1950s Cinema - vo.rs

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956): The Paranoia Blueprint

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The most frightening idea in science fiction is not the monster you can see. It is the neighbour who looks exactly like your neighbour, speaks in his voice, remembers what he remembered, and is nonetheless no longer him. Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers built that idea into a machine so efficient that seventy years of paranoia cinema have run on its parts. Shot in nineteen days on a shoestring at Allied Artists, a studio best known for cheap westerns, it is the leanest, meanest horror-of-conformity film ever made, and every takeover thriller since has been reverse-engineering it.

Forbidden Planet: Shakespeare in Deep Space

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Most 1950s science fiction was shot fast and cheap in black and white, a monster and a scream and a matinee crowd. Then in 1956 MGM, the most opulent studio in Hollywood, poured roughly two million dollars into a CinemaScope space epic in lush Eastmancolor, hired a Disney animator to draw the monster and a pair of avant-garde composers to invent the soundtrack, and built it all on the skeleton of a Shakespeare play. Forbidden Planet is the film that dragged the genre uptown, and its ambitions were so far ahead of its moment that the movies spent the next decade catching up.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951): The Sermon in a Flying Saucer

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

In 1951 a saucer landed on the President’s Park Ellipse in Washington, a man in a silver suit walked down the ramp with his hand raised in peace, and a jittery soldier shot him for his trouble. That gesture — the outstretched hand, the reflexive bullet — is the whole of The Day the Earth Stood Still in one beat. Robert Wise’s film is a sermon disguised as a science-fiction thriller, and it remains the founding document of the benevolent-visitor tradition, the picture every later filmmaker who wanted the alien to be wiser than us had to answer to.