THE BROADWAY MUSICAL JAMAICA (1957) STARRED LENA HORNE AND RIcardo Montalban, and had a score by Harold Arlen that set Calypso to a Broadway beat and used wickedly satiric lyrics by E. Y. “Yip” Harburg. Josephine Premice stopped the show with “Leave De Atom Alone,” making light of the specter of nuclear war:
If you want Mississippi to stay where it is
If you want to see Wall Street and General Motors continue in biz
If you want Uncle Sam to keep holding what’s yours and what’s his
If you’re fond of kith and kin in their skin and bone
Don’t fool around with hydrogen
Leave de atom alone.
Bad for the teeth, bad for the bone
Don’t fool with it, leave it alone.
The lyrics were black humor, forcing a laugh—a nervous one, perhaps—out of our deepest fear. And yet, as in most black comedy, reality seeped through the darkness. Who would not be “most exasperated” when “radio activated,” or agree that becoming “fissionable material” would leave “big smog in the atmosphere?” But Hollywood would not “leave de atom alone.” It was a plot point, and plot points never die; they are only recycled. The bomb proved to be an all-purpose plot point, especially for science fiction.
Except for humanitarians like Louis Pasteur (The Story of Louis Pasteur [1936]), Marie Curie (Madame Curie [1943]), and the Australian nurse, Elizabeth Kenny, who pioneered a treatment for polio victims (Sister Kenny [1946]), Hollywood’s scientists were a colorless lot. That is, unless they were dabbling in the black arts, which made them alternately fascinating and repellent. They devised formulas to detach their dark side from their better self (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in its various versions) and created life out of inert matter (Frankenstein and its successors). Science was put to demonic use in the B movies of the 1940s, strangely mirroring the equally demonic experiments being conducted in the Nazi death camps. Scientists turned themselves into apes (The Ape Man [1943]), apes into women (Captive Wild Woman [1943]), men into wolves (The Mad Monster [1942]), rivals into zombies (The Mad Ghoul [1943]), and Nazi spies into respectable American citizens (Black Dragons [1942]). They could disfigure the innocent (The Monster Maker [1944]) and implant a human brain into a gorilla (The Monster and the Girl [1941]). One could argue, of course, that such films did not present science as a force for good. But audiences can take only so much nobility. Pasteur and the Curies were humanitarians as well as scientists, whose stories are edifying. So is Dante’s Paradiso, yet no other part of the Divine Comedy has had the universal appeal of the Inferno. Sin has always been more marketable than virtue because, as Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), the unprincipled reporter in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival (1951) proclaimed: “Bad news sells, because good news is no news.”
When the horror films of the 1950s reverted to their gothic roots, replete with baroque embellishments, science fiction picked up the slack, exploring the effects of a more disturbing kind of experimentation. In July 1945, less than a month before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a dress rehearsal took place in New Mexico. In 1946, underwater detonations were conducted at Bikini Atoll. In 1951, nuclear testing resumed in Nevada and would continue there for forty years. And in November 1952, the first hydrogen bomb was exploded at Eniwetok atoll. The bomb provided screenwriters with fresh fodder. It was as if—by generating its own mushroom cloud of movies that imagined the after effects of the bomb, taken to the extreme—Hollywood were making America pay for Hiroshima. What if nuclear testing produced giant ants (Them!), locusts (Beginning of the End), and leeches (Attack of the Giant Leeches)? What if it created sea monsters (It Came from Beneath the Sea), and evicted prehistoric creatures from their lairs (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms), revivifying and freeing them to wreak havoc? If Hiroshima heralded “The Dawn of the Atomic Age,” it was an age that did not bear the name of a metal, but a particle. It was as if the advent of the bomb were a grim parody of Hesiod’s account of creation in the Theogony, which began with Gaia (Earth) producing Uranus (Sky) out of herself without a male consort, and then mating with her male offspring. Although the coupling of Earth and Sky was a necessary stage in the evolutionary process, it was also an incestuous one that gave birth to the hundred-headed monsters Briareos, Kottos, and Gyges. Analogously, could not the bombing of Hiroshima, the tests in the American Southwest, and the detonations at Bikini and Eniwetok produce their own race of monsters? Hollywood answered with a ringing “Yes.” The studios did not wait for the continuation of the Greek version of Genesis, which culminated in the reign of the Olympians. For the Greeks, it was a long haul from chaos to order, each stage less barbaric than the previous one, but none totally free of violence. Hollywood did not care about the Olympians; monsters sold tickets.
Although the MGM classic Forbidden Planet (1956) has nothing to do with the bomb, it offers a way of interpreting atomic mutant offspring. The film is richly allusive. Its point of departure is Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with the setting transferred from “an uninhabited island” to the star Altair, designated Altair IV, whose sole human inhabitants are Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Altaira, aka Alta (Anne Francis), interstellar incarnations of Prospero and Miranda. Their factotum, Robby the Robot, is not a sprite like Ariel, but a more inventive creation, capable of doing everything from making bourbon to whipping up a diamond-studded dress for Alta. Alonso’s son Prince Ferdinand, in love with Miranda, becomes Commander Adams (the pre-Airplane! Leslie Nielsen), who is equally attracted to Alta. Caliban, Shakespeare’s “savage and deformed slave,” does not appear as a character, but rather as a planetary force: a remnant of the Krel, an advanced people who perished in one night, surviving only as a demonic presence, invisible and deadly. Capable of renewing its molecular structure, the force is immune to ray guns and atomic blasters. It is “the monster from the Id,” as “Doc” Ostrow (Warren Stevens) declares before he dies. Only the destruction of Altair will annihilate it.
