Sci-Fi Films of the 1950s

Destination Moon

1950 Eagle Lion

OK space drama

color

This was the first full-length space film out of Hollywood since 1930. It at least attempts some degree of technical realism, with the advice of the famous science fiction writer, Heinlein. (Well… better than nothing.)

Vehicle: Silver, cigar-shaped rocket with big fins. Not really very big. Nuclear rocket engine: steam super-heated by nuclear reactor.

Technology: Clips of White Sands V-2, discussion of satellites.

Computer: A clackety computer similar to that in Attack of the Flying Saucers.

Only boys on this mission — Heinlein never wrote well for women.

It has a beautiful pitch for going into space by Woody Woodpecker! With a lesson in Newtonian mechanics!

Why go to the Moon? “There is no way to stop an attack from outer space”

The dialog dismisses public opposition to the nuclear motor as propaganda financed by “somebody with money and brains”.

Upon landing on the Moon, they “claim possession for the United States, for the benefit of all mankind.”

The film depicts the effects of acceleration as excruciating. It depicts weightlessness well, by means of invisible wires. The astronauts report that weightlessness makes swallowing difficult. They walk with what are, apparently, real magnetized boots!

A very nice artist’s rendering of Earth appears; the astronauts soliloquize on its beauty.

An oxygen tank serves to thrust an astronaut to make a rescue.

Rocketship X-M
(a.k.a. “Rocketship Expedition Moon”)

1950 Lippert Productions

OK (but silly) space drama

B&W, some scenes tinted pink

Vehicle RXM (Rocketship Expedition to the Moon). Two-stage, shaped like a squid’s mantle. Carries “Twice the fuel we expect to use, to keep within the margin of safety.”

Not strictly a military project, but built in secrecy. That “…an unassailable base could be established on the Moon, to control world peace.”

According to a trailer provided with the tape, the crew consists of “Four Men and a Girl”.

They guys comment on her as they’re taking their physicals: “The weaker sex, the only one whose blood pressure is normal!” “Unless you look like a test tube or a chemical formula, you don’t have a chance”. She’s on board because she invented the fuel the rocket uses.

They get a case of “meteorites”.

At some point between the Earth and Moon, they have an encounter with reduced gravity. It’s briefly amusing, but they aren’t bothered by it again.

While in space, they gaze upon a gauge that reads “Air Speed - MPH”.

Something goes wrong: “By heading into space, we’ve added the Earth’s orbital velocity to our own”. They’re doing a course change, and everyone blacks out (for days). (Perhaps they should have made another correction.)

“You know the consequences of a body moving with unchecked velocity in free space… Infinite motion!”

The ship ends up going to Mars instead of the Moon. They acknowledge that this is wildly improbable, and “pause and observe respectfully while something infinitely greater assumes control”.

On Mars: “We have atmosphere here, we won’t need pressure suits”

Martians are just people. They have nuked themselves back to the stone age. The whole Mars episode is disappointing.

Most of the film is B&W, but Mars scenes are pink!

The musical score resembles the Star Trek theme.

Texan Bill Corrigan prefers colorful expressions like “Mars — whaddya know!”. Remarks: “On my ranch, I’ve thrown heifers over my shoulder bigger than that”. Col. Graham retorts: “You sure that wasn’t a bull?”

Graham has been chipping away at able co-worker and assistant Van Horn’s icy exterior all along, but after a couple of guys die, and they’re headed back to Earth, it’s time for romance. Graham: “Lisa, you’re a pretty swell girl.” Van Horn: “Girl? I’m not Dr. Van Horn anymore?” He has hit on the right formula!

But too late. Brace yourself for a bummer.

Parables:
God is in the pilot seat (and He can’t be killed!)
Races naturally engage in combat on first encounter.
Mars is too boring to bother with.

The Man from Planet X

1951 Mid Century Films

OK straight-up low budget alien arrival

B&W

Premise: a new planet shows up, like that’s like ho-hum. The world experiences “strange astronomical phenomena”. Then something appears on a Scottish island, with a space man in it.

Alien: the man from planet X. Always appears in a space suit with a clear bubble helmet. Has “a horrible, grotesque imitation of a face”. The worst part of this film is the face of the alien, which looks like a papier-mâché Mardi Gras mask, like a first attempt.

The alien tries to communicate by making musical sounds. Good question: “How to communicate with the X guy?”

As to why planet X is making a visit, it is later explained “…they managed to make the planet deviate from its natural orbit by scientific degravitation”.

The script never clarifies why the alien is such a threat — near as we can tell, he only gets mistreatment. The decision about how to handle him is stock ’50s sci-fi: because he is his people’s last hope, who will invade Earth to save themselves, they blow him up — thus, according to what the script tells us of them, dooming his people to extinction.

Vehicles: a pretty cool looking little rocket thing, made of impossibly light metal. The alien lands in a sort of bell-shaped capsule. The windows on it are harder than diamond.

Gadgets: a ray coming from the capsule takes away Elliott’s will. The alien has a lot of trouble with his gas regulator, Lawrence helps him out, but then Mears uses it to coerce him — it plays into several scenes. The people use a heliograph to communicate with a ship at sea.

Weapon: alien has a hand gun, which we never see him fire.

The acting in this film is better than the average B-movie of this period.

The character Enid is pretty strong — again, for the time and sort of film. She gets a sedative on account she saw something scary. (Margaret Morlan is the mother of Sally Field, and is at least as cute.) Both of the primary male characters sport facial hair. The actor most familiar to me is Schallert, who plays a power hungry bastard scientist here — unlike his usual roles. His acting isn’t bad, but his character’s behavior isn’t believable.

The script isn’t all bad, but it’s choppy, and was definitely cut short. As limited as the props are, they are at least — different. I’ve read that this film was completed in just a few days, and a very low budget — there were complaints about pay. They could have done better with a little more time and money.

The Thing from Another World

1951 Winchester Studios

− period piece military vs. space monster

B&W

They start in Anchorage. Something’s up at the North Pole.

The original story is about a shape-shifter. In this version, it’s a vegetable-man, that wants to eat bloooood!

Vehicles: They’re flying around in a C-47. (Nice paint pattern.) Alien flying saucer stuck in the ice: what we see is a lovely blue, streamlined tail fin.

First idea is to use thermite to get the saucer out. They thereby blow it up, so we never see any more of it.

There’s radioactivity everywhere.

They find a frozen anthropoid figure, 8′ tall, whom they straightaway accidentally thaw out, and commence shooting at. They determine that it’s a vegetable: they call it a “carrot”.

The rest is all military bad-boy banter and how to destroy the creature. The dialog fairly gallops, some aspects of naturalness lacking in many films especially of this era — intriguing, if not good, direction. Somehow, the many principals don’t completely lose their individuality. But, while the banter is fun, it doesn’t really help the scary mood.

It’s scariest when we can’t see the creature. When we do see the creature, it’s little different from the old Frankenstein’s monster — just a big guy lumbering and growling menacingly. (Saying that he’s really a plant doesn’t help make him scarier. The monster is only scary because we’re told it is.)

As science fiction, well, science is part of the story, but it’s mostly that the creature will reproduce itself quickly, given enough blood. A standard mad scientist is just mad about science; makes one wonder why any normal person would be a scientist.

The book has seen three adaptations so far. This one and the one from 1982 are both good enough in their own right, and different enough, I’m going ahead and listing both. Another adaptation in 2010 doesn’t add much but CGI.

“Watch sky… everywhere, keep looking, keep watching the sky!”

Flight to Mars

1951 Monogram Pictures

− space flight drama

color

Date “Fifty Years into the Future” (from trailers)

Vehicle: Sleek silver rocket-ship, boarded in the conventional manner — a little ladder to a door at the rear.

The inside of the rocket ship is identical to that of Rocketship X-M.

Premise: The ship was built in secret by the Pentagon, but the (much-discussed) reason for the ship is just to get there.

Crew: a frigid woman scientist, a know-nothing-but-whimsical newspaper reporter who has unexplained authority over the others, the handsome and lusty captain, and some old guys who worry about stuff.

They nearly get sucked into the Moon by its gravitational field, but by some last-second swerving, manage to avoid it. The obligatory encounter with “meteorites” (which appear to be micrographs of blood cells) causes a crash landing on Mars.

Aliens: Martians are just (white, North American) people with futuristic clothing. The thoughts of both species turn promptly to procreation with the other.

The Martians are running out of “corium”, which is their equivalent of coal.

Martian girls can’t really bend over in their outfits. Futuristic! The length of their skirts was a taste of things to come in Star Trek.

Mars is a “woman’s paradise”, because instead of a kitchen, there is a “food laboratory”, which delivers meals, and washes the dishes.

If you’re looking for utterly idiotic dialog and miserable confusion not only of scientific facts, but of human behavior and the workings of government and what constitutes humor, go no further! There are more chaotic efforts and worse production, and even examples of worse acting. But for sheer dumb, this film explores every crevice!

Parables:
Watch out for meteorites.
Mars is dying.
Martian girls look good in mini-skirts.
Martian women belong in the food laboratory.

The Man in the White Suit

1951 Ealing Studios

++ comic economics of science

B&W

Premise: Sydney is a genius, and he’s up to something unauthorized in the company lab.

The Question: If something too good to be true really comes into being, is it truly a good thing?

Everything about this film is just lovely. Every actor shines — even the bit parts. The photography is brilliant, the sounds are perfect. The characters are rich, but all quite believable — including the outrageous ones.

The humor is absolutely on the mark. A quiet little joke pops out every few seconds.

The science part might be far-fetched, but the economics and social issues are very real.

It’s an exquisite story about society, and the limitations of science in improving it. It is also a brilliant piece of movie-making.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

1951 Twentieth Century - Fox

+ space alien arrival, scary robot

B&W

Vehicle: Beautiful flying saucer

Robot: The very cool and scary Gort

Date: 1951 (shows on a cleaner’s tag on a suit Klaatu appropriates).

Klaatu comes from a planet 250 million miles away. Well, that would have it within our solar system. (The term “light-year” had been in use for a hundred years already. Maybe the writers were just unaware of it.) He looks just like a human; his skeleton is “perfectly normal” — the doctors think this implies a “similar atmosphere”.

The reaction of the Earthlings is to circle the spaceship with heavy artillery, and to shoot Klaatu after he says he has come in peace. Then they try to imprison Klaatu in a hospital. Then they shoot him again! Government officials are indifferent to his message.

Regarding the original short story: it ends with a twist that doesn’t appear in the movie.

International: Get to hear Hindi, French spoken. There are blacks in crowds of Americans.

All the principals deliver good performances. The script is coherent and directed, despite its scientific and social weaknesses.

Compare to Stranger from Venus, The Man Who Fell to Earth.

A 2008 re-make with modern special effects doesn’t add much, except to update the reason for Klaatu’s visit and the scariness of Gort. (Also, John Cleese is in it.)

Five

1951 Arch Oboler Productions

+ post-nuclear holocaust

B&W

This is the first, full-length film depiction of the world after a nuclear holocaust.

The science fiction here is that of a bomb that quickly kills almost everybody pretty much everywhere, so only a handful of live people find one another.

We don’t see much of what happened — a stock clip of a nuclear explosion, then just smoke blowing over churches and mosques all over the world; the Eiffel tower, Taj Mahal, Empire State building. They applied biblical stuff at either end, for scriptural legitimacy.

It’s primarily a play of personalities. Of course, it is not a happy story.

Mixed-race cast! The script treats racism directly.

Mostly, it’s just about a few damaged people: here we are, everything and everybody else is gone, now what?

It’s clean of special effects, mutant hobgoblins, hero heartthrobs.

The acting is great, as is the camera work.

The main interpersonal conflict resolves feebly, though.

The budget for the film was miniscule, with a crew of college graduates.

The fancy house on a hill is of course a Frank Lloyd Wright design.

When Worlds Collide!

1951 Paramount

OK space mega disaster-n-salvation

color

Premise: star Bellus will collide with Earth, while its planet Zyra will come just near enough for people to move there.

Computer: a “differential analyzer”. It makes a lot of noise.

Vehicle: inter-planetary “Space Ark”, silver, winged, cigar-shaped rocket that conserves fuel by riding a rail that curves down a mountainside and up another.

The film begins with disaster newsreels and preachy stuff.

There are lots of titanic special effects, mostly done with small models on cellophane.

Non-white people appear in the U.N., but not in the U.S.A. The rocket ship factory, in particular, is completely Anglo.

