This Island Earth (1955)

This Island Earth (1955) is a classic nineteen-fifties sci-fi adventure monster interplanetary interocitor movie with neither film noir style nor qualities to speak of, but which yet speaks of the Cold War, the connection between pulp fiction and the cinema and the invention of styles and sciences new in the storytelling of the period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, that started in 1947, two years after the end of World War II, and lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and has film noir elements and connections in more than enough areas of style and production for it to pass unnoticed by an serious noireau looking at the year of 1955 in the United States. This island earth could take it no more.

Invaders From Mars (1953)

Invaders From Mars (1953) is an independently made child point-of-view flying saucer fantasy science fiction alien peril SuperCinecolor, occupying a near maverick status in the mid twentieth century annals of US science fiction cinema.

Directed by super-Scot, or at leaset second generation American Scot William Cameron Menzies and starring Jimmy Hunt, Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Morris Ankrum, Leif Erickson, and Hillary Brooke, it was produced by Edward L. Alperson Jr. and released by 20th Century-Fox in terrifying color, not just SuperCinecolor. For more on that Cinecolor effect, go here to Wikipedia.

The Flying Saucer (1950)

The Flying Saucer (1950) is a film perennially and erroneously filed as science fiction, despite the fact that the movie is as much in the action and adventure and romance film noir style of its day — as it is anything else.

With its bizarre chain smoking hero and elite Washington power brokers, its blockish tropes and violence, there is not a hella lot of science with this fiction but there is plenty Alaskan wilds travelogeurie and nature adventuring, including no end of aerials, with a fat deal of picnicking romance style fun and longing to a melodramatically marital soundtrack. 

In between these is a stab at an espionage story, with the notion being the playboy hero.

The Flying Saucer does suddenly forget itself from time to time but it surely identifies as noir. It must be the only science fiction with a film noir voiceover when it wants it. 

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) is the quintessential high quality high concept high tension classic Hollywood 1950's science-fiction presentation.

The nascent and sudden re-invention of the science fiction film in the 1950s does inevitably draw on film noir style when need be.

And although the themes are of a universal and global nature, not quite the subjective and local tendency in film noir, there are still film techniques and themes aplenty which crossover between the film noir of its day and the science fiction.

Directed by Robert Wise The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) is spritely, earnest, playful, philosophical, funny, serious and has distinct Bernhard Hermann music, as well as the most irresistible use of the theremin in film history.