Don’t Leave Earth Without It: Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties
It’s getting hard to remember in this time of home streaming, but in the glory days of Hollywood, the great studios (each of which had a recognizable house style and its own particular areas of cinematic expertise) poured forth a seemingly endless river of movies in every genre you could think of, many of which have seeped so far into our subconscious as to become permanent parts of our collective culture.
Merely to name these studios and genres is to instantly summon iconic images; the MGM musical — Gene Kelly swinging around a streetlamp in the pouring rain, Astaire and Charisse dancing in the dark across a stylized Manhattan park; the John Ford western — John Wayne closing the door on hearth and home to walk alone into the desolate beauty of Monument Valley; the Warner Brothers Gangster picture — Cagney and Robinson and Bogart sneering, snarling, shooting, dying; the Universal monster movie — Karloff and Lugosi slowly stalking their victims, as implacable, as inevitable as death itself; the film noir — darkened big-city streets slick with mist and moral ambiguity; the women’s picture — Davis and Crawford and Stanwyck, selflessly sacrificing themselves for husbands and children unworthy of them, their faces glowing with the glory and agony of unrequited motherhood; the screwball comedy — Claudette Colbert bringing a car to a screeching halt by pulling up her skirt and showing some leg…
There’s something missing from this list, though, isn’t there? You bet there is, and few genres are as rich in indelible moments and images as the science fiction films of the 1950’s.