A naïveté about the scale of things and engineering details is present throughout, but nothing worse than the scale of human population. Shortly into the film, the script reduces the population of the country to a few people working in the factory to build the ark, and perhaps for a chance to be saved. What became of everyone else?

At the last moment, rabble-rousers do what they must do. The mob fires on the spaceship, but to no avail: the bullets bounce off its hull. (It isn’t clear that all the workers knew that only a select few were going to escape.)

The intrepid pioneers take a pot-shot at planet Zyra: without knowing whether it is livable or not, they fling open the ship’s hatch! What a relief, to find that Zyra is a cultivated Grecian countryside, just waiting to be inhabited!

The love triangle is completely gratuitous, and out of place.

The House in the Square
(aka. I’ll Never Forget You)

1951 Twentieth Century Fox

OK time-travel romance

B&W and color

A travel-into-the-past story, or perhaps time-loop, with a romance twist.

Date: present (1951), past (1784)

Place: In and near London.

Lots of atomic sciency stuff at an atomic research laboratory in England: the boys are irresponsible with radioactive samples. Nothing comes of this, near as I can tell. He blurts a big mess of relativity talk, to explain how he’s going to go back in time. It makes no lick of sense, and drones on a while. There’s a storm. (There’s always a storm.)

Oh, fun! In the 1950s present, it’s B&W; in 1784, it’s color! (Of course, this was very old hat, after The Wizard of Oz of 1938.)

One moment Standish insists on the immutability of time, and the next pursues a plan to change the past. He has his temporal cake, and eats it, too, but unfortunately, can’t keep it down.

He meets historical figures in an effort to change their minds, and instead, shortly divulges that he is from the future. He can’t help himself.

In the past, he has a lab, to show all the fancy inventions of the future. It serves to convince nobody but his partner in romance.

It’s love at first sight, on account of good looks, apparently. It ends unresolved, thus avoiding losing a point from me.

Call it a period piece adaptation of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the main plot difference being the dates involved. (The protagonist is an American living in London.) But in contrast to that story (and its previous adaptations), the time travel here isn’t a dream — it’s some natural phenomenon.

The acting and direction is typical of 1950s action-adventure films.

I read that the film project was started in 1945, with bigger-name stars, but got shelved, and then revived.

“You want to talk to Doctor Johnson, do you? You’ll have to interrupt him to do that!”

3000 A.D.
aka. Captive Women

1952 RKO Radio Pictures, Inc.

− early post-nuclear-apocalypse

B&W

Date: The title screen reads

1000 Years from Now
(The Year 3000 A.D.)

Place: New York City

Narration explains a view of world politics of the time. A painting of nuclear destruction of a city appears briefly.

This is one of the first of the post-nuclear-apocalypse sub-genre, dealing with what happens to civilization long after the conflict. Its predecessor, Five, dealt with short-term consequences.

Is it sci-fi? In that engineers used science to produce the weapons in the war, it’s a sort of engineering sci-fi. This one explores the idea that radiation might permanently mutate whole groups of people.

Groups: “Upriver men”, march, bent on further destruction, “Mutates” with radiation disfigurements, cower in the ruins, “Norms” live in subways, and are pretty people — but not nice.

There’s a wedding among the Norms, and the Upriver Men want to visit. The Norms are remarkably ill-prepared for the treachery and infidelity that are afoot.

The Mutates are Christians, and have forbidden themselves to marry one another, for fear of producing more mutations. Their men capture Norm women for reproduction — hence, the title.

The dialog is very artificial and stylized, resembling that of contemporary Robin Hood movies. Direction is very poor, even for the times. But there are some great old actors, doing their best.

It’s a sincere attempt, just a very flawed execution.

Invaders from Mars

1953 National Pictures Corp.

− evil Martians arrive and possess

color

Vehicle: a glowing flying saucer.

Aliens: one scary, brainy Martian in a plastic bubble has tentacles, and orders the other Martians around using his bloodshot eyes. The other Martians are in fuzzy, faceless, teddy-bear suits.

Gadgets: brain implant, rock-boring ray.

The kid sees the saucer land, exclaims “Gee, whiz!”. Nobody believes him.

The Martians suck victims into the sand. The victims return home, with only a little scar on the back of the neck to show for it, and… they aren’t the same.

Weird choral music reminds me of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Despite the kid and the silly outfits, it’s not a happy movie — certainly not a movie for little kids. It treats death and treachery. But pathetically lame props and sets sabotage its attempt at drama and horror. Its ending is stock Hollywood, unsatisfying as it is unimaginative.

The film was re-made in 1983, with more special effects, but not better.

Parables:
Listen to the kid!
Martians, bad!
Leave it to the army!

Four Sided Triangle

1953 Hammer Film Productions

− duplication to solve romance problem

B&W

Premise: a scientist has invented a system that perfectly reproduces objects.

Now imagine the most ill-advised thing to duplicate, and the worst possible reason for doing so, and imagine convincing others to participate.

As science fiction, the film is a fair attempt at the stock premise. The story is beyond the pale, though.

The camera work is quite good — it’s a pretty film. The special effects don’t amount to much — some bubbling flasks, lots of electronic whatnot, an oscilloscope.

Some characters are fairly sympathetic. There are moments of fairly good acting. And… I’m a sucker for perfect British diction.

The production values can’t redeem the film from the wildly unlikely behavior of the main characters at crucial points of the story. In a film like this, one expects to swallow a difficult science fiction premise. To watch otherwise-reasonable people acting in ways that no normal person would… is not what I signed up for.

“In all my life, I only wanted two things: knowledge and… love.”

It Came from Outer Space

1953 Universal International

OK aliens arrive… now what?

B&W; originally 3-D

Vehicle: a mesh of polygons in fireworks. Sounds like a jet aircraft as it flies over the Southwestern desert, and crashes into the ground.

Once it’s on the ground, a hexagonal door slowly opens, showing… something like a classical atom model inside.

Aliens: big shapeless glob with an eyeball on a stalk in the middle, with mossy hair over some parts. Leave a sparkly trail on the ground as they move. We know when we’re seeing through a monster’s eye when it’s like looking through a bubble.

It’s a little confused in a couple of places whether the aliens take over a person’s form, or actually steal their body. It must be the former. When they take over the pretty girl, she changes to a pretty evening gown. But while some players get fancier clothes when the aliens take them over, and others don’t — as though the director was unsure what the change of clothing signified.

Weapon: metal wand that produces a cool ray that can cut through rocks.

Gadget: cone that also shoots a ray. There’s some talk about some device that propels the spacecraft — it’s not clarified whether this is the cone or the atom-model thingy.

The hero is an amateur stargazer and a writer — evidently of fiction. He has a bad tendency to talk to himself in front of other people. The heroine is a schoolteacher. It looks very much as if they are a couple, maybe they live together. They aren’t married! And they’re stupidly poetically in love.

They get into a cute, open mini-chopper to investigate the crash. The hero gets a peek inside the alien ship, but then a landslide re-buries it.

An alien appears in the road in front of them, driving them off the road. “Did you hit it?” “I’ll see.” He pulls the pistol out of the glove box.

The story is like this: the creepy aliens come, and do creepy things, but what should we do about it? The question goes back and forth many times in the picture, unfortunately, both sides again and again make threats and issue ultimatums, and then back off from them, without any apparent reason. It’s like — what were we arguing about? Why?

As sci-fi, this is one of the better alien visitation films of the 1950s, inasmuch as it presents the situation from the point of view of the aliens.

The script is pretty bad, though. The actors do their best, within the conventions of the time.

"We are sure of the future,… so very sure."

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

1953 Jack Dietz Productions

+ dinosaur NYC terror due to nukes

B&W

Premise: they blow up a nuke at the pole (depicted by stock footage) — a giant dinosaur commences stomping about shortly thereafter.

Vehicles: Transportation to the pole is with C-47s. Stock footage of other contemporary military aircraft also appears.

Monster: doesn’t resemble any dinosaur I know. The head looks like T. Rex, but it walks on all fours. It has something like plates on its backbone, not so big as a stegosaurus had, but similar in shape. Also, it sports big canine teeth, in un-dinosaur fashion. They start calling it a “Rhedosaurus”.

The first sighting is in the ocean off Nova Scotia as a sea serpent. Another sea captain reports a sea monster; the radio announcer follows the report: “he really ought to stop smoking that stuff and try Virginia Gold…” Half the movie is about the problem of witnesses convincing authorities.

Science isn’t the only sort of knowledge that’s shaky here: “…Galileo who said the Earth is round. They made him recant, but the Earth is round.”

The professor goes down in a diving bell and straightaway locates the monster, and things go sour. I’m afraid that animals were injured in the making of this movie.

Be warned. The scenes you’re waiting for are 80% to the end of the movie. The rest is all build-up.

Finally, the monster appears on the docks in New York, Brooklyn Bridge in the background. The monster stomps on cars and walks through brick buildings. Guns only annoy it.

The famous scene of the monster eating the cop horrified me as a kid.

They hurt the monster, but then it turns out its blood carries some disease. There is some discussion this, but the film shows only guys feeling sick and sleepy. In the end, it becomes an excuse to use science to combat the monster.

Harryhausen’s stop-action photography execution of the monster is beautiful. In some scenes its scale and movement isn’t convincing, but in others, you can almost believe.

Bradbury relates how the idea for the story came from a demolished roller-coaster reminding him of dinosaur bones. (An homage to the roller coaster appears.)

The historical progression of giant monsters starts out with early depictions of dinosaurs in their natural environments, then to King Kong, who gets loose in New York, to this film, where a dinosaur gets loose in the same town, to Godzilla, where another dinosaur-like thing stomps around in Tokyo. But thereafter, every manner of giant creature was going for walks all over the place.

Spaceways

1953 Hammer

− murder-mystery-romance oh and rockets

B&W

Vehicle: the film employs stock sounding rocket clips throughout; repeatedly, clips of White Sands V-2 rocket tests. (White Sands missile range gets mention in the dialog!) We see a model of the rocket on a table. The design, if not the model itself, is familiar. The whole thing is roughly conical, in three parts. The bottom stage has four huge fins, the top stage has swept-back airplane wings, with canards in front.

They’ve been sending mice, etc., up in rockets. Now they’re planning to put the first artificial satellite in orbit.

To set up the back-story, the film shows lots of military guys, fancy parties, and pretty ladies, lots of social nonsense, and marital infidelity.

The only notable acting was that of Bartok. She takes the camera — not just because she’s pretty. (The rest are character actors at best.) As woman technician Lisa Frank, she does play an important role, but she is there primarily to provide a romantic edge.

A third into the film, it delves into rockets in earnest. It provides a crash course of partially-accurate information for those who know nothing about space flight.

Dialog explains that once they get the rocket to “1075 miles above sea level… because at that height we know the rocket will become a satellite of the Earth, it will never return…” They believe a three-stage rocket is the answer.

There is talk of building a space station — nothing further comes of it.

More stock V-2 film. Count-downs drag out excruciatingly. As the V-2 takes off, the view switches briefly to show the launch scene from the film Rocketship X-M.

It is hard to associate the rocket model and drawings they present with any of the rocket launches they depict — they don’t resemble one another at all.

The big launch just shows another V-2. Like… their special effects department couldn’t produce a convincing launch of their cool rocket model. And they thought nobody would notice. (The movie poster showed rockets zooming around a space station. Surely I’m not the only one who was disappointed.)

But then it becomes a murder mystery, with rockets used as a place to hide bodies. From there, it stumbles into a romance.

Almost to the end of the film, we see nice matte paintings of a rocket like the model, and a set meant to represent the area beneath the rocket. The rocket interior consists of a big room with braces on the walls.

The space suit helmets have a tiny window, like a welder’s mask. There is a reason: it conceals the identities of the astronauts. Turns out, they aren’t careful about who gets into their rocket ship.

The space activity occurs in just the last few minutes of the film. The following all happens within one minute:

“We’ll have to try the emergency!” (Approaches a watertight door wheel, labeled “Emergency”.) “It’s jammed!” (Oh no! They’re doomed!) But whoops, then it turns! And that returns them to Earth! (somehow) Happy faces! End credits!

This isn’t so much a science fiction as engineering fiction. The technical part was on drawing boards at the time, and it’s just a background to a main story, which itself was in need of editing — scratch that – re-writing.

The writers didn’t know what to do with a space adventure, so they spiced it up with murder mystery and romance, and by the time they got back to the space adventure, they just sloppily tacked it onto the end. It’s a writing and directing travesty.

