SCI-FI SOUNDS A WARNING
HOLLYWOOD, SEPTEMBER 1951 — A specter is haunting America.
Ever since Hiroshima, Americans have been ducking and covering under the nuclear threat. Months earlier, the first H-bomb blew a Pacific atoll off the map. A new emergency radio system — CONELRAD — promises nationwide alerts of any Soviet attack. William Faulkner uses his Nobel platform to define the Zeitgeist — ”when will I be blown up?”
But pop culture diddles on.
Bars serve atomic cocktais. Songs eulogize my “Atom Bomb Baby.” L.A. has an “Atomic Cafe,” Las Vegas hosts “Atomic Liquors.” Then 75 years ago this week, one movie gets serious.
Cue the eerie woo-woo of a theramin. Cut to a radar station. An unidentified craft is approaching. Reports come from India, France, the BBC. With a nod to Orson Welles’ 1938 “War of the Worlds” panic, the announcer assures us, “This is not another flying saucer affair. Whatever it is, it’s something real.”
A disc of light soon soars over Washington, DC. As crowds gawk, it lands on the National Mall. Hours later, surrounded by tanks and artillery, a man in a silver suit steps from the saucer. “We have come to visit you in peace,” he says, but when he reaches in his suit, a jittery soldier shoots him.
“The Day the Earth Stood Still” has all the elements of shlock sci-fi. Its hats are hilarous, its cars clunky, the acting stilted. The saucer looks like a giant hubcap and the robot is out of central casting. but the movie’s message is eternal.
Transcending cliche, Robert Wise, who would later direct “West Side Story” and “The Sound of Music,” turned pulp fiction into a movie whose intelligent pursuit of peace touched a world on the brink.
“There’s a quiet confidence running through the film,” Past America noted. “It respected its audience.”
Making the earth stand still was no easy task. Pentagon officials read the script, saw a trigger-happy military, and refused to cooperate. Actor Sam Jaffe, who plays Professor Barnhardt, dodged a McCarthy-era blacklist to appear. Hollywood’s top leading man, Spencer Tracy, wanted the role of the saintly space visitor but the producer turned him down, saying, “If that spaceship opens up and the character gets out and walks down the ramp, and it’s Spencer Tracy, there’s no credibility.”
But reading headlines about an American “peace offensive,” Julian Blaustein was determined to make a movie where peace “is not a dirty word.” Blaustein read hundreds of sci-fi stories, searching for something beyond the usual ray gun apocalypse. Finally he found “Farewell to the Master,” about aliens who come to warn a warring world to clean up its act.
Blaustein especially liked the opening, where the alien is shot. “That’s the way we deal with strange things, with weapons, guns. No effort at finding out how the other person thinks, feels, works. Different from us? Kill ‘em.”
Screenwriter Edmund North, who would later win an Oscar for “Patton,” worked and reworked the script, making the smart people the good guys.
“I will not speak with any one nation or group of nations,” the alien Klaatu tells a DC official. “I don’t intend to add my contribution to your childish squabbles.”
“Your impatience is quite understandable.”
“I’m impatient with stupidity. My people have learned to live without it.”
“I’m afraid my people haven’t.”
Many sci-fi movies have eccentric professors but this one has Einstein. Not the real thing but a frizzy-haired doppelgänger who, when Klaatu solves a baffling Newtonian problem on his blackboard, agrees to gather the world’s wisest to hear the alien’s message — stop your nuclear program or we will stop it for you.
But that trigger-happy military just can’t stop shooting. Luckily, in anticipation of another attack, Klaatu gives his female lead (Patricia Neal) three words to disarm the giant robot who would wipe out the world. If you ever saw the movie you know the words.
Patricia Neal could barely deliver them without giggles. “I just thought it was hysterical,” she remembered. But facing the towering robot, played by a 7’7” usher at Graumann’s Chinese, she manages to utter the phrase that would become a sci-fi mantra. Altogether now.
Klaatu. . . Barada. . . Nikto.
When the robot restores his master to life, a hidden motif surfaces. Klaatu descends from the heavens. He performs miracles. He takes the name “Mr. Carpenter.” He seeks peace and is resurrected. The screenwriter never told the director or producer about the Jesus link. “It was my private little joke,” he said.
In the Hollywood year of “Streetcar Named Desire” and “Singing in the Rain,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still” did okay — just okay — at the box office. A NY trade journal called it “by far the best of the science-fiction pictures yet produced.” And in the subsequent wave of B-movie aliens — “Invaders from Mars,” “The Thing from Another World” — the movie stood out for its gravitas.
“There’s an emotional richness to the picture that you don’t find in most mainstream pictures,” said director Joe Dante.
Film historians agreed. The American Film Institute ranked “The Day. . .” #67 of the 100 Most Inspiring Films. In 1987, Ronald Reagan echoed the film when he told the U.N. “I occasionally think about how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”
But Reagan may have missed the ending. The movie’s final words come from Klaatu just before his departure. Seventy-five years later, the message still rings.
“It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet but if you extend your violence, this earth of yours will be reduced to a burned out cinder. Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you.”