The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)
Directed by Val Guest

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  Now that the threat of global warming has superseded concerns over nuclear war, the film probably has a greater resonance today than it did when it was first seen, for what it presents is a truly horrifying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.

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...