Target Earth (1954) & Deadly City (1953) by Paul W. Fairman

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Let's see. What do I want to say about this little film? (It is quite small, in terms of both budget--$85,000--and run-time--75 minutes.) Hmm. I think what I'll say is that it kind of surprised me by not being what I thought it would be.

What I thought it would be was a fairly forgettable 50s low-budget invasion sci-fi-er, with acting and effects so horribly unconvincing they would be hard to sit through. And while it definitely was low-budget sci-fi (complete with unconvincing effects), it wasn't in the least forgettable.

The movie in fact turned out to be a reasonably well-acted and fairly satisfying little psychological drama. There weren't really all that many sci-fi elements--they were more worked in around the edges--and the human drama going on at the film's core could have taken place in any number of settings and done just as well for itself.

So the plot is basically this: Nora King wakes up (in what I think stays an unnamed city throughout the film) with an empty bottle of sleeping pills on her nightstand, having just inadvertently survived her suicide attempt. (We learn later Nora was the one driving when she and her husband were in a fatal-to-husband car accident, and she's been blaming herself for hubby's death.) Well, she notices pretty quick her water and electricity are both off, and after knocking on a few neighbors' doors, decides to go outside and see what's up.

Off-screen at about the same time, Frank Brooks, a businessman passing thorough the city on his way back to Detroit, is coming to after having been slugged over the head, robbed and dumped in a back alley. Now the point is this: both these folks have been unconscious for a good portion of the previous day and night, and as a result have no idea what's going on when each separately wanders out to find... the city is completely deserted. The two eventually meet up and, after a rocky start, are off together in search of food, shelter, and/or a way out of town. Oh, and they're looking for other survivors, too.

Which they find (other survivors, that is) in the persons of Jim Wilson and Vikki Harris, a hard drinking, ten-years-together-but-never-married couple. It seems Jim won a little money at the track, and the two went out and got so drunk on his winnings, they ended up sleeping through whatever had emptied the city out as well, so they're no help in solving the Empty City Mystery. The group is eventually joined by a gun-toting fifth character, "Davis," and before too long we find out the man is not only unbalanced, but wanted for... muuuuurder.

So this mystery is playing out in the first part of the film while its characters are figuring out what's going on, and the actors do a really nice job portraying the fear, bewilderment, volatility, etc. you'd for sure be experiencing in a situation like this. It's just a nice bit of work.

And, while the group does eventually figure out the city has been evacuated in the wake of an--eeeeeeeeeeek!--alien invasion, and that there are myriad (though we budget-consciously only see one at a time) death-ray-sporting-remote-controlled robots wandering about killing survivors on sight, both the invasion and its robots are mostly sidelined as we follow this little group of extremely disparate individuals around in an extremely high stress situation and watch how they treat each other.

And it's pretty interesting to watch. Of course, the movie ends with the army roaring in to save the day as Nora and Frank are about to be death-rayed, and along the way there are a few bits of lumbering-robot-ness, interspersed with scenes of military scientists figuring out a way to stop said robots, but honestly these scenes feel tacked on and most of the time we're just following the group of survivors as they try to avoid being killed by each other and/or the invaders. Like I say, it's a fairly taut little psychological drama, worth a watch.

So then. I'd noticed in the film's opening credits it was "based upon the story 'Deadly City' by Paul W. Fairman," and I'd enjoyed the film enough I thought I might try to find myself a copy of the story. Which I did.

Turns out it was published the year prior in March 1953's issue of If: Worlds of Science Fiction. (Fairman had used a pseudonym, "Ivar Jorgenson," for the magazine.) And what do you know--the source story turned out to be just as, if not more, enjoyable than the derived film had been.

You can give this story, and a few others as well, a read for yourself (it's billed as a "short novel" but only clocks in at 34 pages) by following the link above to the Internet Archive, where that particular issue of If resides, all public-domain-legal and everything (I love it when that happens).

And I'll tell you this: The story is both more and less than the film it spawned. (Hey! What does he mean by that? He's being so mysterious!)

What I mean is this: the story focuses even less on the alien invasion than the film does--there are no robots at all, and the invaders are only seen by our group once and from a distance. There's also a lot less army goings on in the print story--the military just rolls up at the very end to "explain things" after the invaders have all died from some Earthly atmospheric contaminant (a la War of the Worlds). So in print this story is ninety nine percent human drama, versus the film's maybe 80/20 split between drama and sci-fi.

