Director Robert Wise (Odds Against Tomorrow, Want to Live!, The Setup, Born To Kill).
Written by Edmund H. North based on a story by Harry Bates. Cinematography by Leo Tover (I Walk Alone, The Woman on the Beach, Dead Reckoning), Music by the great Bernard Herrmann.
Michael Rennie (Dangerous Crossing) as Klaatu, Patricia Neal (A Face in the Crowd, Hud) as Helen Benson, Hugh Marlowe (Rawhide, Night and the City) as Tom Stevens, Sam Jaffe (The Asphalt Jungle) as Professor Jacob Barnhardt, Billy Gray as Bobby Benson, Frances Bavier as Mrs. Barley, and Lock Martin as Gort
Supernatural, Sci-Fi and Fantasy based Noir have been around since the beginning of the Classic Film Noir Era. Decoy (1946) had a Sci-Fi storyline of an executed convict being brought back to life, ditto for The Indestructible Man (1956). Other films like Cat People (1942), The Leopard Man (1943) I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Alias Nick Beal (1949), Repeat Performance (1947), The Amazing Mr. X (1948), Fear in the Night (1947), The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), Nightmare (1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Thing from Another World, and this film all covered roughly the same Supernatural, Sci-Fi and Fantasy territory, there are probably a few more that have been forgotten. The Twilight Zone TV series (1959–1964) beautifully explored these various Noir tangents in some of its stylistically Noir episodes. Transitional and then Neo Noir films continued it to the present.
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| Michael Rennie as Klaatu |
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| Patricia Neal as Helen Benson |
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| Hugh Marlowe as Tom Stevens |
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The Story
An interplanetary space ship in the form of a saucer buzzes Earth and touches down eventually in a ball field in Washington D.C.
Opening Montage
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The army is mobilized and the extraterrestrial ship is surrounded by tanks, artillery and armed soldiers. A guarded enclosure is demarcated to keep the curious away.
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The ship looks like a flattened bell which showed no visible joints until suddenly it materializes a ramp to the grass of the ball field. The upper part of the bell splits open and a metallic man (named Gort) emerges and stands on the rim by the opening. Behind him a more human like alien figure appears and walks down the ramp.
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The alien reaches into his tunic and pulls out a cylinder which he points at the soldiers and crowd. He presses a button and it sort of opens similar to the rods of an umbrella but with with crystalline ends. One of the soldiers takes the move as an aggressive action and shoots the alien in the shoulder and breaking the object the alien held.
The metallic man immediately opens a visor like mechanism on his head and a laser beam melts all the weapons to slag within range. The alien gives an order to the metallic man who closes the visor.
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| Klatuu laying wounded, Gort showing his power |
The officers that reach the alien see that he is just wounded. The alien explains to them that the object was a gift for their president that would have enabled him to "study life on other planets."
The soldiers call for an ambulance and the alien is taken to Walter Reed Army Hospital. The aliens name is Klaatu. He undergoes surgery and uses a special salve to completely heal the wound. Meanwhile back at the saucer, Gort stands as an unmovable sentinel unconcerned by the various machinations and experiments that military scientists use to test the space ship and Gort.
Klaatu tells Harley the president's secretary that he has a message that must be delivered to all the worlds leaders simultaneously. Harley tells him that that may be impossible with the current international problems.
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Klaatu escapes from Walter Reed and disappears into the population of Washington D.C. He ends up at a boarding house using the name Carpenter (it was written on a dry cleaning tag that was attached to the suit). He befriends a young widow Helen Benson and her son Bobby. Helen's current boyfriend Tom Stevens doesn't like it.
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| Klatuu is gone |
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| A dry cleaning ticket gives Klatuu a name to use |
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| Klatuu finds a place to hole up in |
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| Klatuu is on all the News programs |
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| Klatuu's entrance into Mrs. Barleys Rooming House |
Bobby and Klaatu bond, while Helen finds Klatuu strangely alluring.
Bobby takes Klaatu on a tour of the city. They visit Arlington Cemetery and Bobby shows him the grave of his father. Klaatu realizes that all the graves are of soldiers. They go to see the space ship. They then go and visit the Lincoln Memorial. Klaatu asks Bobby who is the greatest living person? Bobby suggests Professor Barnhardt (an Einstein like scientist).
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| Arlington Cemetery |
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Klaatu suggest that they visit him. They find no one home but Klaatu finds a French door open and studies the professor's blackboard which is full of equations. Klaatu checks off the right answers. and adds a solution equation of his own. About that time the professor's house keeper shows up and Klaatu gives her his contact information telling her that the professor will want to see him.
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When Professor Barnhardt finally meets Klaatu, and asks if he wrote that new equation tells him yes. When Barnhardt asks him if he thinks it would work Klaatu tells him it worked good enough to get him to Earth revealing that he is the alien. Klaatu asks Barnhardt what would get the attention of Earthlings and this leads to the "Day" of the title of the film.
Noirsville
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This is not only a Sci-Fi Noir it's also got a whiff of extraterrestrial romance, and of course it's a "message" movie about nuclear destruction. Not just a warning about self afflicted destruction but also about the concern by other intelligent life in the universe of the threat we pose to them in the future as we develop both space travel and nuclear energy.
A greater being, Klaatu, basically a god-like substitute, gives us "the word," shape up or get destroyed for the greater good of the universe. It implies there's some order out there. It's the Christ story, he comes to extend a peace offering and wants to instruct mankind about a fork in the road that is up ahead. He dies from our stupidity. You can't fix stupid.
The other view was brilliantly written about by Douglas Adams in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe, where the Earth is so insignificant in the totality of life in the universe that it is routinely destroyed to make room for a Hyper-Space Traffic By Pass. Nobody came to Earth to tell us, and a notice about it with an extended comment period was posted in Alpha Centauri, our areas seat of government. lol 8/10
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