Movie-A-Day: The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) – Or, the sci-fi film that started it all

Starring: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe, Billy Gray Director: Robert Wise Year Of Release: 1951 Plot: The world is shocked when a flying saucer lands in Washington DC. The alien that emerges, Klaatu, says he’s has a message to be give to all the people of Earth. However in-fighting between countries makes it impossible to get all the world leaders together. While the Americans want to keep control of the alien, he escapes and adopts the guise of ‘Mr. Carpenter’ so he can learn more about the world. He discovers both the good and bad side of humanity, but will human nature and suspicion mean he won’t be able to impart his message, putting the entire planet at risk?

The Day The Earth Stood Still is one of those frustrating films for the Movie-A-Day series, as there’s so much to write it’s barely possible to scratch the surface in an article like this. It’s such an important movie, and perhaps the most important ever in the history of the science fiction genre (although Forbidden Planet and Star Wars also have a good case for that title). Although there had been a couple of major sci-fi movies before The Day The Earth Stood Still, such as Destination Moon and The Thing From Another Planet, mostly it was the preserve of monster flicks and cheap, throwaway films of little artistic merit.

However The Day The Earth Stood Still was the first to take flying saucers and aliens from another planet seriously, playing things straight, with a decent budget and major studio backing. It took the world by storm, as while sci-fi had always previously been seen as being a rather cheap and schlocky niche pursuit of nerds and kids, The Day The Earth Stood Still introduced a much broader audience to what the genre could do. For many it was a revelation, as they suddenly realised you could use sci-fi to tell interesting stories that had a message, and could explore issues in ways it would be difficult to access otherwise. Of course since then sci-fi has completely taken over cinema, with most big blockbusters at least tipping their hat to the genre.

The 1951 movie deals head-on with the fear of communism and more particularly the proliferation of nuclear weapons. However while it’s normally said to have an anti-nuclear message, it’s actually a bit more complex than that. Klaatu comes to Earth to tell humanity that other planets have started to notice earthlings have discovered nuclear bombs and are beginning to work on rockets that could take them to the stars. He wants to tell the world that while the aliens don’t mind what they do on Earth, if they start to become a threat to the rest of the galaxy, the entire planet will be destroyed.

This is normally seen to be showing the stupidity of humanity, and how our obsession with war and trying to find ever more extreme ways to kill one another puts us all in jeopardy. The movie also takes a sharp jab at the then emerging spectre of McCarthyism and its suspicion that anyone who thought outside the mainstream was a commie. However what Klaatu actually say is that people on other planets live under a system where they’ve ceded control of security to a robot force who act decisively if anyone or anything acts incorrectly, and that if humans don’t do what they’re told, the planet will be destroyed by these machines.

This means that the aliens have ceded control to an outside authority and after that have no choice but to live by its strictures, and also that once mankind has heard Klaatu’s message, we have to do what we’re told as well, or otherwise the planet will be blown up. It’s actually an incredibly authoritarian vision posing as a future of peace and prosperity. It is essentially a variation on mutually assured destruction – the thing the film is ostensibly arguing against in its anti-nuclear message – because it’s not about people living in peace because they believe that’s right, but because they’ll be destroyed themselves if they become aggressive. As a result you could actually see the movie as pro-nuclear, as long as everyone has enough weapons to kill everyone else, with the presumption that this will ensure peace because nobody wants to get blown up.

Anyway, despite the slightly confused message (it wants to be about peace, but isn’t really), it is an immensely thought provoking film, largely because it’s very good at showing how humans really do tend to react to the unknown, with a mix of curiosity and wonder as well as a large measure of suspicion and a tendency to shoot first and ask question later (which literally happens when Klaatu first steps off his spaceship).

Due to being a seminal classic, The Day The Earth Stood Still has also proved immensely influential. For a start it was the movie that broke Robert Wise into the ranks of top flight directors. Wise started out as an editor, working on the likes of Citizen Kane, but began directing movies in the mid-1940s. However it was his 1951 sci-fi flick that really made people take notice, and from there he went on to make the likes of Helen Of Troy, Run Silent Run Deep, West Side Story, The Haunting, The Sound Of Music, The Andromeda Strain and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

It was also vital in the career of composer Bernard Herrmann. While he’d worked in film a bit before The Day The Earth Stood Still (like Wise he was involved in Citizen Kane), his New York orchestra was disbanded in 1950 and after that he moved to Hollywood permanently, with the sci-fi movie being the first film he scored after he arrived in LA. It’s believed it’s his score for the 1951 film that piqued the interest of Hitchcock, who hired him for 1955’s The Trouble With Harry, with the collaboration continuing through The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho and beyond.

