Day for Night Magazine

Peace From Above: Reexamining The Day the Earth Stood Still
BY CORTLAND RANKIN

It’s been a little over half a century since The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) brought its message of peace and international understanding to cinemas. Fifty years since Michael Rennie, playing the spaceman Klaatu, delivered his sobering ultimatum of peace or destruction. Two generations since Patricia Neal yelped the now famous “Gort, Klaatu barada nikto” and saved the Earth from certain annihilation. Viewed largely as an allegory for Cold War paranoia at the time, The Day the Earth Stood Still remains a seminal film. During this past winter break, I watched The Day the Earth Stood Still again with my Dad. Though I had seen the film several times before, I had always appreciated it for what it appeared to be – a polished version of the same 50’s sci-fi camp that brought you the alien-invasion classics Invaders From Mars (1953) and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956).

When watching the movie again, what struck me most about it was — perhaps more than the simple and polished screenplay by Edmund H. North (Patton), Robert Wise’s quietly thoughtful directing, or the splendid yet sparingly used special effects — is how little the world has fundamentally changed. All the international “petty squabbling” and “strange, unreasoning attitudes” that Klaatu finds so distasteful have proved damn hard to grow out of. In a world that seems immune to peace, The Day the Earth Stood Still addresses perennial fears of impending doom. While the threat of nuclear holocaust has subsided, the possibility of an atomic conflict plagued the national conscience in 1951. When The Day the Earth Stood Still premiered, World War II was only six years behind us. We were still 18 years away from landing on the moon. Even Sputnik was six years in the future. But the Atomic Age had arrived with a bang (two of them, in fact). Wise’s masterpiece held a mirror to the country’s anxieties about weapons of mass destruction and our own irrationality that threatened us in ways that The Good War only hinted at.

Understandably, the film has lost some of its gloss over the years. Both as a movie and as science fiction, it’s primitive stuff by modern standards. But as a science fiction movie it’s so mindful of purpose and skillfully crafted that it embarrasses us and our vacuous CGI gimmickry. While its ruminations on human nature and our collective future were already familiar to the science fiction magazine readers of the time, big-budget movies that attempt to tap into those higher chakra points remained distressingly rare. The Day the Earth Stood Still remains one of the few spaceships-andaliens features determined to be about something bigger than just itself.

One scene best captures the alluring innocence of the film’s politics. On the lam from the military, Klaatu, disguised as an ordinary man named “Mr. Carpenter” rents a room at a boarding house in Washington D.C. There he befriends Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her Americanas- apple-pie son Bobby (Billy Grey). One day, Bobby takes Klaatu on a tour of famous D.C. landmarks including the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, where Bobby’s father is buried. Understandably, Klaatu has never heard of Abraham Lincoln or of military cemeteries such as Arlington. Bobby’s attempt to explain his father’s death in World War II confounds the alien who says that he comes from a place where “they don’t have any wars.” Bobby replies, “Gee! That’s a good idea.” Somehow, and maybe this shows the genius of the director Wise, that scene doesn’t come across as pretentious or grating at all.

Whatever personal spin you may give to The Day the Earth Stood Still, it’s the deeply earnest attempt to speak plainly to and about our world that keeps it high on every list of Great Science Fiction Movies. Rightfully awarded a 1951 Golden Globe for “Best Film Promoting International Understanding,” The Day the Earth Stood Still juggles science fiction stylistics and political undertones with the grace befitting a classic.