Names are significant in Forbidden Planet. Morbius’s ship, which landed on Altair, is the Bellerophon, named for the rider of the winged steed Pegasus of Greek mythology. Morbius’s own name is derived from the Latin morbus (“disease”). He is an anti-Prospero “in pursuit of forbidden knowledge.” Altair is a double star in the constellation Aquilla. We are in a darkly magical world, one of doubling. In attempting to transcend the material world through reason by choosing the Apollonian over the Dionysian, the Krel failed to control the monster from the id that burst forth in internecine slaughter. Such was the uninhabited Altair that Morbius found on his arrival—uninhabited, that is, except for the monstrous id, which he channeled into himself, becoming the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Altair.
For those whose Freudianism is rusty, Adams defines the id in layperson’s terms as the “mindless beasts of the unconscious,” which, if unleashed, can cause destruction. These “beasts” are “the drives and instincts common to humankind, whose existence cannot be denied, but whose power, if uncontrolled, can produce chaos.” The language corresponds roughly to Freud’s “dark, inaccessible part of our personality,” “a cauldron full of seething excitations,” unaffected by logic and the passage of time. Most frighteningly of all, the id is amoral. Finally, Adams, who is as good a Freudian as he is a commander and romantic lead, confronts Morbius with the truth. In his determination to establish a utopia for himself and his daughter in order to shield her from the outside world, he has drawn the Krel force into himself, becoming as much of a double being as Henry Jekyll, whose id was Mr. Hyde. The force is Morbius’s döppelganger, which he, like the Krel, tried to overcome by privileging ego over id, which retaliated like a scorned lover. Morbius must perish, along with Altair 4, for a new beginning to arise from the ashes of the past. Just as Ferdinand and Miranda presumably embark for Naples at the end of The Tempest, Adams and Alta head back to Earth, which will probably strike Alta as terra incognita.
Altair IV might have been destroyed, but the monsters from the id were not. They reside in the interstices of any weapon of mass destruction, code-named Thanatos, the death instinct, one of the id’s many manifestations. The id, as embodied in the bomb, is amoral and ambivalent. It was used to shorten a war and save the lives of American service personnel, but it brought death and devastation to the innocent. Although created by great minds, it was capable of returning life to the state in which it began. Ironically, the bomb intended to save American lives ended up destroying the lives of others. The anthropomorphic names of the first atomic bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, were palliatives that downplayed their lethal nature. They sounded like toys or playthings, inanimate twins ready for a mock christening. Hollywood found the monsters from the id in science fiction without having to resort to euphemism. The studios gave the audience its frissons and perhaps some food for thought—not too rich, but substantial enough to make some question the ingredients.
Hollywood in the 1950s was stuck in a time warp, exactly where the Greeks were after the mating of Earth and Sky, which, on 6 August 1945, became the violation of Earth by Sky, producing a new kind of enemy capable of destroying civilization. The bomb even caused mutations in insects. Ants, once household pests, became a menace in Them! (1954). Unlike any other film of the 1950s, Them! was site-specific. It identified the culprit: the bomb that was tested in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. The film opens four years later. A traumatized girl wanders aimlessly along a stretch of road in the New Mexico desert. A police car arrives, and then the child is taken away in an ambulance. The “them” that left her in shock are mutated killer ants, whose presence is heralded by shrill chirping reminiscent of frenzied cicadas. The humongous ants prey on the locals, injecting formic acid into their bodies. When the formic acid is placed before the child, she screams, “Them,” thus validating the title. The ants are not just bomb-generated; they are also a totalitarian colony, whose workers are dominated by queens that have established nests beneath the streets of Los Angeles.
Them! is atypical in other respects. The scientists are a father-daughter team (Edmund Gwenn and Joan Weldon). Anyone assuming that a romance would develop between the daughter and the FBI agent (James Arness) was disappointed. What matters is the destruction of the nests, which is accomplished with flamethrowers. At least the bomb that caused the crisis is not used to resolve it. If it were, Los Angeles would have been reduced to a heap of cinders. But the 1945 bomb test was only a point of departure, not the crux of the film, which is a warning that apocalypse may be near. “The beast shall reign over the Earth,” Dr. Medford (Gwenn) intones, invoking the seven-headed beast from the Book of Revelation (13:1–8). Medford delivers the grand summary: “When man entered the atomic age, he entered a new world. What he will find in that new world, nobody can predict.” The unknown was a challenge to writers, who envisioned the worst.
The Deadly Mantis (1957) did not allude to Hiroshima, but the opening image, a volcanic eruption in the Arctic Circle, clearly evoked the atomic bomb. The documentary-style prologue about America’s radar defenses, which do not figure in the plot, reassures us that “radar is everywhere” and “designed to defend us against attacks”—especially from the Arctic. But attacks from whom, or what? This time, the enemy is a “what,” spawned by a volcanic eruption of such magnitude that it melted the polar ice caps, releasing a long-buried carnivorous mantis capable of circling the globe, attacking planes, wrecking trains, and demolishing buses. Eventually, it sets down in Washington, DC, where it mounts the Washington Monument, and then proceeds to New York, where it takes refuge in a tunnel. Bullets and grenades do the trick, destroying the mantis without disrupting traffic—so much for radar and our defense system. At least moviegoers knew that the system existed, although one doubts that anyone remembered the prologue by the end of the film.
