William Cameron Menzies' 1953 film, Invaders from Mars has always been the stuff of nightmares. Even in bad prints on TV, and even on a ricketly black-and-white set in the Seventies, for example, the movie has exerted a hypnotic power on viewers. It looks like a dream, and never more so than now in this stunning restoration from Ignite Films.
The story of David (Jimmy Hunt) lost in a world of mostly unbelieving adults as a Martian invasion gets underway in the suburbs, Invaders from Mars now shines bright in this wonderful new blu-ray presentation. The colors are vivid and eye-catching, but not overwhelming, and the film retains the look of a film, without suffering from that dreaded soap opera-ish quality that some pictures get on blu-ray. The 1953 tale of paranoia and fear retains a mood that remains unnerving. More than even Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Menzies' moody melodrama is feverish, borderline hallucinatory in spots, and wonderfully garish in others. It's hard to know what seeing this was like in 1953, but it still feels a film you imagined you'd woken up and seen on TV at 3 A.M. one night. And for many of us, that's more or less how we did see it. But seeing it on this Ignite Films edition is like seeing it for the first time.
The painstaking restoraton project by Scott McQueen, formerly of the UCLA Film & Television Archive's preservaton department, is the kind of undertaking that's sure to please any film fans. Drawn from an Eastman color camera negative, the print looks superb. There's a film-y quality here that I appreciated. This looks glorious, but it doesn't have that fake-y, videotape-like look of too many things from subsequent decades put on blu-ray. Skin tones are bright and clear, and the textures and colors similar to the best films from the era, with the carefully-chosen color schemes from director William Cameron Menzies rendered better than they've ever looked. As David descends further into his plight, the whole drama glimmers with the glow of a vivid nightmare. Menzies wasn't intent on producing something realistic, but perhaps a child's candy-colored perspective of how things seemed. Here, the stark clarity of good and bad is up-ended as David faces a Martian invasion he's unable to escape from, in a world of suddenly untrustworthy adults. There's a Powell and Pressburger quality to some of this, with Menzies using the beauty of the imagery to illustrate a vision that's haunting and wonderfully unreal.
Loaded with extras on the film and its restoration, and a nicely detailed booklet, this blu-ray edition of Invaders from Mars (1953) is highly recommended. The folks at Ignite Films are to be praised for undertaking this monumental project of film restoration.
Invaders from Mars (1953) can be purchased directly from Ignite Films.
[Imagery from Ignite Films website.]
