to work into the script than a new alien monster.

That said, I think the redeeming factors of The Beast with a Million Eyes more than outweigh the negatives. The monster, the real alien menace not the puppet that it controls for three seconds at the end of the film, is a unique conception. An alien creature that has no psychical form, just psychic energy, that survives by dominating a series of physical hosts for itself is an interesting and novel concept in 1955. Its ability to control a multitude of lesser creatures sets it apart from monsters like Gor from The Brain from Planet Arous (1957), who can only possess one human being at a time. The core message of the film is also quite interesting in the context of 1950s America and sheds a little light on how our forbearers saw themselves and their family, making this film like Tobor the Great (1954), a surprisingly useful cultural touchstone for people interested in the era more broadly. There's also a surprisingly strong emotional core at the center of the movie, and even though one of the main characters can't act her way out of a paper bag, I found myself caring about these people and their plight. Still, if you're the type that found Gog (1954) unbearably slow and ponderous, beware, The Beast with a Million Eyes is even worse!

The movie makes its worst mistake in the first minute of runtime when the alien invader announces his nature and his plan to the audience via voice-over narration. It is a psychic monster that can easily dominate the minds of lesser animals, like birds or dogs, and with a bit of effort even control human beings. I assume that the filmmakers were worried that audiences wouldn't be able to understand the nature of the alien creature, given that it is an incorporeal disembodied monster that survives by controlling and feeding off more traditional lifeforms. However, the place for this explanation is not in the first seconds of the film. Having this monologue here robs the rest of the film of mystery and tension. The audience knows immediately what the alien is and what it intends to do. To make matters worse, the monologue is even accompanied by footage from later in the movie showing exactly which animals and people the titular beast will control as its pawns. This movie needs a spoiler warning for itself!

From there we jump into another monologue, one that would be far better as an introduction to the film than the one that precedes it. Here, Allan Kelly, the proprietor of a failing date farm waxes poetic on his and his family's miserable existence. It isn't just the bad harvests or the desolate landscape though that's got him down. No, there seems to be some unnameable weight pressing down on him and his family, driving them into hatred and bitterness. “A growing, twisting thing that's slowly destroying us.” Just what he's describing here is left totally up to the audience to imagine, though it seems to be referring to the grinding poverty the family must endure, that is gradually leading them to despise those that they should hold most dear. This monologue is the first indication that The Beast with a Million Eyes, despite its lurid monster movie title is going to be unusually focused on small, domestic dramas.

Alan himself seems to be bearing it with a certain stoic resolve, but his wife Carol is on the verge of a mental collapse. The poor woman can't even manage to cook a meal (she burns both dinner and lunch) without crumpling into a hysterical mess. She openly despises her husband for leading her away from what appears to have been a comfortable middle-class childhood and into the desolate semi-squalor of the failing date farm. She even admits to hating her own daughter, Sandy because she's “so young and pretty with all the best years ahead of her... The years I missed.” Despite all these negative emotions and hysterics, Carol does seem to genuinely love her family. Indeed, on the very day that Carol says she hates her daughter, it's revealed that she has also prepared a birthday surprise: a new dress that could have only been purchased with careful scrimping and saving for many months. She feels as I suspect many men and women have felt with regards to their families: Trapped, yet still deeply fond of all the things that are holding her in place. We're dealing with an unusually complex and compelling leading lady, especially for a period sci-fi film. Indeed, the only other film that I can recall that offers a similarly intriguing role for a woman is Dr. Lisa Van Horn from Rocketship X-M (1950).

The other unusual figure on the Kelly farm is Him, a deaf-mute lobomite who hangs around doing odd jobs for Allan. He's called “Him” because he can't speak and therefore can't tell the Kelly's his name, and presumably, he is too feeble-minded to write it down. However, as we learn at the film's climax, his real name is Carl and he's a member of Allan's old military unit; his mental disability is the result of a mistake in judgment by Allan that lead to him being shot in the head. Allan kept him fed and employed on the farm as an act of penance for his mistake. This raises the rather serious question of why didn't Allan ever tell his family Carl's real name. It seems needlessly cruel to keep him around and refer to him only by an obscure moniker when he knows full well what the man's name was.

In any event, the really interesting part about Him/Carl is not his name, the nature of his mental retardation, or his history with Allan. No, what makes the mute handyman so interesting is the foul shadow that he casts over the rest of the film. He is a dirty, unpleasant figure from the start with an air of sexual menace hanging over him. Now obviously, this was a 1950s creature feature, so nothing explicit can be said onscreen but the visual storytelling is quite obvious, even to sexually desensitized audiences in the 21st century. Carl/Him sleeps in a squalid little hut, which he has decorated with clippings of pin-up girls taken from magazines. He spies on Sandy when she takes a swim in the nearby creek and seems openly hostile when her boyfriend, Sheriff Larry Brewster turns up. Watching the pair of young lovers leave for a date, Carl/Him sullenly sulks back into his shack, when he emerged again eagle-eyed viewers might notice that his fly is down.

