Extraterrestrials traveling in high-tech flying saucers contact a scientist as part of a plan to enslave the inhabitants of Earth.

Earth vs The Flying Saucers came out 70 years ago.  The special effects aren’t convincing, but the movie doesn’t rely on spectacle.  Nobody is fat, the cars and clothing are vintage, and everyone is competent. 

It’s only got an IMDB rating of 6.3, but after watching it, you don’t have that tired feeling you get from modern movies, like you put more thought in to the movie than the people who made it.

I’m just going to cover a few notable parts because you can watch the movie on Youtube if you want.

Hugh Marlowe, the guy in the middle, is the scientist in charge of  the rocket program.  The woman is his secretary, and now his wife.  The old guy is her dad and a general.

The general just got into town, so Trixie has him over for a cookout.  They see these weird lights floating around the rocket launch facility.

Trixie says something like, “Yeah, we see these around the rocket base all the time.  They are so common, we hardly notice them.”

These orbs are seen by all the scientists at the rocket base, and nobody is concerned?

Spoiler Alert:  The orbs are alien surveillance drones.

The rocket base has been launching satellites.  Trixie says, “Satellite 9 should be coming around any time now.  Oh, there it is.”

You thought that girls couldn’t do science.  Trixie is just a secretary, and even she understands orbital mechanics.  That doesn’t look realistic, but this was a year before Sputnik, so nobody knew what a satellite in orbit would look like.

Hugh wants to communicate with the aliens via shortwave radio. He’s got a fine looking rig. 

It looks like it weighs 20 pounds, but it works.  The aliens want to meet, so Hugh has to escape military escort.

If that parking garage had been sealed up with those beautiful cars inside, they’d be worth millions now.

Hugh meets the aliens and gets some ideas for a new weapon system.  When the eggheads are ready to test the new weapon, an orb enters that laboratory.  Hugh’s military escort thought it was a good idea to start shooting inside an industrial engineering physics lab.

The military escort may have been sore because Hugh evaded him in the parking garage.  Nobody else thought it was a bad idea to start shooting in the lab.

The scientists have been busy.  They had captured an alien helmet from one of the aliens that they’d killed.  These invaders were not hard to kill if they were outside of their ship.

Of course the helmet is made from an unknown material not found on Earth.  The nerds at the Bureau of Standards call the material “Solid Electricity”.  Seriously?  And modern audiences thought unobtainium and vibranium sounded stupid.

As an aside, take a closer look at this device.

Have you ever day-dreamed about winning a big jackpot like the Powerball?  I’d find the guy who made this device, and have him design my house.  Then I’d have a competent architect verify the design since this is a movie prop and not a piece of industrial equipment from the mid 20th century.

Doesn’t matter, I don’t buy lottery tickets and the guy has probably been dead for decades.

Women are props in the movies also.  There is always an attractive woman who is probably the daughter of a high-ranking minor character and the love interest of the guy who becomes an unlikely hero. 

The men fight for Earth, and the women remind them of what they are fighting for.

Occasionally they give the woman something trivial to do so she doesn’t seem completely useless.  In this case, Trixie is given the microphone to demonstrate the language translation feature of the alien helmet.

This is her chance to shine, so in her mid-Atlantic accent, she has to say something apropos and profound, drawn from the Western canon.  A quote from the Bible, Shakespeare or some ancient Greek philosopher will do. 

How else will people know that she went away to a proper women’s college, instead of  some rummy secretarial school downtown.

Using the alien translator to come up with a dictionary, a bunch of recorded alien transmissions were fed into a mechanical computer.

That was a real thing.  By setting different gear rations, the mechanical computer could add, subtract, multiply and divide.  With clever mechanisms, the mechanical computer could take the derivative or integral.

I don’t know how that would work with sounds and words, but I don’t know how it works with digital computers either, so who’s to say?

The output device looks bloody unlikely.

It’s difficult to believe there ever existed a mechanical linkage that could write in cursive, but it looks real.  Maybe that’s just a prop, and some guy practiced writing with chopsticks.

In all of these movies, there comes a time when the brainy scientist has to get out of the lab, and go to ground.  It’s customary to end up in combat with the love interest.  Hugh at least had the foresight to pull out his cool looking leather bomber jacket from his time in the war.  It still fits.

Absent sophisticated special effects, these movies had to get an emotional response by choosing images that would strike a cord.  In this movie, it all took place in Washington DC, so all of our best monuments and historic buildings were targeted.

Usually these movies end with some profound insight into the nature of Man, God’s creation or eternal vigilance.  This one ends with the aliens just not attacking anymore, so Hugh and Trixie go on their honeymoon. 

I’ve seen orangutans with less hair on their backs than Hugh has, but it was a different time.

Earth vs The Flying Saucers was a good movie from the era, but not great.  Communication was established with the aliens, but it was never clear how many there were and what they wanted.  The description says they wanted to enslave humans, but that wasn’t really clear.  Most of the conflict came from miscommunication.  Not having a definitive end to hostilities also left the situation vague.

I give it a 7.5 out of 10 because modern movies are so dismal.