Joseph Newman’s This Island Earth is one of the truly great 50s science fiction films of that boom in the genre that we saw in the 1950s. Producers Universal clearly poured a lot of money into the film and the budget is there for all to see on the screen, the film boasting then state-of-the-art effects, great production design and Technicolor (beautifully used by director of photography Clifford Stine). But above all else, it has a literate and clever script from Franklin Coen and Edward G. O’Callaghan, based on the 1952 novel by Raymond F. Jones, that grips from the opening scene and never lets up.

The hero of the piece, Dr Cal Meacham (Rex Reason), is first seen flying in aboard a Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star which almost crashes due to mid-air engine failure seemingly caused by a mysterious green glow. Once back at his lab, he’s intrigued by a consignment of unusual electrical supplies that have been delivered along with instructions for building something called an “interocitor.” He and his assistant Joe Wilson (Robert Nichols) build the device and it turns out to be a video communication screen on which appears a strange-looking man with a high-foreheaded man named Exeter (Jeff Morrow). He tells Meachem that he’s passed an unexplained “test” and is invited join Exeter’s special research project. Whisked off aboard an unmanned, remote-controlled aircraft, he finds himself in a remote corner of Georgia with other leading scientists, including Ruth Adams (Faith Domergue) and Steve Carlson (Russell Johnson). Suspicious about Exeter and his equally odd-looking companions, they try to escape only for Carlson to be killed and Meacham and Adams to be taken aboard a spaceship. Exeter is from the doomed planet Metaluna which is losing a brutal war with the neighbouring Zagons and are running out of the uranium they need to keep their defensive shield operating. Their last hope is that the Earth scientists can transmute lead into uranium, but it may already be too late to save Metaluna…

We have to accept the notion that an alien race sufficiently advanced enough to build spaceships, long-distance video communicators, tractor beams and brain-reprogrammers can’t find a way to obtain the uranium they so desperately need to stay alive. But once we get past that, it’s a marvellous film, full of ambition and very big ideas. This being the 1950s, the shadow of The Bomb hangs heavy over This Island Earth. The destruction of Metaluna, the film cautions, is the fate that awaits the Earth is we don’t learn the errors of our ways and learn to tame our warlike nature. Even the title alludes to the vulnerable nature of our small rock and although the film avoids explicit references to Mankind’s mistreatment of the only home it has, the idea is there in spirit.

If there’s an issue with the film, it is perhaps that we barely spend any time on Metaluna. By the time we get there, the allotted running time is almost up, and the final scenes feel more than a little rushed. The iconic and much-loved “Metaluna mutant” (played in a Millicent Patricks-designed monster suit by Regis Parton), much featured in the film’s publicity, barely even gets a look in, just turns up to lumber about a bit menacingly before keeling over and dying. The lack of time spent on Metaluna is all the more disappointing in that these scenes were directed by an uncredited Jack Arnold – at least according to the director: “I had to go in and re-shoot a great deal of it,” he told Mark McGee and Susan Frank in an interview first published posthumously in SPFX magazine in 2002. “I was on what the studio called an ‘A’ picture, The Lady Takes a Flyer, with Lana Turner. They’d finished principal photography of This Island Earth, cut it together, and it lacked a lot of things. So they asked me if I would help them. I went in and re-shot about half of it, but I didn’t take credit for it.”

But despite Arnold’s sterling work – the sequence undeniably looks gorgeous – the trip to Metaluna feels anti-climactic and somewhat superfluous. It needed to have taken up more of the film, giving us room and time to explore the planet’s dying days with the gravity they deserve. Once arriving on the planet, the budget seems to dry up and there’s barely anyone around to greet the new arrivals, despite the fact that the defence systems are still holding up at this point.

But this is just a quibble really. The rest of the film is chock full of terrific performances, and boasts a rousing score culled from cues by Henry Mancini, Herman Stein and Hans J. Salter, all uncredited, unforgettable images and a smart script. This Island Earth is one of the few American science fiction films of the 1950s to feature essentially benign aliens who simply want out help and not to invade us or make off with our women. In itself, this makes it one of the more mature and thought-provoking genre films of the decade, a maturity occasionally smothered by some unnecessarily pulpy asides – much as we all love it, the mutant feels out of place – and some clumsily inserted religious business – when taunted by Metalunan leader The Monitor (Douglas Spencer), telling him that “it is indeed typical that you Earth people refuse to believe in the superiority of any world but your own. Children looking into a magnifying glass, imagining the image you see is the image of your true size,” Meacham counters nonsensically “our true size is the size of our God.”

But overall, This Island Earth more than deserves its cherished status as a classic of its kind, despite its narrative shortcomings. It’s a bold, bright and intelligent early examples of space opera on the big screen and its influence on the genre in subsequent years is easy enough to detect – just watch a couple of Star Trek episodes after This Island Earth. And even if you’re not entirely convinced by the film, you must surely join its fans in bemoaning yet another act of culture vandalism from the rarely funny Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crowd. When they made the undeserved and unwarranted leap from the small screen to the big, they inexplicably singled out This Island Earth for their tedious brand of snarkiness. The imaginatively titled Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (how long did it take them to think that one up?) was released to cinemas in the States in 1996 and to add considerable insult to injury, the decision was made to hack 20 minutes out of the film to make way for more of the comedy skits. Whatever you might think of the film, it didn’t deserve to be treated that way.