The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

All of Washington, D.C., is thrown into a panic when an extraterrestrial spacecraft lands near the White House. Out steps Klaatu (Michael Rennie, in a role intended for Claude Rains), a handsome and soft-spoken interplanetary traveler, whose "bodyguard" is Gort (Lock Martin), a huge robot who spews forth laser-like death rays when danger threatens. After being wounded by an overzealous soldier, Klaatu announces that he has a message of the gravest importance for all humankind, which he will deliver only when all the leaders of all nations will agree to meet with him. World politics being what they are in 1951, Klaatu's demands are turned down and he is ordered to remain in the hospital, where his wounds are being tended. Klaatu escapes, taking refuge in a boarding house, where he poses as one "Mr. Carpenter" (one of the film's many parallels between Klaatu and Christ). There the benign alien gains the confidence of a lovely widow (Patricia Neal) and her son, Bobby (Billy Gray), neither of whom tumble to his other-worldly origins, and seeks out the gentleman whom Bobby regards as "the smartest man in the world" – an Einstein-like scientist, Dr. Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe). The next day, at precisely 12 o'clock, Klaatu arranges for the world to "stand still" – he shuts down all electrical power in the world, with the exception of essentials like hospitals and planes in flight. Directed by Robert Wise, who edited Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) for director Orson Welles before going on to direct such major 1960s musicals as West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965), The Day the Earth Stood Still was based on the story Farewell to the Master by Harry Bates.

IMDB
DVDBeaver

The story is simple. An alien, Klaatu, and a robot, Gort - a creature far in advance of anything Fifties Earth had seen - come to Earth to assess its inhabitants. If allowed to survive, will it become a threat to its neighbours, or are there qualities in human beings that make them worth saving? Things look bad for Earth when Klaatu is shot by a nervous soldier, but after he escapes from hospital, he takes up lodgings in a boarding house where he meets a woman and child who just might change his mind.

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The once stunning special effects on display here may look flimsy now, but if you can look beyond that and connect with the story, you'll find that this fable is as powerful today as when it was originally told. Michael Rennie's discreet, measured performance as Klaatu carries real conviction, and the scenes when the Earth stands still - when aeroplanes hang in mid air and traffic ceases to flow - remain haunting. Because it doesn't depend on science, but rather on our ability to imagine technologies much more powerful than our own, the film has aged much better than many of its genre contemporaries. In many ways it's an extension of warning tales that have been around since human civilisation was born.

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For its time, The Day The Earth Stood Still is also quite brave in terms of the aspects of civilisation it's willing to look at. we don't just see humankind's aggressive potential - we see racial prejudice, poverty, and the many frustrations faced by Klaatu's loyal friend Helen because she's a single (widowed) mother. The wholesomeness that makes Klaatu question his initial bad impression doesn't come from the places one might expect in a Fifties film. Patricia Neal puts in a reserved, subtly nuanced performance as Helen, who is obliged to be more brave and resourceful than anyone else here despite the studio's attempts to squash her into the traditional heroine mold. As her son, Billy Gray isn't exactly naturalistic (nobody expected that of a child star in those days), but he is genuinely likable, and there's real chemistry between him and the alien he adopts as a father figure.

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By keeping its story quite spare and avoiding hystrionics (the occasional quite understandable scream aside), The Day The Earth Stood Still gains an almost documentary-like authority - it is, after all, recording a moment in history by taking a snapshot of people's feelings about the nuclear arms race. In the end, of course, we don't need aliens to wipe us out - if we take things too far, we'll do it ourselves - but this film requests that we take the time to sit down quietly and think about it. It's a depiction of a teeming world in which nobody really knows where they're going, and it forces the viewer to look at that world afresh.

Jennie Kermode, Eye for Film

Working from Edmund H. North's unusually literate adaptation of Harry Bates's short story "Farewell to the Master," Robert Wise created a classic science fiction film with a strong pacifist message.

Sent by a federation of planets to warn the people of Earth to stop nuclear testing before the planet is destroyed, the Christ-like Rennie descends into Washington, D.C., in his spaceship, accompanied by his massive robot, Gort. When an American soldier panics and shoots Rennie, Gort eliminates them, but the wounded Rennie stops the robot from destroying the planet. Taken to a military hospital, Rennie escapes and, posing as a normal human, seeks shelter in Neal's boarding house. Here he begins to learn that Earth people really are not so bad. Since he can make no formal contact with the governments of Earth, Rennie arranges a demonstration of his power that justifies the title of the film.

Superb performances by all involved, restrained direction by Wise, and a magnificent and innovative score by Bernard Herrmann help keep this 35-year-old film just as relevant today as it was the day it was released.

