The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1963) is one of Lippert's least interesting sci-fi melodramas, despite two startlingly good moments. The 69-minute film plays like a protracted, lesser episode of Twilight Zone, and almost certainly was built around the availability of Doheny Mansion (aka Greystone Mansion), a Beverly Hills landmark. (More about Doheny Mansion below.)

Filmed in CinemaScope, The Day Mars Invaded Earth arrives on DVD courtesy Fox Cinema Archives, which up-rezzed a 4:3 letterboxed master rather than create a new HD or standard-def 16:9 enhanced widescreen one. On one hand, the transfer falls way short of perfection, but it still looks a lot better than I was expecting.

At Cape Canaveral (represented by a single, barren office set), scientist Dr. David Fielding (Kent Taylor) oversees the first unmanned capsule to land on Mars. A robot probe, not too unlike those that eventually made it to Mars decades later, disintegrates just six minutes after it begins transmitting data back to Earth. Oddly, power readings show a huge surge rather than a steady decline before contact is lost.

Fielding heads home to Beverly Hills, where his two children, teenager Judi (Betty Beall) and young son, Rocky (Gregg Shank), are delighted by the workaholic Fielding's return. Less thrilled is Fielding's estranged wife, Claire (Marie Windsor). Rather than join her husband in Florida she's moved herself and the kids into a guesthouse at the Wainwright Mansion, a decaying, unoccupied estate with still-beautiful grounds; a parcel of prime real estate waiting to be sold.

Family members begin suffering lapses of memory, triggered by a crude visual effect in which the areas around their heads momentarily blur. Eventually it becomes clear that the entire family is being duplicated by Martian beings composed of something like electrical energy.

The movie clearly was written around the filmmakers' opportunity to cheaply rent the Doheny Mansion. The movie offers a virtual tour of the place: some scenes have characters simply standing around admiring the grounds, while later in the film there's a modest effort to generate a bit of suspense having its characters roam the eerily empty, cavernous Tudor Revival interiors.

One of the problems with the film is that it takes nearly half its running time before anyone realizes something is seriously wrong, and yet more running time before they (or the audience) are given a better idea of what the menace is all about, and by what means everyone might escape it. Mostly, The Day Mars Invaded Earth just ambles along, alternating between talky scenes with Fielding and Claire discussing their troubled marriage, and long stretches of characters wandering about the estate.

Doheny Mansion was a gift from oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny to his son, "Ned" Jr. It was completed in 1928, but just four months after Ned moved in, he and his male secretary, Hugh Plunket, got into an argument and both died in a guest bedroom in an apparent murder-suicide. Wikipedia makes no mention of this, but my understanding has always been that they had a long-term homosexual relationship, and though "officially" Plunket murdered Ned before taking his own life, in fact it was the other way around.

Ned's widow, Lucy, remained in the house until 1955. Some of the land was sold off (becoming Trousdale Estates) while industrialist Henry Crown moved into the mansion for a short time, then began renting it out to film companies, which is when The Day Mars Invaded Earth enters the picture. The mansion was slated for demolition but the City of Beverly Hills purchased and began preserving it in 1965, leasing it to the American Film Institute for many years. It's now a city park and part of the National Register of Historic Places.

As for The Day Mars Invaded Earth, this otherwise dreary movie has two startling moments. The first is when Judi's Martian double makes its first appearance, at the foot of her bed. Judi jumps out of bed to confront it. In all other scenes, obvious stand-ins are used when, say, Fielding or Claire are in the same shot with their doppelgangers. With Judi, however, the filmmakers did something ingenious: they hired actress Betty Beall's identical twin sister to play her Martian counterpart. Seeing them actually interact and touch one another is for the movie audience momentarily startling and unexpected.

The other worthwhile moment unfortunately entails a huge spoiler, so if you don't want to know how the movie ends, read no further.

The final moments of the film reveal that the Martians have won: the duplicates have successfully replaced the originals who've all been destroyed, their remains lying at the bottom of the mansion's drained (and notably deep) swimming pool, taking the form of human-shaped piles of ash.

For one thing it's highly unusual for a routine studio B-movie kill off all its protagonists, including a completely innocent wife and her two kids. Further, the last moments have pool water rushing in, instantly dissipating what's left of their remains in the rush of water. For an otherwise dull, talky, and derivative film (with bits of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and War of the Worlds tossed in), this is a very surprising, even disturbing little moment. If only the rest of the picture had been this darkly imaginative.

Video & Audio

The Day Mars Invaded Earth was filmed in black-and-white, 2.35:1 CinemaScope but the DVD obviously sources a flat 4:3 letterboxed master up-rezzed to 16:9 enhanced widescreen. I expected the results to be pretty terrible (like MGM's similar treatment of The Satan Bug) but actually it doesn't look too bad at all. The mono audio, English only with no alternate audio options or subtitles, is fine, and the disc is all-region.

Extra Features

The only extra is a give-away-the-store trailer, also 16:9 enhanced (for 1.85:1 widescreen). Watch it and you'll need not bother with the movie.

Parting Thoughts

A must for sci-fi completists but rough sledding for everyone else, split the difference and this is a Rent It.

Stuart Galbraith IV is the Kyoto-based film historian and publisher-editor of World Cinema Paradise. His credits include film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features.