BY HANK REINEKE
Val Guest’s The Day
the Earth Caught Fire (1961) is one of the better science-fiction films to
come out of the Cold War decades of the 1950’s and 1960s. While it’s no metaphorical masterpiece as Don
Siegel’s more celebrated Invasion of the
Body Snatchers (1956), the screenplay for this British production was
co-penned by Guest and the novelist/playwright/screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz. The two would collaborate on other projects
as well, but it’s the thoughtful, literate script co-written for The Day the Earth Caught Fire that would justifiably garner them the award
for the Best British Screenplay from the British Academy of Film and Television
Arts. This superb new Blu-ray from Kino
Lorber is absolutely beautiful, having been digitally re-mastered from a print
held in the National Archive of British Film Institute in association with
StudioCanal.
Partly inspired by the worldwide early anti-nuclear
weapon sentiments and protests of the late ‘50s/early 60s – and in particular
by the demonstrations of England’s annual Easter Aldermaston Marches (partly commemorated
here via actual newsreel footage) – the foreboding screenplay warns of the cost-to-be
-paid due to the escalating tension and muscle-flexing of the world’s two
superpowers. The film’s critics on the
right would dismiss the 1961 production as an example of sobbing leftist
propaganda. Interestingly - and almost a
half-century following the film’s release - London’s Guardian newspaper was among many British journals giving this
charge some measure of credence. It was reported
in August 2010, upon the recent declassification of security documents, that Mankowitz
– who passed in 1998 – had once been suspected by members of MI5 to be a
possible agent of the Soviet Union. This
was a delicious bit of ironic tattle since Mankowitz had long been celebrated
as the figure that brought Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman together to
produce the films of the world’s favorite “imperialist thug†spy, James Bond.
If not a bona fide, card-carrying Marxist – and there’s
no proof that I know of that he was, nor would such a personal political
leaning been criminal unless engaged in espionage - Mankowitz was, at the very
least, a gifted seer. The advertising
for the film promised a “picture that gives you a front seat to the most
jolting events of tomorrow!†When news of the real-life Cuban Missile Crisis erupted
in October 1962, cinemagoers who caught The
Day the Earth Caught Fire on its release in the late autumn of 1961 through
the spring of 1962, were no doubt understandably chilled by the catastrophic preview
they’d already witnessed. The film
depicts, in uncompromising seriousness and sobriety, the dire consequences of
unbridled nuclear weapons testing by the world’s two reigning super-powers. This is a science-fiction film where the monster
created was completely of human design. Unless one wishes to extrapolate on the possible symbolism of film’s final
image and audio, director Guest stubbornly refused to guarantee the requisite
happy ending.
The film is a very much a science-fiction movie for
thinking adults. The original British
censor card tacked onto the film’s front end informs that no one under the age
of sixteen would be permitted admission. I imagine only the most worldly and erudite middle and early high school
age teens would have even cared about such disbarment, as there’s no space-age
“monster†to be found in this sci-fi classic. Instead the film crackles with reasonable, thoughtful, snappy dialogue
and thinly-disguised homilies on the subject of cold war insanities.
It’s interesting that the film’s attention relies not on
the cataclysmic events accidentally wrought by the United States and the Soviet
Union. It dwells almost entirely on the
fallout of such a disaster. In brief,
the Soviets and the Americans have conducted – unbeknownst to one another - almost
simultaneous thermo-nuclear tests at the Earth’s poles in Siberia and
Antarctica, respectively. The resulting
explosions are described by one journalist at London’s Daily Express newspaper as “the biggest jolt the earth has
sustained since the ice age.†One result
of these simultaneous explosions is a seismological shift, one that unleashes a
succession of worldwide environmental disasters.
