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 meteor crashes outside a desert town, and, before it disappears into the earth, the local astronomer (Richard Carlson) notices it’s really a space ship. The townspeople scoff at his story, but soon some of them are turned into alien hosts after coming into contact with a soft-focus Jell-O-y entity that looks like a glaucomatic eye as seen from the inside. (The effect was creepier in the movie’s original 3-D version.) Jack Arnold, director of many sci-fi near-classics (Creature from the Black Lagoon, Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man), gives the film the matter-of-fact tension of a police procedural. But the best thing about the movie is Ray Bradbury’s story, the blueprint for a decade of sci-fi paranoia. Bradbury says that the most toxic alien invasion is not of our skies but of our minds — especially if we only think we’re being invaded.
In one of the great openings in movies, a girl (Sandy Descher) staggers through the New Mexico desert, dazed and mute. Then she erupts into hysterics, screaming, “Them! Them! THEM!” The them are giant ants, magnified to 18-wheeler size by the atomic bomb tests in nearby Alamagordo. The antosaurs somehow set up their formicary in the Los Angeles sewers, where they’re faced down by the usual bunch of cops and scientists (including the Thing himself, James Arness). And it’s no picnic. This superior drama — not a B but a B+ — boasts brisk, no-nonsense direction by Gordon Douglas, working from a story by sci-fi movie ace George Worthing Yates (It Came from Beneath the Sea, Conquest of Space, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Earth vs. the Spider…).
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.