War of the Worlds

1953 Paramount

++ Martians on the rampage

color

The film opens with an illustrated tour of the Solar System, by Chesley Bonestell. A Jupiter scene is reminiscent of a scene from the Disney film Fantasia. It has features typical of George Pal films: newsreels and ghastly preachy stuff at beginning and ending of the film. (A minister who looks chillingly like Billy Graham prays for deliverance.)

Aliens: Martians, of “cool intelligence”, with a single, tri-color eye, spindly arms with three suction-cupped fingers and gooey skin. They scream like girls when hurt. They “recognize the significance of the British Isles”. (Which, presumably, means they aren’t all bad.)

Vehicles: Martians arrive on Earth in cylinders that land as meteors, with hatches that unscrew.

Very otherworldly magnetically-levitated hovering death machines, have on a flexible stalk a death ray that “neutralizes mesons”, and a protective force-field “electromagnetic covering — a protective blister”. They have a tri-color “electronic eye” on a prehensile cable.

A US Air Force YB-49 Flying Wing drops an A-bomb is on the alien craft, to no effect, as they are protected by their force-fields.

Forrester, a “top man in astro and nuclear physics”, has ill-fitted horn-rim glasses, which he removes to gaze upon Sylvia. (Seems he only needed them to make a smart first impression — we don’t see them again.)

The narrator (Paul Frees) speaks of the battle of the populations of other countries against the aliens.

The only non-white is one Mexican-American who gets vaporized right off.

The film is a modernization and Americanization of the book, which is itself an intertaining read. Other alterations include: the book’s tripods are replaced by flying machines, the book’s suggestion that the Martians are devouring slaves is removed, and the movie adds the obligatory Hollywood romance angle, and the religious stuff. The book suggests that the Martians might have mastered the “secret of flight” (because it was published before the first heavier-than-air flights.) The sense of running away in hopeless panic from something incomprehensible horrible and ravenous carries through in the movie well.

Postscript 1: A 2005 adaptation altered the nature of the Martian machines, making them more tripod-like as in the novel, and re-introduced the Martian’s vampirish behavior. I’m not convinced it was overall an improvement.

Postscript 2: I saw a restored version of this film at the Berlinale in 2017 — the first time I had seen it on the big screen. They had cleaned it up beautifully — sound, color and everything: just gorgeous. The place was packed. Most of the audience had never seen it. Sure enough, the girls still screamed at the appropriate places, and it received hearty applause!

Project Moon Base

1953 Galaxy

− silly space spy drama

B&W

Date: post 1970

Vehicles: very small one-person rocket ships, Canada and Mexico, fly to the space station, from which a Moon ship departs.

The space station is 350 ft in diameter; bears insignia USSF: U.S. Space Force (but craft bear the USAF insignia). Its purpose is to “consolidate the safety of the Free World.”

Elaborate sets and models manage always to look like sets and models.

Set-up: the “enemies of Freedom” kill a scientist that was to go on the flight, and replace him with a double who’s to destroy the space station, which to them is a “perpetually menacing eye-in-the-sky”.

A lot of the action involves issues such as space-docking, weightlessness, and the airlessness of the Moon. The crew have the sense to wear space suits on the Moon, and communicate by radio while in the space suits.

The depiction of weightlessness of “free-fall” is quite unconvincing. The crew wear special space-boots that allow them to walk normally on ceilings or floors, to which are attached conventional chairs and tables.

The crew exhibit signs of great distress each time the rocket engine fires.

Everybody smokes.

Haydon Rorke has a lot of trouble with the technobabble.

First surprise: Colonel Briteis is a woman! The dialog explains that she was picked because she weighs so little.

Briteis doesn’t fill us with confidence, though. She’s as cute as a button, but sounds like Judy Garland (“Ooh! YOU!”). And of course, due to her feminine weakness, she accidentally fires the rockets that force them to land on the Moon.

Uniforms consist of T-shirts and shorts, a cute little skull cap, and cute space-boots. While Briteis makes this look great, the others strain to maintain their dignity.

Briteis and Ford get stuck on the Moon, and duly marry, as is required by common decency, thus providing an ending to the story.

Last surprise: The President of the U.S. is a woman!

Parables:
Blast-off!
A woman on the ship is bad luck (but if she must be President, I suppose she must)
In space — to enforce Freedom!
The perpetually menacing eye-in-the-sky of Freedom!
When on the Moon, get married!

Riders to the Stars

1954 United Artists

+ man-in-space melodrama

color (B&W prints were made for TV)

Also credited: Acceleration Research on the Human Centrifuge at the University of Southern California.

Date: near future.

This is one of the first “man in space” films: there are no aliens or fantastic weapons. It’s about, what would we do up there anyway? It’s a pretty elaborate production. Aside from the outer space scenes, the cinematography is very impressive.

The titles cite several groups as scientific advisors for this film. The narration repeatedly plugs various institutions, such as Palomar Observatory. Despite that, the dialog garbles a lot of facts: reducing cosmological time scales by large factors, and asserting that cosmic rays may destroy the Moon in a million years. It says that “meteors” “survive” in space for “thousands of years”.

Meteors are everywhere in space, and just as much a menace as in most other space films of this time. The film depicts weightlessness. An astronaut whose ship blows up is skeletonized immediately.

Premise: to “catch a meteor in flight”, “to study the molecular structure of its outer hull before it’s burned away by friction with the air”, because they have observed that metallic objects are quickly “pounded to dust” by cosmic rays.

One pilot, Wells, objects on political and moral grounds:

The dialog brings up a suggestion that an “electronic brain” should fly the rockets, but “it would have to be a mile long and would weigh thousands of tons”. It argues further: “courage and aggressiveness — that’s why we need men rather than machines for this job”. (At another point, though, they do use an “electronic computer”.)

The plot mostly concerns the choice and training of the pilots for the job. (Despite all this, the pilots regularly crack up and flaunt impassioned orders from the ground.) The principals wax and wax and wax romantic, about exploration, and the stars, and about romance generally. It’s a bit heavy.

The script emphasizes respect of professions: most of the characters are fancy doctors and pilots. One of the doctors is a lady. (One of the guys reacts to the information she’s a doctor, and another says: “Please, no obvious remarks.” She looks great in the various brown jumpsuits she wears, and is, as it turns out, available. Still, this film is more adult about the question of women professionals than many in this genre.)

The progression rocket–jet–“prop job” comes up more than once in dialog, with dismay always expressed for the latter, doubt and surprise for the former, and awe for the middle one.

The only non-white person involved is the famous jazz vocalist, Kitty White, who sings the awful, clumsy lyrics with egregious competence. Not depicted, but at least cited!

There are inappropriate relationships: the main pilot is the son of the main scientist in charge, and a romance emerges between him and the lady doctor.

Most of the guys are smoking most of the time (but that’s the way it was). Nonetheless, one candidate for the mission fails to make the cut because he was “pacing and chain-smoking”. (There are “No Smoking” signs about, while fueling rockets.)

The acting isn’t bad, typical of the time period, even excellent, given the corny lines they had to work with.

Unfortunately, the rockets and meteors vibrate ridiculously on their wires, swooping and wobbling worse than in earlier sci-fi serials — and the rockets whistle like bombs on their way down. It’s a pity — it blows any hope of realism that they tried so hard to set up.

The dialog explains that the rocket extends wings to fly back to the ground (very poorly depicted) and that it has a “scoop” for collecting meteors (again very poorly depicted).

We don’t even see the rockets until 3/4 through the film. Various stock footage of U.S. V-2 rocket tests serves to represent the film’s rockets, on the ground and launching. There is also some footage about assembly of the V-2s that I had never seen before. Famous stock footage of Earth photographed from sounding rockets also appears.

Parables:
Space is a place to go crazy about.
Look out for the meteor!
No rocket fuel around? Have a smoke!
The cute guy gets the best girl whose career brings her closest to him.

Creature from the Black Lagoon

1954 Universal-International Pictures

OK fish-man discovered; tragedy and screaming ensue

B&W; originally 3-D

Begins with a reading from Genesis, followed by an image of planet Earth cooling. Explains that life formed in the sea, and animals came out onto the land… we see strange footprints on the beach. “15 Million years later, in the upper reaches of the Amazon, man is still trying to reach it.” (?)

The paleontologist finds a claw sticking out of the rock; he pulls it out. Scarcely do they turn their backs, before a very similar but wet claw reaches up from the water.

The scientist keeps saying the claw is from the “Devonian age”. Now, that’s 420 to 360 million years ago. That makes no sense. They talk about the animals being unchanged from Devonian times… but none of the animals they mention existed as such at that time. Surely they could have just looked up a local university professor and given them a call!

Nonetheless, the story does have a sci-fi premise, however wobbly.

They use ’50s SCUBA tanks. The water is awfully clear, for a lake named “Black Lagoon”.

All we see is the terrible claw for about a third of the film. But then, peek-a-boo! The guy in the creature suit really had to do some great swimming. That must have been hard in a full-body suit. It appears to be human! But it gulps air like a fish and its gills move!

There have been much worse monster suits — they really spent some time on this one.

They tackle the usual question about keeping the creature alive for study, or killing it because it’s dangerous.

Weapons: they harpoon the creature twice, and hit him with poison, and shoot him with guns. He’s not impervious, but he’s very resilient.

The Brazilians are the first to snuff it, conveniently.

Man! She’s all buttressed up in that ’50s swimsuit. It’s enough to turn any prehistoric fish-man’s thoughts to abduction!

The first time I saw this film would have been in ’63 or so. Some kids down the street had the first color TV in the neighborhood, and it could get more channels than my family’s. They said the “creature” was going to be playing. We all went over, and gathered around, squealing with excitement.

With difficulty, we got to see a few scenes, but the station wouldn’t come in well. Somehow that made it even more exciting. But the truth is, we hardly ever got to see the monster. (And who cares it was color anyway? The movie’s B&W.)

It’s a monster movie. It’s the Creature most Featured. There were many bad imitations.

A popular 2017 movie, The Shape of Water, which really isn’t sci-fi, concerns a creature patently derived that of the Black Lagoon.

Gog

1954 Ivan Tors Productions

− cold-war technology horror

color (very saturated); originally 3-D

It’s a cold-war technology film.

Vehicles: The initial titles are on paintings of stylized V-2 rocket, and a wheel-like space station. The good guy arrives in a very cute, small double-rotor helicopter… looks like a McCulloch MC-4. They fly in it without helmets, and just chat and smoke, like it’s not loud.

All sorts of antennas and gadgets pop out of the ground. Sun mirrors “focused on us, they could burn us to a crisp”. We get talk about a paraboloid!

Computer: a “giant brain machine”, N.O.V.A.C. Nuclear Operative Variable Automatic Computer, controls the gadgets. It was made in Switzerland “five years ago”.

Robots: Gog and Magog, roll on small tank tracks, each has five arms with grasping hands and another arm that is a blow torch. They wave their arms maniacally when they move. Compare to Lost In Space “Danger, Will Robinson!”

Other gadgets:
Paper tape storage gets wows.
Teletype machine running at about 2 bytes / sec.
Atomic reactors.
Electronically-controlled tuning forks, to pick up vibrations.

The technobabble in this film is just terrible. The dialog is chock-full of high-school science and almost-science.

Thin mustaches prevail.

The women characters mostly have important positions, and the guys take them seriously. They also die just like the guys do. Most of the women are blondes or redheads. I saw one gray-haired older woman, and one brunette.

We’re blindsided by a romantic scene, à propos of nothing, leading nowhere. They get back to it only in the closing scenes.

The story would have us understand that the best way to stop robot havoc is by flamethrowers, preferably in confined spaces — and, when the flamethrower poops out, by whacking them with the flamethrower nozzle. Yes, this is how our hero finishes the titular monsters off.

A rocket plane turns out to have been the culprit, “made of fiberglass” so it was invisible on radar, made by “our enemies”, quickly dispatched by USAF jets. One fighter jet is probably an F-86 Sabre another is probably an F-94C Starfire.

The next day, they launch a space station, “so that nobody can take us by surprise again”. The launch of a V-2 test rocket appears. The End.

It’s pretty bad. It gets points for the color, the inventory of gadgets, and the cold-war atmosphere.

Quotes:

Of paper tape computer records:

“every punched hole represents a thought.”

“Science is never frightening”

… famous last words.

“At these frequencies, sound generates intense heat! Open your mouths!”

Them!

1954 Warner Brothers, First National

+ giant ants cuz nukes

B&W

Premise: nuclear testing has made giant man-eating ants.

Dumb as that may sound, and in fact be, the movie is pretty well made. It even manages to be scary.

