On Moonlight Bay (Roy Del Ruth, 1951)

Doris Day and Gordon MacRae in On Moonlight Bay

Cast: Doris Day, Gordon MacRae, Billy Gray, Leon Ames, Rosemary DeCamp, Jack Smith, Mary Wickes, Ellen Corby, Sig Arno, Jeffrey Stevens, Eddie Marr, Henry East. Screenplay: Jack Rose, Melville Shavelson, based on stories by Booth Tarkington. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Douglas Bacon. Film editing: Thomas Reilly. Music: Max Steiner. 

Leon Ames must have felt right at home playing the paterfamilias of a Midwestern household in 1917 in the Warner Bros. musical On Moonlight Bay: It was the same role he had played in 1944, when he was the paterfamilias of a St. Louis household in 1904 in Vincente Minnelli's MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis. In both films he comes under fire for making the household move, upsetting his wife (Rosemary DeCamp in the former movie, Mary Astor in the latter), his daughter (Doris Day/Judy Garland), his bratty kid (Billy Gray/Margaret O'Brien), and even the family servant (Mary Wickes/Marjorie Main). In both films, the daughter falls in love with the boy next door (Gordon MacRae/Tom Drake). There's even a big scene set at Christmas in both movies. Granted, On Moonlight Bay suffers from comparison with Meet Me in St. Louis. For one thing, the songs in the latter are better, and Garland brings a note of heartbreak to the film that Day can't quite match. But the Warners movie gets a little life from a screenplay based on the Penrod stories by Booth Tarkington, a writer not much read anymore but who inspired two classic movies, Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935) and The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942). The stories, about the misadventures of an 11-year-old boy, clearly inspired On Moonlight Bay's subplot about Wesley Winfield (Gray), kid brother to Marjorie Winfield (Day). Wesley is a scamp who purloins one of Marjorie's letters to her boyfriend, William Sherman (MacRae), and tries to pass it off in English class as his own composition. He torments Hubert Wakely (Jack Smith), who tries to court Marjorie, and he even manages to convince his teacher, Miss Stevens (Ellen Corby), that the reason he falls asleep in class is that his father is a drunkard who abuses his mother and sister. Much of this stuff is clumsily directed, but it's an effective enough distraction from the rather routine romance of Marjorie and William and from the tepid musical numbers, set mostly to old parlor ballads and turn-of-the-century love songs like the one that gives the film its title. Day is in sweet voice as usual, but her role in the movie and the songs she's asked to sing don't give her much to do, and she doesn't really have much chemistry with MacRae. Nevertheless, On Moonlight Bay was popular enough that it inspired a sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon (David Butler, 1953), that reunited most of the cast. 

The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)

Lock Martin, Michael Rennie, and Patricia Neal in The Day the Earth Stood Still

Klaatu: Michael Rennie
Helen Benson: Patricia Neal
Tom Stevens: Hugh Marlowe
Prof. Jacob Barnhardt: Sam Jaffe
Bobby Benson: Billy Gray
Mrs. Barley: Frances Bavier
Gort: Lock Martin

Director: Robert Wise
Screenplay: Edmund H. North
Based on a story by Harry Bates
Cinematography: Leo Tover
Art direction: Addison Hehr, Lyle R. Wheeler
Film editing: William Reynolds
Music: Bernard Herrmann

It's a truism that the science-fiction movies of the 1950s are really about the Bomb, the nascent Cold War, communism, McCarthyism, and other social and political crises of the era. All of that is apparent in perhaps the most celebrated film of the genre -- though I prefer The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951) -- Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. It has the virtue of being a straightforward fable: A being from another world comes to Earth to warn us that our bellicosity threatens the existence of the planet itself. And naturally, the reaction to his arrival is one of hysteria. But what the film really seems to me to be about is the disappearance of religious faith, something it rather clumsily suggests by having the messenger take on Christlike attributes: i.e., he performs miracles, dies, and is resurrected. The movie seems to suggest that we need a community of belief to survive, and not the fractured dialectic that has taken the place of a universal creed. The denizens of the other planets who have sent Klaatu to warn Earth have decided that true peace depends on a community guarded by robot policemen, of which Gort is the film's representative. For those of us now contemplating the warnings that artificial intelligence could produce sentient machines capable of developing a simulacrum of life, self-maintenance and reproduction, and hence of evolving into beings that might dominate humanity, this vision of submission to squads of robocops is rather chilling. Still, though The Day the Earth Stood Still is rather naive in its trust in technology, it's a well-made and provocative film that shaped the consciousness of my own generation, even if all we took away from it was a magical phrase: Klaatu barada nikto.