As far as it being more than the film, the story's characters definitely feel more gritty and "real" than the film's do, and the story's action unfolds a lot more brutally than the movie's does. I'm sure that's mostly due to censorship issues the film would have been forced to dance around, but I'm telling you, the story doesn't dance around much of anything, and the ugliness we sometimes see in human nature is well on display. In fact, the story makes a point of exploring that ugliness in a fair amount of depth, which is where much of the fun comes in. There's a fair amount of violence, a bit of nudity, and even some (out-of-scene) sex depicted in the story--a little surprising for a mid-fifties mainstream offering.

As far as main characters go, the film's Nora King is Nora Spade in Fairman's original story, and rather than being a guilt-ridden widow, she's a prostitute who can't face another day of turning tricks. Frank Brooks is pretty consistent between story and film, other than leaning more towards blue-collar than businessman in  the print version.

The print story's Jim Wilson is a violent, recently jailed thug who'd used the evacuation as an opportunity to escape lock-up. His companion Minna Trumble (the film's Vikki Harris), rather than being Jim's long term companion, is recently acquired and almost a captive--trading sex for protection and a sense of belonging.

The film's gun-toting Davis is, in print, Leroy Davis--a considerably more terrifying (than the movie's) psychopath, with a history of killing that his family has used their wealth to cover up. During the evacuation, he kills his chauffeur and sets out on a glee-filled murder spree, like a (ghoulish) kid in a candy store.

Okay, so if you're a regular, you already know deadmansbrain is a captivating-but-spoiler-ridden-land-of-enchantment, and right now I'm about to throw one of those (a spoiler) into the mix, because I really wanted to give you a sense of the story and Fairman's prose. The spoiler is this: Davis dies a gruesome death in both movie and story. There. With that being said, here's an excerpt of the very scene....

He fired the gun twice and Minna died appreciating the incongruity of his words. She went out on a note of laughter and as she fell, Jim Wilson, with an echoing animal roar, lunged at Leroy Davis. His great hand closed completely over that of Davis, hiding the gun. There was a muffled explosion and the bullet cut unnoticed through Wilson's palm. Wilson jerked the gun from Davis' weak grasp and hurled it away. Then he killed Davis.

He did it slowly, a surprising thing for Wilson. He lifted Davis by his neck and held him with his feet off the floor. He squeezed Davis' neck, seeming to do it with great leisure as Davis made horrible noises and kicked his legs.

Nora turned her eyes away, buried them in Frank Brooks' shoulder, but she could not keep the sounds from reaching her ears. Frank held her close. "Take it easy," he said. "Take it easy." And he was probably not conscious of saying it.

"Tell him to hurry," Nora whispered. "Tell him to get it over with. It's like killing—killing an animal."

"That's what he is—an animal."

Frank Brooks stared in fascination at Leroy Davis' distorted, darkening face. It was beyond semblance of anything human now. The eyes bulged and the tongue came from his mouth as though frantically seeking relief.

The animal sounds quieted and died away. Nora heard the sound of the body falling to the floor—a limp, soft sound of finality. She turned and saw Jim Wilson with his hands still extended and cupped. The terrible hands from which the stench of a terrible life was drifting away into empty air.

Yikes! Pretty intense. Oh. Belated double spoiler: Minna dies too.

Fairman also ends the story in a way that's fairly discomfiting to me (yet more spoiling ahead): He makes a point of bringing Nora and Frank together in the midst of this crisis, with Frank appearing to come to terms with Nora's past as he falls in love with her. But at story's end he sheepishly walks away, telling himself one just doesn't settle down with "a prostitute," and the very last scene has Nora back on her own, turning tricks again. Fellow-survivor Jim is back in the slammer and it almost seems like Fairman is saying "See, humanity may rise to an occasion when it's forced to, but people are basically schmucks and lasting change for the better is really just a pipe dream." Now that's chilling.

And on that depressing note (Geeze, Dan, lighten up!), I guess I've said all I set out to say about these two little items. So yeah, while neither film or the originating story are top tier stuff, both are engaging and more than worth a few minutes of your time, especially if you want to explore the whole print to film translation (which I love doing).

Let's see, brains? I'm gonna have to give the film and story each their own count, on account of their being as different from one another as there are. So here goes:

Target Earth: TWO AND A HALF LOW-BUDGET-ROBOT BRAINS

"Deadly City": THREE HIGH-BROW PULP FICTION-Y BRAINS

Oh, and guess what? Fairman also wrote another story that was later turned into a movie. I haven't read that one yet, but the movie derived from it was (long ago) covered right here at deadmansbrain. It's pretty choice in its own right....