Without disrespect to actor, I think the way alien was cut to have almost no distinct, visible sense of a personality and only barely any sense of scale was perfect. It allowed you, the watching party, to project your own worst nightmares onto the vague impressions seen. I'm sorry for him as an actor almost all his work was lost to the end product but I think the end product was better for leaving much of this up to the imagination.

I watched alien as a prerelease (at least in the uk) at the edinburgh film festival in 1979. It was great. Harry Dean Stanton was perfect in his role, as was Ian Holm in his.

I've watched it subsequently on domestic devices. The chest buster scenes are a bit more henson-puppet like than I remember but I have read the cast were not warned and some of the furore is their initial WTF and not reshoots.