The upgrading of science-fiction for its children's serial associations was greatly motivated by the contemporaneous atmosphere of political anxiety coinciding with rapid technological advance. The film that single-handedly changed the face of science-fiction cinema was Destination Moon (1950), puppeteer George Pal's production was sheer technology, the giant leap for mankind, pre-staged as simple, stirring prophecy. There was certainly nothing nominal where Destination Moon was concerned, with its majestic space-flight and super-spectacular lunar surface. It in turn would inspire science-fiction on the screen to be seen as both viable and respectable, even if the magazines persisted in disguising themselves as lurid codswallop. Derived from a Robert Heinlein story, designed by the Father of Modern Space art himself - Chesley Bonestell, advised by rocket scientist , deemed Father of Rocketry, Hermann Oberth, the film proclaimed its authenticity in each and every detail. It even avoided at all costs, the extremes of Heinlein's original (in which Nazis are discovered plotting away on the moon), by translating his precocious schoolboy astronauts into average American adults, all courage and good humor.
The three classic science-fiction films of 1951 were The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Thing and When Worlds Collide, and they each demonstrate how quickly the filmmakers and their public recognized that a simple moonshot would do little to restore domestic security. The ending to The Thing with its famous admonition 'Watch the skies!' illustrated that teamwork and wisecracks can burn one bloodthirsty alien but there are plenty more willing to disburse the woodwork, all too ready to propagate their seed-pods at the drop of a severed hand. And if they don't arrive as chilly foreign agents, they'll turn up as Michael Rennie in The Day The Earth Stood Still, accompanied by his over-sized robot, ready to burn us to a crisp by way of chastisement. Mankind will surely learn its lesson, or G-d would certainly intervene once more ; the gospel according to Philip Wylie's script for When Worlds Collide shows a new Ark leaving for a Technicolor Eden right smack dab in the midst of the Cold War.
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| Lock Martin transforms himself as The Robot In Disguise. |
The late Fifties and early Sixties brought to an end with increasing frequency - most depressingly with The World, The Flesh and The Devil and On the Beach and most intriguingly with The Last Woman on Earth (1960) and Rocket Attack USA (1961). The Cuban missile crisis was on the cusp, and for students of science-fiction this would come as no great surprise.
The most consistent mantra of the era, as we now look back on it, was one of helplessness. William Cameron Menzies' Invaders From Mars (1953) was an early example, a melancholy account of a young boy's discovery that his parents had become alien contactees. The takeover thematic would return in the mid-Fifties with Britain's The Quartermass Experiment (1955) and 1984 (1956) - two very different sides of the same coin - Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Roger Corman's trilogy of compulsion ; It Conquered the World, Not of This Earth and Attack of the Crab Monsters (respectively 1956).