TV Guide

Filmed and released at the height of the Cold War, The Day the Earth Stood Still presented a bold call to look beyond national borders and quest for peace and unity rather than war. In particular, the film was an anti-nuclear parable, a grave warning that the consequences of nuclear warfare could be global or even cosmic, a far cry from even the greatest devastation resulting from conventional war. This message is delivered to the people of Earth by the very human-like alien Klaatu (Michael Rennie), who arrives in a spaceship accompanied by a tremendous, indestructible robot named Gort (played by real-life giant Lock Martin beneath a clumsy costume). The film's anti-war and anti-nuclear agenda was controversial in its day, just as its special effects were state of the art. Seen today, the message is utopian and obvious, while the effects look rudimentary, but the film stands up surprisingly well as a classic of its genre.

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Partly, the film's enduring status as a sci-fi masterpiece, rather than a historical curiosity, can be attributed to the great use that is made of relatively modest effects. Director Robert Wise, coming to the film from a background in noir and horror, knows how to get the most from a minimalist aesthetic, and he slathers these sets in artfully applied shadows that give a realistic feel to the cardboard-like backdrops. Klaatu's ship, draped in shadows, has an unearthly ambiance as the alien walks around its circular inner chamber, turning on lights one at a time by waving his hand over rows of strange buttons. The lighting often keeps the alien himself shrouded from view, keeping him mysterious and aloof. Though he looks human and, for most of the film, attempts to blend in with humans, he is often kept at a remove, his thoughts and goals hidden from understanding.

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Even Gort, who in the broad light of day risks looking kind of silly rather than threatening, is mostly filmed in ways that enhance his intimidating aura rather than exposing the awkward artifice of his costuming. The robot's cold, silent acts of destruction, mostly presented in inscrutable closeups on his blank face, are terrifying in their slow, deliberate inevitability. Wise manages to make this robot seem all-powerful and unstoppable with only a few unconvincing laser bursts and amorphous glowing effects. The film also achieves a great deal with its score, a minimal drone mostly played with a pair of theremins, and composed by the great Bernard Hermann. This score functions much like the sets, creating tension and suspense from a surprisingly ascetic foundation. From the very opening strains, over the credits sequence's static painted images of outer space, the music's whining pulsations create an uneasy mood, a sense of impending doom. The score, the sets, the lighting, the effects: all are unified in creating believable sci-fi from the most minimal starting point. The individual elements might be cheesy and makeshift, but the total effect is brilliant.

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More importantly, the film succeeds because its emphasis is not on the whiz-bang bravura of its technical effects, but on the dramas triggered by the alien's arrival. The bulk of the film takes place on a very human scale, with Gort and the spaceship offscreen as Klaatu attempts to blend in with the people of Earth so that he can learn about them and understand their capacity for violence. When he arrives on the planet, bringing his message of peace, he is shot in the arm immediately by a skittish soldier who mistakes the gift he offers for a weapon. He soon escapes the military's custody and takes a room at a small boarding house, where he befriends the young widow Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her son Bobby (Billy Gray). Klaatu seeks to understand this race of people who react so instinctively with violence and fear, and if the film's overall message of peace is overly pat — giving up violence is hard to argue with and harder still to achieve — its insight into the global politics of fear is more acute. The film portrays a planet wracked with fear, suspicious and all too ready to believe the worst about others. It takes an alien outsider to question why this planet is so consumed by "us versus them" politics rather than taking a global view to preserve the integrity and survival of the planet as a whole.

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Klaatu's interactions with Helen and Bobby provide him with a positive counterpoint to his experiences elsewhere on Earth, though Helen's boyfriend Tom (Hugh Marlowe) is just another suspicious jerk who's certainly not thinking globally: he's only out for himself. The film implicitly draws the connection between Tom's personal selfishness and the larger selfishness of nationalism. Whether it's one person putting personal gain above all else, or entire countries and governments valuing their own aims over the possibility of international cooperation, Klaatu simply doesn't understand this kind of short-sightedness. His tour of Washington with Bobby — taking in both the rows of graves at Arlington and the words of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial — encompasses both horror and hope for the potential of this planet's societies. For its subtle atmosphere and its overriding humanistic touch, The Day the Earth Stood Still remains one of the great achievements of the science fiction genre.

Ed Howard, Only The Cinema

Edition Details:
• Commentary by Director Robert Wise and Nicolas Meyer
• Commentary by Film & Music Historians John Morgan, Steven Smith, William Stromberg & Nick Redman
• Isolated Score Track 5.1
• The Making of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" (23:51)
• The Mysterious, Melodious Theremin (5:39)
• The Day the Earth Stood Still Main Title Live Performance by Peter Pringle (2:15)
• Farewell to the Master: a reading by Jameson K. Price
• Fox Movietonews from 1951 (6:21)
• 3 Trailers (teaser, theatrical, 2008 re-release)

Disc 2 (single-layered)
• Decoding "Klaatu, Barada, Nikto"; Science Fiction as Metaphor (16:13)
• A Brief History of Flying Saucers (33:59)
• Edmund North: The Man Who Made The Earth Stand Still (15:42)
• The Astounding Harry Bates - Farewell to the Master: An Audio Presentation of the Original Short Story (11:01)
• Race to Oblivion : A Documentary Short Written and produced by Edmund North (26:41)
• 7 Galleries

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