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FILMS Part 2 |
Science Fiction Films The Golden Age of Science Fiction Films:
Alien Invader Films in the Cold War Era:
UFO sightings and reports of flying saucers or strange visitors from outer space found their way into Hollywood features as allegories of the Cold War, such as in director Christian Nyby's and producer Howard Hawks' sole science-fiction film The Thing From Another World (1951). [It was remade by director John Carpenter in 1982 with a faithful return to the original 1938 source, Who Goes There? a novella by John W. Campbell, Jr.]. It told the story of the discovery of a frozen block of ice encapsulating an alien life form (a killer, chlorophyll-based humanoid vegetable), played by Gunsmoke's James Arness, buried at a 'flying saucer' crash site near a remote Arctic outpost. After the creature was accidentally thawed, its presence was thrillingly announced by a beeping, flashing Geiger counter. [This same technique was later copied by the Alien films, notably Alien (1979).] When the monstrous creature finally appeared, it was doused with kerosene and set ablaze, and eventually electrocuted. The influential film's last line of dialogue, a reporter's radio warning broadcast: "Watch the skies! Everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!"
Other Alien Invader Classics:
In They Came From Beyond Space (1967), formless alien spacemen landed in Cornwall, England and began to take over the minds/bodies of a group of scientists. The early 1970s sci-fi thriller film adapted from Michael Crichton's novel, Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain (1971), captured the terror of a deadly, bacterial, crystalline organism from outer space that was brought back to Earth in a satellite, and the efforts of assembled high-tech scientists racing against time to save the world from extermination. Disaster-Tinged Science-Fiction: Stanley Kramer's masterpiece On the Beach (1959) dramatized the realities of an apocalyptic world, with survivors waiting for their radioactive doom in Australia, the last refuge on Earth in 1964. And disaster film expert Irwin Allen offered up Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) about the mission of an atomic submarine to destroy a deadly hot radiation belt. Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) black comedy irreverently juxtaposed incongruous comedy and the prospect of atomic war. It featured Peter Sellers in three prominent roles, including one of the title character of Dr. Strangelove -- a bomb-loving, mad scientist type with a Nazi accent and an artificial arm. The Mutant Creatures/Monsters Cycle: With the threat of destructive rockets and the Atom Bomb looming in people's minds after World War II, mutant creature/monster films featured beasts that were released or atomically created from nuclear experiments or A-bomb accidents. The aberrant monsters were the direct result of man's interference with nature. There were many examples of low-budget 50s films about the horrors of the Atomic Age:
It told the story of a journey by astronauts of United Planets Cruiser C-57D (led by commanding officer Leslie Nielsen in one of his earliest roles) to a distant planet named Altair-IV. There, they investigated the fate of a colony planted 20 years before. It re-worked Shakespeare's The Tempest and has been psychoanalyzed as a dramatization of repressed sexual desires. The film has been best-remembered for Walter Pidgeon as Dr. Morbius (the Prospero figure) on a tour of the ill-fated Krell laboratories, and his pretty 19 year-old daughter Altaira (Anne Francis as the Miranda character who had never seen men). The Tempest's Ariel was represented by a language-fluent, lumbering Robby the Robot (its first appearance in a film), and Caliban by an invisible Id-monster that attacked and penetrated the electric force-field fence set up around the spaceship's perimeter. The popularity of Robby the Robot spawned another film, The Invisible Boy (1957) with a supporting role for the 'good' computer robot. Robby also served as the prototype for the robot in the Lost in Space TV series (1965-68). |
After
a dry period during the war years, science fiction films took off during what
has been dubbed "the Golden Age of Science Fiction Films," although many of
the 50s exploitative, second-rate sci-fi flicks had corny dialogue, poor screenplays,
bad acting, and amateurish production values. In response to a growing interest
in rocketry and space exploration, feature-length space travel films gained
popularity in the early 1950s, pioneered by two 1950 films: 
Suddenly,
science fiction films were viewed as financially profitable and audiences
flocked to the theatres and craved more. Quickly, there were many cheap, low-budget
imitators, such as Monogram's and director Lesley Selander's Flight to
Mars (1951) - about a manned space-flight in the year 2000 to the Red
Planet of Mars. The Mars sequences were filmed in washed-out two-color cinecolor
[this was the first science fiction film made with color]. 
