JAMES SEY explores the enduring appeal of Fifties B-grade science-fiction movies
THOSE wonderful and genuinely strange people at Norwood’s Seven Arts cinema have done it again. Following hard on the heels of their Friday night lesbian-vampire-grunge-horror movie slots (what do you mean, you missed them? You fool!) comes a festival of “space- fiction” movies, running under the banner of an invitation to Explore Cine Space. Until April 2, six films will be screened, including four rarely seen classics from the great decade of American B-movie science fiction, the Fifties.
In our millenial decade of miniaturised and intimate high-tech information exchange, of slick and sanitised Hollywood versions of cyberpunk life in the fast lane of the infobahn (The Net, Johnny Mnemonic, the just- released Hackers), it is easy to see the Fifties film version of a technological universe as faintly ridiculous.
This would be a mistake. In the Fifties, and most of the Sixties, America lived in a kind of interregnum between the discovery and use of the atom bomb, and the first moon landing in 1969. As such, the popular cinematic obsessions with space travel, alien invasion and the furthest reaches of the universe dramatised a deep ambiguity in the psyches of the denizens of the Land of the Free.
On the one hand, the US was a superpower for the first time, and had a vision of a world ruled and improved by benevolent American technology — technology which would then colonise the universe, though not in so many words, of course. On the other hand was the underlying fear of technology gone wrong: those same spaceships and atom bombs in the hands of aliens/communists/mad scientists.
This underlying cultural drama played out in Fifties B-movie science fiction would probably make it interesting only to maladjusted sociologists, were it not that the films were intended also as popular entertainments, and often succeeded spectacularly in painting convincing pictures of the brave new frontiers of outer space. We should remember, too, that these were the days when alternative reality and its fearsome alien inhabitants had to be made of plasticine and chipboard, la Ed Wood; none of your digital compositing and morphing here.
The Fifties “space-fiction” movies that will be screened at the festival are:
l When Worlds Collide (1951): Produced by George Pal, who specialised, along with the notorious Roger Corman, in science-fiction B- movies in the decade, this film had a relatively large budget and special-effects technical advisors for its climactic scenes of global destruction. Strangely enough, given the title, it’s about a rogue star which enters the solar system on a collision course with Earth. The doughty humans must escape into space.
l It Came From Outer Space (1953): Based on a Ray Bradbury short story and directed by Jack Arnold, who later in the decade gave us one of the great SF films, The Incredible Shrinking Man, this one concerns aliens who land on Earth and duplicate humans to act as slave labour. In a departure from type, however, this is not part of global domination, but because their spaceship needs repairs. It would never have happened to the Mothership.
l This Island Earth (1954): A very interesting example of the genre, bringing together alien conspiracies, interplanetary wars on the planet Metaluna, and the omnipresent theme of Big Science on Earth, the film includes aliens with groovy double-storey foreheads (stock make-up for advanced alien races) and a fight with an insectoid slave mutant.
l Conquest of Space (1955): Another George Pal production, this rather more serious effort was based on an actual technical tract by scientist Wernher von Braun, entitled The Mars Project. It is an early example of the scientific-adventurer-in-space sub-genre perhaps best represented by later, less optimistic films like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
The festival is rounded off by rescreenings of 2001, and George Lucas’s equally influential but very different Star Wars. If Kubrick’s film represents a seductive but nonetheless cautionary and bleakly cosmic view of humanity’s relationship with technology, then Lucas’s space opera paved the way for the massive budgets and rollercoaster special effects which have characterised the genre ever since. The contrast between these films and the naive awe of Big Science and the final frontier in the Fifties films couldn’t be more marked.
This is without doubt a festival for obsessive nostalgists, committed cultists and cosmic weirdos. Give your support to the Seven Arts strange crew, for they know the difference between a trite package and a genuine cult. And, in the immortal closing words of Howard Hawks’s original The Thing (1951): “Keep Watching the Skies!”
The line-up at the Seven Arts is as follows: March 29 6pm: Conquest of Space; 8pm: 2001. March 30 6pm: This Island Earth; 8pm: 2001. March 31 6pm: When Worlds Collide; 8pm: Star Wars. April 1 6pm: It Came from Outer Space; 8pm: When Worlds Collide. April 2: Conquest of Space; 8pm: 2001. Inquiries: 483-1680