Unearthly Stranger, directed by John Krish, is a weird little British programmer that emerged in 1963 and channels all kinds of English and American horror pictures while sporting its own style. It’s not very well known, but we’ve now got it on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, looking and sounding excellent, with no less than two commentary tracks.
As the credits blare the title Unearthly Stranger, we’re looking at a tilted angle of London’s iconic Westminster Bridge, especially a huge streetlamp designed in a Modern Phallic style. A sweating and be-sweatered man abruptly rushes into close-up from stage left, looks at the night sky around him as the score twitters, and begins running hell for leather amid many shots of his feet.
We’ll come to know this terrified man as Dr. Mark Davidson of the Royal Institute for Space Research. He’s played by celebrated Shakespearean John Neville as a cheekboned boffin who swings between complacency and panic.
Amid many high-angled perspectives, including vertiginous shots down the eye-well of a huge spiral staircase, Davidson rushes into an office and begins spilling his story into a tape recorder. This triggers the flashbacks that will take up most of Unearthly Stranger’s short running time.
These flashbacks are more abstractly conceived than personal, since Davidson is absent from many of the scenes and would have no knowledge of them. This conundrum reveals something of the script’s haphazard development, as we’ll explore directly.
After slipping back in time a few days, we find Professor Munro (Warren Mitchell) arriving jauntily at the office and telling his efficient secretary, Miss Ballard (Jean Marsh), that he’s cracked part of a super-duper math problem. He sashays into his office, looks up and about him in ghastly surprise at high-pitched whistling, and keels over backward in dramatic fashion, as presented in a flash-cut to a photo of his picturesque corpse.
His mysterious death is discussed by his boss, the stern-faced and balding Lancaster (Philip Stone), and by a jolly, officious security officer, Major Clarke (Patrick Newell), who is given to robust vests. Their exposition tells viewers that the facility is working on a fantastic top-secret project that will send human minds through space and time without worrying about spaceships and stuff.
Lancaster and Clarke bicker about security, as they endlessly do, for much of the action inUnearthly Strangeris men arguing in offices and going over what they’ve already gone over. It’s a device for padding the 80-minute film without spending money. The stuff in between is what grabs our attention, and Krish is a good enough director to maintain visual interest during both the grabby stuff and the talky stuff.
Davidson is the dead scientist’s replacement. He’s just returned from vacation in Switzerland, where he abruptly married a bombshell named Julie (Gabriella Licudi). She’s introduced in a clever flashback within the flashback, and there’s more than one of those. Before we’ve even met her, however, Davidson is raving that she sleeps with her eyes open, never blinks, and has no pulse! He’ll then spend the rest of Unearthly Stranger sticking his fingers in his ears and humming whenever anyone suggests there’s something odd about his “alien” wife.
We might surmise that, perhaps having not much experience with women, Davidson has fallen so head over heels that he doesn’t care if Julie’s weird, and we like him for it. By that point, viewers have seen enough of Julie that we like her as well, especially when she cries so disturbingly after an uncanny scene about schoolchildren that riffs on a recently popular British horror film, Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1960).
As discussed in the commentary by film historian Gary Gerani and the other commentary by authors Bryan Reesman and Max Evry, the story seems to originate in William Sloane’s 1937 novel, To Walk the Night. To describe its premise would be simply to give away what’s happening in Unearthly Stranger, although it’s got an extra twist or two up its sleeve.
The film’s story is credited to American actor Jeffrey Stone, and he sold it to producers Julian Wintle and Leslie Parkyn, who ran a small UK studio called Independent Artists. They hired Rex Carleton to write his own script. Evry quotes from an interview in which Krish states that he hastily rewrote the whole thing in the handful of days before filming, when he was hired to replace a previous director.
This chain of events explains much of what’s wonky in the construction ofUnearthly Stranger, but viewers will focus on those crackerjack scenes of paranoia, terror, and quietly chilling “something is not right” moments. Furthermore, even the continual tension between the jabbering men conveys a sense of rivalry, locked horns, and professional queasiness that works in favor of the movie’s commentary on traditional sex roles. The small cast of characters includes two women, one a traditional housewife and the other a secretary, as events tilt toward a creepily implied gender war. The ending’s a doozy.
Horror fans will be reminded of films that Krish and his producers must have seen, such as Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Sidney Hayers’ Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn, 1962), and Gene Fowler Jr.’s I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). Unearthly Stranger fits snugly into their league of gender politics and political paranoia and is just as worth watching.
Wintle and his producer, Albert Fennell, would work prominently on the British spy series The Avengers (1961-1969) during its Diana Rigg era, of which Krish directed three episodes while Newell and Mitchell had recurring roles. Krish also devoted his keen visual attention to The Wild Affair (1963) and Decline and Fall of a Birdwatcher (1968), one of my favorites of the decade.
Krish is greatly abetted on Unearthly Stranger by the moody black and white photography of Reg Dwyer and the nimble editing of Tom Priestley, who would soon work with Karel Reisz, Peter Brook, and John Boorman. I run hot and cold on Edward Williams’ score, which runs from spooky to overstated.
If you’re seeking full-on horror or spectacular sci-fi, you won’t find them in Unearthly Stranger. What you will find is an excellent cast in a visually engaging tale whose conceptual restraint and subtlety make the freak-out moments all the more effective and memorable.