The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

Dir. Robert Wise

Amid giant irradiated crabs and attacking UFOs, American post-war science-fiction cinema in the 1950s produced some genuine classics. The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of the very best.

The intelligent script covers a wide spectrum of social concerns, while the contrasts between the military response to an alien visitation and the scientific response (i.e. between men of war and men of reasoning + logic) couldn't be clearer.

Alongside that are more subtle but no less powerful parallels, including an evil among us that looks like us and a determined saviour with a powerful message for the entire world.

Bernard Herrmann's futuristic-sounding score, using electric strings and the wacky theremin, conceptualises the eeriness of another world.

The Illustrated Man (1951)

The Illustrated Man (1951)

Author: Ray Bradbury  |  Page Count: 294

'...[P]erhaps ten minutes elapsed while the first terror died and a metallic calm took its place. Space began to weave its strange voices in and out, in a great dark loom, crossing, recrossing, making a final pattern.'

Perhaps because of the 1969 filmed version of the same name — or perhaps in spite of it, if like me you don't consider it to be a very good adaptation — the book is one of Ray Bradbury's more well-known anthologies.

The sixteen stories that are included weren't written specifically for the collection, but were gathered together with a newly penned bridge narrative that explains how each individual tale is represented as an inking on the human canvas that is the illustrated man.*

While they take place across many different times and locales, thematically most of them have a connecting cynical edge, something that the master fantasist is more proficient at than people often give him credit for. It's a theme that complements the temperament of the titular man, a drifter who feels that the pictures on his skin have a weight that burdens his soul.