Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X is a minor entry in the 1950s American science fiction film boom, but it’s an interesting one. Shot in just six days on the tiniest of budgets, it began filming after The Thing from Another World but was in cinemas first and as such takes the title of the first “alien invasion” film of the 50s. It’s a small-scale invasion, that much is true, but it was there at the very start none the less.

The unusual setting is the Scottish island of Burray in the Orkneys (largely populated by Americans or Scots with accents that exist nowhere in the real world) where American reporter John Lawrence (Robert Clarke) is despatched to interview Professor Elliot (Raymond Bond). He’s met by Elliot’s beautiful daughter Enid (Margaret Field) (where would a 50s science fiction film be without the scientist’s beautiful daughter?) and learns that a rogue planet, designated X, has entered the solar system and is on its way to a close pass by the Earth. Also with Lawrence at his remote tower is fellow scientist Mears (William Schallert), a man with a questionable past who takes an instant dislike to Lawrence. While out on the moors, Lawrence and Enid stumble upon a metallic object which everyone agrees is an atmospheric probe. They later find the source of the probe, a downed spaceship with its single occupant who initially seems friendly and willing to try to communicate. But back at the tower, the greedy Mears manages to communicate with the man from Planet X via geometry and learning of potential scientific secrets of great importance, begins to torture the alien by regulating his air supply. In revenge, the alien uses its ray gun to hypnotize the villagers and most of the people at the tower, enslaving them ahead of summoning an invasion force from Planet X. Lawrence and local policeman (Roy Engel) call in the military and things rapidly escalate…

The Man from Planet X is as cheap as chips, even by the impoverished standards of an independently shot B-movie of the day, but by using standing sets left over from Victor Fleming’s Joan of Arc (1948) at the Hal Roach Studios, making effective use of an over-worked dry ice machine and keeping the lighting in the same subdued, film noir style exemplified by the excellent Detour (1945), Ulmer manages to sell the illusion reasonably well. The painted backdrop of the Scottish village sticks out like a sore thumb but once we’re out on the fog-shrouded moors, he whips up a good deal of atmosphere from next to nothing.

The alien is an interesting one, not only in his distinctive appearance (again very cheap but he certainly stands out from the 50s pack and was popular enough to turn up again in a cameo in Joe Dante’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)) but in the ambiguity of his behaviour. Even by the end, we’re not entirely sure what he was up to. At first, he seems genuinely willing to communicate and it’s only after he’s mistreated by Mears that he turns nasty. But Planet X is doomed, “dying, turning to ice” we’re told, and “if his people do not escape from the planet before it swings back along its route through space, they will be doomed.” So, was the invasion planned all along? Or was he an ambassador who might have negotiated a mutually beneficial “planet sharing” scheme had he not been exposed to the nastier side of human nature? Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen’s unusually nuanced screenplay never lets on which just makes the film all the more intriguing.

It’s just one example of a degree of intelligence that runs through the film, and which would become increasingly rare in the genre as the decade wore on. There are faux pas of course – if the aliens are able to pilot their entire planet through space using “scientific degravitation” why don’t they just move it to an orbit that will heat it up again? – but there’s enough going on here of a more intelligent bent to keep the interest up. Instead of trying to blast the alien to kingdom come – at least initially – the film devotes some time to working out how best he might find common cause with the humans he encounters, putting in the same camp, or at least on its fringes, as Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). One might also be reminded, perhaps less happily, of David MacDonald’s Devil Girl from Mars which also featured an alien incursion on a remote and unmistakably studio-bound Scottish moor, though the alien’s attempts to communicate using musical tones must surely have been at least at the back of Steven Spielberg’s mind when he was writing Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

But overall, The Man from Planet X is a pleasant surprise. It made enough money to encourage producers Wisberg and Pollexfen to turn out several more ultra-cheap genre films, but without the visual sense and ability to turn a minuscule budget to good use of Ulmer, they didn’t amount to much. He may have just been a hired gun with little initial input into the film, but Ulmer invests it with real style, getting the best from his director of photography John L. Russell and the tiny, cramped “outdoor” sets. It’s one of the most intriguing films from the lower budgeted end of the 50s science fiction film spectrum, unusually thoughtful and with that pleasing ambiguity that one wishes more genre films of the period had gone for.