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.

The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934)

Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress

Princess Sophia Frederica/Catherine II: Marlene Dietrich
Count Alexei: John Lodge
Grand Duke Peter: Sam Jaffe
Empress Elizabeth Petrovna: Louise Dresser
Prince August: C. Aubrey Smith
Capt. Grigori Orloff: Gavin Gordon
Sophia as a Child: Maria Riva

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Manuel Komroff, Eleanor McGeary
Based on a diary of Catherine II of Russia
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Film editing: Josef von Sternberg, Sam Winston
Music: W. Franke Harling, John Leipold

The Scarlet Empress may be the silliest movie ever made, and never sillier than when Marlene Dietrich, her hair done up all in curls, pretends to be innocent and naive by opening her eyes wide beneath her penciled-in eyebrows. Now mind you, I have nothing against silliness; some of of my favorite movies are silly, like Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), which may be the silliest great movie ever made. (Or the greatest silly movie, depending on which way you come at it.) So I love The Scarlet Empress, for all its outrageous camping-up of 18th-century Russia with cartoon icons and ubiquitous gargoyles -- the greatest of which is Sam Jaffe's grinning idiot of a grand duke. But we all know that Catherine II didn't earn the sobriquet "Great" just by sleeping with her soldiers (and perhaps some of the horses we see clattering up the palace staircases in the movie). So you really have to suspend a lot of disbelief and accept Josef von Sternberg's film for what it is: an outrageous parody of the historical epic, the sort of thing that people were expected to take seriously when, for example, Norma Shearer played Marie Antoinette for W.S. Van Dyke four years later. If The Scarlet Empress was a box office failure at the time it was because audiences weren't keyed in to the joke. Now we are, so we can revel in Hans Dreier's febrile vision of a Russian palace and the music arrangers' delirious pastiche of Tchaikovsky mingled with Mendelssohn and laced with a bit of Wagner's Valkyries (for when those horses are galloping through the halls). 

Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939)

It's imperialist and racist, and its title character is an example of the Magical Negro trope, the person of color who saves the white folks' asses. It's embarrassing to see actors like Sam Jaffe (in the title role), Eduardo Ciannelli, and Abner Biberman in brownface. So I have to swallow a lot that I object to when I admit that I still enjoy Gunga Din. We typically evade the issue of a film's content and message by emphasizing style and technique, and Gunga Din is loaded with style and technique, from the comic performances of Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to the crisp cinematography of Joseph H. August, convincingly turning the Sierra Nevada into the Khyber Pass. The movie was originally supposed to be directed by Howard Hawks, who brought on Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur to develop a story out of Rudyard Kipling's poem, which they did by plagiarizing their own play The Front Page, which hinges on a man (in this case two men) trying to prevent his friend and co-worker from going off and getting married. Hawks might have made a better movie: He would almost certainly have given Joan Fontaine more to do in her role as the woman who is trying to take Fairbanks away from Grant and McLaglen. But he was fired from the film and replaced with Stevens. The real star of the movie is Grant, playing at peak clown and loving it, while still pulling off the dashing hero. It's interesting to compare Grant's performance in this movie with the one he gave for Hawks in Only Angels Have Wings, which was released the same year, in which Grant is more serious as the troubled boss of a group of pilots flying the mail across the Andes -- people who think Grant was only a movie star and not a "real" actor should make the effort.