The First Postwar Security State Invasion Films, 1950–1956

Abstract

The films of this period, perhaps not too surprisingly, show less of the tendency of films discussed later in this volume to more openly or even reflectively question the implicit imperialist stance of the United States as it took over Great Britain’s role, described by Keith Booker, as the main bearer of the “legacy of colonialism,” making America’s Cold War rhetoric a “substitute for the language of colonialism” (8). Nevertheless, as the decade progresses, these invasion films show signs that the hegemonic tendencies of the culture were showing strain under the pressures released by anticommunist rhetoric unleashed not only toward Russia and its allies but against American citizenry. As Stephen Whitfield says in The Culture of the Cold War (1991), “the cost that American society paid to crush domestic communism was disproportionate. For the repression weakened the legacy of civil liberties and tarnished the very image of democracy” (4). The films in this chapter reflect this process as if to prove Robert Corber’s thesis from In the Name of National Security, discussed in the previous chapter, that the seeds of the Cold War consensus’ dissolution were sown by the period itself.