Unearthly Stranger (John Krish, 1963)

"I expect to die - to killed by... something you and I know is here.  Invisible... it moving, unseen, amongst us all each moment of the day and night.  There were times when you thought i was insane, but listen to this tape i beg you - so that you know what it is that you must fight."

Black and white Britain of late 1963 was a good place to find the alien.  Whilst the November of that year spawned a monster in the shape of 'An Unearthly Child', begetting the 55 years and still rising reign of BBC television's Doctor Who, two months earlier - on the big screen, but not in colour - the cinemas had bore witness to an Unearthly Stranger.

Also known as Beyond the Stars, and in Mexico under the title Mujeres de lo Desconocido (Strange Women or Women of the Unknown), the film was distributed by Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy's Anglo-Amalgamated in the UK and James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff's American International Pictures (home at the time to horror mavens Roger Corman and Herman Cohen) in the US.  Filmed at Buckinghamshire's Beaconsfield Film Studios by production company Independent Artists, the film was produced by Julian Wintle - who would go on within the next two years to take over from John Bryce (who had earlier inherited the mantle from Leonard White) as producer of ABC TV's spy-fi telefantasy classic The Avengers.  The cast list also includes Avengers alumni, including Philip Stone (Dr Richard Tredding, co-GP of original Avenger Dr David Keel in the show's earliest episodes, and who would also go on to portray the spectral Mr Grady in Stanley Kubrick's monumental 1980 horror The Shining), Patrick Newell (Mother in the sixth and final Tara King season, as well as Colonel Faraday in the 1976 Doctor Who story 'The Android Invasion') and Warren Mitchell (just about to make the first of his four Avengers appearances in 'The Golden Fleece', which would air in December of 1963), as well as featuring Jean Marsh (three-time Doctor Who guest star - including as doomed companion to the First Doctor Sara Kingdom - as well as memorable childhood-scarring turns as Mombi and Queen Bavmorda in Return to Oz [Walter Murch, 1985] and Willow [Ron Howard, 1988] respectively).

Filmed in atmospheric black and white, the movie begins in media res with the protagonist, Dr Mark Davidson (John Neville, who would go on to go head to head with Jack the Ripper as Sherlock Holmes in James Hill's 1965 A Study in Terror as well as starring as the eponymous Baron Munchausen for Terry Gilliam in 1988 and forming part of the vast conspiracy faced by The X-Files' Mulder and Scully as The Well-Manicured Man) running for his life through the darkened streets of London pursued by some unseen force.  His invisible pursuer effectively conveyed utilising only sound, Davidson holes up in his nighttime-deserted workplace - the Royal Institute for Space Research (doubtless an offshoot of Professor Bernard Quatermass' British Rocket Group) where you begins to record his testament of the things that he has seen (and the horrors unseen of which he has become aware) on his desktop dictaphone, taking us via his terrified reminiscences into the main body of the story.

In flashback we see how Davidson gained his position at the Space Institute after the sudden and mysterious death of his predecessor Professor Munro (Mitchell), whose inexplicable demise is simultaneously being investigated and covered up by Major Clarke (Newell, in a strangely mercurial performance) - to the extent of Munro's corpse being 'disappeared' before Davidson and his coworker Professor Lancaster (Stone) can take a look at it, his unoccupied coffin being weighted with bricks before the funeral.  The project being worked on by the late Munro, and now Davidson and his colleagues, is an audacious plan to circumvent the vast time scales involved in physically traversing the vast interstellar distances by devising a method for a human being to mentally project him or herself through space to another world (shades of Ian Curteis and John Croydon's 1966 The Projected Man, or the Guild Navigators' "travelling without moving" in Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune), and it begins to emerge that otherworldly interests are vested in killing this project at birth before mankind can spread out into the cosmos.

At the same time, Davidson has returned home from time away in Switzerland with a new bride, Julie (Gabriella Licudi, who would later play Beryl Stapleton in the BBC two-part adaptation of 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' starring the inestimable Peter Cushing as Holmes), whom he met in strange circumstances.  Taking an interest in meeting his friend's new spouse, Lancaster at first puts her strange air down to her adjustment to life in Britain but notices some strange things about her.  Her lack of blinking extends to sleeping at night with her eyes wide open, which unnerves her husband, and Lancaster takes particular note when he walks into the Davidsons' kitchen to see her lifting a red-hot casserole out of the oven with her bare hands without registering the slightest pain or discomfort.  Julie is, of course, an alien in a very different sense from being Swiss and is the agent who has been assigned to Davidson with orders to prevent his work from proceeding up to and including killing him in the same way that Munro was dealt with (aneurysm via some kind of ray projection - literally exploding his brain).  The alien plan is somewhat complicated by the fact that even as her husband slowly begins to realise her unearthly origins, she has begun to have genuine feelings for him.  Going against her orders, Julie confesses both her true identity and her love for Mark shortly before she vanishes - leaving only her clothing behind like Nessarobe Thropp's shoes.

This is where we catch up with the opening events of the movie, as Davidson is pursued through the twilit avenues of Westminster by the unseen and malevolent alien force that took Julie, and dictates the preceding events in his office.  At this point he is surprised by his loyal secretary Miss Ballard (Marsh), who reveals that she is his pursuer ("We have been here for twenty years") and fully intends to carry out Julie's disobeyed orders be killing him.  Their subsequent life-or-death struggle results in Miss Ballard plummeting from a high window to the streets below, only to also vanish leaving only her apparel by the time Davidson descends to street level, where he is surrounded by the accusing glares of a crowd of eerie non-blinking women - the strange women from the unknown of the Mexican title.

An unusual and unique take on the well-worn theme of alien invasion so beloved of the b-cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, Unearthly Stranger benefits from effective direction and a steadily building atmosphere of paranoia seeping into the gentility of middle class '60s Britain, as well as strong performances from John Neville and Gabriella Licudi in particular.  A neat subversion the hackneyed pulp SF trope of astronauts landing on a "planet of the women": for they are the ones who have come here...