Destination Moon, co-written by the great Robert Heinlein, is a reasonably good effort at a depiction of the first human flight to the Moon. It certainly does not reach the level of sobriety and all-around professional filmmaking of such classics as The Thing from Another World (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) or Forbidden Planet (1956), but it nevertheless tries very hard to convey (more or less) accurately the human and technical challenges of reaching the moon.

In between the amusing standard 1950s silliness of some of the acting and dialogues and the irritating shallow displays of courage and patriotism, there are some interesting moments and one can’t help but being impressed by the amount of care that went into the special effects and in trying to understand the science behind reaching the Earth’s only natural satellite. One has to bear in mind that this film was shot several years before the Soviet Union’s Luna and Sputnik Programs produced their first results and 19 years before NASA succeeded in sending the first astronauts to the moon. Last but not least, it would be another 3 years before Tintin walked on the Moon!

It is refreshing to be reminded of a time when people were truly excited about progress and technology and still dreamt about the future.

Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astair, in one of the bleakest films produced by Hollywood during that period.

With the exception of Australia, the entire planet has been decimated by nuclear war, the origin and details of which are adroitly never explained, and simply blamed on the absurdity and stupidity of humankind. A US submarine escaped the devastation and makes its way towards Melbourne where the locals have only a few months to live until the radiation reaches their country.

Tightly directed by Stanley Kramer, the director of Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), On the Beach maintains its serious and dark premise until the end, never letting cheap and easy sentimentalism take over and never trying to provide a false sense of hope or of a greater moral truth. In addition, and that is commendable for a film from that period, it does not choose sides and refuses to engage in ‘we are better than them’ or ‘it’s all their fault’ type messages.

Instead, the film focuses on a handful of people and how they choose to spend their last months of life and the decisions they face during that time. While the overall emotional intensity feels a bit subdued at times, a feeling reinforced by the decision to avoid showing scenes of madness, folly or desperation (unlike, for example, in The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), another serious film from that period that deals with somewhat similar themes, where various scenes of chaos and rioting are shown, or in The Day After (1983), the made for TV film that shocked America with its realistic and disturbing scenes of apocalypse, or even in Peter Watkins’s groundbreaking docu-drama The War Game (1965)), the narrative nonetheless works effectively by keeping it all fairly understated, and, well, bleak.

Gardner and Peck are quite a charismatic couple to watch and I can only admire their liberal willingness to play in such a film.

Often considered one of the best Sci-Fi novels ever written, and winner of the first Hugo award in 1953, The Demolished Man tells the story of Ben Reich, a rich and corrupt businessman in 24th century America, who murdered one of his rivals (the first murder in 70 years) and is being investigated by a very intelligent and telepathic detective. Yawn.

I clearly was not engrossed by this detective story which, aside for the concept of a telepathic society, offers few surprises and interesting ideas. Perhaps it did in the 50’s when it came out but I find it today to be quite dated and to propose a vision of the 24th century that I think is way off the mark and slightly irritating in its simplicity and lack of imagination.

A decent 1950’s Sci-Fi effort. The film has its share of silly moments but it tries very hard to deal seriously with a potential invasion of earth by UFOs.

Imagine Independence Day 40 years earlier, with some nasty aliens in foam suits trying to destroy earth and most of its recognizable monuments. Only the ingenuity of a human scientist keeps the invaders from succeeding with their not-very-well-thought-through plan.
The ‘special effects’ were produced by the father of stop motion in cinema, Ray Harryhausen, who would later work on the visual effects for Jason and the Argonauts, One Million Years BC and Clash of the Titans. The UFO’s and their laser beams are particularly well done. The rest is, well, it’s 50’s sci-fi. So let’s not beat a dead horse.

Many scenes reminded me of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. It is likely that Earth vs the Flying Saucers is one of the many films that inspired Burton to make his homage.

Roger Corman is one of Hollywood’s most amazing personalities and a producer’s favourite case study.

Throughout the 60’s and 70’s, he was churning out films by the dozens, drawing on an ability to discern and understand public taste, trends and fears. His films cost very little to make but generated fairly high returns. He can easily be considered the father of the B movie and continues to influence a large group of filmmakers, producers, and studio execs. He also happens to have given Coppola, Scorcese, Bogdanovich and many others, at the dawn of their careers, a chance to practice, experiment and direct by using his cameras or left-over film stock from his productions.
The Day the World Ended is one of his better films, meaning that it must have taken him 2 weeks to shoot instead of 2 days. The film depicts a post nuclear world where, in addition to struggling to find non-contaminated goods and resources, survivors must also deal with some annoying and incredibly cheap looking mutated animals…

This is all terribly and poorly done and it is hard to think of Corman in a good light when watching this pile of nonsense….

A winner on several occasions of various ‘worst film ever’ competitions, this film does indeed live up to its reputation.

No efforts were spared for this extravagant science fiction saga in which aliens from space decide to exterminate the human race by turning its dead into zombies…

The costumes are ravishing, the acting of the highest calibre and the production design surely must have had an influence on Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick…

Or maybe not…it’s all bad and cheap but, perhaps because I have seen Tim Burton’s film Ed Wood, i couldn’t help but smile at the naivety of it all…

And if one watches long enough, it almost becomes…cute.

A classic French film noir with the great Jean Gabin. Shot mostly at night on the streets of Paris, Grisbi is not quite as poignant and grabbing as Rififi which would come out a year later, but nevertheless offers a captivating story of rivalry between gangsters trying to steal each other’s money.