Many
other sci-fi films of the 1950s portrayed the human race as victimized
and at the mercy of mysterious, hostile, and unfriendly forces.
Cold War politics undoubtedly contributed to suspicion, anxiety,
and paranoia of anything "other" - or "un-American." Allegorical
science fiction films reflected the collective unconscious and often
cynically commented upon political powers, threats and evils that
surrounded us (alien forces were often a metaphor for Communism),
and the dangers of aliens taking over our minds and territory. It
was a tale told to illustrate how scientists had foolishly meddled
with things that should have been left alone - and caused further
catastrophe. 
More
US films about space invaders in the 50s included: 
Rudolph
Mate's When Worlds Collide (1951), adapted By Sydney Boehm from an
original novel by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, told of a runaway planetoid
(Bellus) destructively approaching toward the doomed Earth (with primitive
but dazzling for-the-time Oscar-winning Special Effects by producer George
Pal), and the financing and building of a 'Noah's-Ark'-like spaceship to
evacuate a few chosen survivors to fly to Bellus' satellite Zyra (with Earth-like
climactic conditions) and colonize it
the
creepy, low-budget, cult classic film Invaders from Mars (1953) [remade
in 1986], was the last film of director William Cameron Menzies,
and one of the earliest films of its kind to be filmed in color;
it told the paranoid, foreboding story from the point of view
of young boy David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) whose warnings went unheeded;
during a dream he witnessed a Martian flying saucer landing in
a nearby field; the menacing Martians, who took residence under
his house, were guided by a disembodied bulbous head in a glass
sphere; the film ended with the opening sequence of the dream
being repeated in reality; contrary
to popular belief, it was not shot in 3-D
Universal's
thought-provoking science fiction adventure This Island Earth
(1955),
from director Joseph Newman, was based on the novel The Alien
Machine by
Raymond F. Jones. It told about nuclear physicist
Dr. Cal Meacham (Rex Reason) and his ex-love interest Dr. Ruth
Adams (Faith Domergue) who were recruited to a scientific world-peace
project in Georgia by white-haired Exeter (Jeff Morrow) and his
subversive right-hand man Brack (Lance Fuller); they were revealed
to be mysterious
humanoid aliens from the dying planet of Metaluna seeking
uranium and the knowledge of noted Earth scientists to save their
planet from destruction in their inter-planetary war against the
evil Zahgons; they were the disguised aliens
with odd-shaped skulls, distinguished by large heads with raised
foreheads; when the scientists were abducted to Metaluna, one
of the hideous Mutant servants with a large swollen, pulsating
cranium or exo-brains injured Exeter, although he successfully
pursued his mission to sacrifice himself to bring the two innocent
scientists Meacham and Ruth back to Earth; this classic sci-fi
film was targeted for heckling in Mystery
Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996)
producer/director
Gene Fowler, Jr.'s effective vintage sci-fi thriller (with a ludicrous and
misleading title) I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958), told
about a race of monster-like aliens from Andromeda Nebula, one of whom 'took
over' the body of a man (Tom Tryon) on his wedding night
In
more creature features, parasitic alien seed pods threatened to duplicate
and transplant themselves as emotion-less human clones in a hostile takeover
of the small California town of Santa Mira, in Don Siegel's suspenseful and
brilliant film 
director
Eugene Lourie's The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), with spectacular
effects and stop-motion animation by FX expert Ray Harryhausen was based
on a Ray Bradbury short story of the same name; about a subterranean monster
(a fictitious crocodilian dinosaur called a Rhedosaurus, a cross between
an alligator and a T-Rex) thawed in the Arctic after atomic testing and
threatening to rampage New York City on its way to ancestral breeding grounds;
the attacking creature was cornered in an amusement park among various rides
and ferris wheels, where it was killed by a radio-active isotope fired into
a wound in its throat and burned in a roller-coaster bonfire; a precursor
to the 1954 Gojira or Godzilla monster
Kurt
Neumann's (director of the original The Fly) low-budget sci-fi thriller Kronos (1957), about a giant, electrical energy-sucking alien machine/robot
from outer space, with Jeff Morrow (of This Island Earth)
Hollywood
pursued the commercial success of these post-war SF films with many
more. One intelligent, lavishly-expensive science fiction film was
MGM's