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the audience applauded

Perfect cast and a good story

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

A party of Americans secretly enter Red China in search of a downed flying saucer. The group includes Fred Norwood who is a pilot previously buzzed by a similar saucer. On the way they meet a group of Soviet Russians who are doing the same. The two groups join together to locate the saucer. They find it in an abandoned church and study it. Meanwhile Chinese soldiers are mobilised to find them. Written and directed by Frank Telford this is slow moving until the last half hour when it livens up considerably. In between there is a dull love story between Fred Norwood and the attractive (of course) Russian scientist Anna Karachev. Of the actors Dan Duryea (in his last film) as the grizzled leader Hank Peters and Lois Nettleton as Anna come off best. Good support is given though by Bernard Fox, James Hong and Robert Hastings. A fair adventure story with science fiction trappings done on a low budget.

'The Bamboo Saucer' attempts far more than its obviously tiny budget can manage, and at 100 minutes takes much too long to deliver too little. Writer-director Frank Telford's garrulous script feels like one written in the fifties that took ten years to get made - so was then brought up to date by making Red China rather than the Russkies the heavies. A competent cast led by the late Dan Duryea does their best, and Lois Nettleton as a hot Russian scientist with lovely blue eyes gamely spouts some particularly atrocious dialogue. (There's a lot of Russian dialogue in the script; and it would be interesting to learn what a native Russian speaker makes of her accent and how convincing the dialogue spoken by her and the other actors playing Russians actually sounds).Competently lit in an overlit TV movie sort of way by twice Oscar-winning Hollywood veteran Hal Mohr, the 'Chinese' locations resemble an episode of 'Star Trek' and the Chinese church where much of the action is played out is presumably a standing set from something made earlier. But where the corner-cutting really shows is in the dreadful music score and the perfunctory special effects. The score is obviously carelessly selected odds and sods taken from a library when a halfway decent score would have generated a bit of much-needed atmosphere to make up for the slack pacing. And the special effects are spectacularly inadequate.The budget evidently didn't exist for the design & construction of a full-sized flying saucer exterior for the studio scenes, so we instead get a flatly lit superimposition that looks even worse than Edward D. Wood Jr's notorious hub-caps of ten years earlier. When the thing finally takes off, the flight to Saturn and back (aided by shots of outer space, the Moon, Mars and so on presumably lifted from other films) certainly makes for a final ten minutes that is fascinating for what it attempts with so little.

The budget for this movie was never going to allow it to get beyond the B level, barely at that. The cast and crew seems to have decided that despite the limitations, they were going to make an honest effort in a bad situation. They succeed in creating a movie that manages to be worth watching as a curiosity. Notable successes are some decent scientific references, the authentic Russian language, proper weapons for the Russians and Chinese and acting that is better than expected. There were some good people at work here. Inevitably, some contemporary clichés slip in (e.g. seemingly canned feminine screams, California scenery you have seen many times before) that date the film in a way that pulls it back into its B level pedigree. If you are a genuine movie buff, you'll probably like this but it is limited.

It's always a treat to watch Dan Duryea. He just made everything look like fun. The former Western bad guy plays an authority figure here, but does so with the same lust and zip that gives a charge to an otherwise dull script.The situation is "cold war" intrigue, with Russians and Americans teaming together to find a downed flying saucer guarded by the Red Chinese.The characters are actually fairly credible for the times. If the film was made today, I doubt a writer would be able to sell "time credible" characters to the ignorant masses, particularly the masses too ignorant to realize they are ignorant.However, it is sort of routine. It looks like a sort of "make believe story" you and your friends would play with as adolescents.Still, the actors, particularly Duryea, help make this enjoyable enough to sit through. I could sit through it, and with my attention deficit disorder, that says a lot. Fairly well paced. Nothing to brag about, nothing to be ashamed about.