The mantis looked like a crane with a bulbous head, glassy eyes that occasionally glowed, and appendages resembling metallic prostheses. It was too synthetic to be frightening. Even its leitmotif—a buzz that swelled into a laryngitic roar—simply grated on the ear. More impressive was the scientific talk, which was layperson-friendly. The Deadly Mantis treated science and the military impartially. Although the military solved the problem with explosives, they would not have known their enemy were it not for the paleontologist, who concluded that what appeared to be a hook was a piece of the mantis’s cartilage.
Scientists are not always as helpful as the paleontologist in The Deadly Mantis. Initially, Jack Arnold’s Tarantula (1955) appeared to be a straightforward science fiction film set in Arizona, where a renowned biologist (Leo G. Carroll) is experimenting with laboratory animals, hoping to discover an inexpensive nutrient to combat world hunger and increase longevity. White rats and rabbits, injected with a serum, increase in size at an astonishing rate. To test the serum’s effect on humans, the biologist’s longtime colleague injects himself, resulting in facial disfigurement and death. A graduate student does likewise, and although he is disfigured, he does not die. Maddened by his transmogrification, the student injects the biologist with the same serum, trashing the lab and inadvertently releasing a gigantic tarantula. The biologist’s face rots away until he looks like a sickly Cyclops, and the tarantula terrorizes the community, eventually destroying the biologist’s home, as if in retaliation for the experiments conducted there. When neither bullets nor dynamite can destroy the creature, it is napalmed—as Tokyo was by American bombers in 1943 and North Korea in 1950.
Tarantula’s tie-in with the bomb is introduced so casually that it can easily be missed. Mutant movies of the 1950s skirted the issue of responsibility. Since the Cold War was in progress, atomic testing was performed for the common good, regardless of the consequences. “Ban the bomb” was a slogan in waiting. Although the bomb itself did not produce the monstrous tarantula, the biologist admitted that he and his colleague had been together at Oak Ridge. It was a throwaway line, but anyone who caught it realized that the two were part of the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, known as the “home of the atom bomb.” The serum they devised contained radioactive isotopes that increased the size of animals and insects, but produced acromegaly in humans. The experiment, however well intentioned, was not simply a failure, but one with disastrous consequences.
Tarantula is one of the subtlest of the bomb-centered movies of the 1950s. The creature, lumbering towards its prey, its spindly legs extending outward like pincers, was indirectly the product of the Manhattan Project. The biologist would not have experimented with radioactive isotopes if he had remained a college professor. “Oak Ridge” was shorthand that did not require translation.
Beginning of the End (1957) also featured a scientist (Peter Graves) with a noble goal: averting world hunger by subjecting fruit and vegetables to radiation. The result was gargantuan produce. The process is not without risks. Radiation left his assistant hearing- and speech-impaired, the scientist (really, an entomologist, as the plot requires) dispassionately informs a reporter (Peggy Castle). Amazingly, the assistant takes his disability in stride and is irritatingly good-natured, until he is attacked by a monstrous locust, part of a plague sweeping through Illinois.
When the reporter learned that the locusts have broken into a warehouse and eaten the radioactive grain that was also part of the scientist’s nutrition experiment, she reacted the way the audience would to such an aberration, inquiring if there is an “atomic installation” nearby. By 1957, moviegoers knew that the atom’s offspring were many and varied. If giant ants, why not giant locusts?
Beginning of the End absolves the scientist of culpability. In fact, the thought that he indirectly caused the mutations did not cross the mind of any character, including the reporter. What alone can redeem him—at least in the minds of thoughtful moviegoers—is finding a way to destroy the monstrous fruit of his experiment, although nothing can compensate for lives lost and towns leveled. When the locusts reach Chicago, the military is ready to evacuate the city before bombing it, as if that were the only solution. General Hanson (the ubiquitous Morris Ankrum) outlines his plan so clinically that he seems as much a threat as the locusts. The scientist saves the day, if not the film, by coming up with a solution worthy of an entomologist: a simulation of a mating call transmitted to a launch on Lake Michigan that would lure the locusts into the water, where they would drown. The plan worked, but, as T. S. Eliot asked in “Gerontion,” “after such knowledge / what forgiveness?” Beginning of the End is not an either-or film, which is why it is so disturbing. The boy-man scientist may have saved the day, but he did so but at terrible cost. He is unfazed by the devastation the experiment has caused. The general believes that the solution to any extraordinary problem is the bomb, as if Chicago were another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Rebuild and get on with it. Things could be worse. And forget about the irreplaceable masterpieces in the Art Institute; they’re only paintings.
