The Man from Planet X, 1951, dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1951, Movie Night at Tom’s (on Blu-ray), Tuesday, October 4.

In 1950, Edgar G. Ulmer hauled his cameras and crew onto the old sets of Universal’s Joan of Arc film (the one with Ingrid Bergman) to shoot a quickie sci-fi flick. He must’ve found some fog machines cheap, because he loaded up these sets with steam to hide that walls and cables and other stuff to make fake-France now look like fake-Scotland. Probably they settled on Scotland because they couldn’t think of anyplace that had more fog.

The problem appeared to be that they got everyone together, actors, too, and discovered they forgot to write a script. The Man from Planet X is beautiful to look at thanks to Ulmer’s camerawork, the lighting, and the fake but strange sets. It fails miserably because it’s not ludicrous—the best B movies have plots that make no sense even under the influence of drugs. Here, like von Trier’s Melancholia, a rogue planet is zooming towards Earth—it moves, like a spaceship, actually, bringing with it the titular villain/good alien. But in this movie, things just happen because something has to happen and the guy who wrote the script was a factotum. The film stars Margaret Field, who looks and sounds exactly like Jennifer Jones but who turned out to be the mother of Sally Field.