Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
And a Klaatu barada nikto to you too. So, here the Earth is, right, post WW2, swaggering around going “ooh, look at us, we’re harnessed the power of the atom to melt people, aren’t we the King Poops of Excrement Mountain”, and just generally settling in for a good old fashioned Cold War, when out of nowhere, well, out of space I suppose, a flying saucer lands in a park in Washington DC. The alien flying the thing gets out, saying he comes in peace and goodwill, and because it’s America, he gets shot for it.
Said alien, Michael Rennie’s Klaatu, does manage to call off his robot, Gort’s rampage of melting down every puny earthling weapon around, and is taken off to hospital. Healing quickly, thanks to his own advanced medicine, he wants to be taken to the Earth’s leaders in order to deliver an urgent, highly important message. However, politicians being politicians, neither a guest list nor location can be agreed for this, and Klaatu insists this message must be delivered to all simultaneously.
Deciding, somewhat out of nowhere, that he must live amongst these hoo-mans to better understand them, he slips his guards and takes up residence in a boarding house, befriending Patricia Neal’s Helen Benson and her son, Billy Gray’s Bobby. He makes contact with Sam Jaffe’s Professor Jacob Barnhard in an attempt to reach the great scientists of the world to deliver his message, and is prompted to make a demonstration of his power.
This takes the form of stopping all but essential power in the world, bringing the Earth to a stand still. So it’s not just a clever title. This is certainly head-turning, but not completely unreasonably is seen as a touch too threatening for the authorities who turn their manhunt into more of a “preferrably dead than alive” sort of thing.
But, as it turns out, that message is very much “stop killing each other or our intergalactic robot peacekeeping corps will bring you the peace of the grave”, so good job on that one, Earthlings.
It’s hard, at least for me apparently, to recap this film without it coming over a bit trite, but I should point out that I quite enjoyed The Day the Earth Stood Still. It’s not perfect – I don’t know how an alien should react, exactly, but it’s probably not like an impatient army officer or a kindly uncle, which seem to be the two poles Michael Rennie bounces between, and it’s perhaps best not to speculate on the finer details of what little is revealed about the aliens as it’s not all that coherent.
It’s more interesting as a cultural by-product of the dawning of the atomic age, and while the likes of Godzilla and Them! (more on which soon) were, arguably, trying to process the practical effects of the power of the atom bomb, The Day the Earth Stood Still stands more as a intergalactic extension of the nightmare of the mundanely phrased mutually assured destruction. But with cool robots, which makes it better.
It’s dated, naturally, although I’d argue that like Things to Come this is a little less reliant on then-whizzy special effects than some other films of the era (or indeed of this episode), and by spending most of its time holding up a mirror to humanity does retain some relevance to this day. Shorn of a contemporary Cold War setting it’s perhaps a little harder to understand quite the context for it, but perhaps the unwanted refresher course from Trump’s sabre-rattling brings it back to some relevance. Thanks for that.
Maybe not quite essential viewing after 60 years, but it’s a pop-culture milestone that’s held up surprisingly well and, again, a worthwhile watch for anyone interested in the history of the genre.