Science fiction movies are like that food you don't eat much but sometimes find yourself in the mood for. Notwithstanding Georges Melies's famous Trip to the Moon, shot at the dawn of the twentieth century, and Fritz Lang's undisputed 1927 masterpiece, Metropolis, the science fiction picture didn't come on the scene in a significant way until after the Second World War, spurred on by two significant and bewildering world developments: the splitting of the atom, and the resulting Cold War.
In this new atomic age, where a subtle paranoia lurked just beneath the surface of everyday existence, two unanswered questions loomed: first, are we alone?; and second, if we really try to find out, just what might we uncover?
Many science fiction films of the fifties have one innate drawback: they don't tend to age that well. Indeed, watching one of the earlier post-war entries, George Pal's Destination Moon (1950), I was diverted more by its undeniable kitschiness than by any authentic thrills or suspense. Given the state of technology today, these early depictions of futuristic space travel or the evils of atomic power most always come off as -- well, let's just say, amusingly quaint. Nevertheless, these films remain inventive, interesting visual documents of their time, and importantly, they also entertain.
The film that really put the sci-fi genre on the map was Robert Wise's The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). Starring Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe and Michael Rennie, this was no "B" movie quickie, but a first-rate drama about an advanced civilization on another planet that sends a visitor to earth with an important message: don't always seek to destroy what you fear. With solid performances and steady, expert pacing, Day holds up unusually well, and its message feels just as relevant now. (Avoid the anemic remake with Keanu Reeves.)
The great director Howard Hawks was quick to jump on the bandwagon, and that same year produced The Thing From Another World. Here, another spaceship lands in a remote frozen tundra, and when thawed out, another visitor makes itself known, one considerably more frightening than Michael Rennie's erudite alien. It is no less than a pre-Gunsmoke James Arness, playing a very large and frightening creature who clearly should have stayed frozen. The Thing remains gripping, suspenseful entertainment.
To any sci-fi aficionado, the name George Pal will be familiar. Having re-introduced the genre two years earlier with Destination Moon, he took a quantum leap forward in 1953 with The War Of The Worlds, starring Gene Barry (familiar to mature TV viewers as Western gunslinger Bat Masterson and later, the suave star of Burke's Law and The Name Of The Game). Based on the H.G Wells classic, War helped feed the public's lurid fascination with the possibility of world annihilation, with a Martian invasion standing in for a nuclear attack. Worlds is skillfully directed and played, technicolor adds vibrancy to the picture, and the Oscar winning effects still work their magic. Personally, I favor the original over the Spielberg's effects-laden but curiously flat update.
Stories involving the mutation of people and animals through atomic radiation comprise a sci-fi sub-genre all its own. And the best of them is called just that: Them! (1954). Imagine if you will hordes of ants mutated to roughly the size of...well, a lot bigger than a Buick. Trust me, you would not want these babies invading your Sunday picnic. This terrifying if unlikely scenario is made sufficiently believable through solid direction, effects, and script, and a sturdy cast, including the talented James Whitmore and the cuddly Edmund Gwenn (best remembered as Santa in the original Miracle on 34th Street).
My personal fifties sci-fi favorite is Don Siegel's ingenious, paranoiac nightmare vision, The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956). The chilling premise: in Everytown, USA, your neighbors are acting strangely. They look the same, but something has gone dead inside them. Soon, strange pods are discovered, and it appears they serve to replicate aliens as these same neighbors, thus beginning an insidious takeover of the earth itself. Invasion remains one of the top science fiction classics of our time, still creepy and disturbing today. And talk about remakes: there have been three to date, and still, first is best.
1956 was in fact a banner year for science fiction movies. Witness the literate, ambitious Forbidden Planet, loosely based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. One Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his comely daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) live on Altair 4, a beautiful planet, but when Commander J.J. Adams ( a young Leslie Nielsen) and crew attempt to land there, it becomes clear that conditions are not as placid as they appear to be, and that in fact, an invisible and malignant force still exists on Altair. Planet is undeniably talkier than my other picks, but beyond its high production values, you have to credit both its ambition and all it has inspired since, from TV's Lost in Space to the Star Trek phenomenon. And who could resist Robby the robot?
