The Day the Earth Stood Still (20th Century-Fox, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 6) I put on Turner Classic Movies at 7:30 p.m. for the second half of their double bill of science-fiction films about relatively beneficent aliens visiting the Earth. The first was Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which I’d commented about relatively recently on the moviemagg blog: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/03/close-encounters-of-third-kind-julia.html) and the second was the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. I did a moviemagg review of this film when the DVD of the remake with Keanu Reeves came out in 2009 and posted it to https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/04/three-days-earth-stood-still.html; I called the post “Three Days the Earth Stood Still” and compared both the 1951 and 2008 movies to the original source for the story, Harry Bates’s “Farewell to the Master,” published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940. Bates’s story has almost nothing in common with either film; it takes place well in the future (when humans have already been to Mars and back and have developed ray guns and television) and all the human characters in the 1951 movie were added by the screenwriter, Edmund H. North.

About all Bates’s story has in common with the 1951 film, written by North and directed by Robert Wise (a graduate of both Orson Welles’s and Val Lewton’s training programs, and it shows) is the arrival of a flying saucer on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C.; its two occupants, a humanoid named Klaatu and a robot companion named Gnut (renamed “Gort” by North, I’m sure just to give the actors something easier to pronounce); and a scene in which Gnut/Gort is encased in high-tech plastic to immobilize him but he’s able to escape by heating his own body to such a degree that the temperature melts it. “Farewell to the Master” builds to an O. Henry-esque climax in which Cliff Sutherland, a D.C. journalist who’s the principal interlocutor between the aliens and the human race, sees Gnut and the temporarily resurrected Klaatu off as they return to their home planet. Sutherland tried to apologize on behalf of the human race for the religious fanatic who shot Klaatu with a ray gun, thinking he was an emissary from Satan out to conquer the human race, and said to Gnut, “‘But will you promise to tell your master — just those words — as soon as he is arrived?” Gnut replied, “You misunderstand. I am the master.” Bates also left powerfully ambiguous just why Klaatu and Gnut came to Earth, while North supplied an explanation that made The Day The Earth Stood Still a surprisingly powerful pacifist “message film” that went very much against the grain of the Cold War Zeitgeist.

Indeed, the most poignant aspect of The Day the Earth Stood Still in 2024 is how much its politics go against the grain of today; at a time when nation after nation (with the surprising exception of Great Britain) is voting into office Right-wing pseudo-populists with nothing but contempt for the rest of the world and the idea of international cooperation, The Day the Earth Stood Still seems as wildly out of step with the times in 2024 as it no doubt did in 1951. The explicit message of the movie is that Klaatu’s and Gort’s planet has organized a united federation (forgive the anticipation of Star Trek here) in which robots like Gort are the enforcers. They are programmed to act ruthlessly to stamp out any form of aggression that arises on one of the member planets and cannot be hacked or reprogrammed – though the film features the famous stop-code, “Klaatu barada nikto,” which Klaatu gives to his human friend, Helen Benson (Patricia Neal, playing the female lead in a Left-wing message movie three years after she’d starred in a Right-wing one, The Fountainhead), to tell Gort when he is intent on destroying the human race after they have mortally wounded Klaatu (which happens twice in the film).

In his 1967 book An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, Carlos Clarens faulted The Day the Earth Stood Still for the awfully human-sounding threats and ultimata Klaatu gives to the human race, but it seems to me like Robert Wise and Edmund North were on the right track here. The members of Klaatu’s federation remain susceptible to the temptations of violence and aggression, so they need to have a sort of robot police force either to neutralize aggression or to eliminate the creatures who’d perpetuate it. North even gave Klaatu a speech in which he analogizes Gort and his fellow robots to human police officers deputized to fight human crime. This time around I liked the touch that in the opening scene in which an Army detachment confronted the space visitors, Gort just vaporized their weapons without harming them; later, after a soldier has mortally wounded Klaatu, Gort vaporizes not only the soldiers’ weapons but the soldiers themselves. (“The first red-shirts,” I joked.)

As I said before, Robert Wise trained as a filmmaker under both Orson Welles and Val Lewton, and Welles’s influence comes through mainly in the early scenes in which we’re given exposition about the space aliens via simulated news radio and TV broadcasts – much the way Welles did in his fabled Hallowe’en 1938 broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Lewton’s influence comes through most strikingly in the scene in which Benson’s son Bobby (Billy Gray) follows Klaatu, who’s boarding with them under the name “Carpenter” (one of the cleverer allusions to Christian mythology – there’s also a much clunkier one, more on that later), to the site where the flying saucer landed and sees Klaatu enter it, thereby realizing that the nice “Mr. Carpenter” is actually the space visitor everyone is trying to hunt down. The clunkiest line in the script was actually written not by Edmund North, but by Joseph Breen, Roman Catholic Jesuit priest and head of the Production Code Administration at the time. He demanded that the filmmakers insert a line in which Klaatu would acknowledge that his resurrection would only be temporary by saying, “That power is reserved for the Almighty Spirit!,” thereby acknowledging the supremacy of the Judeo-Christian “sky god” over whatever religion there was on Klaatu’s and Gort’s home planet.