In science fiction, radioactivity can cause anything. Witness Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), a cut-rate movie with a ghoulish script by Leo Gordon. Since audiences had already been exposed to gigantism in various species, Gordon, who also wrote the original story, settled on leeches in the Florida Everglades. The Everglades was not an arbitrary choice, although such would not become apparent until the end. Gordon intercut two narratives: monsters from the muck and lust vs. love, the latter, a diptych with an unfaithful wife and her lover, and a game warden and his girl friend, who are as chaste as the lovers are horny. Sex and venality are a prelude to death. Not only does the adulterous couple fall victim to the leeches, so do two locals interested only in grabbing the reward for the creatures stalking the swamp. The film is not for the faint-hearted. The leeches drag their victims down to an underwater cave, where they exsanguinate them—in effect, torturing them to death. “No more,” the wife moans, as a leech sucks out her blood.
Knowing that the audience is entitled at least to a one-word explanation for the mutants, Gordon supplies it: the community’s next door neighbor, Cape Canaveral, now Cape Kennedy, where the first rocket launch took place in February 1950, and from which a ballistic missile was fired in February 1959, eight months before the movie was released. “Cape Canaveral” is a heavily encoded name. Cape Canaveral equals missiles equals radioactivity equals mutants. According to the film, every launch left a radioactive spoor that could wend its way into a swamp. But Gordon does not end by targeting radiation. The warden, originally opposed to using dynamite for fear of killing off marine life, finally accedes. If TNT can do the trick, so be it. Marine biologists might have to look elsewhere for rare species.
Attack of the Giant Leeches is an issue-layered script in a cheesy production—quite the opposite of Jack Arnold’s masterpiece, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), a faithful adaptation of Richard Matteson’s novel, The Shrinking Man. Scott Carey (Grant Williams) is sunbathing on a yacht with his wife, when he notices an approaching cloud that expands into a mist, spraying his chest with specks of dust, later determined to be radioactive fallout. When exposure to an insecticide exacerbates his condition, causing the realignment of his molecules, Scott begins losing height, until he becomes a homunculus reduced to living in a dollhouse. The cat, once a household pet, becomes his enemy, driving him into the cellar, where he must contend with an ordinary spider that, to him, is as terrifying as the tarantula in Arnold’s earlier film (which he is obviously quoting). Any hopes for Scott’s rescue are dashed when his wife and brother, who assume he is dead, make a trip to the flooded cellar, which to Scott is an ocean. Since they can neither see nor hear him, Scott is doomed to a subterranean and solitary existence, literally becoming an underground man.
What is extraordinary about The Incredible Shrinking Man, and what makes it unique among the science fiction films of the period, is the coda, an eloquent voiceover monologue. The movie does not end on a note of despair, although anyone in Scott’s condition might question the existence of a benevolent God. Scott realizes he belongs to a new world, larger than even his cellar-home. More important, he senses that he is not alone in the universe: “If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds . . . would other beings follow me into this vast new world?” He inhabits the world of the infinitesimal, which, joined with the infinite, closes the circle of creation. Although “smaller than the smallest,” Scott has a place in the cosmos. His final words are an affirmation of faith: “To God there is no zero. I still exist.”
The Incredible Shrinking Man is the most theological—as distinct from religious—of science fiction films. Others invoked religion. In The War of the Worlds (1953), the survivors of a Martian attack take refuge in a Catholic church; in The Next Voice You Hear (1950), God takes over the airwaves to preach a gospel of brotherhood. And The Incredible Shrinking Man was not a jeremiad like The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an extraterrestrial arrives in Washington, DC, with a message for Earth: Desist from nuclear war, or write your own epitaph. “The decision rests with you.”
A few science fiction films of the period portrayed scientists as reasonable human beings, interested in the new species, but not so as to endanger human life, which was already imperiled. And it was only fitting that they came up with a way to destroy the mutants indirectly created by members of their own profession. Hollywood did not adopt a quid pro quo approach. The bomb was the villain, and implicitly its creators were villainous. But Hollywood was savvy enough not to indict the Manhattan Project. The burden, if not the blame, falls on the next generation of scientists to solve the problems caused by their predecessors.
The Thing from Another World (1951) posed a different question: Should a scientist, in his quest for knowledge, endanger others by attempting to study a new and lethal species? It is an unusual film in several respects. Purportedly directed by Christian Nyby and produced by Howard Hawks, The Thing seems more like a Hawksian venture into an alien genre—but with traces of his imprint that confirm what several of those associated with the film maintained: “Chris Nyby didn’t direct a thing.” In typical Hawks fashion, cues are disregarded as actors intentionally step on each other’s lines. The overlap provides a sense of reality in a film that grows progressively more fantastic, yet is presented so compellingly that everything that happens is believable. The most Hawksian moment occurs in a scene that has little to do with the plot. Captain Pat Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) and Nikki (Margaret Sheridan), secretary to the Nobel-Prize winning scientist Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite), recall their last night together, when she crept out of bed to catch a cargo plane, leaving him with a departure note that made the rounds. Hawks turned their banter into verbal Ping-Pong, which was explicit for 1951 and is still titillating today. Nothing is made of their liaison, except that later it is implied that it will lead to marriage. The sexually charged badinage (which may have been written by Hawks, whose contribution to the screenplay is uncredited) evokes memories of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell firing barbs at each other in His Girl Friday, and Lauren Bacall informing Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not, that, if he’s interested, he can whistle: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”
The battle of the sexes is only a diversion in The Thing. The real battle is twofold: the first, between man and an alien, and the second, between the lone scientist desperate to communicate with “the thing” and the others who realize it must be destroyed. The quest for knowledge only produces disorder. A twenty-thousand-ton UFO has crashed in the Arctic, leaving its tail fin jutting through the ice. An attempt to dislodge the aircraft with thermite bombs only succeeds in destroying it, sending a gusher of smoke into the sky—less awesome than a mushroom cloud, but just as threatening. The UFO’s pilot is discovered to be an eight-foot alien encased in ice, the same size Victor Frankenstein specified for his creation in Mary Shelley’s novel. In the interests of science, the icebound creature is carted back to a research facility, where it thaws out and runs amuck, leaving enough evidence to convince the scientists that they are dealing with an anomaly, a being without animal tissue and nerve endings, incapable of emotion. In short, the creature is a vegetable, “a super carrot with a brain” capable of flying a space ship. Since the vegetable needs blood for its seedpods to germinate, it attacks the sled dogs and slits the throats of two of the scientists, draining off their blood.