The legendary Ray Harryhausen was the fifties' answer to computer generated effects. (Beyond his work in science fiction, his "stop-motion" technology is seen to best effect in the evergreen adventure/fantasy, The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad). Harryhausen's contribution is pivotal in the ultimate flying saucer movie, Earth Versus the Flying Saucers (1956). Earth may be a welcome counterpoint to the more cerebral Planet, since there is action aplenty, as a fleet of Harryhausen-generated, alien-manned saucers make themselves a nuisance both in and out of our atmosphere, frightening the populous at large, and foiling the efforts of one dedicated scientist (Hugh Marlowe) to explore the mysteries of space. While not a bona-fide classic, Earth is a trim, tight little film that makes for fun family viewing.
The same can be said for Harryhausen's next venture, 20 Million Miles To Earth (1957). Here a rocket returning from a secret flight to Venus crashes into the sea off Sicily, carrying just one survivor (we think), a Colonel Calder, played by William Hopper (best remembered as Paul Drake on TV's Perry Mason). Soon, it's painfully evident that the rocket was carrying one more passenger, an embryo of a Venus resident who is rapidly born, and whose growth is then accelerated by the Earth's atmosphere. Before you can say "Cancel my flight to Rome", this extremely ugly and now enormous Venusian creature is camping out in the Coliseum, causing all manner of havoc. If this is not yet a cult film, it should be: Harryhausen's creation is a monstrous work of art, and having the devastation occur in Rome adds a unique touch to this sometimes silly, but still highly diverting, picture.
Dated as some of these titles are, they're still great fun for those partial to the genre, or game to get acquainted with it. And let us not forget: sitting in those dark theatres back in the fifties were young people with names like Kubrick, Roddenberry, Lucas and Spielberg, who'd be inspired to take the science fiction film to new levels of excellence in the years to come, largely as a result of seeing these pioneering features.
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"The Thing" and "The Day The Earth Stood Still" deserve their reputation. The best, as you noted, was "Invasion/Body Snatchers" which was the perfect metaphor for the times: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party/alien race?"
But by and large, many of the scifi films from that decade were mindless, with many episodes of "The Twilight Zone" showing far greater intelligence and thoughtfullness.
Also loved "The Fly" and "Eyes Without A Face". Harryhausen's "odyssey" pictures were all spellbinding. But, by and large, the fantasy films of the 40s and the scifi films that were to come in the 60s, were much more memorable. One could argue "The Day of the Triffids", "Village of the Damned" and "The Time Machine" were better than anything turned out in the 50s, and that was just the first three years of the 60s.
However, as to making that argument for VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and THE TIME MACHINE, yes, it could be made. (One might counter-argue that both of those movies came out within weeks of each other in 1960, and so were shot in 1959, and are still a product of the 1950s.)
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, by far the best of the three, benefited from following Wyndham's novel cloesely, whereas, TRIFFIDS suffered in large part because Wyndham's great novel was tossed out the door, with only the premise retained. (And not intact either. In the book, the Triffids had been genetically engineered by humans for oil. In the movie, they're just from outer space. Yawn.)
I think objectivity can be difficult when analysing scifi/horror films from our youth. The original "Triffids" had a GREAT impact upon me, particularly when the convicts ran amok, and it became a question of whom do you want to be consumed by, triffids or humans.
Saw the 1981 mini-series and enjoyed it, but it had no permanent impact. Both "The Tingler" and "Premature Burial" scared the sh*t out of me as a kid, but in showing them to kids now, I get nothing but yawns and laughs. Talk about, "I guess you had to be there"
I feel sorry for today's youth. I can't even sit through one "Transformers" movie, and yet they keep cranking them out. If these films are "The Time Machine" of today, at the risk of sounding like an old fart, I don't think Michael Bay direction and overwhelming CGI is doing the kids any favors.
For every "The Others" that tips the hat to "The Innocents", there are 100 releases of torture porn, and I can't really grasp the entertainment value.
I think I threw in the towel after having great hopes for Jack Black and Peter Jackson tackling "King Kong", and walked out of the theatre in a daze, wondering how it all could have gone so wrong. Thought that might bridge the chasm of the ages, but I was wrong.
EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS, with its terrible lead performance from Hugh Marlowe, uses footage from WAR OF THE WORLDS throughout. When the saucers blow up the tower of the Smithsonian Institute, it changes into the LA City Hall an instant before it blows up, as it uses the exploding of the LA City Hall from WAR OF THE WORLDS (Not the only footage common to both films, but the most egregious.)
