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.
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.
From the fertile mind of H.G. Wells came this vision of a nation under aerial alien siege. It might have been London under the Nazi blitzkrieg, but this is Los Angeles taking a hit from sleek Martian saucers. Oh, they were handsomely designed — as gorgeous as the actual Martians, once they landed, were spindly and grotesque. Producer George Pal’s fantasy thrillers, such as Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, Conquest of Space and The Time Machine boasted the snazziest special effects of the day. His vision of trans-world Armageddon has terrors both epic (Angelenos zapped by the planes’ death rays) and intimate (a few people hiding in a basement, hoping to elude a Martian probe that looks like a TV screen on a metallic snake). Much superior to Steven Spielberg’s frantic 2005 remake.
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.