At first, The Thing from Another World seems unrelated to offspring-of-the-bomb films, yet there are a few intimations that the anomalous creature and the mutants are kin. Dr. Carrington, the acclaimed scientist, had been at Bikini, although nothing more is said of that. This piece of information is just a bit of exposition for the plot police. The creature is also radioactive, which suggests that in some way it had been exposed to radiation, either from tests conducted by the United States or from Russia’s first detonation in east Kazakhstan in August 1949. One of the axioms of 1950s science fiction is that the bomb affected every form of life, including extraterrestrials. The scientists assume that the radioactive “thing” is a Martian, Mars being Hollywood’s outer planet of choice. If so, the Manhattan Project could claim the “thing” as offspring. The film, however, did not resort to scapegoating. The closest it comes to criticism is an offhand comment by one of the crew that America succeeded in splitting the atom, evoking the cynical reply, “And that made the world happy.”
Because the actors underplay, speaking naturally and often inaudibly, many of the points that are raised but not developed (culpability, the effects of radiation) are caught up in the narrative undertow. Still, The Thing from Another World only raises points worth pondering without offering solutions. But on one point, the film is clear: If scientific research endangers human life, the interests of humankind take precedence.
Carrington may be a genius with an impressive scientific vocabulary, but he is a loose cannon, determined to make contact with the creature. To Carrington, “the thing” is superior to homo sapiens and must be treated humanely. “He is a stranger in a strange land,” he pleads. Carrington is also a throwback to the mad scientist of the horror film and comes perilously close to being the villain of the piece. He would have endorsed Victor Frankenstein’s attempt to “bestow animation on lifeless matter” even if doing so meant becoming a grave robber. But Carrington would never have recanted, as Frankenstein did: “Learn from me . . . how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.” Carrington believed that knowledge is power, and that having been born great, he wielded greater power than lesser beings.
If The Thing from Another World has a hero, it is Captain Hendry, who, frustrated by his superiors’ classification of the alien as a “prisoner” to be safeguarded, realizes that his prisoner must be annihilated before claiming any more lives. When one of the men asks what one does with a vegetable, Nikki replies nonchalantly, “Boil it, stew it, bake it, fry it.” That was all Hendry needs to hear. After a trap was rigged up to electrocute the creature, Carrington, who had even stolen plasma to keep the seedpods germinating, attempts to turn off the generator in order to save his specimen. Coming forward, he cries, “I’m your friend. . . . You’re wiser than anything on Earth.” His flattery gets him nothing but a broken collarbone. The creature is electrocuted in a sound and light spectacle—a lesser version of the bomb—and reduced to ash. The electrocution is a tribute to human ingenuity, which steps in when science fails. That is the point of the film: A species capable of destruction is better destroyed than studied.
The film’s coda is almost a trailer for other science fiction movies. A reporter files his story over the air, engaging in clever word play, by noting that just as humankind was once saved by Noah’s ark, now it has been saved by an “arc” of electricity. But salvation comes with a warning: “Tell the world. Tell this to everyone, wherever they are. Watch the skies everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the sky.” And the studios did. They also watched the oceans.
The trailer for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) posed the question of the decade: “Are we delving into mysteries we were never meant to know?” The answer was “yes,” and audiences eagerly took the plunge. True horror would not return to the screen until Psycho (1960). Meanwhile, moviegoers needing icy fingers moving up and down their spines looked to science fiction for that old black magic.
Beast owes its title—and nothing more—to Ray Bradbury’s 1951 Saturday Evening Post story of the same name, which underwent a title change to “The Fog Horn” so it would not be confused with the film. The story was a tale of the supernatural, which, as a movie, would require such a makeover that the original would have been unrecognizable. Bradbury’s beast is a dinosaur-like sea creature that responds to the plaintive sound of a lighthouse foghorn, thinking it comes from one of its own species. Mistaking the lighthouse for an avatar and frustrated by the lighthouse’s lack of response, the creature retaliates by destroying it. But a happy ending guaranteed the reader a good night’s sleep. The lighthouse is rebuilt, and the monster is seen no more. The movie, on the other hand, begins in the Arctic, where atomic testing sends the snow cascading in an eerie half-light. Unlike the blinding blizzard at the beginning of The Thing, here the swirling snow is strangely beautiful, hypnotic but disturbing, as if nature was daring humans to marvel at the spectacle of whiteness, yet at the same time posting a “remain at your own peril” notice. The tests yield their forbidden fruit: a prehistoric reptile, one of animator Ray Harryhausen’s creations, emerging from the shower of snow with a kind of primeval grandeur, as if he were reclaiming his domain. The snow gave the beast the trappings of royalty. On land, he looks like a refugee from Skull Island, lethal but no longer regal.
