The SPACE CHILDREN

   Film (1958). Paramount. Dir Jack ARNOLD, starring Michel Ray, Adam Williams, Peggy Webber, Johnny Crawford, Jackie Coogan. Screenplay Bernard C. Schoenfeld, from a story by Tom Filer. 69 mins. B/w.

   This was the last of Arnold's cycle of sf films with producer William Alland, though here the studio is Paramount, not Universal. In this earnest but likeable moral fable, a group of children are "taken over" by a benign ALIEN resembling a glowing brain (which expands as the film progresses). The peace-loving alien's aim is to use the children in the sabotage of a missile project on which their parents are working, and it gives them special powers to help them do this. The alien is not entirely a pacifist; it kills the brutal father of one of the children. Arnold makes his usual evocative use of landscape - this time a remote beach.

   JB/PN