Invasion, U.S.A.

Wow what a movie!! You thought Ed Wood or Bert I Gordon where stock footage happy. Alfred Green had probably no budget but a large supply of WW2 footage!! "Make a story around this war film, it'll go to the History Channel if we don't use it!!" (Al Green was probably psychic) It's not much of a film otherwise, acting is dull, characters are the type you don't really care about and the whole thing stinks of propaganda. Well it was the cold war. MST had fun with this and deservingly so!! Does this film exist in non-mst form?? Probably so but I do not recommend without Mike and the bots. This film also features the two Lois Lanes from the old Superman series. Hey this would be a great double feature with Jungle Goddess (featuring George Reeves) Enjoy!!

A small diverse group of strangers lounge in a New York cocktail bar . Suddenly there's a newsflash and reports come in that a foreign power has captured key installations in Alaska and the whole of America is now threatened with invasion

You want to make a small subtle point ? Well just get a sledgehammer to crack a nut and this propaganda film is it . The opening sequence is set in a cocktail bar and a middle class businessman complains about having to pay the top rate of tax and if this atrocious behaviour by the government wasn't bad enough they also feel the need to interfere in other aspects of the free market . Wow next thing you know they'll be banning smoking in bars or perhaps even banning the sale of alcohol itself . Taking taxes off people is rather small fry compared to what American federal government has done in the past or indeed the future when this film was made . Perhaps this character might like to live under a regime where people don't tax simply because they don't get paid . Oh hold on here's a newsflash " Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it comrade "

I've seen a few Christian propaganda films recently that were all universally dreadful they made me forget there was a time when American studios were constantly spewing out propaganda like this one . Often they were entertaining enough to disguise the danger of communist invasion by producing science fiction films where the aliens were closet reds , usually from Mars which is " The red planet " . With INVASION USA no attempt is made to disguise who the invaders are . Even though both Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union aren't name checked you're under no misapprehension who these bloodthirsty tyrannical invaders really are . I suppose this is indicative of American thinking at the time but the invasion itself isn't creditably developed or delivered . If the Soviets capture Alaska as a bridgehead why not nuke the airfields in that state ? How are they able to fly over Canada with impunity ? How are able to bomb New York from San Francisco ? etc etc etc . There's also a lack of credibility in other aspects ? For example here's no sense of time passing between events and the time frame seems bizarre to say the least . How on earth can the TV news report detailed casualty figures to events that have just happened ? OF course there might be a very good internal reason to this once the film ends but while the film is entertaining - possibly for all the wrong reasons - it's never credible on even the most basic level

It was the early 1950s. J. Parnell Thomas of The House Unamerican Activities Committee was accusing everyone in sight who had any measure of public visibility with Communist allegiance. He went after Hollywood in a series of highly publicized hearings, resulting in the arrests and convictions of the Hollywood Ten for invoking their Fifth Amendment rights against self incrimination... just before Thomas himself was hauled before a Grand Jury to answer fraud charges. In a moment of high irony Thomas himself invoked the Fifth Amendment before he was convicted and imprisoned.

It was the time of "Tail Gunner Joe" McCarthy, who charged that Communist influence in the State Department and Army had caused us to "give away" China. He recklessly charged that Communists had infiltrated nearly every aspect of American life... strictly in the name of enhancing his own political power base. In the Army hearings McCarthy was finally unmasked as an unprincipled charlatan by Army counsel Joseph Welch, and he was subsequently censured by the Senate for unethical conduct. Joe McCarthy subsequently died of alcoholism.

Besides these men... Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, and many others in positions of power shrieked the gospel of anticommunism, demanding that Americans surrender Constitutional rights in the name of defeating this new enemy.

It was a time of fear where American opinion could be easily manipulated. Partly for financial gain, and partly to spare itself from further attacks by the Thomases and McCarthys, Hollywood became a willing tool for the use of politicians, a propaganda machine that produced a number of sensational films that capitalized on the anti Red hysteria.

Some of the more notable Hollywood efforts were the major studio film BIG JIM MACLAIN, starring John Wayne and James Arness, and a B-movie effort, THE RED MENACE, whose opening credits graphic showed an octopus wearing a hammer and sickle logo using it's tentacles to embrace the entire world.

Pretty heavy handed stuff, but it was effective for the political manipulation of a frightened American populace. It kept McCarthy off of the studio's backs... as well as made a few B-movie bucks.

Along with these heavy, ideological films came INVASION USA, a mythical war and adventure movie. Of the whole lot, THIS is the most interesting of the Red Scare films, and it's the ONLY one that's ANY fun at all! Ed Wood must have LOVED this film; it clearly taught him the cinematic techniques he was to later make famous. As a cost cutting measure the film makes GENEROUS use of stock footage, mostly Public Domain stuff from military sources.

To make American planes into enemy ones, they just printed the stock footage BACKWARDS, so that UNITED STATES AIR FORCE on the planes came out REVERSED, and it looked sort of like Russian Cyrillic lettering.

