Film Review
In the early 1960s, the threat of global annihilation by nuclear war
was a very real prospect and cinema was not so slow to pick up on this
concern, presenting horrific visions of what the Atomic Age may have in
store for mankind. Usually, this involved gigantic monsters
brought to life by radioactivity and sent on a killing spree, but there
were also more grown-up films with more plausible scenarios for the
what the future may hold. Val Guest's
The Day the Earth Caught Fire was
one of the more respectable in the latter batch, a haunting
visualisation of man's possible demise brought about not by war but the
mere possession of nuclear weapons. Now that the threat of global
warming has superseded concerns over nuclear war, the film probably has
a greater resonance today than it did when it was first seen, for what
it presents is a truly horrifying vision of what may lie ahead if
climate change does, as some scientists fear it may well do, escalate
beyond man's ability to adapt to it.
Val Guest started his career dealing with much lighter fare, scripting
comedies for Will Hay and directing Arthur Askey in a few films.
His association with science-fiction began when Hammer invited him to
direct
The Quatermass Xperiment
(1955), based on a television series by Nigel Kneale that had gripped
the nation a few years earlier. Several subsequent Hammer films
came Guest's way, including
Quatermass 2 (1957) and
The Abominable Snowman
(1957). He conceived the plot for
The Day the Earth Caught Fire as
early as 1954, two years after Britain's first atom bomb test at the
Monte Bello Islands, off the northwest coast of Australia. No one
seemed interested in the project until British Lion agreed to make the
film in 1960. So grim was the film's subject matter that, for its
UK release, the censors gave it an X certificate.
What makes the film so effective is Guest's decision to give it a
near-documentary realism, which he achieves by focusing our attention
on a handful of well-developed characters and setting most of the
action in one, fairly mundane location, the offices of a British
newspaper. It is by showing the characters' reaction to the
events gradually unfolding around them, rather than the events
themselves, that Guest manages to get across the enormity of the
disaster that is coming and the almost unimaginable consequences for
humanity. The script that Guest put together with Wolf Mankowitz
consists mostly of wisecracking one-liners which the protagonists throw
at each other like jousting partners, a game of wit that would be more
in keeping in the court of Louis XIV than in 1960s London on the eve of
the Apocalypse. This constant verbal fencing may at times seem
artificial but it does expose the psyches of the three main characters,
and as the situation becomes grimmer, it is noticeable that the humour
darkens, in a way that lends an increasing tension to the film's final
scenes.
This is the film that should have made Edward Judd a worldwide
star. As the bruised and bitter journalist at the heart of the
film he certainly gives a solid performance, although his character is
not someone you can readily sympathise with. Guest reputedly
found Judd a temperamental and unaccommodating artiste, and the actor's
sporadic subsequent career bears this out. In
The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Judd
has a forceful presence and he carries the film admirably, but he is
hard to like. Instead, we are more easily engaged by co-stars
Janet Munro and Leo McKern, who come across as far more real and
three-dimensional. McKern is particularly convincing - you'd
almost swear he'd spent every waking moment of his life chained to a
desk in Fleet Street, constantly hurling barbed witticisms at his
colleagues as he pounds away at his trusty Remington. In fact the
only member of the cast to have any firsthand experience of tabloid
journalism is Arthur Christiansen, who effectively plays himself as the
editor on the
Daily Express,
his obvious ill-ease lending more than a touch of gravitas to the
film.
Another wise move was to hold back on the special effects and use these
only where absolutely necessary. Matte paintings are employed
effectively to give a stark visual impression of the escalating crisis
with cities being abandoned and scarred by extreme weather.
Archive footage of real climatic disasters negates the need for
specially created effects and these fit seamlessly into the narrative,
used just enough to give a sense of the scale of the disaster.
Shooting the entire film in anamorphic widescreen was a gamble but
again this adds to the drama of the piece and allows for some
spectacular sequences such as those at the top and tail of the film
depicting an abandoned London, tinted a golden yellow on some prints to
emphasise the crushing heat.
The Day
the Earth Caught Fire is more than a conventional disaster
movie. Simultaneously it provides a peep into the past, showing
how newspaper offices used to function before the all-powerful media
magnates took over and typewriters became obsolete, and a glimpse of a
possible future that looks increasingly likely as the prospect of
a global warming caused fry-up comes ever nearer.
© James Travers 2015
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Val Guest film:
Casino Royale (1967)
Film Synopsis
In a deserted London bathed in a scorching heat, journalist Peter
Stenning returns to his desk at the vacated offices of the newspaper
the
Daily Express to compose
what may well be his final report. Ninety days ago his main
preoccupation was his acrimonious divorce which had driven him to drink
and led him to become a Street Fleet hack after a promising career as a
writer. Without the support of his friend and colleague Bill
Maguire he would be a complete washout, but still he resents having to
write articles on trivia that are of no interest to him. At the
moment, the main topic of interest is the weather, which is more
capricious than unusual, with outburst of torrential rain preceding an
unprecedented hot spell. In the course of his research for an
article on sunspots Stenning comes into contact with Jeannie Craig, a
junior employee at the Meteorological Office. As she pursues a
promising love affair with Stenning Jeannie lets slip an item of news
that the Met Office are reluctant to make public: as a result of
simultaneous atomic bomb tests by America and Russia the angle of
rotation of the Earth has been altered by eleven degrees. The
consequences of this could be catastrophic - regions that are presently
heavily populated may soon become uninhabitable. But this is not
the worst of it. As temperatures continue to soar, the
governments of the world have no option but to come clean and reveal
the true extent of the disaster awaiting mankind...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.