The music itself was unlike anything people had heard before. It was the first movie score to make extensive use of electronic instruments, most notably the Theremin. You may not know the name of that instrument, but you’ll know its strange, ethereal sound, as after The Day The Earth Stood Still it became a bit of a cliché when people wanted to suggest other-worldly, extraterrestrial qualities. It not only had an effect on subsequent sci-fi scores, but also on a young Danny Elfman, who’s said it was Herrmann’s Day The Earth Stood Still music that made him want to become a film composer.

Incidentally, while I wrote about the unexpected Jesuses of film in the Movie-A-Day article about Cool Hand Luke, one I didn’t mention was The Day The Earth Stood Still. While director Robert Wise said he hadn’t realised the parallels until several years after making the film, they’re definitely there. Klaatu is sent to Earth from another place to impart a message to mankind. However while some are ready to listen, he’s largely met with suspicion from the authorities. He also adopts the name ‘Mr. Carpenter’, which seem an obvious reference to Jesus.

Eventually the authorities kill him, before he comes back to life, leaves his message of peace (and possible destruction if we do wrong) and then departs into the heavens. He is pretty much Jesus in alien form.

Indeed while Wise says he didn’t realise the Jesus comparisons, the Breen Office, which was in charge of Hollywood censorship at the time, seemed to. They were concerned about Klaatu coming back to life and his eventual message, as they thought it was left-leaning and made him out to be too god-like. They insisted the filmmakers showed it was technology that brought him back from the dead, that his resurrection was temporary and that the alien said that with life and death “That power is reserved for the Almighty Spirit”. Although the filmmakers didn’t want to change anything, they were forced to.

Finally, I’d just like to point out how the recent remake is a perfect example of why it’s so often a bad idea for Hollywood to mess with the classics. The problem is that The Day The Earth Stood Still is an unusual sci-fi film. Although it has science fiction trappings, for the majority of the running time it’s a fairly straightforward drama and doesn’t bother with endless amounts of action, weird looking aliens running around and huge special effects. Instead it’s more interested in ideas and conversation.

However due to its status, when Hollywood announced a remake, they inevitably wanted it to be a major event picture, which involves spending hundreds of millions of dollars, ensuring there’s loads of explosions and CGI, and making it all about the spectacle. It’s what the studio feel they have to do, but it inevitably involves throwing most of the things that make the original special out the window. It was patently obvious this was going to happen from the moment Fox announced they were making a new version, and when the Keanu Reeves flick arrived, everyone’s worst fears were realised.

The original’s pacifist message got hidden under a barrage of CGI nanobots that ate everything they came into contact with. Klaatu was no longer on Earth just to impart a message, but was also ready to start the apocalypse, and the alien becomes a far more menacing – and less interesting – figure, as does his robot GORT, although not in a good way.

Like so many remakes, it seems immensely stupid to make a new version of a movie and do it by jettisoning everything that people loved about the original. However because of the economics of modern Hollywood, and the studio’s worries that no one will watch a movie that isn’t totally overblown (it all about what they presume modern audiences expect from a major ‘event movie’ sci-fi flick, which isn’t what the original The Day The Earth Stood Still is or ever was), it happens all too often.

I really have just scratched the surface of original The Day The Earth Stood Still, as it’s a fascinating movie and immensely important. If you want to know more, I’d recommend buying the two-disc DVD or Blu-ray edition, which features an 80-minute documentary on the making of the movie, including interviews with numerous members of the cast and crew, as well as various film experts.  It’s a fascinating watch and well worth a look, while the audio commentary by Robert Wise on the main film is also worth spending some time with.

Oh, and if you fancy reading the story the movie is based on, ‘Farewell to the Master’ by Harry Bates, you can find it here. It’s very different to the film, but it’s interesting to see how they took some of the ideas from the story and wove them into something that’s become an absolute classic.

TIM ISAAC

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