Cold War fears made the 1950s a golden era for paranoid science-fiction flicks. TIME looks back at the decade's best outer-space and nuclear-monster movies.
A spaceship lands in Arctic wastes, its only passenger a six-and-a-half-foot-tall frozen vegetable with a brain. (“An intellectual carrot — the mind boggles.”) That spells trouble for the small troupe of soldiers and scientists, plus a reporter and the token fabulous babe. Directed by Christian Nyby, The Thing has the hallmarks of movies by producer Howard Hawks: taut, snappy camaraderie and a preference for men of action over men of thought. Whereas 1951′s other big spaceman movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, took the liberal view that a visitor from another world would be benign, superior and peace-loving, this one suggests an interplanetary Cold War, with a creature (played by James Arness, later Sheriff Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke fame) who’s angry, hungry and hard to reason with. Humankind’s only logical response to this vegetable invader: cook ‘im! (But don’t eat ‘im.)
That simultaneous arrival in the early ’50s of the Cold War and the sci-fi movie boom: coincidence? Or conspiracy? Whichever, most sci-fi films could be read subtextually as a validation of America’s military-insanity complex: that we should prepare to go to war with foreigners who were determined to take us over or wipe us out. In Red Planet Mars there’s no need for scholarship: the message is the text. Seems an ex-Nazi scientist, working for the Commies, is beaming signals suggesting that God lives on Mars. Then citizens overthrow the Soviet dictatorship and make Russia Christian again. Then a U.S. scientist (James Arness’s brother, Peter Graves) discovers that God really does live on Mars. This head-scratcher certainly came with a pedigree: it was directed by top production designer Harry Horner, and written by John Balderston (who worked on the Universal horror classics Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and Bride of Frankenstein) and Anthony Veiller (who, the same year, scripted John Huston’s Moulin Rouge). Recommended for its sonorous, ponderous lunacy, and as a rear-view mirror into the roiling national psyche of the ’50s.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
