***SPOILERS*** Traveling at speeds of 180,000 MPH the Cosmic Man, John Carradine, lands on earth in what looks like an either giant beach or cue ball in the western desert of the USA. At first seen only in shadows the Cosmic Man later fills out and is almost, but not quite, human looking as if he has just been liberated from a Nazi concentration camp. What his mission on earth is isn't made clear only that he's looking for rock and soil samples for his planet that it needs to survive.It's Dr. Karl Sorenson, Bruce Bennett, who feels that Cosmo or Mr. Cosmic is of no harm to the US and only wants to get a chance to talk with the guy about the peaceful use of nuclear power. It was in fact Dr. Sorenson who was one of the inventors of the atomic bomb that in flattening Hiroshima & Nagasaki in WWII that killed upwards of 200,000 innocent human beings. With that guilt on his head Dr. Sorenson wants to make good use of nuclear power not have it used as a weapon of mass destruction like in was in WWII. But the US military has other ideas. They want to do in the what turns out to be peace loving and harmless Cosmic Man because they fear that he has the same destructive ideas as they do in using his knowledge of advance nuclear power to conquer not only the USA but the entire earth!Taking a brake while picking rock & soil samples Mr. Cosmic runs into the polio stricken 12 year old Kenny Grant,Scotty Morrow, whom he feels that with his advanced knowledge on medical science he can help to walk again. He also gets smitten by Kenny's mom Kathy ,Angela Greene, a Korean War widow who's had to see and confront the hard reality that her bright little boy will not ever walk again but has barely, due to his illness, a year left to live. ***SPOILERS*** With the US military determined to take Mr. Cosmic into custody and force him, by water-boarding if necessary, to tell them the secrets of the universe as well as advance nuclear energy, that they can use against the USSR Communist China and possibly Communist Cuba, they send from the Penatgon this warmongering crazed mad scientist, a former member of Hitler's medical experiment team, Dr. Ignots "Man Dog" Steinholtz, Hal Torey, to keep the Cosmic Man from taking off on his giant beach or cue ball for home. That mad and insane attempt by Dr. Steinholtz to destroy the man, the Cosmic Man, from outer space in fact proved to be his, in never being taken seriously by the US Government again, demise! After collecting the rock & soil samples he was after in a show of good faith Mr. Cosmic also cured little Kenny of his polio even without the use of the Salk or Sabin vaccine.

"The Cosmic Man" is a charming attempt to make a $5.00 version of "The Day the Earth Stood Still". It's an extremely low-budgeted Sci-Fi movie from the late fifties, so this generally means there are stern scientists talking a lot of pseudo-philosophical gibberish and asking themselves way too many rhetorical questions, villainous looking military men fantasizing about weapons of mass destruction and mysterious alien forces with minds that are immeasurably superior to ours. When a spherical UFO – a gigantic golf ball actually – is discovered in a small Californian canyon community, the army wants to nuke it and a local scientist wants to study it. Meanwhile, the alien passenger sneaks out of his interstellar golf ball and begins exploring the earthly habits, rites and inhabitants. This is where our cute and cheap little B-movie rips off "The Day the Earth Stood Still", in fact, as the alien witnesses the imbecility and self-destructive nature of the human race. How come aliens get such a kick out of observing how stupid we are? Like in a few hundred of the films he starred in, John Carradine receives top-billing even though he appears all together perhaps for a whole five minutes. "The Cosmic Man" is often rather dull and doesn't contain any real action, but it certainly has good intentions and an earnest supportive cast.

The marginal but interesting sci-fi saga about a large white cue ball shaped spacecraft that comes to Earth and hovers in place without the slightest sign of movement is another "The Day the Earth Stood Still" clone with a wholly predictable plot about an alien being who is intent on thwarting mankind's nuclear impulses. John Carradine appears occasionally without a costume as the sinister being. He runs around looking like a negative image and then masquerades as an old timer in a hat, big coat, and large spectacles. The military send a notable scientist (Bruce Bennett of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre") to conduct tests of the giant cue ball. Eventually, the cosmic man appears before Pentagon generals and gives them a lecture about mankind's predisposition to kill itself and perhaps harm others in the vast universe. Just to show that the cosmic man is not without sentiment, he heals a little boy who cannot walk. Totally forgettable epic was only one of the two movies that director Herbert S. Greene helmed. The other was "Outlaw Queen." This mediocre, black & white, Allied Artists release clocks in at a trim 72 minutes and most of the footage with the giant cue ball spacecraft was lensed on location in Bronson Canyon where "The Robot Monster" was shot. Nobody dies in this earnest little movie that was a product of the Cold War.

You can say a lot about John Carradine but dull he isn't except, of course, in THE COSMIC MAN. He has very little screen time and when he does appear it's behind the darkest pair of goggles this side of The Invisible Man. His affected, halting "alien speak" hampers him even further so he's not a exactly ball of fun and neither is the movie. I know it's a personal quirk but even as a kid I never liked genre films with child actors as major characters and when they play for sympathy (the boy has polio) it gets even more cloying.On the plus side, there are atmospheric touches in a couple of scenes with Carradine printed "in negative." This, however, is more than balanced by scads of talking head scenes, some of which includes the leading lady wavering between her two oldish, low-charisma suitors Bruce Bennett and Paul Langton. It's a very slow go.I recall back in the seventies when THE COSMIC MAN seemed to be a lost film, a friend of mine, a die-hard science fiction fan, was determined to track down a copy. He finally got his opportunity when the film suddenly became available on home video. Even he gave it a big Thumbs Down.