Beast conforms to the atomic age template: the eyewitnesses vs. the skeptics, romance (female and male scientists, female scientist/male professional/military man), a couple of deaths, a seemingly indestructible creature, and its spectacular demise. Beast shows both respect and sympathy for scientists who, true to their calling, act only on empirical evidence. When they are convinced, they set out to study the specimen, regardless of the dangers—until the specimen becomes so deadly that it must be destroyed. When the world’s leading paleontologist (the cherubic Cecil Kellaway) steps into a diving bell, excited about viewing a creature that has been extinct for one hundred million years, we hope he will return safely. But the beast is indifferent to credentials, and the paleontologist becomes another of its victims.
The beast makes its way to land, eventually reaching Manhattan Beach, a stand-in for Coney Island. The finale—stunningly photographed in sharp black and white, with a silver-glazed roller coaster set against an onyx black sky—has its own terrible beauty. The beast begins dismantling the roller coaster, stopping only when it is finished off by a radioactive isotope, a lesser form of the technology that released it from its Arctic grave.
It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), the follow-up to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, adheres to the same formula, but with a twist. Now it is the military that is skeptical of the scientists, who have reported that a radioactive sea monster is capsizing ships and causing mass drownings. The situation changes when the creature—a giant squid, the offspring of the H-bomb detonation at Eniwetok atoll (never mentioned by name, but clearly implied)—reaches the California coast and coils itself around the Golden Gate Bridge before being destroyed by a jet-propelled torpedo.
It Came from Beneath the Sea recycled the two men-one woman plot, the woman being a brilliant marine biologist (Faith Domergue) who is not above using her feminine wiles to extract a confession from a survivor afraid of being scoffed at. The film’s distinctiveness lay in Ray Harryhausen’s visual effects, Harry Freulich’s stark black-and-white photography, and omniscient voiceover narration that at times makes it seem like a documentary. Unlike the beast from twenty thousand fathoms, which conformed to the popular image of a dawn-of-creation reptile, the squid or octopus (it has been called both) is merely repulsive, with tentacles equipped with suction cups resembling open sores. Radiation made the squid look grey and unhealthy, as if suffused with black bile. It is characteristic of atom-spawned progeny that they do not entirely belong to genus “monster.” Universal’s monsters—Frankenstein’s, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and Dracula—did not threaten civilization. In the 1940s, the threat originated elsewhere, in Nazi Germany or imperialist Japan. It was different in the 1950s, when one left a theater wondering if perhaps nature could exact its own form of revenge for the horrors wrought by the bomb—even in the form of another world war, this time with an anomalous enemy.
The two films, although made by different studios (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms by Warner Bros., It Came from Beneath the Sea by Columbia), complement each other. Warner’s lavished more money ($215,000) on Beast, which was a more elaborate production, while Columbia only spent $150,000 on Sea. Yet each turned a handsome profit, $2.25 million and $1.7 million, respectively. The link between them is Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation, which followed the classic principle of making the creature fit the habitat. The reptile looked as if it came from twenty thousand fathoms and the squid from beneath the sea.
The most iconic creature in American science fiction was the appropriately named Gill Man, the half human, half fish antagonist in Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Since the script suggested some kind of contact between the Gill Man and Julie Adams, Joe Breen, who upheld the Production Code as if it were the Ten Commandments, demanded that “intimate parts of the body—specifically the breasts of women—be fully covered at all times.” It was an easy mandate to observe, since the studios had been adhering to it since the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934. What Breen did not know, and Jack Arnold did, was that a white bathing suit, worn by the right actress, can be more erotic than exposed breasts.
Although the creature is not an offspring of the bomb, the film reflects the questionable view of scientific inquiry characteristic of the genre. The Gill Man, in his scaly suit of armor and with his helmet-like head, is even more frightening than mutated insects and giant octopi because, like the centaur, he embodies two forms of life. He was happy in his Amazon digs until the arrival of a research team, intrigued by the discovery of a hand with webbed fingers that points to an unusual type of amphibian. Curiosity is one thing, but the pursuit of the creature is not that different from the “bring ’em back alive” motto of Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) in King Kong. This was not a case of “leave de atom alone,” but “leave the creature alone.” The male half of the Gill Man is activated when Julie Adams, added to the expedition to bring some sex to the plot, dons a tight-fitting white bathing suit to go swimming in the most sensuous scene ever to appear in a science fiction film. Ginger Stanley (Julie Adams’s double) swims above while the Gill Man does a backstroke below, their movements synchronized in rhythmic foreplay that only activates his libido—which had not abated by the time the sequel, Revenge of the Creature, was released in 1955.
