Great Science Fiction Movies of the 1950s
Do you love movies? I do and the ones I like the best are science fiction and action movies. I admit it, I am still a kid at heart. There have been a lot of movie lists by different people and organizations which state which are the best movies in a certain genre. Some I have thought were not accurate to my taste. When it comes to science fiction some have said it is like eating olives, it is an acquired taste. I don’t believe this. I think a good science fiction movie can appeal to everyone and to prove this fact I think all I have to do is point to the recent record breaking sales of tickets for the latest Star Wars film. There are people of every age group who are still going to see this. Having said this I think if we were to compile a list of the best science fiction films ever made we would have to take into consideration the time period they were made, because the technology we have today was just not available in older films. I think the leader in using cutting edge technology was Stanley Kubrick. When the film 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in 1968 the effects were far ahead of anything else from that period. The problem is effects alone do not make for a good story.
In 1950 is when we had just gotten into the cold war and seen the effects of nuclear weapons. A movie came out called Rocketship X-M. As you can imagine the effects were almost non-existent. It was directed by Kurt Neumann and stared Lloyd Bridges. What it lacked in effects in made up for in a great story line. It was about the first spaceship and crew being sent to explore Mars. The ship ran into problems on its way to the Red Planet, but was able to overcome the problems and land on Mars. The crew waited with anticipation until they felt they were able to go out and explore. As they left the safety of their ship and gone some distance away they discovered an artifact buried under the sand, it was a decorative mask. Due to high radioactivity they decided to return to their ship and when they started back they were attacked by what looked like cave people who had various things wrong with them due to radioactive sickness. It seems the Martians had an advanced civilization and had a nuclear war and each side bombed the other back to the Stone Age and took the entire civilization with it. This should be a film that every science fiction fan puts on their list.
A year later in 1951 another of the great science fiction films came out. It was the original The Day The Earth Stood Still. By the way the remake is not even a shadow of the original. While it is extremely dated by today’s standards it is still a wonderful movie and again probably inspired by the cold war and proliferation of nuclear weapons. It starred Michael Rennie and was directed by Robert Wise. A spaceship lands on earth in Washington D.C. and troops are assembled around it. Eventually a helmeted being comes out with a device in his hand and the soldiers start to shoot at him. He is rescued by a giant robot he brought with him. He manages to mix in with humans and contacts the world’s greatest scientist to help him get a message to all the earth and it is they have to stop with the nuclear wars, because ships will be circling the planet piloted by the giant robots who will reduce the earth to a cinder if we attack each other. This is truly one of the all-time great science fiction films.
1951 saw another great science fiction film released. One of the directors was the great director Howard Hawks who didn’t list himself on the film. It starred Kenneth Tobey and the alien was James Arness of Gunsmoke fame. The title was The Thing From Another World also known as The Thing. The story takes place in the Arctic. Scientists near one of our bases have found something in the ice and it is a huge disc shaped craft. When they try and remove it they discover an alien frozen in a block of ice and take it back to their station. One thing leads to another and the ice melts and the large alien comes to life and is attacking and killing the people on the base and seems to be unstoppable. Scientists explain it is more like a carrot and shooting it only creates holes which have no effect. In its day this film had many people sitting on the edge of their seats. The remake with Kurt Russell was also pretty good.
1953 saw one of the most famous of all science fiction stories come to the screen. It was the War of the Worlds. It was directed by Byron Haskin and starred Gene Barry. The movie was very faithful to the book. As humans watched things which seemed at first to be meteors were crashing to earth. Some people went to where the crashes took place out of curiosity and nothing happened for days until one day a hatch opened and aliens appeared and started firing their heat weapons at people and killing them. The aliens produced huge war machines and began to travel across the earth in them killing anyone in their path and cutting off communications and we were helpless to stop them since they had superior technology which included shields we couldn’t penetrate even with nuclear weapons. This film is another must see.
In 1951 A disaster science fiction movie came out called When Worlds Collide. It was directed by Rudolph Maté and starred Richard Deer. Scientists on earth had detected a star with a planet orbiting it which were heading toward earth. They had some time before it would reach us and destroy the earth so the scientists were constructing a large spaceship with money from an industrialist who wanted to be a passenger. The idea was to take the ship to the alien planet when the star destroyed us. There were all sorts of problems. A good flick.
An interesting science fiction film came out in 1954. The film’s title was Them. The director was Gordon Douglas and the star was James Whitmore. The movie was about mutations caused by nuclear testing. Apparently the testing had caused ants to grow to a huge size and they were killing everything they came across. Since they had their nests underground they were hard to track until they came out and then it was usually too late. A very interesting premise and again connected with the newly discovered atomic bomb.
In 1950 a movie came out about the first crew to fly to the moon. It was directed by Irving Pichel and starred John Archer. It was one of the very first science fiction movies to try being accurate about the trip. It had taken a couple of years to create this movie and at the time it was considered a marvel of technology.
Forbidden Planet came out in 1956 and was an important movie to science fiction fans. It was directed by Fred M. Wilcox and starred Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielsen. The reason it was considered so important was the fact many say Star Trek was based on it. The story takes place when a space ship piloted by Nielsen lands on a planet and he is met by an advanced robot named Robby. It seems the beings who once lived there had all died, but something is not right. An invisible beast is attacking everyone and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it.
In 1956 a scary science fiction film came out that many were talking about. It was titled, The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. The director was Don Siegel and it stared Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter and Larry Gates. Alien pod people were replacing humans and looked just like the people they replaced except that were emotionless. As McCarthy’s friends are being replaced he has nowhere to turn. He can’t even be sure if he tells the authorities he is talking to a human. This was a very good movie.
I know everyone has different tastes in movies, but I believe I have compiled a list of the greatest science fiction movies of the 1950s and for you youngsters out there, I think you would still enjoy looking at them.