Shot in the yucca forest.

Cops find a little girl in shock with a mutilated doll. She’s excellent in the part, and sets the ominous tone all by herself. (And she’s the one who says “Them!”)

A dozen very familiar actors appear, many uncredited. The radio announcer is very familiar, too.

Check out the cash register! That would have been antique in the ’50s!

Oh man, then the cops split up on a dark blowy night, where a very violent homicide has occurred. That can’t be good.

Aircraft: North American B-25 Mitchell, USAF insignia, marked 1203. (The underside of the nose windshields were covered up.) Nice whirligigs: Sikorsky R-5 (amazingly quiet and comfy inside).

Weapons: Handguns don’t stop the ants, but can damage antennae. The cop happens to have a machine gun, which is effective. Bazookas are fun, but ticklish to operate. Automatic rifles are also pretty good… but there are so many monsters. Hand grenades! Even better! Flamethrowers prove especially effective in close quarters and tight spaces.

Weldon plays her part like an adult and professional, except her skirt gets caught coming down from the plane, and she screams and falls down on seeing a monster. But besides that… Then again, why’s she in the desert in heels?

Later, Arnass says: “It’s no place for you or any other woman.” She talks him down pretty well, playing the scientist card.

As far as science goes: many people learned much of the science they ever knew about ants from this film. Formic acid, particularly, figures into the script.

Biblical prophesy: “…the beasts shall reign over the Earth” (Added, just so God knows we’re thinking about Him.)

The scene of the skeletons was too much for me, as a kid.

Risk of nationwide panic is a big part of the dialog, and the reason for the G-man telling a shrink not to release his patient. (I hope, even in the ’50s, people questioned the legality of such activity.) Anyway, shortly after, they drop that concern, and proceed to panic the public.

Several of the principals change their hats during the film. Whitmore wears at least three: a cop hat, a fedora, and an army helmet.

Quotes:

ゴジラ (Gojira)
Godzilla

1954 Toho

+ giant dinosaur stomps Tokyo

B&W

Japanese

As a kid, I just wanted to see the monster, of course. Now, for the first time, I’m looking at the work of the creators of the film.

After a few ships get sunk, Godzilla shows up pretty quickly. His voice is one of the most amazing things — really scary — maybe a mix of an elephant’s trumpet and a big steel gate screeching and a tiger’s roar. He’s got radioactive footprints, and leaves trilobites in them. He’s 50 meters tall. Breath (steam?) so hot it burns everything up. The scales on his back also shimmer electrically when he breathes this fire.

The professor describes him as “a creature from the Jurassic era.” Explains that “approximately 2 million years ago”, “brontosaurus” and other dinosaurs were on the Earth. Godzilla must be one of a marine species of reptile, hidden away in a deep cave. Repeated underwater H-bomb tests destroyed its natural habitat.

There’s conflict among authorities about whether to make the info public or not. To avoid panic, or to tell the truth? But evidently, they decide for truth!

The professor doesn’t want Godzilla killed.

But the self-defense force immediately begins dropping depth charges. As near as I could count, besides this ineffective measure, they tried: machine guns, rifles, an electrified fence of barbed wire, artillery, tanks. Rockets fired from jet fighters apparently drove him off.

Godzilla was “baptized in the fire of the H-bomb.” “What could kill it now?”

Hiroshima gets mention.

A scientist has an “oxygen destroyer” “that splits the oxygen atoms to liquid”. This is what finally proves effective on the monster.

Both a guy in a rubber suit, and stop-action figures, represent Godzilla. The detail of the sets and models is very elaborate and convincing. The fighter models appear to be of F-86 Sabers.

This was not the first time a giant dinosaur came stomping out of the sea on film — see The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. This is the first of the Japanese kaiju films, mostly produced by Toho Co., which dominated Japanese sci-fi film production for three decades. They got weirder, but never better, than this.

The message is explicitly anti-nuke-testing. This film explores the personal trauma of people in a disastrous situation, much better anyway than most of its successors.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

1954 Walt Disney

+ pretty, dumb Verne adaptation

color

Look, it’s Disney. You know it’s going to be gorgeously colorful, and it’s meant to be watched by kids. And how far can we get without comic relief?

It’s also a musical. We get to hear Douglas singing and playing guitar. (Evidently he really was playing.)

I read that, at the time, this was the most expensive film ever made.

Vehicle: the submarine Nautilus, done to look quite scary on the outside, and richly appointed inside. The contemporary steam ships are very convincing, too. The gunnery on the ship certainly looks contemporary. Nice big-movie scenes of the mid-century port of San Francisco.

The casting of Peter Lorre as Conseil is dubious. He doesn’t fit the character, and somehow doesn’t fit the script well — I guess they used him to balance Kirk Douglas.

Disney Americanized the film to the point that Ned Land loses his Canadian citizenship. Only Aronnax and Conseil and Nemo appear non-American. The script downplays the role of Aronnax as the narrator and observer for the much more exciting and manly character Ned Land.

The representation of Nemo is faithful enough — he’s mysterious: tyrannical, but cultured, tortured, but brilliant. The film adds that he’s a Bach fan.

The book does not adequately explain why Nemo’s crew stay with him underwater without compensation, and neither does the movie. I found this problematic. I have to wonder if the crew tire of always hearing the same Bach.

The seal Esmerelda is quite fun, an addition for the kids. Nice giant squid!

The story had already seen film adaptations in 1907 and 1916. Since, there have been multiple TV adaptations and film spin-offs.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

1955 Walter Wanger Pictures Inc.

+ alien seeds copy sleepers

B&W

Premise: seeds from space duplicate people’s bodies when they sleep, and kill them. The script makes no attempt to further explain the origin of the seeds. The overtaken people are happy and cooperative, though.

The production is a little choppy. The romantic scenes often seem out of place — although it is noteworthy that the romance does not end in standard Hollywood fashion.

There are stories of controversies about adding humorous scenes and narrated speeches. They were on uncharted ground with this topic, and weren’t sure how it should play out

The original ended with the protagonist running on the highway, hollering at passing cars for help.

The studio tacked on a happy ending, with sequences including Whit Bissell as Dr. Hill and Richard Deacon as Dr. Harvey Bessett (who do not appear in the credits listing).

The dialog repeatedly brings up the dryness of martinis: after they look at a partly-formed human duplicate, “I think we could all use a drink!”

It is odd how often characters just enter one another’s houses. It’s a small town, but this degree of familiarity is hard to believe.

The main props are the seed pods and human copies emerging from them. This effect is as good as any of the time, and even now it’s pretty creepy.

This was the biggest invasion paranoia film of the time — many more followed. Re-makes: one in 1978, Body Snatchers in 1993 and The Invasion in 2007.

Conquest of Space

1955 Paramount

+ why-is-man-in-space

color

The lead-in is a nice summary:

(Those who enjoyed The Muppet Show will recognize a spoof of this lead-in.)

This is a straight-up “man in space” movie. There are no monsters or aliens, computers or weapons.

Much of the action happens in The Wheel, a classical torus-shaped a space station.

Several space vehicles appear besides the Wheel. The coolest is Spaceship 1, which combines a beautiful mono-wing craft, a classic rocket ship, and realistic space fuel tanks. Then there is a single-person “taxi”, open to space, and some transport rockets. The realism was marred by rocket exhaust effects that owe to the Flash Gordon serials, but otherwise, these are the best spaceships of the decade.

Weightlessness and the vacuum are treated passably, as well as atmospheric burn-up, and a space-walk on a moving ship. Moreover, the dialog explains them pretty well.

Space workers wear very functional-looking space suits, and walk only with magnetic shoes.

During rocket accelerations, the faces of the crew contort grotesquely and even bleed. They accelerate to 20,000 MPH (according to the “Space Speed Indicator”).

The crew belong to a military outfit, but the script never clarifies whose. Crew members are beholden to the “Supreme International Space Authority“, and watch TV broadcasts of “Trans-World Communications”.

Crew members talk about having fought in WWII and the Korean conflict.

The only environmental hazards are “meteors” (involved in three scenes), and the dry and crumbly Martian planetary surface.

Even more lethal, however, is “space fatigue”, which causes paralysis, questions of the propriety of man’s place in space, homicide, and readings from the Bible.

The views of Earth from space are beautiful and very convincing. These are unmatched in this decade of cinema.

Space explorers eat food from tablets to improve their health, not because it’s more compact. Then they all smoke (presumably for the same reason).

The script is choppy; it feels like they were just trying to do too much. It mixes interesting space action with formulaic military chivalry, death-defying action scenes, comic relief, awe-inspired monologues, girls in bathing suits, and mother’s love. It contains discussions of race, family responsibility, and the future of mankind. And so on. A little focus would have helped.

A lot of the script is wasted in developing personalities and relationships that are either implausible or stereotypical.

The women portrayed here are archetypal, and appear only in video transmissions, consisting of: a chorus line, a loving, supportive mother, and a vamp girlfriend.

The crew is quite multi-ethnic. Besides the Japanese, German, Irish, Jewish, and Italian-Americans who have lines, there are Black crew members.

While the comic relief, mostly coming from Brooklyn stand-up comedian Phil Foster, really is fun, one wonders why the film required so much relief.

Of a capsulized sandwich, he remarks:

As a tough old Irish-American sergeant, Mickey Shaughnessy delivers a performance that is sometimes really scary, and…really out of place.

The most precious moments are poetic speeches by Benson Fong (who was of Chinese ancestry), wherein he apologizes for the behavior of Japan in WWII, explains why Japanese use chopsticks and build buildings of wood and paper, rationalizes the exploration of Mars, and explains why he and his kind are “little people”.

Parables:
The Universe was put here for Man to conquer (Man meaning “tough military-type guys”)
Questions:
Are we explorers, or invaders of the sacred domain of God?

This Island Earth

1955 Universal

+ aliens take people on space adventure

color

The U.S. Air Force lends James-Bond-handsome scientist/industrialist Cal Meacham a P-80 jet fighter, just because they want him to like them. When he zooms around in it, he gets into trouble with aliens. But when he gets to the lab, he’ll unzip his flight suit to reveal his tweed jacket, and the science can begin!

Aliens: from Metaluna, which is at odds with planet Zahgon, whose inhabitants keep shooting “meteors” at them.

The aliens provide instructions on how to build an “interociter”, which turns out to be a triangular TV, which is equipped with deadly laser beams, explicitly to underscore the superiority of alien technology. (Like, someday, your TV, too, will sport deadly laser beams!)

The Metalunan’s flying saucer surely affected the style of the disk of Star Trek‘s Enterprise. It also has something like a tractor beam.

On Metaluna, Cal and Ruth get scared by a “Mutant” slave, get threatened with captivity, then run away just in time to escape the planet’s destruction. You might think this would be a major part of the story, but it all happens very quickly, in a rush.

The basic idea held promise, but the sci-fi story was eroded by silly immaterial he-man and gee-whiz stuff. What’s left is a mess of fantastic special effects and scenes, and a brief encounter with a scary monster.

Parables:
The aliens have motives, which are, naturally, ulterior.
The alien world is dying.
The usual stuff about the alpha male and the girl.

It Came from Beneath the Sea

1955 Columbia Pictures

− giant octopus attacks

B&W

The film is partly in newsreel form. Some scenes resemble military training reels.

The build-up is very slow, not completely uninspired, but sometimes clumsy.

Vehicles: atom-powered submarine

A USAF B-47 take-off appears. Did I understand the principals were transported in one of these? But — that plane was a two-seater!

Creature: a giant octopus. Radiation has something to do with the creature… although evidently, radiation didn’t create it. A scientist proposes that the creature was “disturbed by hydrogen bombs”. The dialog discusses why the monster behaves as it does, but the question is never clearly resolved.

They wear funny radiation suits… only nose and mouth are visible.

Prof. Joyce is a scientist, and there’s a love triangle. A good part of the action focuses on this, but it never becomes romantically believable. It is at least very out of place — but here and there are tentative statements of female independence.

The romantic fencing match starts off right away, and continues to the end of the film. The Navy commander is real pushy, and she likes it. More than once, the commander makes advances on her, with her main guy directly present, observing and commenting. They stay civil.

Dr. Joyce lists out her complaints about the commander’s mistreatment of her. She is earnest, and her complaints are pretty damning. Next scene: she screams at the sight of the monster.

Both male principals heroically risk their lives to fight the monster. Each takes turns saving the other’s life. This chivalry is awfully forced, and time-consuming.

Another story line is the usual reluctance of the authorities to respond properly to eye-witnesses and scientists.

