Dangerous Crossing (Joseph M. Newman, 1953)

Cast: Jeanne Crain, Michael Rennie, Carl Betz, Max Showalter, Mary Anderson, Marjorie Hoshelle, Willis Bouchey, Yvonne Peattie. Screenplay: Leo Townsend, based on a radio play by John Dickson Carr. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: Maurice Ransford, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: William Reynolds. 

Someone disappears in a public setting -- a train, a hotel, a passenger ship -- and the person who saw them last discovers that no one else claims to have ever seen them. It's a nice trope for a thriller, like The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938) or So Long at the Fair (Antony Darnborough, Terence Fisher, 1950), so who can blame 20th Century-Fox for taking it out of the mothballs for a low-budget picture like Dangerous Crossing? Ruth (Jeanne Crain) boards a ship for a honeymoon ocean voyage with her husband, John (Carl Betz), who takes her to their stateroom and then goes to make a deposit of some money with the purser. He'll meet her in the bar, he says, but he doesn't show up. When Ruth goes to the stateroom to look for him she finds it locked, and when an attendant opens it for her, their luggage is gone. Ruth has them find the maid (Mary Anderson) who was preparing the room when the couple entered and saw John carry her over its threshold, but she swears she didn't see them and that the room has always been vacant. As Ruth becomes more distraught, everyone begins to suspect she's lying or insane. Only the ship's doctor (Michael Rennie) is willing to put up with her frantic assertions that she really is married and that her husband must be somewhere on board. Naturally, since Rennie gets top billing with Crain, we know that some kind of relationship between Ruth and the doctor is going to develop. Unfortunately, the doctor is such a know-it-all male and Ruth such a basket case that it's a dull romance, not helped by a lack of chemistry between the actors. Crain does a nice job from the start at suggesting that there's something fragile and off-balance about Ruth, so even though we've seen her with John, we feel there's something she's not telling us. There is, but as the story unfolds, the movie gets routine and predictable.  

The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss, 1945)

Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady

Cast: Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Patricia Roc, Griffith Jones, Michael Rennie, Felix Aylmer, Enid Stamp-Taylor, Francis Lister, Beatrice Varley, Amy Dalby, Martita Hunt, David Horne, Emrys Jones. Screenplay: Leslie Arliss, Gordon Glennon, Aimée Stuart, based on a novel by Magdalen King-Hall. Cinematography: Jack E. Cox. Art direction: John Bryan. Film editing: Terence Fisher. Music: Hans May. 

Entertaining claptrap about a Restoration beauty (Margaret Lockwood) named Barbara who seduces the wealthy squire Sir Ralph Skelton (Griffith Jones) on the eve of his marriage to the virtuous Caroline (Patricia Roc). But having married Sir Ralph, Barbara quickly becomes bored with life in the country, dresses in men's clothes, sneaks out by a secret passage, and turns highwayman. This puts her in competition with (and the bed of) the notorious Capt. Jerry Jackson (James Mason), the terror of the county's roads. Eventually the wicked are punished and virtue is rewarded, of course. The story needs a little more tongue in cheek than writer-director Leslie Arliss is able to give it, but it moves along nicely. Mason, as usual, gives the standout performance.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)

Lock Martin, Michael Rennie, and Patricia Neal in The Day the Earth Stood Still

Klaatu: Michael Rennie
Helen Benson: Patricia Neal
Tom Stevens: Hugh Marlowe
Prof. Jacob Barnhardt: Sam Jaffe
Bobby Benson: Billy Gray
Mrs. Barley: Frances Bavier
Gort: Lock Martin

Director: Robert Wise
Screenplay: Edmund H. North
Based on a story by Harry Bates
Cinematography: Leo Tover
Art direction: Addison Hehr, Lyle R. Wheeler
Film editing: William Reynolds
Music: Bernard Herrmann

It's a truism that the science-fiction movies of the 1950s are really about the Bomb, the nascent Cold War, communism, McCarthyism, and other social and political crises of the era. All of that is apparent in perhaps the most celebrated film of the genre -- though I prefer The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951) -- Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. It has the virtue of being a straightforward fable: A being from another world comes to Earth to warn us that our bellicosity threatens the existence of the planet itself. And naturally, the reaction to his arrival is one of hysteria. But what the film really seems to me to be about is the disappearance of religious faith, something it rather clumsily suggests by having the messenger take on Christlike attributes: i.e., he performs miracles, dies, and is resurrected. The movie seems to suggest that we need a community of belief to survive, and not the fractured dialectic that has taken the place of a universal creed. The denizens of the other planets who have sent Klaatu to warn Earth have decided that true peace depends on a community guarded by robot policemen, of which Gort is the film's representative. For those of us now contemplating the warnings that artificial intelligence could produce sentient machines capable of developing a simulacrum of life, self-maintenance and reproduction, and hence of evolving into beings that might dominate humanity, this vision of submission to squads of robocops is rather chilling. Still, though The Day the Earth Stood Still is rather naive in its trust in technology, it's a well-made and provocative film that shaped the consciousness of my own generation, even if all we took away from it was a magical phrase: Klaatu barada nikto.