Just like Frankenstein (1932), Creature from the Black Lagoon proved so popular that it demanded a sequel. The Gill Man is presumably asleep in the deep at the end of the first film. He was too marketable to die—besides, Universal-International reasoned, who would remember that he sank into his watery grave at the end of the movie? In Revenge of the Creature, the team returned to the “tributary on the upper Amazon,” using dynamite to capture the Gill Man and cart him off to Florida, where he is put on exhibit in a tank, as if he were an attraction in a freak show. King Kong illustrated the folly of relocation. Not meant for urban life, Kong ran amuck in New York, as does the Gill Man in Florida. Like Kong, he wants his blonde (Lori Nelson) so badly that he crashes a party and carries her off. But Lori is meant for John Agar, who will make her a very dull husband. At least the Gill Man had a sex drive.
Jack Arnold never intended for there to be a Gill Man trilogy, but like John Ford’s three westerns dubbed the “Cavalry Trilogy” (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande), the third Gill Man movie completed the story, signaling the end of the most empathetic of creatures. In The Seven Year Itch, after seeing Creature from the Black Lagoon, Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell discuss the movie as they walk along Lexington Avenue. Before the familiar shot of Marilyn standing over a subway grating, she expressed her sympathy for the Gill Man, who was the object of an unwarranted eviction and treated as a specimen. When Marilyn spoke so compassionately about the creature and his objectification, it seemed as if she were speaking of herself.
In the Revenge of the Creature, the Gill Man is last seen swimming away in a “to be continued” ending. It would have been better if he had returned to the Amazon, where he would be remembered as Julie Adams’s swimming partner and Lori Nelson’s abductor. But UI was bent on a trilogy, even if Jack Arnold could not direct the third installment. That dubious honor went to John Sherwood. In The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) the head scientist (Jeff Morrow) is obsessed with the Gill Man’s evolutionary potential and jealous of his wife’s attraction to another member of the expedition. A fire destroys Gill Man’s scales, leaving him a mammal with a rubbery face—like Orson Welles at the end of Citizen Kane, but more grotesque—and chambered ears like those of the god Pan. He is even imprisoned in a goat pen. The film is open-ended, but those who identified with Gill Man, the ultimate displaced person, can only hope that, as a humanoid, he will find a substitute for his former aquatic home, perhaps in another film. But this last was not an option; without his scaly body suit, he would be just another monster. The artificial trilogy was complete, but the message was disturbing. Pursuit of Gill Man led only to death and terror, culminating in the transformation of a semi-human being into a misfit, at home neither on land nor in water. Moviegoers may have gotten their kicks, but they did so at the expense of someone who—like Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel (1932)—only wanted to be left alone.
The most unusual creatures in science fiction were the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Director Don Siegel insisted they were not aliens, even though the trailer portrayed them as coming from outer space, which by then had become the designated launching pad for the paranormal and preternatural. Pods are everywhere—particularly in the movie business, as Siegel slyly suggests: “Many of my associates are pods, people who have no feeling of love or emotion.” He singles out pod directors, who shoot as if they were on autopilot. “They have no dark moods, but neither do they have moments of exaltation that I might have.” The Hollywood pods are the least dangerous. Far more deadly are the ones in the film that infiltrate communities, hijacking the personalities of residents, absorbing their minds and memories, and reducing them to automatons devoid of feeling, whose only resemblance to their former selves is superficial.
The film was supposed to open with Dr. Binnel (Kevin McCarthy) returning to his hometown, the fictitious Santa Mira, after a medical convention and discovering that a strangeness has settled in. A woman insists her uncle is an imposter. A boy says the same of his mother. After a preview left audiences confused, a frame narrative was added, which, despite Siegel’s objections, worked to the film’s advantage. Siegel was blessed with a skilled screenwriter, Daniel Mainwaring (the pseudonym of Geoffrey Homes), who turned his novel Build My Gallows High into one of the great film noirs, Out of the Past (1947). The released version of Invasion opens with Binnel, restrained by hospital aides and insisting he is not insane, as he stares, eyes bulging, into the camera lens. “Listen to me before it’s too late,” he insists. In a sense, it is too late, as one by one, the residents of Santa Mira accept pod life, welcoming it as a release from anxiety and turmoil and reveling in the communal homogeneity it brings. Podism is the great equalizer. It is not a matter of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” In Podland, ability does not matter, and need is nonexistent.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers blurs into horror. There is nothing in sci-fi comparable to the sequence in which the pods in a hot house break open in a parody of birth, as primordial fluid oozes forth, revealing incipient clones. At first, reports that relatives have become simulacra are dismissed as mass hysteria, attributable to the “What’s going on in the world?” syndrome. The explanation is a variation on alien invasion, with an assist from the bomb. Perhaps—and only “perhaps”—the cause was the atomic radiation of plant or animal life that sent seeds drifting through space, forming pods that drained humans of their humanity, leaving them incapable of loving or being loved, and reducing them to a common denominator. Even Binnel’s inamorata (Dana Wynter) succumbs. In a death-defying sequence, Binnel weaves in and out of heavy traffic, desperate to tell his story and encountering only disinterest. Finally, he is picked up and taken to a hospital, where it seems certain he will be committed. Then another patient is brought in, the victim of a collision between a Greyhound bus and a truck carrying pods. Binnel’s story is confirmed. The ending is a deus ex machina that avoids the big question: Even if Santa Mira can be saved, what about the rest of the country?
