It’s getting hard to remember in this time of home streaming, but in the glory days of Hollywood, the great studios (each of which had a recognizable house style and its own particular areas of cinematic expertise) poured forth a seemingly endless river of movies in every genre you could think of, many of which have seeped so far into our subconscious as to become permanent parts of our collective culture.

Merely to name these studios and genres is to instantly summon iconic images; the MGM musical — Gene Kelly swinging around a streetlamp in the pouring rain, Astaire and Charisse dancing in the dark across a stylized Manhattan park; the John Ford western — John Wayne closing the door on hearth and home to walk alone into the desolate beauty of Monument Valley; the Warner Brothers Gangster picture — Cagney and Robinson and Bogart sneering, snarling, shooting, dying; the Universal monster movie — Karloff and Lugosi slowly stalking their victims, as implacable, as inevitable as death itself; the film noir — darkened big-city streets slick with mist and moral ambiguity; the women’s picture — Davis and Crawford and Stanwyck, selflessly sacrificing themselves for husbands and children unworthy of them, their faces glowing with the glory and agony of unrequited motherhood; the screwball comedy — Claudette Colbert bringing a car to a screeching halt by pulling up her skirt and showing some leg…

There’s something missing from this list, though, isn’t there? You bet there is, and few genres are as rich in indelible moments and images as the science fiction films of the 1950’s.

The Monster from the Id crashing against the energy-fence in Forbidden Planet; an out-of-control saucer slicing through the Washington Monument in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers; the space ark rocketing up the take-off ramp in When Worlds Collide; the elegant and sinister Martian machines slowly rising from the pit in The War of the Worlds; a miniscule man with a stickpin battling an enormous spider in The Incredible Shrinking Man; a suburban basement full of alien pods in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers; terrified teenaged moviegoers fleeing the theater in The Blob; the massive, ominously silent robot Gort emerging from the spaceship in The Day the Earth Stood Still…

I could go on forever; God, I love these movies, and I know that I’m not alone in that. Of course, people don’t just love watching these films — people love reading and writing about them, too. All of the classic Hollywood genres have had countless fine books written about them, but the 1950’s science fiction film is one of the few to have a single, indisputably indispensable book, a true Book of Record.

That book is Bill Warren’s massive Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, a volume so loving, so obsessive, and so exhaustive as to eclipse all other treatments of its topic.

Warren (who died in 2016) was a newspaper film critic and scholar whose knowledge and dedication to his chosen subject was nothing less than awe-inspiring, and when he departed this planet for Metaluna or Altair IV or Zyra or wherever he was bound, he left behind a book that I can’t imagine ever being superseded. Forty-three years after it was first published, there’s still nothing else in its class.

Originally published in two volumes in 1982 (covering the years 1950-1957) and 1986 (covering 1958-1962, the year Warren reckons as the end of the cinematic 50’s), Keep Watching the Skies — the title is taken from the last, portentous line of dialogue in 1951’s The Thing from Another World — was later republished in a combined volume in the late 90’s; that volume, which is the one I own, runs a whopping 839 pages. In 2016 a revised “21^st Century Edition” appeared, containing over 200 additional pages, many of them filled with new, color stills and posters, and quotes from interviews with filmmakers. (It also has an introduction by sf writer Howard Waldrop.) I’m still trying to scrape together the fifty bucks for the newer edition; I know it’ll be money well spent.

In my older edition there are plenty of black and white illustrations, but mainly the book consists of page after closely-printed page of meticulously detailed analyses of every movie in the genre that you could possibly think of, from the highest of the highs to the lowest of the lows, from Roger Corman’s first rummage-sale, no-budget quickie, Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), which merits two and a half pages of carefully considered analysis, to the ultimate prestige product, 1956’s Forbidden Planet from MGM, which gets eleven pages. To show the seriousness with which Warren takes his subject, here is a paragraph from his review of the utterly dismissible Monster from the Ocean Floor, discussing what separated Corman from other low-budget directors:

But it’s also easy to underrate Roger Corman as a director. His films actually are better than those made by his contemporaries, including those who, like Edward L. Cahn, generally had higher budgets to work with. Corman was not only craftier than most of his rivals, he operated on a level of more sophistication and greater intelligence, for he is an extremely intelligent man. Where Cahn will doggedly shoot a scene in one long master shot from the same vantage point, with the characters moving horizontally on the screen, Corman will move the characters toward and away from the camera, which will also pan to new set-ups, so that in the same extended take (with perhaps one or two cutaways) he manages to make an almost identical sequence livelier and less dated. And with less need for editing — hence cheaper.

Warren isn’t going for laughs in Keep Watching the Skies (though his reviews are not devoid of a dry and understated wit); the book is devoted to a serious treatment of his subject, and all aspects of production are covered — evaluations of budgets, scripts, casts, directors, sets, special effects (of course), and editing are here, as well as summaries of contemporary reviews where Warren could find them.

