Science fiction is a way of telling something about the present that for some reason can't be said, or said as effectively, by ordinary means. In the still stunning 1956 production of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, director Don Siegel (1912-1991), later known for many films in the tough-guy genre, such as Charlie Varick and Dirty Harry, delivered a fast-moving, well-written and well-acted version of paranoia.
Minimalist poster for Invasion of the
Body Snatchers.
While famous for its scene of Kevin McCarthy running among traffic screaming "They're here already ... You're next", perhaps the more chilling dialog is that when one of his colleagues urges him to given in to the invasion:
Your new bodies are growing in there. They're taking you over cell for cell, atom for atom. There is no pain. Suddenly, while you're asleep, they'll absorb your minds, your memories and you're reborn into an untroubled world...Tomorrow you'll be one of us...There's no need for love…Love. Desire. Ambition. Faith. Without them, life is so simple, believe me.
Issues of trust, religion (what does it mean to have a soul?) and the boundary between appropriate interdependency and mob conformity permeate the film. Variously considered either a right-wing allegory against creeping communism or a fable about not giving in to McCarthyism, the movie appears to have been simply created as a really good story. That it remains so almost 60 years later is a mark of its success. There have been at least two remakes, both good, of the story, but the original remains the best IMHO.
This lurid poster for Them! plays
down the film's strengths:
suspense and psychological terror.
The nuclear radiation supersized critter genre has brought out more than a few turkeys, but hear me out on
Them!.
Much like Alien (1979) and Aliens, which were clearly inspired by it, Them! starts out with an apparently routine investigation, this time by a police officer, played by the always-effective James Whitmore (1921-2009). Whitmore's character discovers in the desert a series of mysterious "crime" scenes, and the rescue of a single witness, a small girl in a state of catatonia, who, upon revival, screams out only two words: "THEM! THEM!".
An ant expert, played by Edward Gwenn (1877-1959), known these days primarily for his role as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), is brought in, as well as his daughter, played by Joan Weldon, who is also a scientist, and the trustworthy FBI man, played by James Arness (1921-2011).
Them!, which has the government seeking safety on ships, raises the wagon train to the stars trope, made famous in Star Trek, albeit without the necessary home planet devastation, and developed further in Battlestar Galactica and World War Z. This theme is very old, for example, Herodotus, in the The Persian Wars 8:61 credits the Athenians as still having country enough with 200 ships even though their city has fallen to the Persians.
HET DING van een andere wereld
Bilingual Belgian poster.
James Arness had also played the title role in one of the great sci-fi classics,
The Thing from Another World, directed by the famous Howard Hawkes, whose other work included such classics as
Bringing Up Baby (1938) and
The Big Sleep.
The movie combines the classic elements of horror, an isolated location, in this case an Arctic research station, a small group of characters, and an unknown and apparently unrelenting threat. The film was based on a 1938 short story, "Who Goes There" by science fiction writer and editor John W. Campbell, which postulated an attack by a creature which could imitate perfectly another animal, including human beings. The novella presents the theme of what it means to be human, and it was refilmed and released again in a very powerful 1982 production called simply The Thing.
Despite the flamboyant poster,
nowhere in the movie did the robot
carry Anne Francis.
Another classic was the 1956 MGM production,
Forbidden Planet, which established or contributed to numerous sci-fi precedents, including the flying saucer motif and of course Robby the Robot. Look for excellent performances by Leslie Nielsen (yes, Frank Drebin himself), Walter Pidgeon, whom you may recall from 1941's
How Green Was My Valley and the ubiquitous Richard Anderson.
Prior to Forbidden Planet, the general portrayal of robots had been as menaces, such as in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Robbie the Robot established a tradition of mechanical comic relief that was continued most prominently in Star Wars (1977) and somewhat less successfully in Disney's 1979 production, The Black Hole
The spaceship, with its hinged ramp lowering out of the hull onto the ground, was reused in the famous 1962 Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man.
Robbie the Robot went on to star in numerous productions, including an episode of Columbo where despite all the efforts of the Ph.D-holding murderer, played by the always wonderful Jose Ferrer, he failed to supply the requisite alibi. I recently watched Forbidden Planet again. The director John Carpenter was inspired as a child by Forbidden Planet, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the opening scenes of both films include a dramatic entry into a planet's atmosphere by similar space craft.
Beware of mind-control desserts!
I have to close with one of my favorite sci-fi spoofs,
The Stuff, which I saw back in the pre-VCR days of 1985 as a double feature with, of course,
Godzilla 1985 ("Will Godzilla come to Tokyo"?). Anyhoo,
The Stuff is about an underground movement against various evil corporations that are peddling a new dessert (recall the '80s were the days of the frozen yogurt craze) that in fact is a sentient being bent on enslaving the human race through mind-control and zombification. (So, it's kind of like the Tea Party, I guess!).
Look for Paul Sorvino, playing Col. Malcolm Grommett Spears, obviously modeled after uber-patriot Bo Gritz, who commands a sort of flat-earther militia which ends up combating The Stuff. Sorvino gets some classic lines, such as:
Col. Malcolm Grommett Spears: [after shooting guard who begins "bleeding" Stuff] I kinda like the sight of blood... but this is disgusting!
So, here are five fun ones that lasted beyond their time, and remain entertaining to this day.