The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1962)

Key to the success of The Day the Earth Caught Fire are the exceptionally good central performances. The under-rated Edward Judd is outstanding as the embittered Stenning, moving effortlessly between the steely, hard-drinking journo and a more vulnerable persona, best seen in the affecting scene when he briefly meets his estranged wife and her new lover after a day out with his young son. What makes Judd's performance all the more impressive is that, in the first half of the film at least, Stenning is a seemingly irredeemable bastard and first class loser - his drinking leads to him fouling up at work (he only keeps his job because of a caring colleague who keeps bailing him out); he treats Jeannie, his love interest, abysmally, betraying her trust for the sake of a story; and he's just generally rude and abusive to almost everyone he meets. It's his transformation and eventual redemption (he gives up the booze, shapes up at work and finally admits his true feelings for Jeannie) that ultimately makes him such an appealing and interesting character.

Janet Munro makes for a refreshingly different kind of SF heroine. She's smart, sexy and very much her own woman, a far cry from the dim, sexually conservative scientists' daughters who appeared in most contemporary genre films just to scream, ask stupid questions to keep audiences up to speed and be rescued from the monster / alien by a hero who has fallen in passionless love with her. Much of the fun of her early scenes lies in her refusal to be intimidated by the predatory Stenning, matching him quip for quip as he crudely tries to seduce her. The later abuse of her trust by Stenning is the catalyst for his eventual redemption and the erotically charged scene where she and Stenning, both scantily clad, flirt through a closed door in her apartment is the turning point for the world-weary journo, the moment he realises that there is, perhaps, a better life than the one he's been blurrily peering at through the bottom of his pint glass.

Jeannie is very much a woman of the early 1960s, very different to Stenning's briefly glimpsed wife, who seems positively dowdy, unassertive and unstimulating by comparison. Jeannie falls into the stereotypical SF heroine role only once, when she has to be rescued by Stenning from a gang of marauding beatniks (whose 'perversions' seem to run mainly to forcing people to have a bath!), but for the most part she's a welcome change of pace for such things. Munro plays the part to perfection, carefully balancing Jeannie's toughness in the early scenes, with her later momentary lapses into uncertainty and self-doubt.

Leo McKern is, as you'd expect, superb as Bill Maguire, Stenning's confidante, saviour (he files stories under Stenning's by-line to save his job) and surrogate father-figure. The cynical but likeable Maguire is what Stenning is on his way to becoming at the end of the film, assuming that the world survives of course. One senses that at some time in the past, Maguire had been very much like Stenning (which explains his almost fatherly interest in his much younger protégée) and that, in the wake of his own redemption, he's been rehabilitated and reformed back into mainstream society.

Some critics were suspicious of this apparently conservative streak that permeates The Day the Earth Caught Fire, though as most of these seemed to be working for left-wing newspapers whose right-wing rival, the Daily Express, features so prominently in the film, perhaps we should be suspicious of their suspicions. they saw Stenning's redemption (and Maguire's implied social rehabilitation) as indicative of the film's adherence to mainstream right-wing values. The rebellious and provocative Stenning is quickly 'tamed', knocked back into line and his redemption is another victory for conservatism.

But one of the many beauties of The Day the Earth Caught Fire is that its intellectual complexities give rise to multiple, often conflicting, interpretations and while the left-wing press were dubious about the film's perceived conservatism, the political right were concerned with what they saw as a pro-disarmament message running throughout the film. The timing of the film's release made it particularly sensitive to some - its UK release came hot on the heels of the arrest of several key members of anti-Bomb pressure groups and, as has already been noted, nuclear testing had been resumed. With the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament making in-roads into the mainstream political arena and with the Cuban missile crisis just a year away, these were politically volatile times and no matter how much the production team might have pleaded impartiality, it was inevitable that the film would be used as a political football by all colours of the political spectrum.

But then surely that's the measure of the film - it rattled cages, got people thinking seriously about the unthinkable. And it retains some of its power even now - though the nuclear threat may have diminished (though it's not been eliminated entirely of course) it has been replaced in the global psyche by the threat of ecological disaster. Scenes of London roasting to death in tropical heat spring worryingly to mind whenever the subject of global warning is broached.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire remains the best example of British big screen science fiction, a beautifully crafted, deeply intelligent film that more than holds its own against the better known and more widely seen Hollywood films of the day. It's immediate influence was evident in the series of black and white SF thrillers that proliferated throughout the early and mid 60s and there's been occasional murmurings about a remake ever since. It doesn't need a remake of course - it would be difficult indeed to improve upon a film as challenging and satisfying as The Day the Earth Caught Fire.
KEVIN LYONS

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Last Updated: 1 January, 2009