The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)

Starring: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe, Billy Gray, Frances Bavier, Lock Martin

First, the Lowdown: A man from outer space comes to Earth and tells us to make with the peace already!

At a remote Army base, radar technicians detect a large object that is moving at incredible speed. Soon, all over the world wires are buzzing about the craft with no means of identifying it. Radio announcements worldwide confirm that the object has come from space, but beyond that is anyone’s guess. People around the globe stand riveted, waiting for the least bit of information on the intruding craft. In DC, radio broadcasters are doing their best to put the public at ease – pointing out that the fine spring weather has brought the tourists out in droves to the various points of interest about the town.

Speaking of which, people in the National Mall are enjoying a fine morning walking amongst the various monuments and attractions to be found there. Suddenly, a whirring sound fills the air, and a large shimmering disk descends from the sky to land in a park. The police and National Guard are quickly summoned to cordon off the area, and soon the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president are placed on full alert. The landing site is almost immediately secured and surrounded by tanks, armed soldiers, and frightened onlookers.

The ship lays quiescent for a couple of hours, but then a door opens and a ramp extends from the previously seemless surface. A man in a spacesuit and helmet emerges from the opening, assuring the crowd that he has come in peace and goodwill. As the spaceman descends the ramp to the ground below, the soldiers anxiously unholster their sidearms and train them on the visitor. Perhaps not realizing fully the gravity of the situation, the spaceman reaches inside his suit and produces an odd-looking rod. The gesture leads the military personnel to suspect it’s a weapon, and when the rod snaps open to reveal spiky protrusions, a nervous private shoots our spaceman.

But before the National Guard can take in a damage assessment, a giant robot stalks out of the craft. The presence of the alien homunculous is enough to scare away the civilians, who flee into the distance. The soldiers are now positive that the huge automaton poses a threat to them, suspicions that are confirmed when the robot begins to disintegrate all guns, artillery, and tanks in the area. The spaceman diffuses the situation by calling off his robot buddy and surrendering himself to the Earth authorities.

The spaceman is taken to Walter Reed Hospital to recuperate from his wound. The president’s secretary, Mr. Harley, comes to visit the alien – who identifies himself as Klaatu. Klaatu understands perfect English, looks human, and claims to have come from a neighboring planet. Mr. Harley points out planetary bodies are hardly “neighboring” (rockets and artificial satellites were still theoretical at the time), but Klaatu says it will be an adjustment Earth is going to have to make soon. Klaatu carries an important message, one so important that it must be delivered to the heads of state of all Earth nations. As laudable as the goal sounds, Mr. Harley informs Klaatu that it’s difficult to get nations that are on easy speaking terms to share a room together let alone ones who hold each other in mutual distrust. The spaceman is not concerned with the petty affairs of Earth politics, though, for the message he has eclipses their disputes in importance and the future of the planet is at stake. Mr. Harley agrees to pass on the suggestion to message all of Earth’s leaders for a meeting, but voices his doubts about their willingness to do so.

Evening falls on the giant spaceship, and the Army Corps of Engineers are doing their best to crack it open it, but the ship’s hull is impregnable. The robot has stood as a motionless sentry since the morning, and seems to be made out of the same indestructible material. In the following morming, the doctors who treated Klaatu are examining his x-rays and physiology, marveling at how his body makeup is nearly identical to a human being’s – right down to the internal organs. What’s more, Klaatu says the average life expectancy on his planet is about 130 – Klaatu himself is 78. Another attending physician enters the room with even more astonishing news – Klaatu had secreted a healing salve on his person and applied it to his gunshot wound – and it is now fully healed.

Mr. Harley returns with the invitation replies, and they all decline – almost petulantly. Klaatu restates that his message is too important for one nation or group of people – it has to be shared with the world. Klaatu suggests that he be allowed to mingle among the humans, to better understand our unreasoning nature, but Harley tells him that he is to remain in his hospital room, and will be kept under guard until further notice.

Later that evening, Klaatu makes his escape – having borrowed a change of clothing from the hospital’s laundry. Roaming the streets, he comes across a boarding house and takes a room – using a pseudonym borrowed from his clothes’ original owner, Mr. Carpenter. Mixing in with the natives, Klaatu desperately tries to find a way to get his message out to the world, and soon.

