Continuing my trend of confusing films I've not seen with films I've seen, I'm bringing you this time the 1961 British film The Day The Earth Caught Fire. What did I confuse this with? Two staples of Saturday Afternoon, Crack in the World (1965), and possibly Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). All of these films are Science Fiction\Disaster fare, but the most dramatic treatment of it, and the most ambiguous in its outcome is The Day The Earth Caught Fire.
The opening of the film is stark and eye-catching. Done with an orange filter, a sweaty and exhausted looking Edward Judd staggers through an abandoned looking London to a newspaper office where he phones an equally tired and sweaty Janet Munro and they talk briefly about a countdown. The orange tinted and empty newsroom dissolves to a much cooler looking and traditional black and white footage of the same newsroom, now crowded and busy, as the flashback begins and the story unfolds as to what has happened.
This is a slow burn, and that's not a bad thing at all. Its something of a character study. We meet our main characters; Edward Judd plays burned out newspaper reporter Peter Stenning, Janet Munro plays a temporary office worker and typist in the British Met Office (the Office of Meteorology) Jeannie Craig, and the late great Leo McKern as gruff science reporter Bill Maguire. What follows is a slow, but increasingly tense and desperate story... reports come in that the United States and the Soviet Union, in aggressive shows of one upsmanship, have simultaneously detonated nuclear tests at opposite poles. This is wearily shrugged off by the reporters as 'just another thing' and they go on with their lives. Stenning is divorced, and the breakup of his marriage has led him to drinking too much and being given fewer and less important assignments... sending his career into a downward spiral. He struggles to maintain at the very least, a good relationship with his 7 year old son. Over the next few days or weeks, odd weather patterns start to emerge globally, and Bill Maguire starts to suspect something has altered the climate and thinks it may have been the nuclear tests... and he asks Stenning to gather some information for him at the Met Office where he meets Jeannie Craig... they trade a few insults, but are attracted to one another anyway. As conditions worsen, and the temperatures steadily rise, it is discovered that something far worse that climate change has occurred... the Earth itself has been knocked out of its orbit, and is slowly moving toward the Sun.
We see the gradual unravelling of society, as first weather conditions make everyday life difficult, and then more serious things begin happening, including riots, looting, bandits, criminal activity, and disease ramps up. Having just come through the pandemic (which is still going on), its a bit curious to see that the people in the film had a great deal more patience before fraying and fighting back against the public health and safety measures than what has happened in real life. I suspect it was in part due to the nearness in time of WWII and the fact that people still remembered the sacrifices they had to make during that time in order to keep themselves and their neighbors and their country safe.
It DOES however touch on Government Cover-ups, and it is a plot point that the governments of the world DID try to conceal how serious the situation really was, and it is left to the Press to reveal the truth of it. There are no cries of 'Fake News' here... this is the old days, the golden era of the press as fighting to get the true facts out to the people and let the people take it from there. The press here is shown as heroic champions of the people. That would be considered rather innocent and naive these days I'm afraid, but I for one believe that's what the press ought to be. Its aspirational, I suppose.
But while all this is going on, there is genuine human drama going on as well. The complexities of human relationships are on full display here. Stenning's self-destructive tendencies are stemmed as he and Jeannie grown closer... and their relationship is strained when he uses information she provides in confidence to break a big story. Stenning's devotion to his son is put to the test as the situation becomes more dire, and he has to make decisions to protect the boy which hurt him personally, by sending him out of the city to someplace 'safe' with the boy's mother and stepfather, with no guarantee of ever seeing him again. And, he discovers what it means to him to be a reporter again, and tries to rebuild his shattered reputation.
Edward Judd is excellent here. He has a lot of emotional baggage he has to bring to the character, and he has to balance the character's negative personality traits carefully with the positive ones. He can't make you hate him entirely, or you wouldn't be invested in his story. But, he 's also not a saint either, and his struggle between those poles of his character are fascinating to watch. He reminded me a bit of Richard Burton in this role. Charismatic, but also, deeply flawed. He doesn't abruptly change his personality... you SEE him make every decision to change, for better or worse.