In one of several unintendedly silly scenes, the big scientist blows up a balloon and lets it fly, sputtering away in a serious meeting.

Scenes represent at least three of the U.S. armed forces. Most of the military scenes take place in a submarine, but there are long Navy destroyer scenes, battling the monster.

The Army drives the creature back with flamethrowers. The Navy finally dispatches the creature (as is only fitting, since it came from the sea).

Each hero goes out from a Navy sub in a scuba suit to attack the monster by hand.

Like most giant monsters, the beast evolved the ability to growl like a tiger, in order optimize its chances of making teenagers squeal. Similarly, it finds itself drawn to recognizable monuments — in this case, the Golden Gate Bridge.

Chinese-American women appear briefly, working at the telephone exchange. No other non-whites appear.

The problem with this film is the 90% back-story, dominated by the male writer’s ideas of modern sexual interactions. This in itself might be amusing as a study of the period — but it detracts badly from the main story. They try to combine the newsreel aspect, with war training films, with a romance drama, with the monster movie. It’s just too much, and it fails overall.

The action isn’t always great, but sometimes not bad. The acting isn’t bad.

The romantic conflict is never resolved… but we find out she is a “new breed of woman”. This is mildly intriguing, but it serves here only as a closing scene.

As a giant monster film: it was preceded by more famous ones, better executed, the year before. The main attracton in this movie is Harryhausen’s brilliant animation. I include the film here mainly because of that, and because its production values are otherwise fair (on and off).

The Quatermass Xperiment
(aka. The Creeping Unknown)

1955 Hammer Film Productions

OK space travel dangers

B&W

Date/Place: near future, English port town

Vehicle: The missile is known to have men in it. Scientist Quatermass launched it — he didn’t get proper clearance to do so. Its name is Q1.

Creature: This is a space monster story, of the disease-that-absorbs people variety. It builds rather slowly, but have no fear: an icky monster does eventually show up!

The film opens with the crash of a missile-looking thing with fancy fins, plunging its nose into a farmer’s yard. (Surely by this time, people were aware of what happens to aircraft that dive straight into the ground. Who did they fool with this?)

Call in the fire brigade! The police advise people to return to their homes. Call in Quatermass! In this one, Quatermass is a Yank, a loud, overbearing jerk, who will not let anybody get in his way cleaning up the disaster he caused.

The woman actors are much younger than any of the men, and they aren’t very good.

Scenes inside the space rocket show no concern about absence of gravity.

It’s pretty scary in places, and unlike anything of its time. It must have terrified people at the time.

Like the two other Quatermass experiment films, this one was based on 1953 BBC TV serial The Quatermass Experiment.

宇宙人東京に現わる
(aka. Warning from Space)

1956 Daiei Film

− early mankind-meets-aliens

color

Aliens: from planet Paira. (They are obviously just people wearing star-shaped canvas suits.) It may not be very encouraging, but — the alien’s appearance is the worst part. Planet Paira is on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth.

I looked away from this film a couple of times, because of the very silly star-shaped aliens, with their one great big blue eye. (In the U.S. cut for TV, the aliens appear in the first scenes, probably to grab the attention of young viewers. These scenes are close-ups, because in the original, the aliens speak a non-Earthling language, and the original film took screen real estate for Japanese subtitles. English versions simply overdubbed the alien language, and dropped the subtitles, which, to fill the screen, required magnification of the scenes, along with their weak costumes.)

Vehicles: There are customary flying saucers, which the scientists have a great deal of trouble photographing. A large space station, or mother ship, has a horn-shaped axis, with six horn-shaped spokes, connected by a transparent toroidal tube.

Weapons: none as such. No robots, no computers.

Halfway through the film, the aliens express disappointment that people react in terror when they sneak up on them in star form. So they choose one to arrive in the body of a famous show-girl. She can walk through walls, etc.

The aliens worry about super-explosives developed by Earth scientists.

Then the aliens have to warn the Earth to destroy yet another planet “R”, which is going to collide with Earth. (As though the explosives excuse weren’t enough. I suspect the writers had two stories, and rather than picking one, merged them.)

Scientists get a lot of the action. It is they who see the alien flying saucers in their big telescopes, it is they whom the aliens contact, and it is they who ultimately resolve the threat.

The dialog isn’t bad, so long as the main topics aren’t being discussed. Otherwise, it’s very artificial and conventional.

The actors remark on the colors that appear in the scene with them, which are indeed very nice.

Lots of scenes show pretty, prosperous, post-war Japan. The filming is good, and the direction isn’t as bad as in many bad sci-fi movies.

There are lots of disaster scenes. The resolution is very dramatic, but unsurprising.

Basically, if you can bring yourself to overlook the alien suits, this turns out to be a respectable early story of alien contact.

World Without End

1956 Allied Artists Pictures Corporation

− space / time travel drama

color

Dates: 1957, 2508 AD.

Vehicle: rocket ship, pointy, silver, winged, horizontal-flying. Has “magnetic gravity”.

It leaves for Mars to do reconnaissance without landing. That’s the end of the Mars part of the story.

On the way back, something (never explained but later described as an “exponential time displacement”) that makes them go faster than light, so that they end up crashing on Earth in the future. (The crash is very cheesy: the rocket ship buzzes like a diving prop plane, and bounces like a plastic model.)

Atomic war has destroyed Earth’s surface. They are beset by giant spiders and cyclops cavemen “mutates”.

They find the remains of civilization underground, where the doors slide automatically, the men wear tights and skullcaps in the wimpiest way possible, and the women, who are all shapely and between the ages of 19 and 25, wear high heels, short skirts and very low-cut blouses.

Several romances ensue.

Stylistically, the look is more like ’60s sci-fi. Sets are in styles that would appear later in Star Trek.

The space guys show the peaceful humans the benefits of firepower and aggression. They also determine that the best way to deal with a cave man is with a bazooka (hand guns being deemed somehow inadequate). They spare the better-looking cavemen, and teach them English.

Parables:
Man was not meant to live in a hole in the ground.
(Men, anyway: the men get wimpy, the women get voluptuous.)
To live in peace, you gotta shoot the bad guys.
(The bad guys are the ugly ones.)

Earth vs the Flying Saucers

1956 Columbia Pictures

+ paradigmatic invasion by spaceships

B&W

Vehicles: spinning flying saucers that zing and zip and flicker and teeter alarmingly. Magnetic fields power them.

On first encounter with flying saucers, driving through the desert, Dr. Marvin wisely takes the wheel from his wife, and offers her a smoke.

There is much discussion of purported sightings of UFO’s, and of satellites that blow up in outer space (or do they?).

The film is punctuated by newsreels, We see nice ’50s engineering drawings. A few clips from educational films show science is involved.

To rrepresent Earth vehicles, it employs stock footage shows various sounding rockets, including V-2, Viking (VIII, IX or X).

Computers: indeterminate boxes attended by military guys. Electronic translator: an enormous, clicking, table of spinning switches which produces output in the form of cursive writing by means of a mechanical pen.

Aliens: Big-eyed, slit mouth, pointy jaw. Resemble certain bog bodies. Only seen suited or dead. “Humanoid, and ancient“.

An “electronic screen” protects the saucers, with a pretty otherworldly effect. When one alien ventures out from under this screen, it is immediately and without warning fired upon with heavy artillery.

The alien space suits are quite cool, if clumsy, and made of “solidified electricity”, and feature helmets with no transparent part. “These suits serve as electronic and mechanical outer skin; take the place of their atrophied flesh and muscles.”

The alien’s voice (that of Paul Frees) sounds suspiciously like Orson Welles’. Its message repeats in Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, French, and other languages.

The aliens have flat-screen (presumably black-and-white) TV. They use glowing reconnaissance drones that are susceptible to handguns. They also have a rose-shaped crystal translating device that reads the info from human brains into an “infinitely indexed memory bank”, momentarily rendering the victim’s brain visible, and turning the victim into a zombie. (When I saw this as a kid, I got too scared.)

Weapons: Aliens have an ultrasonic ray (anticipating Star Trek phasers) that makes people and things evaporate noisily or blow up. It fires from the arms of alien space suits, and from guns on flexible stalks beneath saucers. Soldiers persist shooting with rifles, only to be evaporated; stock film of Nike Ajax and Nike Hercules missiles portrays futile attacks.

The Marvins make an “ultrasonic gun” to no avail; then they make the “induced electrical field” weapon, which finally proves effective. (If humans had made use of the saucers’ propensity for crashing into recognizable monuments, this would have been unnecessary.)

The majority of the film is about the hero scientist and his lovely wife figuring out how to save the world. There are pacing problems, besides an overall unnaturalness of the script. Once the saucers start attacking, it becomes all about the animation: direction and dialog go out the window, and integration with the animation is very poor.

One asian man appears in the introduction; all other actors are anglo.

Forbidden Planet

1956 MGM

++ the Tempest + long-dead aliens

color

Date: 2257
Place: planet Altair-4, of star Altair, and deep space.

Vehicle: Beautiful flying saucer, United Planets Cruiser C-57-D, with Hyperdrive, which propels it to speeds greater than that of light.

Robot: The venerable “Robbie”, is equipped with circuits that will automatically burn out if ordered to harm intelligent life, a food replicator, and a nanny personality.

Aliens:
The Krell, long-dead by their own devices, are not seen, but loom.

Gadgets:
Crew have to go into suspended animation during light speed — the effect is similar to that of Star Trek‘s transporter.
Artificial gravity holds the crew down while they’re in flight.
They get “radar scanned”.
“Dispose-all” is a household disintegrator unit.
Hand-held communicators have TV cameras built-in.

Weapons:
“Blaster”: a sort of laser beam weapon,
“Neutron beams”: for shooting monsters.

Krell stuff:
“Plastic educator” makes 3-D images of thoughts; boosts human intelligence
Morbius talks about “pure nuclear matter” which would “sink to the bottom of this planet”. Scenes of the inside of titanic Krell machines are very impressive. According to Morbius, the power of some Krell machines is “The number 10 raised almost literally to the power infinity”. (Thus rendering the units this number measures literally inconsequential.)

The sets are very elaborate. The landscaping of Morbius’ house is very tasteful, in a sort of Southwest rock-garden style.
Atmospheric sound effects are more than background noise.

The special effects are gorgeous. They include: huge metal doors that snap shut in the blink of an eye, massive underground power-plants, force-fields, and a very scary “monster from the Id”.

Scenes of the planet from space are very convincing. (Are these stock footage of Earth?)

The plot parallels in many ways Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Prospero – Morbius, Miranda – Altaira, Ariel+Caliban – Robbie, Stephano – Cook).

The cast is unrelentingly WASPy. (There’s an Irish stereotype).

Altaira suffers from fascination in healthy male specimens, and ignorance of kissing.

At least one of the SFx guys was from Disney. (Compare spaceship decor to that of The Black Hole.)

The careers of many of the props, notably Robby and the flying saucer, were longer than those of the cast members. The saucer appeared many times on TV, including the Twilight Zone.

The Incredible Shrinking Man

1957 Universal Pictures

+ guy shrunk by radiation

B&W

The premise is that radioactive fallout causes a guy to physically shrink, and that’s about as far as the science goes. Note: deliberately and scientifically shrinking people had been done before: see The Devil Doll and Dr. Cyclops. This one takes the premise much farther than those films, however.

But it’s a silly idea very well executed, without a pulling a punch. The guy has grave problems to solve.

The acting is very good, and the special effects are among the best of the time.

This film rises above its premise, and is one of the best sci-fi movies of its decade.

Its success spurred development of similarly-themed films that shortly followed its release, including The Amazing Colossal Man, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman and War of the Colossal Beast. None is as good as this one.

20 Million Miles to Earth

1957 Columbia

+ Earth ship returns with Venusian

B&W

Vehicle: a very large U.S. “air-ship”, a XY-21, single-stage “astro-propelled” rocket crewed by 17 men, built like a space plane, crashes into the sea at the beginning of the film. For its brief appearance, it’s awesome — another Harryhausen creation.

The ship has visited Venus (whose closest approach to Earth is indeed about 20 million miles), but gets plugged by a “meteor”.

Alien: a Venus-creature, looks like a cross between a T. Rex and a man (with a sort of fish’s dorsal fin on it head), craves sulfur as food, and grows really, really fast. It’s a wonderful Harryhausen creation. Sounds like a cross between an elephant trumpeting and a man hollering.

