The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)

The early 1960s were golden years for British big screen SF. Although there were still monstrosities like the delirious Konga (1960), the bizarre Gorgo (1961) and the eminently forgettable What a Whopper! (1961) and Paradisio (1962) to contend with, there was nevertheless a slow but encouraging move towards an identifiably British strain of gritty, realistic SF that would flourish briefly in the 60s in response to a range of key social concerns.

As the 1950s came to an end, they gave birth that peculiar and frequently exasperating demographic, the teenager, whose wayward, American-influenced excesses caused much concern for mainstream British middle-class society, a concern expressed in films like Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned (1960), Joseph Losey's excellent The Damned (1961) and Anton M. Leader's Children of the Damned (1963) in which our children were alien, uncontrollable, dangerous. The erosion of national confidence and identity in the wake of Suez found expression in films like It Happened Here (1963) (a remarkable pseudo-documentary documenting a Nazi invasion of the UK during World War II), Lord of the Flies (1963) (in which the nation's youth, its future, deprived of its cultural roots and social context, reverts to savagery) and the early James Bond films, which suggested that despite the humiliation of Suez and the gradual weakening of the country's grip on its fading empire, Britain was still a major player in international affairs.

And then, of course, there was the big one, the fear that dominated the lives of just about everyone in those turbulent days, the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation. The power of the Bomb had been explored thoroughly, if sometimes obtusely, in American cinema for some time, albeit metaphorically in most cases. British SF was late in addressing fear of the Bomb - radiation had featured mainly in comedies like Mr. Drake's Duck (1950) or in trashy but fun B-movies like The Gamma People (1956), Fiend Without a Face (1957) and Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959). The Day the Earth Caught Fire was the first serious attempt by British cinema to confront the fears raised by nuclear weapons and its timing couldn't have been better - less than a year after its release, with the film still fresh in the minds of many who saw it, the world lurched into the Cuban missile crisis and suddenly no-one was wanting jokey trash films about nuclear weapons any more.

Ironically, Val Guest had written The Day the Earth Caught Fire eight years previously, before he'd made The Quatermass Experiment (1955) for Hammer, but found its politically charged  narrative difficult to pitch to a traditionally conservative industry. But Guest had just been a bit ahead of his time and, as the success of serious minded if rather ponderous American Bomb movies like The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) and On the Beach (1960) had proved that audiences were ready for a more mature and considered approach to the subject. The fact that 1961, when The Day the Earth Caught Fire was preparing to go into production, also saw the USA and USSR resuming nuclear testing after a two year moratorium leant the film an added urgency.

Gust had been working towards a directorial style that drew heavily on documentary, giving his films a cinema verité style realism in line with the 'kitchen-sink' dramas of the time. He'd already tested out his style in an SF milieu with the remarkable The Quatermass Experiment and it's even more impressive sequel, Quatermass 2 (1957), but it reached its zenith in The Day the Earth Caught Fire. The film's subject matter and Guest's desire to film it straight demanded the hard-edged verisimilitude that he'd brought to the excellent crime thriller Hell is a City (1960) and which would later inform many of the better British SF films of the decade - Unearthly Stranger (1963), The Night Caller (1965), Invasion (1966), Privilege (1967).

In The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Guest uses the technique to bring to life the journalistic milieu in which much of the film is set and to give a terrifying edge to the destruction wreaked on London by climactic changes as a result of nuclear testing pitching the earth off its axis. Although some of the newly shot special effects scenes are primitive and tend to disrupt the sense of realism (the fog that rises from the Thames is particularly poor, though a number of matte paintings of a near-deserted London are eerily effective), the use of stock footage of real natural disasters was a stroke of genius born of poverty that greatly heightens the documentary-like approach.

Also contributing greatly to this sense of "you-are-there" realism is the superb  script, with its quirky characters and sharp dialogue. The lean narrative has a sense of urgency to it that was almost entirely lacking in most contemporary British SF. Framing the film in flashback certainly helped - the creepy and enigmatic opening shots, of journalist hero Pete Stenning wandering the eerily deserted London  streets, sets up a tension that is never really resolved even at the climax. The final scenes, as the Daily Express presses prepare to print the latest edition with one of two headlines (World Saved or World Doomed) ready to go in response to a last ditch effort to reverse the damage, allowing for no easy resolution to the drama. Audiences filed out of theatres unsure of just what future Stenning faces - if any - as he disappears from the final shot.

The ending of the film has caused some controversy, even among those who profess to championing the film. Some see it as too bleak, too inconclusive to be truly satisfying. Conversely, there are those who read the ending as essentially optimistic - in his essay on the film in British Science Fiction Cinema (1999), which he also edited, I.Q. Hunter suggests that the very last image, a slow pan up to the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, is "sentimental, affirmative and audience-pleasing... (it) harks back to Britain's survival of earlier threats to national integrity." In truth, it's simply the only ending the film could have had - a happy ending (World Saved) would have betrayed the carefully crafted approximation of documentary that had accumulated throughout the film, while a definitively bleak one (World Doomed( would have been too much for contemporary audiences to endure.

Hunter is probably write when he reads the ending as essentially optimistic. While the larger issues (the future of Mankind) remain tantalisingly unresolved, the smaller scale, more intimate dramas are  brought to satisfyingly upbeat conclusions. The film's narrative is carried by Pete Stenning, a bitter, almost washed up journalist whose veneer of laddish cynicism and sharp-tongued misanthropy is maintained by a steady diet of alcohol and self-loathing. By the end, even with total obliteration  staring him in the face, he finds redemption in his awkward relationship with pool secretary Jeannie. Even with catastrophe looming, ailing British society can still rehabilitate is wayward sons which is certainly in keeping with Hunter's reading of the climax.

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Last Updated: 1 January, 2009