In newly shot scenes where stock footage couldn't be used, set decoration relied heavily on the local Army-Navy store! There are literally TONS of military surplus equipment on the sets.

The fact that enemy troops were dressed in American military surplus uniforms was explained neatly by saying that they were infiltrating in disguise! As another cost cutting measure, the cast is ENTIRELY made up of B list "talent" who would work for Actor's Equity scale. The amount of over the top, hammy acting has to be seen to be believed! To throw in a touch of sex, a drunken enemy soldier tries to ravage a blonde American beauty, who chooses instead to kill herself by diving out of a window!

The script is absurd, but for frightened audiences of the time it was plausible... it bore out all of the dire threats that politicians had been making. Hedda Hopper's review of the film said "It will scare the pants off you!", and so it did. Bombing raids on San Francisco, the Hoover Dam destroyed by a missile attack, and New York City hit with an atomic bomb were enough to scare the pants off of ANYBODY.

For sheer kitsch value I give it a ten.

As a warning of what propaganda feeding the political hysteria stirred up by unethical politicians can accomplish, it ALSO gets a ten.

As movie-making, it gets a four.

To begin with, I had expected to be more engaged by this one – which I also was under the wrong impression would be a talk-fest: instead, about sixty per cent of its trim 74-minute duration is compiled of wartime stock footage (representing the potential decimation of the U.S. by invading Communist forces) – scenes of the London blitz from the celebrated Humphrey Jennings documentary FIRES WERE STARTED (1943) are supposed to stand in for the burning of New York! I wonder how Americans look at the film nowadays vis-a'-vis the events of 9/11 – which is perhaps the only reason why it ever saw the light of day on DVD in the first place!

As it stands, INVASION USA is both hysterical and unintentionally hilarious – never more so than when a car is caught in the flooding of Hoover Dam (hit by a nuclear bomb!) and a cowboy hat is seen floating on a branch as the sole remnant of its Texan owner!; Also worth mentioning are the fact that when the U.S. Senate is besieged, it's seen to be peopled merely by doddering statesmen, while the intermittent 'appearances' by the American President addressing the nation are taken from a vague solitary angle! Equally queasy is the fact that handsome leads Gerard Mohr (a cynical TV reporter) and Peggie Castle are drawn together at such a precarious time, while the middle-aged bartender keeps mixing drinks as if his life depended on it – apparently oblivious to the ongoing calamities! Needless to say, the unnamed Soviets are depicted throughout as unemotional slogan-spouting caricatures.

The best thing about the film is the brief but typically riveting performance by Dan O'Herlihy (incidentally, years later he'd appear in a genuine Cold War classic i.e FAIL SAFE [1964]) – not least in view of the twist ending brought about by his particular line of work. In the DVD supplements, much is made of the fact that the film features the two actresses who played "Superman"'s Lois Lane on TV – Noel Neill and Phyllis Coates – but their contribution is, at best, negligible!; also on hand as a newscaster is character actor William Schallert, who's said to have made more Atomic-related titles than anyone else (the top 100 such efforts compiled by "Conelrad" are listed, with a brief synopsis for each one, on the Synapse DVD itself); in an interview included on the disc, Schallert speaks of his brush with Orson Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) where he was proposed for the role later played by Maltese actor Joseph Calleia – whom Schallert mistakenly thinks was an Italian! Oh, well, it's near enough I suppose…

As can be gathered, therefore, the extras are quite nice, being pretty comprehensive about the whole Cold War aura which pervaded the first two decades or so of the post-war era (though I've only very briefly sampled the two radio programs which play back-to-back as an Audio Commentary to the film). One of the most telling comments in the extras comes from O'Herlihy himself – when he went to Russia in the late 1960s to film WATERLOO (1970), he was met by such an inefficient people that he couldn't fathom how their threat was ever taken seriously!; Noel Neill, then, overhypes the film's impact – I mean saying it blows PEARL HARBOR (2001) out of the water is not much of a feat, is it? In the end, I have to admit that when the Communist ideology (or critique thereof) was presented as a sci-fi allegory, the results were generally that much more fun

Like many people who have seen this movie, I saw it through the TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000, which lampoons bad movie. As such, I was suprised to find that Invasion USA was not a bad movie. Perhaps this post- 9-11 world makes us all a bit more paranoid about an external enemy, so that this deeply paranoid, McCarthyism influenced film doesn't seem too ridiculous. The film seeks to relay the message that if America lets its guard down we are vulnerable to attack. While full scale invasion seems unlikely, we all learned a painful lesson that we are vulnerable. Is this a great movie? No. The usage of stock footage is excessive, and the subject is overly preachy. The film plays out almost like a morality tale in which each character ultimately meets their doom as a result of America's laxness. Invasion USA is a deeply paranoid film from a different time, whose only purpose is to relay a message, but its a message we should all keep in mind.