Brave Sicilian fishermen set out to save the crew of the sinking craft, and bring two out. One is Calder; the other is the mortally injured Dr. Sharman. Later, Pepe finds a canister washed up on the beach. Its contents, a blob of translucent gel, later comes into the hands of Dr. Leonardo. The creature emerges as a baby from the gel blob, and the doctor and his granddaughter nurture it.

Venus’ atmosphere is lethal, even with what they thought to be fool-proof breathing equipment. But they found valuable minerals, and the government needs the creature, in order to determine how to survive the atmosphere.

Most people treat the creature very poorly, of course: they cage him, shoot him, and electrify him. Nonetheless, the creature lives on in many famous images of its Roman rampage, knocking over recognizable tourist destinations. The story does nothing further regarding setup, but to revisit the end of King Kong.

There are really great performances: especially the Sicilian kid, Pepe, who wants nothing more than a hat from Texas. Generally, the Sicilians play their parts very sensitively and colorfully, certainly better than the stiff Washingtonians or the stock space captain. The obligatory romantic angle between the captain and Ms. Leonardo begins with fun sparks, although it has of course nowhere to go.

Harryhausen’s creature is superbly sympathetic. It emotes, it exudes body language.

Quote:

Kronos

1957 Regal Films

− giant evil robot from outer space

B&W

Vehicle: unadorned, glowing, flashing saucer. Scientists think it’s an asteroid, even when looking right at a picture that shows a clearly artificial object. The Army tries to blow it up with nuclear guided missiles, to no avail. It splashes splendidly into the Pacific.

Robot: The saucer deposits a huge metal robot (referred to as a “monster”) on the beach. It consists of two boxes with a dome on the top one, and four cylindrical pillars that it uses for locomotion, in a stomping fashion. It is at least very strange, and even other-worldly, and is the best thing in this flick. Unfortunately, while in some scenes it takes on a sense of gigantic scale, in other sceneintss this sense is quite lost.

Computer: SUSIE “Synchro Unifying Sinometric Integrating Equitensor”, a big bank of boxes with tape reels and dials, equipped with a buzzer and bells that make it sound like a pinball machine. Vera says: “SUSIE gets a lot more affection than I do”, and taps a few ciggie ashes on her.

Other gadgets: a glowing ball infests people with an “incubus” that controls their behavior, as well as that of the monster.

Scientists hang out in Mexican house, where they make much fun of the spiciness of the cuisine. There is a brave but ineffectual Mexican Air Force attack.

The film has nice film clips of White Sands V-2 tests, including lots of factory shots. A B-47 StratoJet carrying a nuke gets sucked in to the monster, who absorbs the full blast of the nuke only to become stronger. It seems odd to use an F100 Super Sabre as a transport plane.

Invasion of the Saucer Men

1957 American International

− evil space alien attempt at comedy

B&W

Vehicle: glowing (reportedly blue) saucer with booms and tails like a WWII P-38 Lightning. Kinda cool, briefly.

Aliens: “little green men”, bloat headed, cat-eyed, no more than 4′ tall; parts can disassemble and reassemble grotesquely, hands have their own eyes, and venous fingers extend hypodermic needles that inject pure alcohol; react badly to bright light.

Has fun with the usual shtick of the Army covering up UFO sightings. Then there are the teens making out and talking cool, and the farmer who likes to threaten townsfolk with his gun.

Quotes:

The 27th Day

1957 ROMSON

OK aliens give humanity a choice

B&W

Vehicle: a flying saucer, which is familiar because it came directly from Earth vs the Flying Saucers. Its interior decoration is quite stylish.

Alien: looks just like a person.

The alien politely abducts five people from random parts of the world, to play a deadly sort of game with them. He declares: “My name is of no importance.” Later, he reconsiders and takes control of the narrative, proposing that they call him “the alien.” (But how can we be sure the writers just failed to invent a cool name?)

He indulges in science-nonsense paraphrases: “You are traveling at almost exactly the speed of light. At such as speed, time as you know it does not exist.” (They guy looks at his watch. It has stopped! Wow! Einstein was right!)

Sure enough, the alien is planning an invasion, for the usual reasons: “The Universe in which my world exists, is dying. Soon our sun will be going into nova, and explode.”

The alien gives each abductee a terrible weapon, with which they can wipe out human life. They’re to play a game, to see if they’re worthy of being spared. The aliens “expect disaster.”

Each of the abductees reacts to the situation differently. This is where the script shows a little sophistication. There is a mystery to solve.

Although the story is explicitly multinational, the cast is strongly Caucasian-centered. The one Chinese abductee quickly removes herself, leaving only Caucasians. One black waiter appears. That’s the end of the multi-racialism.

The Soviet general is a typical evil character. He bungles his dastardly plan, and a smart professor proves even more dastardly. Unfortunately, no explanation appears for what the professor did.

Turns out, anybody who is “known to have been a confirmed enemy of human freedom” is in trouble. It’s disappointing the authors make such a facile distinction between good people and bad ones, and echo the hysteria of the times.

A romance, under the circumstances, is forced and clumsy.

The film ends with people doing something as noble as it is anticlimactic.

The story had a couple of good ideas, but suffered from poor attention to physical details, and worse, from naive, popular politics.

Quotes:

The professor:

“in mathematics, there is always a solution.”

The Soviet general observes:

“democracies are appeasers.”

Дорога к Звёздам
[Road to the Stars]

1957 Lennauchfilm

+ space educational film

B&W

Russian

This is a Soviet educational film, intended to convey fact, albeit perhaps projected fact. Does that qualify as sci-fi?

The production includes acted scenes, animations and models, all of high quality.

The first half re-enacts stories of Tsiolkovsky and Goddard, etc. and explains the basics of orbital dynamics and rocket flight. The second half depicts possible future space travel.

Shows a 3-stage manned rocket flight. Depicts acceleration stress on astronauts (not in pressure suits) (joyous) weightlessness, space-walking (on the surface of the ship).

The last part shows a very nice space station, and all the wonderful things that people get up to in there, showing living quarters, workers doing their jobs. Inside views include curved floors and gardens.

Crews include female cosmonauts and scientists, of different nationalities, and a feline cosmonaut as well.

Finally, the film uses models to depict a Moon base, and paintings to depict colonies of other planets. A Moon landing plays out using actors, who demonstrate appropriate glee at being the first to walk on the Moon.

The Monolith Monsters

1957 Universal International

OK crystalline alien disaster/horror

B&W

The narrated intro provides a little science lesson about meteors.

Aliens: the “monoliths” — not clear they’re animal or mineral or what — only that they came from a meteorite. This is the best part of the film. The one special effect is fairly convincingly done (within context). Huge crystals (whatever) loom over the landscape, then fall over, and we see new forests of crystals grow out of those.

The main science is high school chemistry. It’s a bit over-done, but it fits. The science of weather forecasting also plays a crucial but uncertain role, and gets due representation in a little gem of a performance by Schallert.

Most of the acting is standard ’50s TV fare. Albright’s performance is particularly poor.

It would have been a medium-length short story, but it’s drawn out to make a feature film. The plot is a mess, involving cute little kids, a romance that goes nowhere, a brave geologist, a brave newspaperman, a brave doctor, and a brave scientist. The actors really didn’t have a chance. It gets especially drab the last quarter of the film, where five people stand in a line and make verbal observations explaining what we’re seeing in the separate special effects scenes, and struggle to demonstrate how one might react to such sights.

It is charming for all that, and the special effects quite eerie. If nothing else, its monsters are different (possibly unique) in sci-fi film.

地球防衛軍 (Chikyū Bōeigun)
lit. “Earth Defense Force”
a.k.a. The Mysterians

1957 Toho Studios

− giant space aliens arrive and cause havoc

color

This is an awful mish-mash of the usual Japanese model monster scenery, lots and lots of toy weapons and explosions, panicked crowds marshaled competently by military, speeches before world organizations, meetings with scientists and military persons, livened up by abductions and rescue of women, and seasoned with a little very confused astronomy and science-talk.

Premise: Strange earthquakes swallow villages, forest fires “burning from the roots up”. A scientist theorizes that Mysterian, a “star” between Mars and Jupiter, blew up, to make other “stars” in that area. (It’s a toss-up whether the use of “star” is poor translation or astronomical ignorance.)

Robots: A giant robot stomps around, the army fires at it with the usual results. When it tries to walk across a bridge, they finally destroy it, by blowing the bridge up.

Aliens: Eventually, the Mysterians show up, with capes and suits like motorcycle racers. They explain the giant robot and forest fires, etc., were just to illustrate how superior their science is.

Turns out: their planet, Mysteroid, was blown up in a nuke war, but a few escaped to Mars. But now they all got lazy sperm or something.

Naturally, they want permission (from Earth men) to “marry” Earth women (only a few…some of which they already caught), and a little bit of land. “I assure you that we are pacifists.”

So… except for the uncivilized ideas about women, it sounds good… but if they were nice, why are so many people dead? On the other hand, if they’re so powerful, why don’t they just take what they want? This dilemma doesn’t go unnoticed by the people. But the Mysterians just keep up this passive/aggressive appeal. The Mysterians turn out to be dishonest, and not that powerful after all. So the right thing to do was to blast ‘em.

There is activity on the “dark side of the Moon”.

A young scientist holds back info, because “a scientist has to be sure”, and receives a rebuke.

The Mysterians keep trying to communicate to Earthlings. Two-way TV again shows Mysterian’s superiority.

Vehicles: the Mysterians have a space station (standard wheel-formed) from which their flying saucers launch.

Weapons: In addition to the giant robot and the earthquakes, a glowing dome comes out of the ground — it is a military base and weapon. A heat beam that looks like lightning and radiates X-rays, with a “destructive power 10 to the 27th power (so equivalent to… earthquake)“.

Humans whip up several new weapons: A very slow, large rocket ship, that flies like a dirigible, somehow impervious to the heat beam. “Markolite”? A very fancy, colorful rocket drops a radio dish that shoots a heat ray.

There is much talk of learning from the error of the Mysterians. Ends with “observation satellites” being put up, “to prevent the Mysterians ever from returning”.

Visually, there is no lack of action and color.

Is it science fiction? It does invoke scientific terminology throughout, albeit haphazardly, and it does talk about planets and aliens that might live on them. Although it is certainly of the category of Japanese movies with gigantic monsters, it isn’t about the monsters. It’s about a first contact with aliens, and although it offers nothing new or thoughtful, it does discuss some possible issues.

Parables:
Just follow the directions of your local militia.
Aliens aren’t to be trusted.
Aliens want our women. (Who wouldn’t!)
Technology will save the day.
Sometimes scientists shouldn’t be sure.

From the Earth to the Moon

1958 RKO Radio

− pretty space travel; poor Verne adaptation

color

Date: 1868

Explicitly but very loosely based on Jules Verne’s De la terre à la lune. The screenplay preserves few details of the novel, save the time period, some names, and the notion of reaching the Moon. This is just as well: in the novel, the Barbicane is President of the United States and the main engineer, and the primary speaker and driving force — which is even farther-fetched than travel to the Moon. So in the film he is re-written more plausibly as an overachieving engineer.

This was a relatively big-budget Hollywood film, with some of the big actors of the time.

Vehicle: Columbia, a gigantic hollow mortar shell fired from a giant cannon. (They speak of “take-off”, a term unknown in Verne’s time.) But it also has rockets (depicted as lazy fires whose smoke billows up over the spaceship — couldn’t they have just filmed the model turned upside-down, so the smoke would go the right way? Details, details!)

Crew: the principal scientists and an engineer; the scientist’s daughter as a stowaway — whose only function is to be silly and pretty and emotional.

Mission: to demonstrate a great new explosive (“Power X”) by detonating it on the Moon, where all can see.

Space suits, an idea unknown in Verne’s time, are decidedly 1950s. At the last moment, they get into “acceleration tubes” which minimize the shock of the cannon’s blast (babble about how they “revolve at the speed of 12000 times per minute”, a gas that reduces their heart rate, to “minimize the shock”). Unaccountably, the stowaway survives take-off outside the tubes. A gyroscope “compensates for gravity”. A very 1960s countdown precedes take-off.

They encounter the obligatory “meteor shower”, in space.

The small crew are not of one mind concerning the wisdom of the adventure, and commits sabotage.

Many sound effects are straight from Forbidden Planet. The actors do their best with a script too silly and confused to salvage. It’s a dizzy morality play.

Quotes:

Parable:
Prevention of war by providing everybody with a super-weapon.