Janet Munro only has a handful of credits, but what credits they are. In addition to this film, she also played Anne Pilgrim in The Crawling Eye (1958) (also known as The Trollenberg Terror) and Katie O'Gill in Darby O'Gill and the Little People (1959) among other things. Here she has some remarkably risque scenes for 1961... in one instance, walking around completely topless and wet, with only a loose towel draped around her neck to cover her breasts for an entire scene. I'm not sure I've ever seen something that explicit in a film this old. The sexual tension between her and Edward Judd in the scene that follows is something to behold. She is more or less the moral center of the film, and also to victim of some of the only violence in it, which is hard to watch, even though it is not explicit at all.
And what do we NEED to say about Leo McKern other than he is as amazing as he ever is? For those who don't know off the bat who he is, I will direct you to his multiple appearances in The Prisoner (1967) in which he played the mysterious Number 2 on several occasions, and most memorably in the last couple episodes, as well as brilliant but curmudgeonly barrister Horace Rumpole in the Rumpole of the Bailey series, his turn as Thomas Cromwell in A Man For All Seasons (1966) and of course Father Imperious in LadyHawke (1985). While the character of Jeannie Craig may be the moral center of the film, Bill Maguire is the heart. He's the gruff, veteran newspaperman with a heart of gold... self deprecating but driven by the truth, and while he's willing to support Stenning, he can't abide self pity or self-destruction, and gently encourages (and later almost orders) Stenning to continue his relationship with Jeannie when he sees that she's a good influence on the other man. While he talks like a cynic, and says its not his problem when the girl gets arrested for leaking information to Stenning, its all talk (possibly talk to get Stenning to do something about it himelf), and when push comes to shoves its HE who goes and gets her and gives her a new job at the newspaper. I really expected something bad to happen to him, as that seems to be the fate of mentor figures in films of this era. However, he remains until the bitter end.
And its quite the ending.
Stenning is waiting in the newspaper offices for the official announcements from the world governments as to the success or failure of their plans to push the Earth back into its orbit with more nuclear detonations. The two printing presses are set, each with its own headline, depending on what the outcome is: Plan Succeeds, Earth Saved, or Plan Fails, Earth Doomed. We never find out which runs.
The imagery is quite something in this. We see London and Brighton slowly drying out, bleaching out, and falling apart as the heat increases. One particularly striking image was of the Thames river dried to a mere trickle of water through a parched and cracked set of mud flats... a single tiny police boat barely managing to navigate it. Or earlier, when a dense, low-hanging mist rolls in and closes down much of Brighton, so low-hanging that you can see above it if you are on the second level of a double-decker bus, but impenetrable below that.
And again, we return to the pandemic and the fears that brings. At one point it is discovered that black-market obtained water may be contaminated with Typhus, and even one of the newroom figures collapses from the disease. And in the next scene we are shown a huge group of nihilistic young people, partying and rioting, and splashing water all over themselves and other people, and you cannot help put wonder if that water is some of the disease contaminated water we just heard about, and wonder how many of those people are doing to die because of it. I was reminded of the filled beaches and public venues during the early Covid era, when so many people refused to wear masks.
This is not an entirely easy film to watch. It asks some tough questions, and really its almost more about what kind of person you are in a crisis than about a science fiction disaster. I was trying to think of more recent films that might have similar themes, but there aren't any that leap to mind. There are disaster movies aplenty, as well as many science fiction and horror movies that have a similar apocalyptic arc to them... but they seem to fail to examine the way people react to it. The closest may be something like various Zombie Apocalypse films, or a TV Show like The Walking Dead, which, unfortunately but maybe realistically, don't so much depict people rising to become better people in a crisis, but watching them abandon the trappings of civilization and become something feral in order to survive in a feral world. That's a cynical take on it... unfortunately, watching the behavior of people during the pandemic, and the post-2020 election, I despair of anyone attempting to remain moral and ethical in an apocalypse.
