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Clear as mud, Joe.
Re: Griffith. Nothing else in his ouvre (!) seems to have anything near an anti-totalitariam message or subtext. The use of working class characters (i.e., LITTLE SHOP) makes me guess his politics would be only slightly left of center, if that. The BODY SNATCHERS style "taking over" of the people in CONQUERED also includes the military (presented by a half-dozen guys in Griffith Park) and the police (i.e., one cop in uniform in the town), which could be a reference to creeping facsism. But I doubt it. The cynicism in his work makes me think he doesn't buy into any of it, far left or far right. How's the rain on the rhubarb?

Another example could be ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, where the antagonists "absorb" their victims' minds and souls into a collective whole, MAY-be a vague allusion to one-mind one-state totalitarian rule. But the most affable character in the film is the "regular Joe," played by Russ Johnson, the sci fi equivalent of a John Garfield character. But I think this is another example of wanting to see a lot of subtext that wasn't there, either.

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Christian Nyby, Howard Hawks, and most of the writers behind The Thing From Another World were all conservatives, so the anti-communist message in that film is pretty obvious.

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Is it?
There's a passing reference up front ("Could be the Russians, they're all over the pole, like flies.") and if you squint really hard and play let's-pretend, you could say Dr. Carrington is representative of The Evil Commie with his Siberian fur coat and Trotsy-esque beard.

But when you LISTEN to the dialogue and actually watch the interaction, it's easy to dismiss this interpretation. He and Hendry aren't enemies, they just think each other are wrong. Both say so, and both realize the primary goal is to insure the safety of the camp and the rest of the world. One plans to do this by thinking and reasoning, the other plans to do the same thing by direct action.

Screenwriter Charlie Lederer was related to conservative wealth and power via Marion Davies but he was no Pat Robertson (or Martin Berkley). His (and Ben Hecht's) THE FRONT PAGE come down pretty strong against railroading leftists, which is what the whole comedy is about.

In THE THING, Scotty -- the representative of the 4th estate and the Constitutional right to know what's happening-- is more at odds with Hendry than Carrington. Maybe-- maybe Scotty's warning at the end is a klaxon bleating right-wing anti-Red paranoia-- "Watch the skies! Keep watching the skies!"-- but it can just as easily be seen as the equivalent of Kevin McCarthy's, "You're next!" from another politically ambiguous sci-fi thriller.

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On the other hand, Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers was written by an unrepentant communist, Bernard Gordon, and produced by liberal Democrat Charles Schneer...with effects by conservative Republican Ray Harryhausen.

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True, but Bernie rewrote George Worthing Yates' script from a Siodmak outline. Who knows what Yates' politics were. Siodmak -- a cypher. Anti-Hitler? Maybe, but certainly no socialist. Doesn't seem to be any politics in his work anywhere. Bernie's "political" influence on the script is pretty minimal. There's the general idea that the world puts aside it's differences to fight a common foe, and there is a wonderful line in the script (realized by Ray Harryhausen, probably in all political innocence) where the crashing saucer specifically smashes into the right wing of the Capitol.

Charlie Schneer was apolitical; a "living room liberal," as Jack Sher described him. He also produced a bio pic of unrepentant Nazi Werner von Braun and strictly followed the State Department PR party line ("Oh, he had to join the party, he didn't really want to." Pucky.)

What does "unrepentant Communist" mean, anyway? Bernie, like most other sensible people, dropped away from the C.P. when 1) the murderous excesses of Stalin became verifiable fact, 2) the local LA branch of the CP began to try to dictate the content of scripts (which it could never do.), and 3) the meetings were boring. Bernie Gordon remains a determined progressive even now, and was one of the leaders in the opposition to the "lifetime Oscar" award to Kazan a couple years back.

As for Trumbo's "bad" script for ROCKETSHIP X-M-- given that he was probably paid under the table something like 5% or 10% of what he was worth, and therefore could afford to spend perhaps 2 weeks on the script, as opposed to months in the earlier and later examples you cite-- why would you expect this to be anything better than functional? And at all that, it's not bad.