The coordinates are set and the TIME TUNNEL is ready to take you back to the year when the Earth stood still, the Gorilla took a bride, and Ray Bradbury released a trifecta!

Film Focus

There’s no more classy 1950s SF movie than The Day the Earth Stood Still. The Thing From Another World might be more thrilling, but Robert Wise’s movie is an effective Christ parable in which Klaatu (Michael Rennie) comes to Earth in a classic UFO-style flying saucer to warn mankind he’d better clean up his act — or else. The ‘or else’ is provided by Gort, a featureless giant robot capable of zapping tanks (and soldiers) into non-existence.

Klaatu lives as a human (under the symbolic name Carpenter) in order to fairly assess mankind’s chances of surviving beyond the nascent atomic age, and becomes a surrogate father and husband in the process.

Based on a Harry Bates short story, The Day the Earth Stood Still brought atomic age anxiety to the movie house, while Wise created a through-provoking and stylish film that still stands up well today.

It takes a fantastic concept, but gives it a realistic, down-to-Earth treatment that makes it all the more effective. Plus that Theremin score cannot be beat! Whatever you do, make sure you see the original and not the truly awful Keanu Reeves-starring remake of recent years.


Other Movies

Science fiction and fantasy movies playing the local theatre in 1951 included the classics The Thing from Another World and When Worlds Collide. The first saw an alien uncovered in the ice of Antarctica, while the second saw mankind preparing to abandon a doomed Earth to find a new home in space.

The British Ealing movie The Man in the White Suit looked at the implications of one simple idea (dirt-repelling material) through a comic prism, while another low budget movie, Five, saw five survivors of a nuclear war squabble among themselves.

Comedy was to the fore in one of the last classic Universal horror movies, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, while inadvertent comedy featured in Superman and the Mole-Men, the film that launched the George Reeves TV series.

Also released in 1951 was the underrated, atmospheric Edgar Ulmer programmer The Man from Planet X.


Oddball Flick

Bride of the Gorilla is notable today for featuring tragic starlet Barbara Payton. Having started in decent film noir movies (Trapped, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye), Payton’s drinking and promiscuity saw her career spiral out of control. After Bride of the Gorilla (a truly terrible movie co-starring Raymond Burr) and her engagement to Franchot Tone, she started an affair with fellow drunk Tom Neal (star of Edgar Ulmer’s Detour), resorted to prostitution and had several run-ins with the law.

Payton died in 1967 aged just 39 having failed to live up to her early promise. In Bride of the Gorilla Payton plays a spoiled plantation wife whose handyman boyfriend turns into a rampaging gorilla due to a native curse. It was not Oscar-winning material.


Television

Running on American TV in 1951 was the juvenile space opera series Captain Video (started in 1949), while the best hope for science fiction and horror on TV were the weekly anthology drama shows that occasionally adapted an SF short story, among them Hallmark Hall of Fame (debuting in 1951), Kraft Television Theatre, Texaco Star Theatre and The Philco Television Playhouse. This early in television history, Westerns and soap operas were the staple diet on US TV.


Books

Issac Asimov published I, Robot in 1951, establishing his three laws of robotics, while Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles brought a new, philosophical sheen to pulp science fiction — the same year saw Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and The Illustrated Man (a connected short story collection) published.

British author John Wyndham released his still-influential The Day of the Triffids, while Arthur C. Clarke’s Prelude to Space chronicled a realistic trip to the moon and featured communication satellites (long before the real thing was invented).

Comics

The 1950s saw a crackdown on the growing field of horror comics (primarily published by EC in such titles as The Haunt of Fear, Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror). EC found success in the early 1950s with its horrific, twist-in-the-tale morality stories, but by 1951 was pushing the graphic envelope ever further. The result would be a mid-1950s censorship regime (the Comics Code) following a series of controversial Senate hearings about the ill effects of horror comics on children and susceptible adults.

Notable 1951 Births

Clearly 1951 was a great year for superheroes, with the births of Batman Michael Keaton, the Hulk Lou Ferrigno and Wonder Woman Linda Cartner. Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill and Stargate’s Kurt Russell joined Dune’s flying underpants-wearer Sting, Star Trek’s Vulcan Kirstie Alley, and Raiders of the Lost Ark’s Karen Allen in all being born in 1951.

TV stars born this year include Babylon 5’s Stephen Root and Fifth Doctor Peter Davison. Directors born this year include Back to the Future’s Robert Zemeckis and Strange Days’ Kathryn Bigelow.


Notable 1951 Deaths

Horror producer Val Lewton, best known for Cat People, died in 1951, as did Algernon Blackwood, writer of many occult ghost stories (one of which was the basis for the movie The Wendigo). Both traded in a more subtle form of horror, relying on atmosphere and spooky situations rather than gore or gruesomeness.

The Real World

The UN Headquarters opened in New York in January 1951, but the organisation failed to resolve the ongoing Korean War. The King and I opened on Broadway making a star of Yul Brynner, while bitchy theatre comedy-drama All About Eve, featuring a young Marilyn Monroe, won the Best Picture Oscar.

The Festival of Britain showcased the arts in the UK and saw the creation of the Southbank arts complex in London, while J. D. Salinger published Catcher in the Rye and I Love Lucy made a television star of Lucille Ball. She created Star Trek you know! (Well, as chief exec of Desilu Studios, she approved the production of Star Trek at least.)


By Brian J. Robb