The Day The Earth Stood Still is one of those classics that I had heard much about, but had never gotten around to watching. As such, I knew about the rudiments of the story: spaceman comes to Earth with an ultimatum, indestructible robot named “Gort”, “Klaatu barada nikto,” etc. So it is impossible for me to view this with a completely blank slate.

Furthermore, I remember catching the gripping “first contact” scene when I was a child and I was kinda disappointed with it. I had been told about Gort from several library books on robots (Transfomers were my favorite toy at the time, but I was to later learn that practical robotics involved tasks that were a bit more pedestrian and we were a long way off from having wisecracking android sidekicks.) The books all had sections on robots in fiction and showed Gort as being one of the first robots presented in a movie – using vivid color production stills. So when I caught it as part of a TV broadcast, I was a little put off by the movie being in black and white (I was still of the mind that black and white was for old people and those too poor to afford a color set.) However, the scene where Klaatu exits his saucer was tense enough to hold my attention. And when Klaatu got plugged by a nervous tank driver, my first thought was “This is a guy who arrived in a flying saucer! You might as well count the last few seconds of your life, pal.” And I got a little bit of gratification by watching Gort zortch everything in sight. But then in the next scene it’s revealed that our spaceman not only looks human, but is about as gentle a soul as Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. No color, no marauding robot, and no bug-eyed alien made for a very disappointed 7-year old: Gort wasn’t holding up very well next to Optimus Prime.

Getting so late into the review process for this movie, it’s hard for me to come up with more things orginal to say about it. To confirm what many a critic has said, the picture is very intelligent – almost bordering on cynical, which I was not prepared for. Mr. Harley’s attempts at delicately explaining the selfish nature of human politics reveals a subvervise scorn for politics in general.

What struck me more than the “peace is the ultimate weapon” message the movie had (which shouldn’t be ignored – The Day The Earth Stood Still came out long before the phrase “nuclear disarmament”) is how sardonically the media is employed: at the beginning, the newscasters are doing their best to quell hysteria, but once the spaceman turns into a fugitive – every media outlet begins to fan the flames of panic. Famed radio commentator, Gabriel Heatter, delivers a Glen Beck-like tirade suggesting that the alien is hiding in the fields, forest, or sewers and should be hunted down like the animal he is. When Klaatu tries to contribute to a “man on the street” interview about the fugitive alien, the host becomes immediately disinterested in Klaatu’s suggestion to deal with the situation rationally. This is during a time when most movies represented news media as an honest institution that valued truth above all else.

A lot of people like to point out the heavy-handed Christian allusions in the movie: Klaatu is very Christ-like in his bearing and demeanor (he seems almost regretful when force is used); and there’s the not-so-subtle overtones in his assumed name “Mr. Carpenter”; and you would think having him being brought back from the dead would be a spoiler, but it’s not. One thing I’d like to point out to a lot of folks is that Christianity was the Scientology of the 1950s in Hollywood – it was almost expected to make some kind of connection between the Bible and whatever story was being portrayed: hell, it made it a selling point in quite a few of them.

Another thing people try to suggest is, with its talk about the United Nations and a nationless government, The Day The Earth Stood Still is either warning against or propaganda for Pat Buchanan’s New World Order. On that subject I have this to say: poppycock. People nowadays have become so used to depth and richness in our science fiction that it’s difficult to remember that it was not always so. The “golden era” works of Isaac Asimov, Lester Del Rey, and Robert Heinlein all tend to paint morality and philosophy with such broad strokes that a lot of their idealism can come off naïve at best and fascist at worst. The notion of a government free from sovreignity looks good on paper, but as this movie points out, humans are complex beings. If anything, it’s optimism for a unified government free from war and strife sounds a lot like the inexperienced wishings of a young child.

One final thing: The Day The Earth Stood Still has a rather leaden monologue at the end of it, but something I found interesting is that there is no indication on whether the citizens of Earth took Klaatu’s message to heart or not – and there is equal evidence we would act either way.

Line of the Movie: “I am fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason.”

Five stars. How about a courtesy flush?