Vynález zkázy
[Invention for Destruction]
aka. “The Deadly Invention” aka. “The Fabulous World of Jules Verne”

1958 Ceskoslovenský Státní Film

+ strange, beautiful animation

B&W

Czech

This is a fantastic adaptation of Verne’s ideas, a wonderful stylistic mix of the plate engraving of Verne’s day, with the cinematic styles of the 1902 film Georges Méliès Le Voyage dans la Lune and 1930s futuristic films by Fritz Lang and the Soviet film The Space Voyage.

I was surprised that I had never run across this before. Maybe I had confused it with U.S. adaptations of Verne’s stories.

The overall plot isn’t much to speak of (neither are the plots of Verne’s novels). The dialog and action are completely secondary to the setting. It’s about the technology and what people might do with it. It’s about the style and atmosphere. The sets and animations and camera work make it worth watching.

While it isn’t itself science fiction, it refers to science fiction.

If you like Terry Gilliam’s cartoons for Monty Python, or his later films, check this out. (You might find Gilliam loses a couple of notches.) If you like Tim Burton’s films, check this out.

Parables:
Bad guys just want to blow everybody up for the dough.
Pretty girls don’t know bad guys from good.
Scientists don’t know better than to make a super-weapon and give it to bad guys.
The handsomest guy isn’t a bad guy or the scientist or the girl, but he is naturally very smart and brave.

The Fly

1958 Twentieth Century Fox

++ transporter accident horror

color

Action takes place in Montreal.

André has created a transporter, which can move material from one box to another some distance away, “at the speed of light”. He makes an analogy with television. He points out a solid is just billions of atoms, which he thinks are themselves “electrical impulses”.

The lab has computer tape reels, oscilloscopes, power transformers, banks of flashing lights. As the transportation begins, there’s a blue glow, clack of mechanical relays; a bell dings, neon tubes flash (instead of sparks). A base guitar beats, and a sound (what? steam on sheet metal?) as the transportation of the object finally transpires.

Most of his initial transportations fail in curious and horrible ways.

The actors are the best of the time. Despite its being a horror film, the film is quite beautifully made — the sets, the costumes, the special effects, the photography.

This is the best horror film of the 1950s, besides being a solid science-fiction piece. It’s shot in very gorgeous color, and makes lavish use of it.

The story is that Neumann died just weeks after the film was released, without knowing what a hit it was.

The film spawned two direct sequels, neither good, both B&W, and a 1982 re-make, which had its own sequels.

Quotes:

It! The Terror from Beyond Space

1958 Vogue Pictures, Inc.

− monster in space

B&W

Date January 1973

Vehicle: Cool but conventional cigar-shaped rocket, Challenge 142, with very spiky fins. Interesting — the fuselage has an additional nacelle(?) along one side. Unfortunately, there is only one main shot of the the rocket. It is evidently nuclear-powered.

Images of Mars look suspiciously like contemporary Moon surface paintings. Col. Carruthers of the “United States Space Command“ narrates the sad fate of his expedition Challenge 141 on Mars: “alive with something we came to know only as… death”.

Before we’ve even heard what happened to the first expedition, a crew member of Challenge 142 leaves the door open and a bad guy in a rubber suit gets in. The guy is terribly pigeon-toed.

So the deal is, the monster killed the crew of the first expedition, and everybody thinks the leader of the expedition did it. For some time they continue to suspect him, and they are taking him back for court-martial.

The quite elaborate interior represents “down” as being toward the rear of the rocket — in space or otherwise. Several floors, with steep stairs between them.

Nobody worries about gravity. There are loose objects such as chairs and books all over. Oh. When they go into the air lock, then the gravity goes away. A walk on the outside hull of the rocket (magnetic boots?)

They play chess and smoke in flight.

The ladies in the crew are homemakers, shown serving coffee and picking up dishes — but one is a medical doctor. When the captain is injured, the younger woman has to switch her romantic focus from one alpha male to the new one.

The screenplay is pretty poor. For example, even after a crew member disappears, it’s a very long time before the rest of the crew to accept that something’s wrong. Toward the end, the protagonist resumes narrating to explain the action.

This is another case where I pitied the veteran actors in the cast.

The direction is pretty poor, too. Much of the time, the actors just stand around, trying to keep their faces on camera.

The crew battles the monster by wildly shooting with conventional firearms, and hand grenades, unconcerned by what that might do to a pressurized vessel. Then they try “gas”… no indication what gas (any old gas will do, evidently). They try electrocuting it, which makes it shake its hand like an owie. And they expose it to nuclear radiation, which only makes it madder.

The worst part here is the guy in the rubber monster suit. It’s almost scary when we just see its shadow, but in full view, imagination does not suffice to produce the intended emotions. There was no excuse for this… there had been other examples of non-rubber-suit monsters on the screen already.

“… an alien and elemental life force,
a planet so cruel, so hostile…
another name for Mars — is Death.”

The Blob

1958 Fairview Productions, Tonylyn Productions, Valley Forge Films

OK liquid space monster horror

color

Alien: The monster of this film is something really new to cinema, and pretty scary. The script offers no explanation, save that it’s from space.

To fight it, they try trichloroacetic acid: no good. Shot gun: nothing. High voltage electricity fizzles. In the end, a physical observation saves the day!

The film aims at a young adult crowd, but the teenage monkeyshines really don’t fit. The teens are all in their twenties, but worse, Steve and Jane have just witnessed something very disturbing — they don’t show it. Half the cast plays comedy relief.

Maybe they thought the main idea was otherwise too scary, or maybe the direction was lacking. Maybe they were unsure of their audience. If they had aimed for people a little older, and dropped some silly stuff, they could have had a really scary movie here.

When the going gets tough, Jane gets screamy and fainty, and then has a break-down. She did her duty, being faithful and chaste.

For me, seeing this at a tender young age, the most horrible part was the old fellow who becomes the first victim. He was just curious. The story contains several other little tragedies. It’s a pretty heavy film, if taken even a little seriously.

The theme song is one of the goofiest ever. It would be goofy for a comedy.

This was Steve McQueen’s début. The story is, he insisted on a percentage for pay, and made a bundle.

“Hey, what gives? I thought you cats didn’t dig spooky shows.”

“Every criminal in the world was a kid once — what does it prove?”

Небо зовёт
[The Sky Beckons]

1959 Dovzhenko Film Studios

++ splendid man-in-space

color

Russian

The science and engineering content of this film are far beyond most Western productions of the time. Only the (far more expensive) Fantastic Planet surpasses its special effects.

In one of the first scenes, a few models of Soviet space probes appear, as in a science museum. Narration describes the space station detail.

The marking on a rocket gantry reads РКВ-7.

Vehicles: Nice big rocket ship models, classic cigar-shaped, finned rockets, but with elaborate details. One flies to the space station with “passengers”. The take-off is pretty convincing: the rocket exhaust at least looks powerful (better than in many contemporary films). A tail of flame recedes into the night sky. From portals, passengers watch Earth fly away.

The U.S. Mars rocket is named TYPHOON, and the Soviet one is Rodina (Homeland). The rocket ships do lots of maneuvering and rendezvous. They land conventionally tail-first — in the last scene, on a barge at sea.

In this film, weightlessness is a sort of accident that happens to people. The astronauts, in spacesuits, do execute some strange motions, but otherwise just walk in slow-mo.

They make a big deal of “reclining” before blasting off — when they’re in space anyway — the blast-off from Earth was much more comfortable.

The space station model is very elaborate, and nice. Workers appear walking on and floating over it. It has hanging gardens, etc., inside, and pretty elaborate electrical gadgets.

The scale of the spaceships is at least consistent. One scene ruins the effect by a rocket scrunching into the space station dock — perhaps to suggest medium-size ocean ships bumping into dock.

The Sun’s heat fires “meteors”, which pelt the TYPHOON.

The political message is the glory of the Soviet Union, and that U.S. interests are greedy and rash. The Americans play a negative role, and cause the problems, but they’re not bad guys as are common in U.S. movies of the time. Their motivations are understandable, though not commendable.

The American astronauts wear ties and suits, while the Soviets wear sensible, drab pants and jackets. They loudly and decadently exploit the space race, including having neon signs on bars, etc. (one such sign features the rocket ship).

Due to bad guys, cosmonauts have to land on asteroid Ikarus (a real thing), crossing the orbits of Mars and Earth. (This is odd… why would they pull in this tiny asteroid, when Mars has two little moons?) Here are neat effects. Wow! Mars rises over the asteroid, with the astronauts in silhouette — to me, the best scene of the film.

The space station scenes and the scenes on the asteroid were not bettered for ten years, by 2001, A Space Odyssey.

The women of the film are in positions of authority — but are very stern and humorless.

The script pays due attention to love interest, but only as backdrop.

The film closes with a protracted, dull, and probably obligatory “glorious homecoming” scene of the surviving astronauts.

The Atomic Submarine

1959 Gorham Productions, Inc.

− nuke submarine battles evil alien

B&W

Vehicles: USAS Sturgeon undersea atomic liner (“largest of them all”), gets blown up. The sub model is pretty, but… loses the sense of scale.
The Nuclear (“atomic”) submarine Tigershark, specialized for a search-and-destroy mission.
It has a small sub Lungfish, “sort of an animated diving bell”.

The sets of the interior of the submarine are just theatrical sets with black walls with some gadgets and furniture, delivering no sense of a submarine. The action repeatedly cuts to stock clips taken inside real submarines, which are very cramped, cluttered and… real, compared to the sets. This probably saved them something on sets and cast, but it only heightens the contrast between a real sub and their bargain-basement set.

The undersea flying saucer appears right off to be the culprit. They theorize that its power comes from magnetism — so it has to repeatedly return to the North pole to re-charge. (The script expends significant effort on this brilliant display of electromagnetic theorizing.)

Weapons: The saucer destroys ships with lightning strikes. A ray gadget inside the saucer melts the flesh off three of the men.

Alien: a huge monster that looks like a sea cucumber with tentacles and a single huge eye. It relishes grandiose monologue. (Think: Kang and Kodos of The Simpsons.) Its kin will modify themselves for life on Earth “Evolution is much too slow a process”, and explains that the space vehicle is a living thing (which serves to explain how it “healed itself” after the collision). It’s from a star or something.

Before anybody has actually seen the flying saucer, a scientist suspects un-earthly intelligence based on: no evidence at all… except that it might help explain the rest of the plot.

Then the crew sees the underwater flying saucer.

They try to torpedo the saucer, with no effect. So they ram it instead, but then the sub gets stuck into the saucer. So they send the Lungfish, after much discussion of who’s the better man.

A scientist sees “a cyclops-like eye or turret” (the film shows a turret with a round window). They refer to the saucer thereafter as “the cyclops“. Much later, we see the monster inside is indeed a cyclops… but they couldn’t have known that before they entered the saucer. This is a continuity problem, which they attempt to fix with a significant amount dialogue.

The Lungfish just sidles up to the saucer and sticks to it, and then… they open the lungfish door with little discussion, and an iris door opens on the saucer, so they can step in high and dry. (Nobody shows surprise about that, as though anybody would expect two mutually alien craft to interoperate flawlessly, to provide passage deep underwater with no leaks.)

They immediately find the nose of the sub (which, bizarrely, is little larger than the men) stuck into the hull of the spaceship. They immediately “go to work” with the cutting torches they conveniently brought. There is no discussion of exactly what they intend to do about the predicament. (Of course, had they been successful, wouldn’t at least one craft have been flooded? This isn’t discussed. We don’t find out anyway. Somehow, the sub pulls free without help.)

The alien explains cheekily that he’s there to take over the Earth, and that he’s selecting the guy as a specimen to take home. So the guy gets smart and shoots the alien in the eye with a flare gun. (Why he had a flare gun for an underwater mission is unclear.) This allows him to escape. But the eye grows back.

The film was released the year after the USS Nautilus (SSN-571) completed a submerged crossing of the North Pole.

The announcer sounds like an annoying version of Walter Cronkite (intentionally or not).

There are way too many principals in this story — an editor could have pulled most of them out to the betterment of the story.

The tone and quality of story-telling in this film carry through directly to the later film and TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It’s just a mish-mash of silly science, scary monsters, juvenile machismo, and savings of the day by last-minute engineering and heroism.

Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth

1959 Cooga Mooga Film Productions, Inc., Joseph M. Schenck Enterprises, Inc.

− pretty, jumbled Verne adaptation

color

Place/Date: Edinburgh 1880

The first surprise is Pat Boon doing a Scottish accent, barely. (In comparison to Diane Baker’s accent, though… it at least counts as an attempt.) The action often lapses into song, usually with Boone singing. Boone gets to say a prayer! And he gets to be naked in front of nuns, and hide his privates from them with a sheep. Could it get any better?