Yes, in 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH, the astronuats have returned from landing on Venus, where the surface temperatrue is 800 degrees, and the poisonous atmosphere is as thick as jello. (And the obnoxious little boy in the movie is Bart Braverman, later of the TV series VEGAS. He's billed as "Bart Bradley.") The poor creature in that film would have died with its first breath of our atmosphere.
Incidentally, the reason 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH is set in Italy was because Harryhausen was bored with living in Los Angeles, and by setting his movie in Italy, the company had to pay to send him there.
Bradbury is not truely a science fiction writer; he is a fantasist and an allegorist. His Mars in THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES is certainly not the real Mars, but one would rather have that wonderful book than all the realism and scientific accuracy on earth. Bradbury is a wonderful writer, but he must be read as fantasy.
This will be news to lovers of such films as THE WOMAN IN THE MOON (Fritz Lang, 1929), THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (MGM 1929), JUST IMAGINE (Fox, 1930), FRANKENSTEIN, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, HG WELLS'S ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, HG WELLS'S THE INVISIBLE MAN, KING KONG, DELUGE (RKO 1933), the FLASH GORDON serials, the BUCK ROGERS serials, THE INVISIBLE RAY, and HG WELLS'S THINGS TO COME.
You call DESTINATION MOON kitchy and dated, yet its science is so accurate, that it was used when we really landed on the moon, to illustrate stuff, because it was the most accurate moon voyage ever filmed to that date, except for the prologue in Ray Harryhausen's film of HG Wells's THE FIRST MEN ON THE MOON.
The giant mutated monster movies were all atomic bomb anxiety movies. BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS and GODZILLA (GOJIRA) are very similar. Both are about atomic bomb anxieties, but BEAST was made by the people who had dropped A-Bombs on Japan, and is light-hearted and guilt-free. GODZILLA was made by the actual victims of atomic war, and is somber, morose, moody, has people who really seem to suffer, and has a tragic conclusion.
Godzilla is very effective and while its' been a long time since I've seen it, the splicing in of Raymond Burr seemed pretty seamless and he adds some real credibility.
I don't remember the Beast From 20000 Fathoms being all that light hearted. The Cecil Kellaway scene in the diving bell really bothered me as a kid. He seemed like such a nice fellow.
"the splicing in of Raymond Burr seemed pretty seamless and he adds some real credibility"
Whatever Burr brings to GODZILLA, it isn't "credibility."
The original GOJIRA and the Burr GODZILLA are out together in a double-DVD. The film without Burr is a MUCH better movie, also longer, and more emotionally telling.
Look at BEAST & GOJIRA together. (They make a great home double-feature.) The optomistic, our-military-can-lick-anything mood in BEAST is quite forthright and bascially upbeat, while GOJIRA is a sad, somber film, made by people who knew first hand what it was like to have your home city destroyed, and millions dead in a single night.
Kellaway's cliched death might well upset a child. Any adult hearing Cecil announce IN HIS FIRST SCENE that he's about to take his first vacation in decades KNOWS he will die before the end, just like any cop in a cop movie who is retiring tomorrow will die tonight. In any event, the heroine's short speech about "his funny little walk" pales next to the long panning over the bodies of the dead and maimed while a children's choir cings a mournful dirge sequence near the end of both versions of Godzilla.
And my favorite giant mutant was The Deadly Mantis, but that could be because it was the first one I saw.
You can of WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, which is George Pal again, and X THE UNKNOWN, which is a Hamemr picture. THE DEADLY MANTIS is a terrible cheapie.
the original "body snatchers" still creeps me out as well.
But they didn't tell me about this. They just made an excuse to stop there, and and made sure I wandered around and got a good look at the place. Then we went to see the film, about 2 miles away.
Of course, that great movie was spooking the hell out of me, and then we got to that sequence, and suddenly THE MOVIE WAS TAKING PLACE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD I WAS WATCHING IT IN!!! Time to freak out. Was I being shown the film by people or pods?? Really made it twice as creepy. After the film, we drove around to several of its locations, all of which were nearby.
That was the first sci-fi movie done by a major studio with a big budget and it was nominated for a special effects oscar.
Regarding the "mutation" movies, like "Them," Mr. Farr, what was your opinion of "The Giant Behemoth" and "Beast from 20,000 Fathoms," the later I believe filmed by Harryhausen?
Wrong. Both WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE and WAR OF THE WORDS were done with large budgets by Paramount, and won the effects Oscars well before FORBIDDEN PLANET. Disney's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA in 1954 ws the most-expensive movie ever made to that date, and won the effects Oscar.