No surprise, then, that the 1940's saw little in the way of real SF or fantasy. Instead, the monsters of the 30's were tamed and sent to play with the likes of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello as Hollywood tried to lighten the constant news of battles won and lost with comedy, music and romance. After all, the misuse of science, which had been the underlying theme of much SF film to this point, had become a reality much worse than fiction. When, after the war ended, the Nuremburg Trials revealed the horrific experiments of Mengele, one suspects the name "Frankenstein" came to more than one mind.
The war brought one other new technology to the foreground, however, and it was that one that the earliest postwar films echoed. German rocket science turned humankind's head back to the stars, this time with a very good chance of getting there. In 1950, Kurt Neumann directed Rocketship X-M, a tightly constructed little gem in which a moon shot goes awry and lands instead on the Martian Desert. There the crew discovers the remains of an ancient civilization. That same year, George Pal produced Destination:Moon, directed by Irving Pichel and based on Robert Heinlein's Rocketship Galileo. This movie, which won the special effects Oscar for that year, is almost a documentary on space travel rather than SF with its detailed astronomical artwork and true-to-science details and the professional demeanor of its "astronauts."
What goes up, however, must come down, and its a moot question whether the many alien-invasion movies of this period were inspired by psychological phobias or the news of Roswell and the subsequent flurry of UFO sightings that followed. Whatever the reason, in 1951 Howard Hawks took a break from the westerns and war movies to direct The Thing From Another World. This story of an isolated Arctic airbase attacked by an extraterrestrial artichoke is better than it has a right to be, relying on the interplay between its human component rather than a lot of shots of the alien for its dramatic tension. In a way, it established a formula that most of its successors followed to a greater or lesser degree -- a sudden burst of action buffered by a lot of dialogue that, among other things, provided the science a general audience needed to understand what was happening.