The cast is a weird combination of experienced older actors and questionably-cast good-looking younger people. Not that it mattered much, given the silly script.

The colors are rich, the sets are elaborate, and the actors all do their very best. The screenplay is harebrained, but not in an amusing way.

The novel itself was entertainment aimed at a public hungry for new scientific discovery, but which was steeped in Greco-Roman notions of an “underworld” inhabited by various gods. (The fact that ancient animal remains, and crystals and other minerals are found in the ground, together with the notion of an underworld, suggest that in the underworld are strange minerals and animals.)

The novel features impossibilities heaped upon improbabilities, especially failures to appreciate scale, beginning with the fact that the center of the Earth is some four thousand miles beneath its surface.

Of course, it’s hard for anybody to imagine the pressures deep within the Earth, but any scientist, even of Verne’s time, could have explained that, beyond the first few miles of Earth’s crust, there are no caves or openings of any kind — the pressures would crush them. This is the biggest physical impossibility in the novel.

The geometry of the story is just weird: in the novel, the center of the Earth is somehow on an ocean deep within the Earth. There is some failure here to grasp a concept, perhaps a confusion of 3D with 2D, as if the center of the Earth were something like the North Pole.

Our hero is very bad with people, particularly with women. This is evident from the beginning, and remains a crippling personality flaw. “A typical female question!” “You can’t come along, you’re a woman!”

They enter into the volcano Snæfellsjökull in Iceland. We get to hear some Icelandic being spoken, which is pretty cool.

There’s a fun scene with a coding goose, which turns out to be a pet, and then a mascot. (Even the mascot doesn’t end well… whom did they hope to please with this?)

We get lots of pretty scenes, full of pretty crystals, giant mushrooms, a vast underground sea. All of this is at least consistent with the book. There are lots of dimetrodons, and other creatures. (They are all just iguanas in costume.)

Then the troupe get cute amongst the ’shrooms. This fails to be charming.

Lindenbrook figures they’re at the center of the Earth, because the junction of the North and South poles tears away all the metal objects (including a gold ring!). Then they go down a whirlpool. Which falls to… where?

They go on to float in a metal bowl on molten lava, which propels them like an elevator up a narrow chute to the surface, which turns out to be the opening of a volcano (Stromboli, in Italy)… whose eruption they survive by being flung far into the air, which they survive variously by falling into the ocean or a tree. This might work in a cartoon — it doesn’t work here.

Verne’s novels were always fantasy decorated with scientific facts. Not much of the journey in the novel makes sense physically. This movie is no different in that respect from the original.

But the film makes no sense interpersonally.

The screenwriters inserted at least two elements into Verne’s already busy story: a battle of sexes, presumably to bring in a female audience, and a bad guy character, presumably to provide a Hollywood story line. Neither of these helped the script.

The script tacks the sex conflict onto almost every scene of the journey. It’s clumsy, insincere and un-funny. It forces the bad guy’s character (played as well as possible), into the story, often nonsensically — it’s just stuffing.

Moreover, the aspect of the film as a vehicle for Pat Boone didn’t help — despite the fact that he looks good on the camera.

The novel was intended to make money, as was this film. Very well. Both are the worst sort of science fiction, just a jumble of incoherent notions. Taken as a flight of fancy, it just isn’t science fiction, which, in my strict view, ought to insist on naturalistic explanation. Why is it in my list?

It stays in the list only because it’s based on Verne. It gets one point for color.

宇宙大戦争
[Battle in Outer Space]

1959 Toho Scope

+ humanity vs flying saucer aliens, on the Moon and in space

color

Japanese

Aliens: we see them only in space suits. They’re humanoid, smaller than people, and squeak like rodents.

Vehicles: the film is replete with different ships, both alien and human. Alien smaller craft are glowing saucers with a tail fin and short pointy wings. Also, a larger mother ship with ports for the saucers.

USAF launches manned space fighters that look like the X-15.

A human space station JSS3, elaborate, spoked, with a very odd defensive weapon. They call ”Space Center”, which turns out to be “Tokyo Space Research Center”.

Very nice collection of ’60s commercial aircraft: DeHaviland Comet, Douglas DC-6, Boeing 707.

Shows fabrication of huge rocket spaceships: SPIP, “The effort of many nations.” They are quite conventional, but with huge fins, and little canards on the nose cones. Nice paint jobs: silver with red trim on one, blue trim on the other.

Very nice lunar transporters can either crawl or hover over the lunar surface.

Weapons: The people make a ray gun using “electron force R600”. Can continuously fire for 50,000 hours, so can be used “practically forever”. They test it on the “special metal S250” used for their spaceship, It makes a pretty wicked-looking ray — a big electric spark! Different models include shoulder guns of various sizes, or a mounted machine gun, or a huge thing that looks like a space radar telescope.

The alien mother ship has a beam weapon that works differently, lifting buildings and vehicles off the ground, thus destroying them.

The aliens send guided weapons, a sort of space torpedo, that looks like… what? shapeless, and pulsate red, but maybe they’re meant to be… asteroids? They use these to blow up multiple city blocks in New York, and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Lots of very international committees discuss the situation.

The aliens turn Dr. Achmed into a mindless slave by putting tiny radio control devices in him! Earth will become a colony of “Natal”. Then they get Iwamura, too. They “implant” their “life energy” in his brain, and cause much mischief.

Military bands and cheering crowds send the astronauts off. There are American astronauts, who occasionally speak in English. And there are women among them. (The script affords no special explanation for their presence.)

The rocket launches into space with a little flame coming out the back, and slowly lifting into the sky, although with little exhibition of power. Astronauts show discomfort of acceleration. Once in space, the comic relief guy promptly floats to the ceiling. But everybody else just walks around — they get advice to be careful about the weightlessness.

Earth appears to be constructed of plaster with cotton clouds.

They will land on Mare Marginis on the Moon, where the signal originates. They encounter the remains of the space station, and a corpse floating in space.

The Moon scenes are really nice, in the classic pre-reality style.

The aliens gang up on the lady astronaut in a cave and grab her, and a guy has to rescue her. Then he blasts them all.

USAF fighter pilots wear full-face sunglasses. They go into dogfights with saucers in space. Win some, lose some. Star Wars certainly derived a lot from this.

If you don’t expect anything beyond what the title suggests, you’re in for a treat! It as good as any space movie of the period. They put a lot of effort and imagination into all the sets, models, outfits, and effects. As to the script, look, it’s a Japanese action-adventure of the late ’50s. That said, it is as good as it comes!

The Angry Red Planet

1959 Sino Productions Ltd.

OK flight to Mars and horror

color (some scenes tinted pink)

The script suggests no date.

Weapons: Sammy uses a “sonic freeze gun”, to limited effect.

Vehicle: a rocket that lands on its tail, represented by various U.S. Air Force film clips of Atlas (Thor?) ICBM’s and a cartoon Atlas rocket flying through space. At the beginning, the rocket has returned to Earth and landed on its tail. The stage prop looks approximately like an Atlas rocket. It has a door and stairs at the base, where in the real rocket, there were pumps for the engines, and the bottom end of the fuel tank.

Technology on board consists of stock electronic equipment. It mentions no computers, although some lights flash. No robots.

No absence of gravity inconveniences the crew.

The crew is half U.S. military, half scientists, one of whom is a woman, Irish.

Irish, one of the two survivors, relates the story of what happened on Mars. She’s fairly butch and says lots of smart sciency-sounding things. The story is at least coherent, and makes some attempt at a few science facts. (But then, there’s the customary encounter with an interplanetary “radioactive meteor”.)

On disembarking the rocket, the romantically-interested Irish promises colonel Tom not to act like a “hysterical female”. She goes on to explain: “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself — I won’t get out of your sight.” Seconds later, she walks right into the tentacles of a giant carnivorous plant, and must be saved by Tom.

Generally, the dialog has way too much silly verbal filler.

They achieved the redness of Mars by filming in color with a red filter. The effect is very eerie, but washes out much of the detail of the scenery.

Mars is full of life, in a variety that seldom appears in these films. Besides all sorts of strange plants (including the carnivorous one), there is a bat-rat-spider thing that they mistake for a plant, and an enormous amoeba with an eye in a dome that spins around (exactly) like an old alarm beacon, and whose goo can infect people. The intelligent Martians finally show up, evidently from within this goo. These effects are pretty crude, but they are imaginative, and when I was five or six, they scared the stuffin’s out of me.

A towering crystalline Martian city (reminiscent of Oz in The Wizard of Oz) appears in the distance. The astronauts head for it, but are chased away by the giant amoeba.

Smoking, not Martians, kills the professor. He’s seen puffing on a pipe, and dies of a heart attack on leaving Mars (“the take-off — the acceleration pressure”).

Other sci-fi mainstays: Colonel Tom electrifies the rocket hull to repel the amoeba-monster. He then becomes infected by its green goo.

The theme music by Paul Dunlap is suspiciously similar to the Lost in Space theme.

This film was shot within a quick nine days on a tiny budget. It’s to their credit that they managed to get so much novel stuff into it under those constraints.

The best quote is by Sammy, who says:

Я был спутником Солнца
[I was a Satellite of the Sun]

1959 Mosnauchfilm, Soyuzmultfilm

OK semi-educational space drama

color

Russian

The sub-title reads “fantastic cine-fiction”.

Note: “sputnik” (спутник) is Russian for “satellite”.

This is a fairly ambitious, colorful, man-in-space drama. It is man battling the elements, and his own fears and limitations.

Furthermore, it takes a stab at delivering scientific information to the public.

It’s also a late-’50s period piece. The fashions, the colors, the attitudes capture the times beautifully.

The story starts with the protagonist recounting a childhood incident. He looks at an old Pravda, and wonders what truth they aren’t telling him. He finds a videotape, and plays it to see a recording of a cosmonaut in distress…

Check out the videophone tape machine! It’s the size of a refrigerator, and takes contemporary magnetic tape, but has a large flat video screen! It’s the main adornment of the living room!

But there’s another screen behind a curtain, with which dad shows his son animated astrophysics lessons.

The hand-painted cartoon animations resemble what had been coming out of Disney studios, especially Fantasia (1940).

Rockets: A variously-tapered rocket with rectangular fins, appears with people walking underneath for scale. (As depicted, they’re not nearly as big as real rockets for orbit insertion.) (They don’t give the people long to get away before launch.) A fancier rocket appears, with what seems to be three stages, each stage with its own fins, and jets or rockets on the fins of the first stage.

The model on the ground looks as if it was fashioned from plaster or papier-mâché. After launch, it appears in space, and looks metallic.

The rocket performs staging, and its exhaust in space is pretty good-looking. But stars visibly move through the cellophane (as they still did in the Star Trek space scenes 10 years later).

It’s the “The first scientific expedition into space”. (But, as I understand the time-line, this happens years after Petrovich lost his life in space. It doesn’t fit.)

The major space piloting problem: “zones” that block transmissions. Scientists illustrate this with some sort of glowing ray.

A pilot talks about having been on the “Moon route” for five years.

Igor Petrovich, evidently the cosmonaut in the videotape, is later revealed to be Andrey’s father.

We learn the sad story of a monkey dying of radiation sickness after a trip in space. The subsequent investigation takes up a good part of the film, as an engineering mystery sub-plot.

The script builds a lot on the 1957 Sputnik (which it mentions repeatedly), and muses about the great achievements of Soviet scientists. It includes inspirational quotations from Tsiolkovsky.

Another lovely animation of the Sun shows its prominences, nuclear fusion on its interior, and how the Earth’s atmosphere protects us from radiation, and shows pretty animated paintings of northern lights. A radio dish on the Moon pointed at the Earth represents a Moon station. Then it shows a sequence of painted landscapes of Mars, and other planets. Paintings of extraterrestrial volcanoes… (where? Mercury?) are again very similar to those in Fantasia.

On the basis of the revelation that Andrey is Igor’s son, the authorities choose him to pilot the likely-suicidal follow-up mission to his dad’s mission.

Guys all over the world radio the cosmonaut. He responds to each in their native language! (Because he’s that good.)

A dial in the rocket cockpit shows speed in km/sec.

Andrey is beset by meteorites. (These have irregular shapes, surprisingly like real-life asteroids.) The remedy is to shoot them with nuclear charges. He empties his cannon. He scrapes through anyway. (Well, he had to, in order to recount the adventure.)

Overall, they tried to do too much in this one film, with the usual result. It’s charming anyway — better than most of the contemporary Western fare.