Ah, we have emerged from the SF desert of the 40’s into the rich garden of the 1950’s. For many people this is when SF movies really started. It is certainly when they came into their own as a genre.
My last post I suffered from few films to select from, and this post has quite the opposite trouble. The 1950’s were such a golden age of SF movie that entire books have been devoted to the movies and their history. (I would heartily recommend Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies! as an invaluable resource.)
It was during the 60’s that we got Creature from the Black Lagoon, the first full body suit monster movie. We are also got Them! which spawned countless giant insect movies. The Day the Earth Stood Still is a prime example of SF film addressing the concerns of the day while Invasion of The Body Snatchers terrifically captured tis terrors. Of there are so many to chose from, but of course I have already made my picks. One I expect bears no surprise, but my first pick is rather unknown to most people today.
Destination Moon – 1950.
Those who know me might suspect I selected this film because of the close association with one of my favorite SF authors, Robert A. Heinlien, but they would be wrong. This film, as a movie, is in my opinion flawed, but I am not selecting for best SF movies in each decade but most influential and on that count there can be no arguing with Destination Moon. This film, released in 1950, was a box office hit, both domestically and over-seas. It launched George Pal into his love affair with SF film, and for that alone it is an important film but it also launched the SF film crazed of the 1950’s. Without this film we do not have the rich fertile treasury of SF films from this decade and without those movies we do not have modern SF cinema. Destination Moon, while dry and flawed, is one of the most important SF films of any decade.
Forbidden Planet – 1956.
This selection should be less surprising. It is a well know movie, beloved and rescreened often. I had the good fortune to catch it in a theater and the special effect and images still hold up quite nicely. The characters are quite a bit dated, very much the writing is a product of the repressed 50’s, with the Production Code still in full effect, but this is still a movie well worth watching. It is influential because until Forbidden Planet science-fiction films were not literature. Most SF films were heavily plot based, being either adventure stories, such as Destination Moon’s exploration of the adventure inherent in a trip to the moon, allegorical story, or arguments for a particular worldview, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still. Forbidden Planet, an SF adaptation of The Tempest took the SF movie, with credible science, beyond the solar system and into the soul of humanity. It asked, with typical MGM glitz, deep questions about revenge and power and to price might they extract. In addition to opening up SF film to deeply internal stories, though they might be about aliens and robots on the surface, Forbidden Planet also inspired Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. The production design of the movie strongly influenced the look of the television series, and the very concept of a paramilitary exploration of new worlds and new life-forms start here. There is no doubt that you can draw a line from Forbidden Planet, through Star Trek, to many shows and films today.
