“Genre From Another Planet: The ’50s”

Intriguing analysis in yesterday’s NY Times:

“THE past is a foreign country,” the novelist L. P. Hartley once wrote; “they do things differently there.” Like everything else in our brave new world this famous sentence, written 56 years ago, could use an update — or in movie terms, a remake. Because sometimes, as in R. W. Goodwin’s wacky new “Alien Trespass” (opening Friday), the past looks stranger than that. In “Alien Trespass,” which is set in 1957 and is both a parody of and a homage to the science-fiction films of that anxious era, the past seems like another planet.

This movie looks like it’s in my wheelhouse. I grew up watching all those sci-fi movies like:

 1950
Destination Moon

1951
The Day the Earth Stood Still
The Thing from Another World
When Worlds Collide

1953
The Beast from 20.000 Fathoms
Donovan’s Brain
It Came from Outer Space
Invaders from Mars
The War of the Worlds

1954
Creature from the Black Lagoon
Them!
20.000 Leagues Under the Seas
This Island Earth
Gog

1955
1984
Tarantula

1956
Forbidden Planet
Godzilla King of the Monsters
Invasion of the Body Snatchers

1957
The 27th Day
The Incredible Shrinking Man

1958
I Married a Monster from Space
The Fly
Monster on the Campus

 1959
4D Man
Eyes Without a Face
Journey to the Center of Earth
World, the Flesh & the Devil
On the Beach

1960
Village of the Damned
The Time Machine

But the writer of the NY Times article Terrence Rafferty makes an interesting point:

These are useful cautions because, as all these movies show, belief in authority of one kind or another — including the authority of science — was considerably stronger in that age than in the present day, when few leaders are trusted, and the word “expert” is almost invariably preceded by “so-called.” It’s this greater credulity that makes people in ’50s science-fiction films seem so far from us now — familiar but distant, unreachable, like the selves we were as children.

Alien Trespass is based on a screenplay by Steven P. Fisher, based on a story by Fisher and James Swift. Here’s a trailer:

What are your favorite 50’s sci-fi movies?

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