The anti-war theme of the screenplay appealed to Wise, and he believed in intelligences beyond Earth. Harry Bates’ original story was first published in Astounding Science-Fiction, as the pulp magazine was titled in 1940. North, later one of the screenwriters on Patton. Wise immediately liked the screenplay for The Day the Earth Stood Still when it was submitted to him by Edmund H. ![]() It was, perhaps she thought, just one of those space-themed flicks born of the 1950’s, with threats from mutant insects and crustaceans, nuclear radiation, robots gone amok and space aliens.ĭirector Robert Wise was the film editor on Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons and had to his credit since 1942 a number of wide-ranging directorial efforts: horror ( The Body Snatcher, The Curse of the Cat People, with Gunther von Fritsch), film noir ( Born to Kill, The House on Telegraph Hill), Westerns ( Two Flags West) and straight drama ( Three Secrets), though a first comedy, never a favorite genre, would be postponed until Something for the Birds in 1952. Patricia Neal, the film’s tentative romantic lead, with a dubious choice between her current beau, an essentially selfish, unpleasant man, and one who is, let’s say, “unattainable,” remarked during filming that she had no idea the movie would become such a hit, have such a cult following or become one of the best science fiction films of all time. A representative from a planet that is never identified-only “250 million of your miles away”-arrives in a flying saucer to give the leaders of Earth an ultimatum: “It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder.” ”īut in a movie anything can happen-and in a movie this dream of a war-free world can come true, or offer that possibility, for The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is an open-ended film. The Bible warns that war will always be with us: “Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. Wells wrote, “war will end us.” The much earlier British writer Jonathan Swift penned, “War!-that mad game the world so loves to play.” An American, one Mark Twain, wrote, “Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War.” Debate, deplore, discourage-it’s all useless: war, like greed and jealousy, is the nature of the beast. War is always with us, it seems, despite the horrors of its continuance, how little it accomplishes and that one war usually results in another. My people have learned to live without it.” - Klaatu (Michael Rennie) 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.“I’m impatient with stupidity. 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. 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. Carpenter" (one of the film's many parallels between Klaatu and Christ). Klaatu escapes, taking refuge in a boarding house, where he poses as one "Mr. ![]() 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. ![]() 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. 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. All of Washington, D.C., is thrown into a panic when an extraterrestrial spacecraft lands near the White House.
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