Director – Paul Landres, Screenplay – Pat Fielder & George Worthing Yates, Story – George Worthing Yates, Producers – Arthur Gardner & Jules V. Levy, Photography (b&w) – Jack MacKenzie, Music – Gerald Fried, Art Direction – James D. Vance. Production Company – Gramercy Pictures.
Arthur Franz (Dave Hollister), Kathleen Crowley (Carol Dahlmann), Robert Brown (Matt Hollister)
Carol Dahlmann arrives in Campeche, Southern Mexico. She is in search of her husband Howard, the head of a chemical company, who disappeared while in the area. He was searching for X-117, a satellite that disappeared soon after being launched, presumed to have burned up in the flame barrier of the atmosphere, which he believed came down in the jungle instead. Carol offers prospector Dave Hollister money to lead an expedition into the area in search of Howard. Dave refuses because it is nearing the rainy season but Carol pleads and raises her offer until they reach a deal. Joined by Dave’s younger brother Matt, they set out, having to deal with dangerous animals and superstitious natives along the way. Nearing the area, they realise that the satellite has brought something back from space and that it is having a deadly effect on the area.
1950s science-fiction cinema was a decade filled with unease. Even aside from the vast numbers of alien invaders and atomic monsters that overrun the era, there was anxiety about the very issue of spaceflight itself. Films like The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), War of the Satellites (1958) and First Man Into Space (1959) were filled the fear that the very act of venturing out of Earth’s atmosphere into orbit would prove too much for astronauts to endure or would have deadly consequences and bring back something monstrous.
The Flame Barrier is another of these films that taps this naked anxiety. The Soviets launched the first satellite Sputnik in October 1957. The Flame Barrier was mounted to exploit the newfound fascination with satellites and came out six months later in April of 1958. There would also still have been fascination with Chuck Yeager’s breaking the sound barrier in 1947 and in the same sense of a sound barrier the title The Flame Barrier imagines something similar that orbits the Earth.
The peculiarity of The Flame Barrier is that it has an opening that announces it is an SF film and then the bulk of it actually turns into an Adventure Film. This plays by the standard book of the jungle adventure film – the venture into uncharted jungle territory; the superstitious natives; the rebellious bearers; assorted dangerous animals – snakes, spiders, a gila monster. The bickering relationship between hard-headed Arthur Franz (a regular B movie actor of the decade giving a not bad performance) and determined Kathleen Crowley is taken straight from The African Queen (1952). The portrayal of the natives reads as fairly racist today, while none of the adventure appears to have travelled beyond a studio backlot.
The encounter with the alien entity comes in the last ten minutes of the film’s 70-minute running time. It is not clear what the alien is – it does not appear to be intelligent, more on the lines of a glowing malevolent amorphous mass something like X the Unknown (1956) or The Blob (1958). With its ability to absorb energy and grow in size it also feels like something of a low-budget version of the previous year’s Kronos (1957). The scenes with the glowing blob are nothing too exciting – just it pulsating in a cave set, while the defeat of it merely requires Robert Brown to climb the cave wall and poke some wires into a vein of rock.
Paul Landres (1912-2001) was a minor director of this era, who made two other genre films of interest with The Vampire (1957) and The Return of Dracula (1958). George Worthing Yates wrote a surprising number of films of this era including Sinbad the Sailor (1947), Them! (1954), Conquest of Space (1955), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Attack of the Puppet People (1958), Earth vs. the Spider (1958), Frankenstein 1970 (1958), Spacemaster X-7 (1958), War of the Colossal Beast (1958) and Tormented (1960).
Trailer here
Full film available here