Things quickly go from bad to worse. Sunspots are initially blamed for causing all
sorts of electrical interference in aero and navigational systems. This is soon
followed by an unexplained early solar eclipse appearing in the sky above, and
suddenly countries of the world are fighting off such ravaging natural
disasters as tsunamis, floods, fires, and droughts. Temperatures reach as high as one hundred and
forty-five degrees Fahrenheit in Texas and Mexico. In London, where most of this story plays out,
a pea-soup thick mist rises from the Channel and blankets the city with a blinding
fog reaching four stories high.
The story primarily unfolds - and twists - in the offices
of London’s Daily Express newspaper
where coverage is assigned to reporter Peter Stenning (Edward Judd). Stenning, on one level, is the usual cynical,
jaded and hard-drinking journalist. He
has been made so as the result of a failed marriage and an estranged
relationship with his own son, whom he adores. He is soon smitten by pool secretary Jeannie (Janet Munro) and the two squabble
as they try to get beyond the official and feeble government responses
regarding the crisis. Something more
dramatic and threatening is going on, and the reporter is determined to cobble
together the story of what is actually happening. Both Judd and Munro are wonderful in their
respective roles, as is Leo McKern’s “Bill Maguire,†a veteran reporter who
remains Stenning’s one true friend throughout. The lovely Munro, who had only graduated from dopey, dream-teen roles in
a trio of mid-1950s Disney productions to being menaced by The Trollenberg Terror (aka The
Crawling Eye), is finally given a role with some gravitas. It’s one she handles skillfully, imbuing her
character with professional nuance.
The screenplay pulls no punches, practically ensuring
that unless a lasting détente between the two superpowers is worked out, a
nuclear crisis will surely occur the future. Things actually get more desperate as the film spools on, the reporters
learning that the duo nuclear-blast has caused a nutation – that is, a warbling of the earth’s poles. The earth’s
axis has shifted a full eleven degrees – and this has caused the planet to
hurtle into a doomsday trajectory towards the sun. Scientists estimate that the planet has four
months to survive until everything and everyone on earth faces
incineration. (Interestingly, this
premise of the earth hurtling disastrously toward the sun was simultaneously featured
in Rod Serling’s teleplay “The Midnight Sun,†an episode of The Twilight Zone, broadcast November
1961).
As The Day the
Earth Caught Fire is as much a “disaster†flick as a science-fiction film, the
production expenses to lens such catastrophes would have ballooned the budget to
an unmanageable level. Guest wisely saves
on the production budget by relying almost entirely on actual newsreel footage
to document the onslaught of such natural disasters. Such newsreel realism contrasts somewhat with
the film’s opening sequences, the frames artificially tinted in yellow to
suggest the presence of the searing heat beating down upon London. Though Guest must rely on an unconvincing
matte painting of a dry river bed that was once the mighty Thames, Harry
Waxman’s photography of the eerily deserted thoroughfares surrounding Piccadilly
Circus and Fleet Street more than make up for this image.
In 2020, the threat of nuclear annihilation is not as prevalent
on one’s mind as it once had been during the unfortunate chessboard that was
the cold war era. That doesn’t mean
Guest’s film is not as relevant today. His
film documents the sad - and not unexpected - doomsday mentalities of those who
plan on irresponsibly partying and acting uncivilly to their own demise. In this age of Covid-19 and the viruses exposing
of the existence of a legion of scientific naysayers, it’s easy to understand
the mournful observation of one Daily
Express reporter in the film who sighs, “People don’t care about the news
until it becomes personal.â€
This Kino Lorber Studio Classics Blu-ray of The Day the Earth Caught Fire is
presented here in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio and 1920x1080p with a monaural DTS
sound and removable English sub-titles. The set also includes a generous set of bonus features which includes
not one but two separate audio commentaries: one by the film’s original
Co-Writer/Producer/Director Val Guest, the second by film historian Richard
Harland Smith. The set also features no
fewer than four original television spots and four radio spots originally used
in promotion as well as the film’s theatrical trailer. Additional trailers include those for The Quatermass Xperiment and The Earth Dies
Screaming.
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