Today, having featured several days of aviation column entries written by "U.F.O." lead player Tom Towers in the fifties, we turn back to various articles by others. Writer Alfred Kay's piece about the movie was all too typical of so much newspaper reporting about the UFO subject back then, when ridicule, derision and gaining points for a laugh was often an implied editorial policy. Kay's reference to the film as an hour-long feature when it was actually just over an hour and a half in length was careless, but his criticism that very few of the "actors" seemed at ease in front of the cameras should have been tempered -- had he bothered to read the studio's press book -- with an acknowledgement that most of them were L.A. area law enforcement officers invited by the producers to recreate briefly various roles based upon historical events. Using non-professional actors does not necessarily result in Shakespearean theater, if that's what Kay anticipated.
Personally, I was far more intrigued by Kay's report regarding the pain and problems actor Gregory Peck endured with a peg leg prosthesis while filming "Moby Dick." Clarence Greene's "U.F.O." has been described as "wooden" for its acting by some, so maybe the inclusion of a peg leg would have satisfied Kay's need to focus upon a prop. But in the end, he simply dissolves into lame humor as he casts the UFO subject aside.
Elsewhere, the movie menu including "U.F.O." among other features is fair enough, but the brief L.A. Evening News article suggesting UFOs are "probably" not hostile and perhaps beneficial to the human race certainly takes a lot for granted. Then again, this WAS the 1950s era, when "space brothers" were all the rage. (credit: Barry Greenwood)
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