Ignite Films has released a Blu-ray of the much-hyped restoration of 1953’s Invaders from Mars by the George Eastman Museum.

Directed by William Cameron Menzies, best known as the art director of such films as Gone with the Wind, The Thief of Bagdad, and It’s a Wonderful Life, Invaders from Mars beat Invasion of the Body Snatchers by three years and I Married a Monster from Outer Space by five to be become the first film in which aliens take over the bodies of humans on their way to taking control of the planet. It has been frightening kids ever since.

If you saw it as a small child as Steven Spielberg did, it probably would frighten you. If you saw it as an older child or adult, it probably wouldn’t have that effect on you. I can’t remember when I first saw it, but I know it didn’t frighten me the way Invasion of the Body Snatchers and I Married a Monster from Outer Space did when I first saw them.

The restoration looks great, but it can’t hide the fact that the film is rather silly especially with its original U.S. release ending. The revised ending for the film’s international release, included as an extra on the Blu-ray, is much more satisfying.

Third-billed Jimmy Hunt is the film’s real star. The whole thing is told from his point of view just as The Wizard of Oz was told from Dorothy’s point of view. Nominal leads Helena Carter as a concerned pediatrician and Arthur Franz as her astronomer boyfriend are okay as are Leif Erickson and Hillary Brooke as the boy’s quickly replaced parents but none of them have that much to do. Sixth-billed Morris Ankrum as the Army colonel in charge of eliminating the aliens has the film’s second largest role.

Extras include a documentary on the life of William Cameron Menzies and an interview with 83-year-old Jimmy Hunt who recaps the plot for anyone who may have fallen asleep while watching the film.

Kino Lorber has released Blu-rays of five more films from the 1950s, including two from Fritz Lang, Clash by Night and Human Desire, and three in a boxed set of forgotten noirs consisting of The Tattered Dress, Man Afraid, and The Girl from the Kremlin. All but Human Desire come with commentaries, two of which are great, and two of which are not so great.

Fritz Lang’s Hollywood films never had the impact of his German films such as Metropolis and M, but he kept trying, coming close with the back-to-back releases of The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street in the mid-1940s and The Big Heat in 1953. The two new Blu-ray releases are from the latter era, one released the year before The Big Heat, the other the year after.

Clash by Night was based on a 1941 Broadway play by Clifford Odets (Golden Boy, The Country Girl). Set in Staten Island, it starred Tallulah Bankhead as an aging femme fatale, Lee J. Cobb as her dull fisherman husband, Joseph Schildkraut as her husband’s best friend and Tallulah’s lover, Robert Ryan as her brother, and Katherine Locke as her brother’s live-in girlfriend.

Lang, working with an adaptation by Alfred Hayes (Paisan), moves the location to the more scenic Monterey, California with Barbara Stanwyck and Paul Douglas in the Bankhead and Cobb roles. Robert Ryan moved up from his original role to the one created by Joseph Schildkraut, replaced by Keith Andes in his old role, with Marilyn Monroe in Katherine Locke’s old role. Monroe’s character is simply referred to as “Peggy”, the assumption being that she is married to Andes in keeping with the Production Code in place at the time.

The film is well cast with Stanwyck giving one of her best performances of the 1950s. Monroe in her first above-the-title billing doesn’t have that much to do but she was a rising star that Stanwyck insisted have equal billing over Douglas’ objection.

Peter Bogdanovich’s excellent commentary from the 2014 DVD with comments from his 1965 interview of Lang is included.

Human Desire is Lang’s remake of Jean Renoir’s 1938 classic, La Bete Humaine, from Emile Zola’s novel of that name starring Jean Gabin and Simone Simon. Lang’s stars of The Big Heat, Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, have Gabin’s and Simon’s roles as the train engineer and the femme fatale who helps her husband (Broderick Crawford) murder a man on Ford’s train where most of the film takes place.

The tension-filled story revolves around whether Grahame is an innocent victim of her crazed husband’s scheme or just as bad.

The only extra is an interview with actress Emily Mortimer talking about how much she loved the film.

The Tattered Dress, Man Afraid, and The Girl in the Kremlin are included in Kino’s Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema Collection XV. All three were released in 1957.

Directed by Jack Arnold (The Incredible Shrinking Man), The Tattered Dress is a tawdry if fun thriller about a famous big city lawyer falsely accused of bribing a juror in a small town. Jeff Chandler, Jeanne Crain, Jack Carson, Gail Russell, and Elaine Stewart have the leads. Film scholar Jason Ney’s commentary is excellent.

Directed by Harry Keller (Tammy and the Doctor), Man Afraid is a minor thriller about a minister (George Nader) whose son (Tim Hovey) is being stalked by the crazed father (Eduard Franz) of the thief that the minister accidentally killed while trying to rob his house. It’s not bad for what it is, but the commentary by film historian David Del Valle and filmmaker David DeCoteau is a chore to sit through as they go off on tangents that have nothing to do with the film.

Directed by Russell Birdwell (publicist for Gone with the Wind), The Girl from the Kremlin is a film that you’ve probably never heard of. It was never reviewed by the New York Times or any other news outlet at the time. It’s a bunch of nonsense about Stalin faking his death and Zsa Zsa Gabor hiring Lex Barker to find her missing twin sister who assisted in the dictator’s facial reconstruction. The commentary is by film historians Emma Westwood and Paul Anthony Nelson who constantly laugh about how ridiculous the on-screen nonsense is while trying to put the film in some sort of historical context. They don’t succeed.

Happy viewing.