A brief postcript to our Friday discussion of the great art director/production designer/director William Cameron Menzies: I feel constrained to add that not all his movies were quite as -- what's the phrase I'm looking for? -- lavishly mounted as, say, Gone With the Wind (that's one of his signature design images on the right, obviously).

In fact, Menzies worked on all sorts of movies, in all sorts of genres, besides blockbusters over the course of a long career, and three of the most budget-challenged are definitely worthy of your attention.

The first, and best known, is the classic 1953 sci-fi flick Invaders From Mars, in which a little kid is the only person who knows that his parents have been taken over by the titular aliens and that the rest of the world will soon follow unless he can warn them (nobody listens, of course, because he's only a little kid). Without question, this is the best Is-It-a-Dream-or-Not? film ever made, and it's been scaring the beejezus out of children for decades. Here's the opening reel, which should give you an idea of its wonderful low-budget surrealism and atmosphere of dread.

And here's my favorite image from the flick -- a vintage Menzies visual composition which is actually far more terrifying than any of the subsequent scenes of green-skinned Martians with zippers on the back of their costumes.

Meanwhile, the most undeservedly obscure of the trio is The Whip Hand (1951), an amazingly over-the-top paranoid Cold War thriller starring Elliot Reid. Here Reid, an actor who was more often cast as comedy support in Doris Day movies, is an action hero who stumbles upon a Conspiracy So Vast.

The plot:

After a minor fishing trip injury, journalist Matt Corbin (Reid) stops off at the small town of Winnoga for medical attention, but for some reason the locals seem eager to be rid of him by the next morning. Corbin tries to figure out why, but wherever he goes he's followed (often by a sinister Raymond Burr), his attempts at outside phone calls are blocked, and eventually somebody takes a shot at him when he strays onto a private estate. A few reels later, he discovers that a Nazi bacteriologist who defected to the Communists is conducting germ warfare experiments in the town and plotting to Rule the World. In a frenetic finale, Corbin blows up the Commies underground bunker (a typically surreal looking Menzies creation) and saves Democracy -- or does he?

But the absolute mindblower of the bunch is The Maze, a 1953 thriller in 3-D and astoundingly unreal Cinecolor. It all begins when Scotsman Gerald McTeam (Richard Carlson) is called away to his ancestral mansion just before his marriage to Kitty (Veronica Hurst). Several weeks pass before it dawns on Kitty and her aunt (Katherine Emery, who narrates the film) that Gerald isn't coming back. The two women head to the mansion, where Gerald refuses to see them. The household servants also blow them off, but the two women intend to get to the bottom of the mystery, the solution of which seems to lie somewhere in the huge maze in the rear of the castle, where every night Gerald and the servants conduct a bizarre ritual (dramatized by Menzies in fabulous Gothic style, of course, with some very subtle, but highly effective, use of 3-D perspectives). Eventually [Spoiler Alert!] all is revealed, in the most outrageous surprise ending in movie history: Turns out that Gerald's cousin, the actual Laird of the Manor, is a pitiable genetic freak -- in point of fact, a giant mutant frog who the denizens of the castle have been tasked to care for in secret for the remainder of his life. And by caring for, I mean taking him out for a daily swim in the lily pond at the center of the maze.

No, I am not making this up.

In any case, Invaders From Mars is, I'm pleased to say, available in a great print on DVD, and you can order it here. You can find The Maze here, but alas, only in a less impressive 2-D version. The Whip Hand, meanwhile, has never been on home video, but Turner Classic Movies shows it from time to time, and if you ever see it scheduled, get your DVR ready and pounce.