The book is even more copious than its title indicates; though the subtitle is American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, it also covers the transitional years 1960-1962, and includes many British and Japanese films as well as American ones. (And a good thing too, because that means that Godzilla and Rodan are here, as well as one of the most unique and bizarre movies of the entire era, the perverse 1954 English import, Devil Girl from Mars.)

Keep Watching the Skies is invaluable for the wealth of hard information it provides about the creation of these films, and when it comes to his overall assessments of the movies themselves, Warren proves himself a careful, thoughtful critic. (Most encyclopedic works like this, such as Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, are team projects, but Bill Warren wrote every review in his book himself, though he did have a research assistant.)

Of course, that doesn’t mean that he’s infallible in his judgments, but that’s not something that we can require of any critic. (What would that mean, anyway, beyond always agreeing with us? If a critic always agrees with us, what do we even need him for?) Even when he’s wrong, as he is about 1956’s The Mole People (“Undoubtedly the worst of the Universal-International science fiction films of the 1950’s, The Mole People is a dull gray film with very little to recommend it”) Warren always marshals respectable reasons and arguments for his position. Sometimes he’s just wrong, that’s all. (Drop by the house one day and I’ll pop in my Mole People DVD and I’ll prove it to you. I think Warren was just in a bad mood when he wrote that review; it happens sometimes.)

All of the awe-inspiring or guffaw-inducing movies that we adore are here, in all of their (mostly black and white) glory, filling out all of the 1950’s science fiction celluloid subgenres — Big Bug (Them, Tarantula, The Giant Mantis), Alien Invasion (The War of the Worlds, Invaders from Mars, Invasion of the Saucermen), Space Exploration (Rocketship X-M, Forbidden Planet, Destination Moon), Monsters on the Loose (The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, 20 Million Miles to Earth), Post apocalypse (This Is Not a Test, Panic in Year Zero, Day the World Ended).

Some (probably the majority) of these movies are laughable schlock with no ambition higher than the siphoning off of teenage pocket money and so incompetently mounted that they approach the surreal (Robot Monster, Plan 9 from Outer Space) and some are well-made, seriously intentioned films with something to say (The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came from Outer Space), but all of them have a special place in the hearts of those who love them.

The themes that they deal with, whether clumsily or adroitly, are still relevant and powerful — the paranoia that comes from not knowing who is who or who you can trust; the fear that results from the world changing too fast, of not knowing from what previously safe place a new and outlandish threat will come from; the unease that comes from ceding control to aliens, outsiders, monsters, and giant, inhuman forces too strange to understand, too big to fight or even hide from… sound familiar? Perhaps, in some ways, the 50’s weren’t all that long ago, were they?

In fact, there’s hardly a burning 2025 issue that these movies don’t address in one way or another. All in a pother over changing gender roles? Try The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) or Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958). The social and environmental chaos caused by climate change keeping you awake at night? Screen When Worlds Collide (1951). Worried about the depersonalization that comes from living in a mass society? Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) will be right up your alley. Interested in the implications of virtual reality? Spend an hour with Donovan’s Brain (1953). Concerned about declining marriage and birth rates? Watch I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). Churned up over the immigration issue? The Thing from Another World (1951) and It Came from Outer Space (1953) will give you two wildly different perspectives on the controversy. And if the social stigma and anxiety that come from suddenly transmuting into a scaly horror is what concerns you most, you should certainly give The Hideous Sun Demon (1959) a thoughtful viewing.

The people who originally thrilled to these movies when they first premiered are almost all gone now; what’s mostly left are people like me (and probably you), who saw them on late-night or weekend television in the 60’s and 70’s or later, and fell under their irresistible spell. Once you get a taste for them, you want to watch them all, good, bad or otherwise.

For that reason, every year or two I used to invite friends over for an all-day Summer 1950’s Science Fiction Movie Marathon. We had our last one in 2021 (right after a science fiction disaster right out of a late-night B-movie — COVID, or It Came from the Wuhan Lab), and we watched The Alligator People (1959), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), Invaders from Mars (1953), The Tingler (1958), The Giant Claw (1957), and The Brain from Planet Arous (1958). We had a blast. Maybe it’s time to have another 50’s film festival, and I have the perfect resource for putting it together (the same one I always use), Bill Warren’s magnificent monument to the disturbances and discontents and fears of an entire era — Keep Watching the Skies!

All manifestations of cultural anxiety should be as entertaining as 1950’s science fiction movies, and all books should be as good as Warren’s affectionate yet rigorous and clear-eyed study of those films. Whatever you do, don’t leave Earth without it!

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Thomas Parker is a native Southern Californian and a lifelong science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fan. When not corrupting the next generation as a fourth grade teacher, he collects Roger Corman movies, Silver Age comic books, Ace doubles, and despairing looks from his wife. His last article for us was A Blurb Reader’s Bill of Rights