Ah, just what I love, a '50s B-movie. This low budget, shuddery sci-fi shocker uses much the same premise as THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN would twenty years later, but obviously without the gore. The plot is pretty minimal, and with most '50s films, the main thrust concentrates on pseudo scientific babble about why what has happened has happened. Although the film is obviously dated because of this, it's kind of fun too, as we listen to the gobbledegook about 'cosmic dust' and stuff like that. Very funny indeed.The cast is nothing to write home about, but the dialogue can be hilarious and frequently is, because it has dated so badly. The man of the title is an excitable chap who speaks like one of the teens from I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF all grown up, talking about "dope" and other silly things. The rest of the cast are all pretty stiff and stilted in their delivery of their clichéd lines, but there's no need to worry about that, it's just typical for a film like this.The special effects aren't bad. The space travel looks quite poor in these post-STAR WARS days, but at least it has some imagination put into it and has that odd quality of looking fake and unrealistic yet looking interesting, magical even, in a way that CGI animation can't create. I can't explain it very well. The makeup for the monster is surprisingly simple and effective, he just looks like he's been covered in some molten rock or something which has then settled. I like the way you can see one of his eyes too.While FIRST MAN INTO SPACE may not be original, or scary, it remains a solid piece of entertainment from a much different time. The scenes of the rampaging monster and weird space travel deserve classic status, these types of things WERE cinema in the '50s. Not brilliant, but okay anyway.

I also saw this movie in 1959 as an 8-year-old. I went to the theater with my "older" friends, they were like 11-12. The movie scared the wits out of me; I hid my view behind the person sitting in front of me, my friends never let up on making fun of me. This was the first time I had gone to the movies with non-adults...big mistake! The monster was scary and creepy. It haunted me for years. In fact, I probably had some persistent subliminal turmoil over the movie. Fast forward to 2008 and I found the DVD to rent. I watched again, and guess what? The movie is still scary! It's pretty high-camp and was made on a limited budget, but the creepiness is still there. I suppose the fact that the back line story is believable makes it even more scary. Watching it with my wife probably exorcised some demons. Funny how movies can move us, positively or negatively. All my 60 years I can still rehash this event when I was eight. Still the scariest movie I ever saw. I dig it.

All in all, First Man Into Space is a solid example of mid-level 1950s science fiction. It's not on par with Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet, Gojira, nor The Day The Earth Stood Still, but it's amongst the better entries in the second tier, and a good deal of the 'believability factor' has to be credited to the always underrated Marshall Thompson. In both presence and ability, he was one of the few B film actors it can honestly be said it was a shame that he wasted his talent in them. The obvious exemplar of this was Vincent Price, but not even Price could pull off military and leading man roles the way Thompson did. And, although he eventually did garner some level of fame on television, to me, he will always be best recalled in such films as this, where the joy received, especially to young boys, was always far greater than it reasonably should have been. And how many films, A, B, C, or Z, can claim that?

1959 movie about a test pilot who disobeys orders and ends up flying higher than he should -becoming the title in the process. He also returns to earth looking like the burnt casserole man.Filmed in England yet set in White Sands New Mexico this is a slow but decent little scifi thriller about an experiment that goes horribly wrong. Its the sort of thing you put on late at night to fall asleep to or laugh at or drift off in the ways that black and white movies of the period are prone to make you do.Not one of my favorites I recently picked it up as part of a Criterion box set called Madmen and Monsters of four lesser films from the late 1950's packaged together with a host of typical extras. Why Criterion would choose these films was a bit beyond me until I realized that all of the films were made by the same producers and were the follow ups to Fiend Without a Face (the crawling brain film) which Criterion put out several years ago. The transfer and such is sterling and the commentary is very informative dealing with the film and the producers life as exploitation filmmakers and to be honest listening to it boosted my appreciation of the film.Its a good way to see the film- though to be honest I'm still not convinced the film needed a Criterion edition-especially since its pricey set (which I got greatly reduced) will limit peoples exposure to the film.