Given the loathsome appearance of Him and his mysterious nature, most audiences would assume that he was somehow bound up with all the disturbing events that start unfolding. At least they would if the opening sequence hadn't announced that it's all being done by an alien invader, and the accompanying footage telling us that Him will be quickly dominated by said alien. Oh well, at least we have an interesting figure hanging out on the periphery in the meantime.

Life on the Kelly date ranch is going along more or less normally, until one day a mysterious low-flying aircraft passes over the valley shattering every glass in the farmhouse and tipping Carol off the edge into out-and-out hysterics. The glassware was the only thing she had left from her childhood and its destruction hits her hard. Of course, there are worse things afoot after the mysterious sonic boom. All across the valley animals begin to act strangely, birds swarm and harass locals, an old cow kills the annoying old farmer trying way too hard to be funny that owns her (Chester Conklin, an over-the-hill silent movie star who probably should have stayed retired), and even Duke, the Kelly family dog, turns and attacks Carol (in a scene that might be more menacing if the dog would stop wagging his tail).

However, these strange events have the unexpected effect of drawing the Kelly family together and reminding them just how much they love one another. This turns out to their advantage because the alien invader has trouble mind-controlling anyone with close personal connections. Hell, even incidental connections are enough to throw it off, like when Sandy and Him/Carl bump into each other in the desert while the alien is trying to dominate both of them, and then both snap out of the spell and go back home. While any type of connection can throw off the alien's groove a bit, genuine love seems to render it completely incapable. Indeed, when the alien finally corners the Kelly family not only can he not kill them, but their combined love is enough to cause his slave monster (the being of pure energy presumably needs somebody to pull the levers and turn the dials on his starship).

Interestingly, the alien himself is initially confused by these feelings of love and affection, as his species had long ago cast off the concept of tender feelings. The alien society is organized around power and domination with all concepts of family and friendship being as forgotten as their long-discarded physical forms. Hence, the extremely sappy revelation that human love can overpower the alien's psychic control. It's just something that the alien was completely unprepared for, and gave his potential victims the strength to resist his control. In the end, he cannot even manage to keep Him/Carl under his thumb for long and Him/Carl is barely even cognizant.

It would be fair to critique this turn of events as overly saccharine and cliché even in a 70-year-old movie. However, it does touch on something rather interesting about the world of 1950s America and provides us with a viewpoint that is lacking in most assessments of the era. Most analysts of the fab 50s carry with them the unconscious biases of the, usually boomer, authors doing the analyzing. To them, the 1950s are a period of stability and stagnation because their memories of the period are merged with the pleasant haze of their childhood.

To the adults who lived through this period though, they must have seems like the first timid steps onto a vast, unknown continent. Most Americans in the 1950s were aware that they were living in an unprecedented and frightening new world. Sure, some of the changes were welcome ones, they were more prosperous than their forebears, lived in big suburban houses instead of cramped urban tenements, and drove huge gas-guzzling cars. Other changes were more unsettling, like America's new position as the de-facto leader of the free world after generations of splendid isolation. And other developments were almost entirely negative, most notably the imminent prospect of nuclear war.

Of particular concern to us here though is the popular vision of a future where individuality is strangled on one hand by the collectivists communist East and on the other by the conformist corporatist West, which would gradually transform mankind into something distinctly less than human. Indeed, this prospect was made all the more believable by the age around it, an age where already much of society had been radically transformed. The notion that mankind (or at least human society) could undergo a radical change, not unlike the aliens in this movie, was not altogether unbelievable in this context. Yet the 1950s wouldn't be the 1950s if Americans simply accepted this transformation as inevitable. Having seen the world already transform for the better, Americans of this time were unwilling to believe that we were simply doomed. No, this evil future could be averted through either faith in God, respect for democratic institutions, or (in the case of today's movie) love for one's family.

Curiously, I've seen a lot of critics try to tie this movie to The Birds (1963), but there is little evidence to suggest any real connection. The swarms of birds attacking cars and pedestrians are mostly a sideshow for the alien menace, serving either as a sign to showcase its growing power or as a plot device to prevent Allan, Carol, and Sandy from fleeing the date farm. The real threat is the alien's ability to psychically dominate larger creatures, from Duke the dog, to the old cow, to feeble-minded men like Him/Carl. The main weakness of the alien is its unfamiliarity with the power of love and affection, which allows the humans to resist its insidious influence. None of this has anything in common with either Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds (1963) or Daphne du Maurier's short story on which it was based. The former is more interested in psycho-sexual conflicts within the family a possible explanation for the strange behavior of the avians, and the latter uses the bird attacks as a metaphor for the civilian experience in England during WWII (particularly the blitz). As much as I'd like to imagine Hitchcock watching the film and frantically scribbling down notes, sadly any resemblance between the two films is most likely just a coincidence.