The title alone inspires awe.
"Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!"
Yes, there was science fiction in the cinema before "2001," "Close Encounters," "Star Wars," "Star Trek," "Alien," and cable TV. Hard to believe but true. In fact, if any film could lay claim to "classic" status in the sci-fi field prior to the 1960's, it would have to be director Robert Wise's 1951 plea for world peace, "The Day the Earth Stood Still." The title alone inspires awe.
Maybe it helped that Wise said he believed in flying saucers. More important, it helped that the world was ready for this sci-fi morality tale in the early fifties. The Cold War was heating up; the U.S. and Russia both had "the bomb"; people were thinking of building nuclear shelters in their back yards; kids were running through air-raid drills at school; and the McCarthy witch hunts were in full swing. It was a perfect time for a spaceship to land in Washington, D.C., and its occupants to say something like, "Whoa, there, Earthlings; stop all this nonsense or we'll stop it for you." A lot folks hoped it would happen. Director Wise and his fellow filmmakers just helped things along with a little wish fulfillment.
The film is the antithesis of the current trend in slam-bang, high-tech sci-fi extravaganzas. Indeed, it's almost the opposite of what most people think of as science fiction nowadays. Rather than an emphasis on things scientific or spectacular, there's a stress on things psychological. It's rather charming, actually, yet the movie maintains a high level of tension almost from beginning to end, with only a slight sag in the middle.
Basing his script on a short story, "Farewell to the Master," by Harry Bates, screenwriter Edmund H. North fashioned essentially a human drama (and clear parable) that director Wise would film as realistically as possible. Now over fifty years on, the story continues to pack a wallop, especially as not a lot has changed regarding the tensions in the world, with terrorism replacing Cold Wars and missiles replacing bombs.
Anyway, in the movie a spacecraft lands in Washington, D.C., on a mission of peace. Naturally, the military surround it immediately, and when its lone living occupant, Klaatu (Michael Renne), emerges, he is immediately shot. So much for peace. Klaatu recovers and it's not long before we learn he's come 250,000,000 miles to offer Earth an ultimatum. Clean up your act, he tells us, or face total annihilation. Seems Klaatu is part of an intergalactic police force that makes sure aggressive planets like Earth, which have recently discovered the destructive potential of atomic power, don't disrupt other, more tranquil planets in the universe. And to back up his mandate, Klaatu has brought with him a gigantic robot named Gort (Lock Martin) that has the power to destroy all mankind.
Klaatu wants to meet with representatives of every nation on Earth, but, of course, that proves difficult since the world leaders are too busy squabbling to meet and discuss anything seriously. Sound familiar? Then, before meeting with anyone, Klaatu decides to get out among Earth's population and find out firsthand why they're such a suspicious and unreasoning lot. He escapes a holding area the military has put him in and takes up residence in a local boardinghouse, where he meets some of the common folk of our land. In a veiled reference to the pacifist Christ, he calls himself "Mr. Carpenter," an allusion furthered later in the movie when he comes back from the dead.
Also in the cast are Patricia Neal as a woman, Helen Benson, living at the boardinghouse with her young son, Bobby (Billy Gray); Hugh Marlowe as Tom Stevens, Helen's boyfriend, who embodies all of the worst traits of Mankind--pettiness, selfishness, fearfulness; Francis Bavier as Mrs. Bailey, another boardinghouse resident; and Sam Jaffe as Professor Barnhardt, an Einstein-like scientist whose aid Klaatu enlists.
The plot allows the filmmakers to explore all the trepidations and paranoia that have plagued people for an eternity. When Klaatu offers to prove his strength by neutralizing all electric power throughout the world for thirty minutes, the movie finds its title. Will the Earth listen to reason or be subjected to Klaatu's ultimate threat?
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" was different from any science-fiction film that came before it and different from most everything that came after it. It's made in a pseudo documentary style, with healthy doses of film-noir shadows thrown in. The film is helped considerably, too, by Bernard Herrmann's musical score, one of the most atmospheric ever composed for a sci-fi or fantasy film. The music is so good it's been imitated a hundred times over; yet even having heard it in a multitude of variations, it never ceases to amaze and tingle. Things are also helped by the numerous location shots in and around the city of Washington, which aid the story's believability; as well as the use of real-life radio and television commentators of the day like Drew Pearson, Elmer Davis, Gabriel Heatter, and H.V. Kaltenborn, who lend the story a documentary air of authority. You may notice these gimmicks are still used in today's sci-fi/fantasy films, "Independence Day" being a prime example.
But it's not "ID4" that this film resembles. Instead, "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is a nearer cousin to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in its assumption that visitors intelligent enough to reach Earth from other worlds would have sense enough to be peaceful. The film may seem awfully slow to younger audiences expecting nonstop excitement, and its ending is not exactly a slam-bang affair, either, but going into the film with the idea that it's closer to a political tract than an outright thriller ought to prepare a viewer for the insights it provides. Let's call it a cerebral suspense film and be done with it. But call it what you may, the movie remains a classic of its kind, and you won't find a better copy of it than in this new Fox Studio Classic edition.
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