THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL

(1951)

Starring Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe; dir: Robert Wise

How convenient for the flying saucer sub-genre in which Cold War anxieties were played out that Mars was the ‘red’ planet. Commies were the new bogey-men (after Nazis) and ‘alien invasion’ supplied the perfect metaphor.

Of this cheesy sub-genre The Day The Earth Stood Still is rightly regarded as the high water mark. This is the saucer flick you can bring home to meet mom and dad, the one to display on the shelf without embarrassment. Day opens up the flying saucer tale to its widest possibilities, comfortably summoning up the ideals of Abe Lincoln as naturally as killer robots. Its breadth is established in the opening scene, when the glowing orb sails over a horizon dominated by the Washington Monument, U.S. Capitol Building and all the other built icons of pax Americana. Yes, institutions do matter, and since such images form a constant backdrop as the events unfold, sharing so many of the film’s visuals, what dawns is the recognition that this is a dialogue with power, and the movie we’re watching is just our side of the conversation.

Of course it’s didactic. Refined alien avatar Klaatu’s climactic speech, essentially straight to camera, pulls no punches in its intent, despite its muddled philosophy. Sure, it’s OK to live a life cowed by robot police – viz. monsieur Gort over here – because now we can’t afford to be violent, or even aggressive! You A-Bomb wielding earthlings should wake up to this, and in case you don’t, thinly veiled references to "the present international situation" drive home the point that now that the Russkies have The Bomb, the old ways of aggressive brinksmanship are dead.

The Day The Earth Stood Still ’s pacifist credentials are strengthened by the film’s eponymous show of awesome strength – when Klaatu literally stops the Earth’s total power supply (save for thoughtfully exempted essential services like hospitals and planes in flight) for a half hour of non functioning elevators, cars, etc – in a demonstration explicitly planned to prove the aliens’ capacity without harming people. This is clearly a direct rebuke to then-President Harry Truman’s refusal in 1945 to drop Fat Man and Little Boy on unpopulated or even military targets in Japan, instead of the civilian population centres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The buck doesn’t stop there, with mass media - radio especially - singled out with damning portrayals of its complicity in these small-minded politics. As the antediluvian shock jock rants on rabidly over the breakfast table in Klaatu’s rooming house about hunting down the escaped alien like a wild animal, urbane Michael Rennie sits pondering his morning broadsheet in quiet contemplation. Soon after, he is approached for a comment by a roving reporter who quickly whisks his microphone away the minute Rennie/Klaatu starts decrying peoples’ "loss of reason".

What’s most interesting though, revisiting the film a half century on, is its sexuality. Leave aside Klaatu’s questionable interest in spending time with young Bobby (and mom Patricia Neal’s alacrity in granting access to a complete stranger, however well-spoken he may be). Neal’s presentation as World War II widow Mrs Benson changes over the course of the film from the brightly-lit, steely maternal heroine we are introduced to in the milieu of the rooming house to something altogether more complex as the story progresses. Her instinctive trust of Klaatu/Rennie fairly quickly brings her into collusion with the alien (ie the forces of good) and to a pivotal position in the narrative where the weight of the plot’s eventual outcome (a brighter tomorrow, or Earth’s annihilation) depends on her ‘performance’ (literally and figuratively).

While it would have been unthinkable for her initial image to be mitigated by suggestions of a darker side or any aspect vulnerable to compromise, by the time we have shared her rebuff to dunderhead suitor Hugh Marlowe, Helen Benson has become a softer and more shadowy figure, unknowable. Her transition becomes complete in the climactic scene which has given us the legendary "klaatu barada nikto" nonsense. Neal’s recumbent posture and the scene’s eroticised half-lighting draw on the visual rhetoric of desire to present her Mrs Benson as vulnerable, sexually possible and complicit with the other protagonist, the threatening-when-wronged omnipotent equaliser, Gort, an agent of ‘the other side’. In surrendering the codified gobbledegook "klaatu barada nikto" to the robot - and the cinema audience – in a wide-eyed release, we sense Helen’s emotional arc has reached fruition and her visceral awakening is complete. No wonder that phonetic babble has passed into pop culture permanence!

1950s America was undeniably one strange place, particularly in this hangover phase from the washup of the forties to the dread-filled dawn of their bright shiny future. The Day The Earth Stood Still suggests the lengths it took back then to express some pretty basic human truths.