This film has been so discussed, so praised, and it holds such a special place in the history of cinema that hardly anything new can be said about it. It is a truly wonderful film…

Film architecture and design has existed almost as long as cinema itself. In 1976, Leon Barsacq argued in Caligari’s Cabinet And Other Grand Illusions that the fantasist sets developed by Georges Melies at the beginning of the 20th century were a considerable improvement over anything that had been done previously in that they created a deeper reality and gave the image a more substantial meaning. He further added that cinema escaped its primitive phase once it moved away from simple backdrops to three-dimensional sets, thereby creating an architectural space within cinema[1]. Post World War I, the German Expressionists fully explored this new architectural space through the creation of sets that attempted to reflect the inner emotions of the characters in the films. And David O. Selznik’s use of the term ‘production design’ in reference to the work of the American director and set designer William Cameron Menzies on Gone with the Wind (1939), finally helped film design and architecture gain the official recognition and visibility that has since become an integral part of the cinematic experience and of the output of most film industries.

Following fairly closely the emergence of production values in the history of cinema has been the rise and acceptance of science fiction cinema. It is indisputable that the two are interconnected and that a process exists where both feed off from one another. Cinema learns from architecture and architecture learns from cinema. As far back as 1926, many architects were said to have been impressed and influenced by Metropolis (1926). Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) also apparently became a source of inspiration for the world of architecture, with the director himself having sourced a lot of his inspiration from several existing architectural and design trends and concepts. Today, terms like ‘science fiction architecture’, ‘high-tech architecture’ or ‘cyber architecture’ are commonly used to refer to a new and ‘modern’ style of architecture that draws heavily on science fiction and new technologies. For many architects, ‘science fiction is an imaginative form of design’[2], making its visualizations worth studying.

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Beautiful film noir set first in New York city then in the New York state country side, it tells the story of a violent and lonely (played wonderfully by Robert Ryan) cop’s journey towards self discovery and redemption. The crime story only serves to support the more introspective, psychological, ‘man on a quest’ angle. Stunning cinematography.

Melodrama has rarely been so beautiful to look at. Sirk took the genre (if it is a genre) to a new level, using irony and social criticism as a way to express opinions which could other otherwise not have been said in 1950 America. Yet this film, about a character (played by Rock Hudson) who becomes a better person through love, is remarkably positive and optimistic for Sirk. It is Sirk’s craft and genius that keeps this soapy and thrashy film from ever going overboard…

‘Either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the results of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them’
Hume
At the core of most paradoxes lie unresolved contradictions. Douglas Sirk was a man in search of ambiguity, most likely due to his own ‘split’ character, even though he never said so in so many words. But it is difficult to imagine a straight and undivided personality seeking, time after time, to populate his work with tormented and ambiguous characters. Even less likely is the idea of a happy and content artist constantly creating situations in which his characters find themselves trapped, constrained, and with nowhere to go except back to the beginning. This inability to confront and to deal with one’s own predicament, or worse, to slowly become aware of it only to attempt a mediocre and inappropriate escape, results in the failure of a human being to transcend his or her space and to ascend to betterment. Whether this interest in failure and the ambiguity that lies in many people originated in Sirk’s experiences in Nazi Germany or from some more innate predisposition (probably a combination of both), it nevertheless instilled in him a cynicism and love of irony, which, combined with a masterly craftsmanship for mise-en-scene and for working with actors, resulted in some very powerful works that could operate on different levels.
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To attempt to define the exact meaning of realism would be a useless excercise, one that would be most likely bound to fail. Countless critics and historians have offered their own interpretations over the years, providing valuable insights into the subject, but succeeding only in offering partial explanations of the concept. Through this ‘extreme relativity of the concept of realism’[1], any effort to develop a universal definition of realism becomes trivial and secondary to the more interesting study of the various branches that a desire for capturing reality can engender in art and, specifically here, in cinema.
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As a film lover, i can’t deny that Fellini is one of the masters. Yet, i was never able to fully engage with his films, which often left me spinning and in need of an aspirin. His post-1960 films that is. His more ‘neo-realist’ work is a different story. Nights of Cabiria is the beautiful tale of a prostitute trying to find happiness.

Winner of an academy award for best special effects in 1954, this film is a precursor to the modern day blockbuster and a brave attempt at bringing Wells’ classic novel to the screen.
As with many Sci-Fi films from the 50’s, one has to alter one’s field of judgment and critical sphere to account for the passing of time.
Yet, other films from that time such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from Another World or Invasion of the Body Snatchers have endured much better and continue to appeal to modern audiences.

British Science Fiction cinema has always lived in the shadow of its American counterpart, either as a result of a direct effort to emulate an American style to enable the films to reach broader markets or as an indirect consequence of the fact that, since the 50’s, Science Fiction cinema has been associated with America, drawing on its rich heritage of comics and magazines.

But British Science Fiction cinema has in fact a much greater legacy than is often given credit to. Since the beginning of the 20th century, various British directors and producers have explored the genre, often taking it into new directions, pushing its boundaries, and drawing on the wealth of ideas and masterful works which British Science Fiction writers like H.G Wells, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham and Michael Moorcock have produced over the years.

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Did the world ever design anything more beautiful than what was created in the US between 1930 and 1955? I tend to think not, at least not as part of a well-defined style as was the case with the Streamline Style of that period. The Streamline Style stood for mobility, speed, efficiency, luxury and hygiene, concepts that were all identified with modernity. It was also the symbol of mass consumption, which Americans were ready to embrace at the beginning of the 30s and after World War II. Once again, what fascinates me here is this embrace of a dream, this thirst to create the perfect city of the future, this belief that all will be well and that the times ahead will only bring prosperity and happiness. In addition, of course, to a design philosophy which appeals completely to my sense of aesthetics. People like Bell Geddes, Teague, Mendelsohn, Dreyfuss and Loewy tried to create a society where form and function would merge to create the most inspiring experiences.