brilliant actors, brilliant editing

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Cheaply made Z grade science fiction clap trap is part Alaskan travelog and like the title says, a bit of sci- fi. Throw in Russian spies whose house the heroine might have been able to see from her back yard, and it becomes pretty obvious almost immediately where this is going. Yes, the mountainous terrain is gorgeous to look at, but the acting is amateurish at best, with romantic scenes dubbed over with warbling music that sounds like a damaged 78 rpm. This looks like something made for prehistoric TV, obviously released in only the most secondary of neighborhood theaters. This seems to me like a film that started off with a conception but no script, with narration tossed over as a last minute thought, and resulting in a film that never seems to know what direction it is supposed to go in. Allegedly the first film to deal with the subject of U.F.O.'s, it fortunately has been overshadowed by many more. If Ed Wood's "Plan 9" failed badly, this "Plan 1" crashed on landing.

The Flying Saucer started life as a documentary on Alaska -and indeed some of the B&W photography and scenery are not only spectacular, they are beautiful. Then, according to Hans de Meiss-Teuffen "the Big Brains in Hollywood re-wrote the story and made me, without the loss of a single foot already shot, into a villainous Russian spy". As an aside, Hans de Meiss-Teuffen was one of the great adventurers of the XXth cy, singlehanded-sailor, mining engineer, hotel owner, lion hunter, double-spy... (his "Winds of Adventure", 1953, is a wonderful read) As a grade-B movie of minimal budget, The Flying Saucer is much better than most. Continuity, that some have criticized her, is actually decent for its period (and immensely better than in the famed "Flash Gordon"); and it is much less incredible than John Wayne's "Jet Pilot". Definitely worth seeing.

It takes nerve and deserves credit to write,direct and feature as the lead actor in a film.Unfortunately it also needs talent and the financial backing to smooth over weaknesses in plot,acting,props etc.Conrad does his best, but the number of cigarettes he gets through on screen probably indicates his worries on these aspects.The end result is watchable but not deftly paced ,with too many flat scenes of passing landscape that tell us only that they moved the camera out of the studio.Pat Garrison ,as the romantic interest Vee Langley,is fine-worthy of better dialogue- and her trim figure going for a swim presents a nice contrast to the white Alaskan surroundings.Brrrr!

I tried to like The Flying saucer...I really did, but this low budget thriller simply didn't work for me. (It didn't "take off", if you will.) For one thing the black and white photography is so bleak and cold that it actually works against the film. The acting ranges from bland to overwrought and the dialog is stilted and lifeless. Here's the thing; all of these shortcomings taken together still might mot torpedo the overall enjoyment of this film, but its' boneheaded polemic (even for 1950) left me flat. I did like the location shooting ( the film is set in Alaska) but that didn't stop me from wanting the movie to be over--soon. The Flying Saucer is disappointing on all levels.