Director – Herbert Greene, Screenplay – Arthur C. Pierce, Producer – Robert A. Terry, Photography (b&w) – John F. Warren, Music – Paul Sawtell & Bert Shefter, Special Effects – Charles Duncan. Production Company – Allied Artists Pictures Corporation.
Cast
Bruce Bennett (Dr Karl Sorenson), John Carradine (The Cosmic Man), Paul Langton (Colonel Matthews), Angela Greene (Kathy Grant), Scotty Morrow (Ken Grant), Herbert Lytton (General Knowland), Walter Maslow (Dr Rich Richie), Lyn Osborn (Sergeant Gray)
Plot
The military track an alien object as it comes down in the Bear Lake area near the town of Oakbridge. They and various scientists rush there and find a mysterious white sphere that floats several feet off the ground. They set up base at the nearby lodge run by widow Kathy Grant. They attempt to employ all methods they can to enter the sphere but it proves impervious. Meanwhile, a mysterious shadowy figure, who is nicknamed The Cosmic Man, is spotted around town. Head scientist Dr Karl Sorenson tries to argue that The Cosmic Man’s intentions are peaceful but the military are determined to perceive him as a threat.
The 1950s was the great era of Alien Invasion cinema, beginning with The Thing from Another World (1951) with the genre finding its feet with The War of the Worlds (1953). Most 1950s films featuring Aliens were of the alien invasion variety. It is however worth remembering that the first few aliens of this period to appear in films like The Man from Planet X (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and It Came from Outer Space (1953) were peaceful in nature where the problem was more one of humanity’s fear and military reaction to them. As the decade progressed, aliens developed an overwhelmingly hostile nature. The Cosmic Man is one rare example among the films that followed where the alien is benevolent.
The Cosmic Man is a low-budget 1950s SF film. It borrows a whole stack of pages from The Day the Earth Stood Still – the peaceful alien who signs into a boarding house and befriends a widow; the alien’s appeal to the scientist who is able to perceive that its intentions are peaceful as opposed to the distrust of the military; the revelation of the alien’s ultimately benign intentions; the quasi-miraculous scenes where The Cosmic Man heals the crippled child, and where The Cosmic Man makes a resurrection after being shot. There are no real surprises to the script – that the stranger at the motel is The Cosmic Man, that The Cosmic Man will heal the kid in the wheelchair.
John Carradine, who was then a horror actor throughout the 1940s, playing Dracula in a couple of Universal films, is the only majorly recognisable name present as the title character (although scientist Bruce Bennett had previously been the serial Tarzan). The Cosmic Man comes with Carradine’s distinctive voice – on the other hand, it is not clear if Carradine actually is on screen at all. For most of the time, The Cosmic Man appears either as a shadowy figure or someone swathed in overcoat, hat and what look like joke store glasses. It feels as if the producers have done something akin Edward D. Wood’s trying to cover for Bela Lugosi’s death in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) and used Carradne’s voice while getting someone else to stand in for the role.
The Cosmic Man (John Carradine) appears to Angela Greene
The Comic Man doesn’t have a very great reputation. The effect of the Cosmic Man’s sphere is simply a plastic ball hung in mid-air. Better is the effect of the shadowy figure of the Cosmic Man walking around the town, which is quite an unusual effect used by superimposing a negative. One of the more amusing things is how the film was clearly shot around Los Angeles where some of the locations have subsequently been used by other films to the point of instant familiarity. We are told that Griffith Park Observatory is the Pacific Tech Institute, while the Cosmic Man’s sphere comes down outside the same Bronson Canyon cave where Ro-Man in Robot Monster (1953) also lurked and was used in assorted episodes of Star Trek (1966-9).
