The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Patricia Neal originated the archetype of “Sci-fi Mom”– a single mother who discovers her son is spending too much time with an alien….
After 3o years, Sci-fi Mom had became iconic in Steven Speilberg’s ET the Extraterrestrial, in the retro animated Iron Giant, and also in Spielberg’s other sci-fi masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind….
What’s the pattern here? Are fatherless boys more likely to attract aliens because they seek a father in every stranger…? Perhaps over-mothering has left the boys gullible, susceptible to the influence of dominating spacemen…. Maybe it’s just because— if left unsupervised — boys will get into all kinds of trouble…. It’s a dangerous world. What’s a single mom to do!
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 panicked 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 robot 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 war spreads to other worlds, the Gorts will destroy you.
The science is generally naive or ridiculous: although parked in the nation’s capital, the flying saucer is guarded by two solders and a wooden fence. The Gort, which had previously melted a tank with his eye-ray, is shellacked in plastic which doesn’t hold him. A meeting of benign and universally selfless scientists is called to disseminate the alien message, meanwhile a trigger-happy military shoots unarmed Klaatu not once but twice — 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 lighting and camera-work, and an ethereal theremin soundtrack by Bernhard Herrmann add gravity to what otherwise might have been a forgetable B-movie.
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 milked, and unsuccessful phone calls to complain about the power outage. Ohh, the horrors…. Today they would just shut down our cell service and the internet, we would crumble without a fight.
There are 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, and the saucer’s interior: a sophisticated executive office of louvered glass and mood-lighting that encloses the ubiquitous Lucite™ bubble control panels in an uncluttered rotunda.
But the star attraction is Patricia Neal as the single mother with hard choices and few options. Six years after the war, how many widows were in a similar position, living at a shared boarding house and supporting a family alone? She works in an office, but with the return of solders women were expected to get married and give up their jobs. 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 pressures her to get married to boost his options for a raise…. People talk at her, not to her. When the alien Mr Carpenter is more sensitive, it’s easy to see why she responds.
I actually started writing about the films I liked because a male reviewer on IMDB completely omited Niel’s character, as if she wasn’t even in the script. He had erased her entirely. Ignored her, like she‘d never been there. An invisible woman.
I decided that if someone could actively write out the main character because she is female, then I needed to be publishing my own reviews…. Separately, the homage-to-Speilberg Super8 managed to omit scifi mom too. The film that claimed to be inspired by Speilberg, with a half dozen children encountering an alien, took place in a parallel no-mom universe. Just dads. How does that even happen?
But in a 1950s 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 character we follow, the one character with a sympathetic connection to the alien. This underestimated woman who helps Klaatu escape, witnesses his resurrection, and confronts the Gort, is completely beneath the authorities’ radar. After cradling the dying Klaatu in the street, she simply walks away as the military presses in. An invisible woman.
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 may be idealistic war-fatigue propaganda, but Neal always seems to be playing several levels at once, carefully navigating her own emotions while cautiously speaking to others only in polite protocol. She’s convincing as a mother. She is moral, strong, and intelligent in a genre that too often dismisses women as hysterical decor, if not omiting them altogether. Overcoming her panic as Gort is about to fry the planet, she alone is able to recite the alien words that reprogram the robot. Sci-fi Mom saves the planet.
