THE CRAWLING EYE (1958)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological*

For a fifties SF-film about aliens who look like gigantic eyes with tentacles, CRAWLING EYE devotes a singular amount of time to showing just how much human beings can see when they set their minds to it.

Hammer Films writer Jimmy Sangster, who adapted the screenplay of EYE from a previous British TV serial, tended during his career to avoid the SF-genre. Prior to EYE he had scripted X THE UNKNOWN, which was something of a conceptual follow-up to Hammer’s successful QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, but for the most part Sangster hewed closer to the world of Gothic horror and Hitchcockian thrillers. Nevertheless, thanks to the brisk efficiency of Sangster and director Quentin Lawrence, EYE stands as one of the best of the fifties SF-movies from the shores of Old Blighty.

Many though not all British SF-flicks revolve around a group of citizens getting confined to some out-of-the-way place that just happens to be menaced by alien presences (though arguably a lot of horror films follow similar patterns). In this case, the remote locale is a Swiss mountain, the Trollenberg, which plays host to seasonal mountain-climbers, a scientific observatory, and a strange stationary cloud that hangs around the mountain’s top. The film opens with a group of young mountain-climbers whose sport comes to an end when some strange force beheads one of them.

Enter Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker, also playing the “American actor whose presence makes the movie more bankable”). Brooks claims to be journeying to Trollenberg “on holiday,” but he’s actually some sort of consultant with the United Nations, and he previously encountered some similar goings-on in the peaks of the Andes. In addition, he only comes to Trollenberg at the behest of the scientist in charge of the observatory, Professor Crevette, who’s supposedly in Switzerland to study cosmic rays. But Crevette collaborated with Brooks on the unsolved mystery of the Andres, so a viewer may fairly assume that he’s set up shop near Trollenberg in search of a related mystery. Nor are the two of them alone among all the locals and visitors in the local village (most of whom have British names, though there’s an occasional “Hans” in the mix). Dewhurst is a geologist who plans to climb the Trollenberg because he expressly wants to learn what might have killed the young climber; if Brooks nurtures any suspicions, he doesn’t say anything to dissuade the geologist, who ends up being among the earliest casualties. A little later, a visitor named Philip reveals that he’s really a journalist, working on the same case. But the most interesting investigator is psychic Anne Pilgrim (Janet Munro). She and her sister Sarah practice a mentalism act, and neither of them plans to stop in Trollenberg. But as their train nears the mountain, Anne feels a fierce compulsion to remain close to the mountain, and they too come to stay at the local hotel.

All of these backstories are revealed at a steady, naturalistic pace, though the revelation that Anne is a genuine psychic takes center stage. To be sure, Anne doesn’t seem to glean anything useful about the mysterious threat atop the Trollenberg Mountain. At first some Dracula-like force draws her toward the mountain. When her fellow residents prevent her from yielding to this impulse, the beings in the cloud send an agent for her execution; Dewhurt’s guide Brett, now turned into a sort of frozen zombie. (In other words, the creatures in the cloud can steal minds in addition to heads.) Crevette informs Brooks that he believes the cloud-dwellers are aliens looking for a new home. One may wonder why the two of them didn’t discuss this possibility back at the Andes, but it’s understandably important that Brooks should play the role of the interlocutor for the audience’s sake. (“What’s that, Professor? Aliens? Tell me more.”)

Crevette’s most interesting revelation about the Andes incident is that back then another psychic, an older woman, also ferreted out the presence of mountain-dwelling aliens, but the locals killed her for being a witch. This detail provides yet another proof that humans have a remarkable capacity for finding out intruders, even when said transgressors conceal themselves on the peaks of mountains. One never knows the precise plans of the aliens, though Brooks and his colleagues piece together, with admirable logic, the aliens’ need for cold temperatures. This suggests that the evil Eyes plan to alter Earth’s climate somehow, though their desire for cold plays a much bigger role in their defeat, Despite the fact that the eyeball-aliens are only on screen for five or so minutes, Lawrence and Sangster have kept the tension percolating so well that the Eyes’ brief appearance doesn’t feel like a cheat.

On a minor side-note, there’s absolutely no romance in the film, for all that Anne introduces herself to Brooks by collapsing so that her head lands in his lap. Given that this is a taut if not overly original SF-thriller, it’s a shame that its title and its boogiemen give the impression of bargain-basement schlock.