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.
In a quiet, sunny California town, some of the folks are behaving…a little off. That’s what their concerned relatives tell Dr. Miles Bennell. Sea pods from outer space, replacing the real townspeople as they sleep with alien simulacra, is the film’s official explanation (from the Jack Finney novel). But Body Snatchers is more plausible as a supple metaphor for 50s alienation, conformity and political hysteria. The pods could be Russian or right-wing — we said it was supple — but either way it’s scary: the people you love have ceased to be themselves, because they no longer can love. Officially remade three times, this Don Siegel version is the simplest, sleekest and best. It’s also the only movie that made 50′s kids, after they saw it, go to bed with the light on. Actually, we didn’t need a night light, because we were afraid that if we fell asleep, we’d wake up as pods.
Today’s special-effects dudes work with computers and zillion-dollar budgets. Ray Harryhausen’s monsters and space ships were handmade, on a shoestring, then animated in frame-by-frame stop motion — the grueling process of a medieval craftsman. He created the giant octopus in the 1955 It Came from Beneath the Sea (where the budget was so skimpy that Harryhausen could afford to give the creature only six arms) and the sleek spaceships here. The aliens want a top-level government meeting to assure a peaceful landing, but the bastards are lying! (Moral: Never negotiate with the Russkies.) Cold War edginess aside, the movie has splendid action scenes featuring these gorgeous killing machines from outer space, all courtesy of Harryhausen’s one-man effects factory. Miraculously, the master is still around, a living inspiration to modern FX savants.
In light of the Material Girl performing at Super Bowl XLVI, TIME takes a look at her life and career, both of which have been lived firmly in the public eye.
