The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

30 years before Steven Spielberg made E.T., Patricia Neal originated the archetype of a single mother who discovers her son is spending too much time with an alien. “Sci-fi Mom” can be found in the retro animated Iron Giant, and also in Spielberg’s classic masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What’s the pattern here? Are fatherless boys more likely to attract aliens because they look for a father in every stranger…? Perhaps over mothering has left the boys gullible and needy, susceptible to the influence of dominating spacemen…. Maybe it’s just because if left unsupervised, boys will get into all kinds of trouble…. Ugh, what’s a single mom to do!

Although an undisputed classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still is a product of its time. It was made in the paranoid Eisenhower-era of wise old scientists and panic-stricken mobs, when suddenly a messianic alien named Klaatu lands in Washington DC (the center of the universe in 1951) with his robot enforcer Gort. Klaatu (née Mr. Carpenter, née Jesus the Christ) delivers a message of universal peace — OR ELSE! He explains that the worlds he represents haven’t so much solved their differences as made violence illegal, enforced by a race of Gorts who will immediately destroy any aggressor. His peace message is actually a warning: Kill each other all you want here on Earth, but if your wars spread to other worlds the Gorts will get you.

The script is at times either naive or ridiculous: although parked in the nation’s capital, the flying saucer is guarded by only two solders and a wooden fence. The Gort which had previously melted a tank with his eye-ray is shellacked in a plastic cube which doesn’t hold him. A meeting of benign and selfless scientists is called to disseminate the alien message, but a trigger-happy military shoots unarmed Klaatu not only once but twice, finally killing him so Klaatu can be resurrected to more convincingly deliver his doomsday ultimatum: Earth will be judged by a higher authority….

The reason this early ’50s artifact is still praised is that it is barely sci-fi at all. Instead the film plays as a taught espionage thriller with long wordless sequences where Billy follows Klaatu to the spaceship, and later when Helen watches Gort bring Klaatu back to life. Solid directing by Robert Wise, noir-ish lighting and camera-work, and an ethereal theremin soundtrack by Bernhard Herrmann add gravity to what otherwise would have been a laughable display of alien power. When the Earth stands still, the result of selectively interrupting electricity for 30 minutes at noon (a noon that is apparently happening all around the Earth simultaneously as Moscow is frozen in midday as well…), we see a montage of soda fountain malts that can’t be blended, cows that can’t be machine-milked, and unsuccessful phone calls to complain about the power outage. Ohh, the horrors….

There are really only three sci-fi elements in the film but they are all good: Gort whose stoic silence and deathray make him cool despite being puffy foam and mitten-handed, the seamless flying saucer that dramatically splits down the center to open, and the saucer’s interior: a sophisticated executive office of louvered glass and mood-lighting that encloses the ubiquitous Lucite™ control panels in an uncluttered rotunda.

But the real attraction is Patricia Neal as the single mother with hard choices and few options. Six years after WW2 how many war widows were in the same position, living at a boarding house and supporting a family on their own? She works in an office, but with the return of solders women were expected to get married and give up their jobs to the men. Her personal life is subjected to gossip from the elder boarders whom she must rely on to help care for her son. She has an opportunistic fiancé who wants to get married quickly to boost his options for a raise….

In a story that combines menacing robots with Old Testament retribution, and pits evangelical scientists against a suspicious shoot-first military, it’s ironic that Sci-fi Mom is the only compelling character. This underestimated woman who helps an alien escape, witnesses his resurrection, and confronts Gort is completely under the authorities’ radar, and she is free to simply walk away after cradling the wounded and dying Klaatu.

Patricia Neal assumed the film would be forgotten, just another in a string of trashy flying saucer films of the day, but her performance raised it to an unexpected drama. The script maybe simplistic anti-war propaganda, but she always seems to be playing several levels at once, navigating her own emotions while carefully speaking only in polite protocol. She’s even convincing as a mother. She is moral, strong, and intelligent in a genre that often dismissed women as hysterical decor. Overcoming panic as Gort is about to fry the planet she is able to recite the alien words that reprogram the robot: Klaatu barada nikto!