Invasion of the Body Snatchers carries with it a weighty subtext, a not-so-veiled critique of McCarthyism and a reductio ad absurdum of communism. And politically astute audiences might have interpreted the film that way. They would have been the same ones who saw High Noon as “a parable for the Committee’s onslaught on Hollywood, and for the timidity of the Community,” screenwriter Carl Foreman’s rebuke of the silent majority that failed to come to the defense of the victims of the witch hunt, shunning them as the town did Gary Cooper, who needed support when his life was in danger. After Foreman was blacklisted, High Noon’s anti-HUAC subtext seemed even more apparent, at least to the knowledgeable. These are also the kind of viewers who sensed political undercurrents circulating in On the Waterfront (1954). The film was written and directed by HUAC informants Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan, who blurred the distinction between testifying before a commission investigating waterfront crime, and testifying before a committee investigating communism in Hollywood, even though crime is punishable and membership in the Communist Party is not—unless the times determine otherwise. As Jeff Smith has brilliantly shown, On the Waterfront is so politically ambiguous that it can even be interpreted as an anti-HUAC allegory. Kazan must have known that HUAC was a minotaur in search of sacrificial victims, not a serious investigating committee like the Estes Kefauver crime committee. The tactics of union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb, himself a HUAC informant) and his mob bear an uncomfortable resemblance to HUAC, with its strong-arming and browbeating tactics that stopped just short of a shakedown. If Friendly’s mob is an evocation of HUAC, it is as un-American—and anti-American—as the committee. In On the Waterfront, a dock worker describes the waterfront to Father Barry (Karl Malden) by saying “the waterfront’s tougher, Father. Like it ain’t part of America,” which also serves as an apt description of HUAC. The film’s ambivalence becomes even more pronounced. To Johnny Friendly, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) is an unfriendly witness testifying against a corrupt union (think HUAC), but a friendly witness for the crime commission. He is willing to cooperate with a legitimate investigation into waterfront crime, but not with one solely concerned with crushing dissent.
Many of the films that Smith discusses (e.g., Johnny Guitar, Silver Lode, The Robe, Spartacus) take on a richness when viewed in a political context that may not have been evident at the time. Thus The Robe emerges as an antifascist allegory about a lunatic emperor persecuting a minority sect. The historical parallels are obvious, the irony being that the persecuted are Christians who, in 1930s Germany, persecuted another minority. But at the time, The Robe was Fox’s first CinemaScope production, which provided a grand spectacle on a screen two and one-half times wider than it was high. Compare The Robe to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932), which dramatized the persecution of the Christians under Nero. In DeMille’s film there was no subtext, no metaphorical level—only prurience, sensuality, and torture, all in the name of religion. The Robe did not pander to its audience, which was given a spectacle that left ample room for speculation. The Robe would really have resonated with 1953 audiences if a suggestion from Darryl F. Zanuck had been incorporated into the screenplay. To create a contemporary parallel, Zanuck proposed a senate committee on un-Roman activities, headed by a Roman senator who must investigate his own son. The Roman version of HUAC never made it into the script; however, Zanuck may still have influenced the script. The son, a military tribune (Richard Burton), has become a Christian, making him a member of a subversive sect. When the emperor Caligula offers the tribune the choice of recanting or death, he chooses the latter, as does his beloved (Jean Simmons), who believes in Christ (although, technically, she has not converted). To complete the parallel, “like the Rosenbergs, the couple march proudly to eternity.” And, one might add, to paraphrase Lillian Hellman, they refused to cut their conscience to fit the fashions of 1 A.D as prescribed by committee. But subtext and metaphor are elusive. One may sense their presence without being able to articulate it, only say that the film is about something other than what it purports to be about. There is an infra-narrative threatening to rise up from the depths, but never getting far enough to confirm one’s suspicion of a secondary level of meaning more interesting than the primary one.
If Body Snatchers had been made in the late 1930s, it would have been considered an allegory of fascism, with the police, who revel in enforcing podism, serving as proxies for Hitler’s Brown shirts. Oddly, in 1956, the same year the film was released, Auntie Mame opened on Broadway with Rosalind Russell starring as a freewheeling bohemian, who provides her orphaned nephew with an unconventional upbringing—including enrollment at an experimental school, where the children romp around in the nude, playing fish families. Mame’s message was a song of the self: “Live! Live! Live! Life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches [changed to ‘suckers’ in the 1959 movie version] are starving themselves to death.” Following the herd stultifies; separating from it revivifies. Both Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Auntie Mame argue, in different ways, for individuation, the only way human beings can preserve their essence—that unique aspect of the self that distinguishes each from the other. The alternative is podism.
In refusing to have Binnel, or anyone, pray for divine assistance, Body Snatchers is reminiscent of film noir, in which darkness is so pervasive that the light-bearing Deity is loath to make an appearance in a world unhinged, ruled by chance, as is evident from the accident that constitutes the dénouement and confirms Binnel’s sanity. It is God’s silence in the face of a metamorphic plague that makes the film so disquieting, and the resolution so sadly ephemeral. In a play with a similar theme, Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1960), mindless conformity reaches the level of the absurd, as an entire town collectively sheds its humanity to become rhinoceroses. Only one person refuses to join the herd, the “little man” Berenger, who proclaims, “I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating!” Both Siegel’s film and Ionesco’s play make a case for selfhood—with the variance that in Rhinoceros, Berenger is the last man standing, destined for an unknown fate. But in the film, Binnel is spared institutionalization through a deus ex machina. He was lucky; Berenger only had his convictions.