The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest, 1961)

Edward Judd in The Day the Earth Caught Fire

Cast: Edward Judd, Janet Munro, Leo McKern, Michael Goodliffe, Bernard Braden, Reginald Beckwith, Gene Anderson, Renée Asherson, Arthur Christiansen. Screenplay: Wolf Mankowitz, Val Guest. Cinematography: Harry Waxman. Art direction: Anthony Masters. Film editing: Bill Lenny. Music: Stanley Black. 

Screenwriters Wolf Mankowitz and Val Guest (who also directed) find a way to send a message in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, whose message is all about nuclear disarmament. They let the newspapers (remember them?) do it. Much of the movie was actually filmed in the old Daily Express building on Fleet Street in London, and the real editor of the Express, Arthur Christiansen, played the fictional editor in the film. The result is that a lot of the exposition is carried by the actors playing the reporters for the newspaper as they try to figure out what the hell is going on with the planet. It seems it was knocked off its axis by two simultaneous nuclear test explosions at the poles, one by the United States, the other by the Soviet Union. The immediate result is disastrous climate change, but the greater threat comes when scientists realize that the Earth's orbit has changed so that the planet is reeling closer to a fiery death by crashing into the sun. The message is not only about nuclear testing but also about the way the authorities keep secrets that they think the public is not ready to know. The protagonist, Peter Stenning (Edward Judd), is a hard-drinking newspaper columnist who uses some unethical methods to disclose the coverup. There's a romantic subplot, of course, involving Stenning's liaison with Jeannie Craig (Janet Munro), a pretty clerk in one of the government offices. And much of the swift, quippy dialogue is between Stenning and his editor, Bill Maguire (Leo McKern). These players make the most of their stereotypical characters, keeping the film lively as the tension builds over whether the world is really catching fire, and whether the proposed fix for the crisis -- a tremendous blast of nukes in Siberia to right the planet on its axis -- is going to work. The movie feels less dated than it once did, because the scenes of climate disaster evoke our current concerns about the Earth and the fear that governments are too secretive and inept to save us. It's a well-made movie whose budgetary inadequacies show but are mostly overcome by the use of camera tricks and stock news footage. The ending is ambiguous, though tilted in the direction of hope by the sound of church bells, which are said to have been introduced by the American distributor, Universal, which wanted a less somber ending.