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.

Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (Ernst Lubitsch, 1938)

David Niven, Gary Cooper, and Claudette Colbert in Bluebeard's Eighth Wife

Nicole De Loiselle: Claudette Colbert
Michael Brandon: Gary Cooper
The Marquis De Loiselle: Edward Everett Horton
Albert De Regnier: David Niven
Aunt Hedwige: Elizabeth Patterson
M. Pepinard: Herman Bing
Kid Mulligan: Warren Hymer
Assistant Hotel Manager: Franklin Pangborn

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder
Based on a play by Alfred Savoir and its English adaptation by Charlton Andrews
Cinematography: Leo Tover
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Usher
Film editing: William Shea
Music: Werner R. Heymann, Friedrich Hollaender

Almost anything goes in screwball comedy, but why does Bluebeard's Eighth Wife feel just a tad off the mark? It has everything going for it: director, screenwriters, stars and supporting cast. But something seems to be missing. There are those who think Gary Cooper is miscast, but Cooper pulled off similar roles -- lovable eccentrics like Longfellow Deeds in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936) and Bertram Potts in Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) -- and director Ernst Lubitsch had established Cooper's gift for sophisticated comedy in Design for Living (1933). There is a certain lack of spark between Cooper and his costar, Claudette Colbert, but that's partly because their characters are not supposed to spark but rather flare. I think the fault lies mainly in the script, which springs Michael Brandon's many previous marriages on us as a surprise and never makes us feel that they're integral to his character. I suspect that the Production Code, which was administered with a heavy hand by Catholic laymen like Joseph I. Breen, blue-penciled so much of the humor surrounding Brandon's divorces that they no longer get the attention they deserve. Still, Cooper and Colbert et al. are fun to watch, and it may be that they are so much more fun to watch in other movies that Bluebeard's Eighth Wife simply suffers by comparison.

The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)

With 12 Oscar nominations and three wins for directing, William Wyler holds a firm place in the history of American movies. But not without some grumbling on the part of auteur critics like Andrew Sarris, who observed, "Wyler's career is a cipher as far as personal direction is concerned." His movies were invariably polished and professionally made, but if what you're looking for is some hint of personality behind the camera, the kind that Hitchcock or Hawks or Ford displayed no matter what the subject matter of the film, then Wyler is an enigma. His most personal film, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), grew out of his wartime experiences, but they are subsumed in the stories he has to tell and not revealed with any assertively personal point of view on them. And anyone who can trace a Wylerian personality latent in movies as varied as Mrs. Miniver (1942), Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), and Funny Girl (1968) has a subtler analytical mind than mine. What they have in common is that they are well made, the work of a fine craftsman if not an artist. The other thing they have in common is that they won Oscars for their stars: Greer Garson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlton Heston, and Barbra Streisand, respectively. The Heiress, too, won an Oscar for its star, Olivia de Havilland, suggesting that in Wyler we have a director whose virtue lay not in his personal vision but in his skill at packaging, at arranging a showcase not just for performers -- he also directed Oscar-winning performances by Bette Davis in Jezebel (1938) and by Fredric March and Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives -- but also for production designers, costume designers, composers, and cinematographers: Oscars for The Heiress went to John Meehan, Harry Horner, and Emile Kuri for art direction and set decoration, to Edith Head and Gile Steele for costumes, and to Aaron Copland for the score, and Leo Tover was nominated for his cinematography. Wyler lost the directing Oscar to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives, but is there any doubt that The Heiress would have been a lesser film than it is without Wyler's guidance? All of this is a long-winded way to say that although I honor, and in many ways prefer, the personal vision that shines through in the works of directors like Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, et al., there is room in my pantheon for the skilled if impersonal professional. As for The Heiress itself, it's a satisfying film with two great performances (de Havilland's Catherine and Ralph Richardson's Dr. Sloper), one hugely entertaining one (Miriam Hopkins's Lavinia Penniman), and one sad miscasting: Montgomery Clift's Morris Townsend. It's a hard role to put across: Morris has to be plausible enough to persuade not only Catherine but also the somewhat more worldly Lavinia that he is genuinely in love with Catherine and not just her money, but he also needs to give the audience a whiff of the cad. Clift's Morris is too callow, too grinningly eager. There is no ambiguity in the performance. If we like Morris too much, we risk seeing Dr. Sloper more as an over-stern paterfamilias and less as the cruelly self-absorbed man he is. Richardson's fine performance goes a long way to righting this imbalance, but he's fighting Clift's sex appeal all the way.