The Day the Earth Caught Fire

The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) marks one of the most potent uses of dramatic realism to tell a science-fiction story in the cinema. A bleak commentary on humanity's insane experiments with nuclear weapons, the story involves the events that follow the detonation of several excessively-powerful nuclear warheads, which seem to begin affecting the planet's weather. The film follows events in London through the eyes of newspaper reporters Bill Maguire (Leo McKern) and Peter Stenning (Edward Judd), who eventually discover that the atomic bomb explosions have knocked the Earth off its axis and are sending it into the Sun.

Memorably gripping, director Val Guest films The Day the Earth Caught Fire with a documentary-like realism, capturing the bustle of a newspaper office with fast, believable, overlapping dialogue and incorporating real footage of natural disasters to rachet the verisimilitude. Screenwriters Guest and Mankowitz are careful to write in key details that show societal reactions to the disaster, such as the rationing of water in 'washing centres,' which makes the film all the more convincing and gripping.

The visual effects by Les Bowie are simple but effective, with one memorable sequence showing an eerie mist flowing down the Thames. The plot builds with deliberate pacing to a terrific, memorable ending which has the black and white film tinted orange to show the burning heat as the planet heads closer to the Sun. It's a simple but highly effective trick, and the recent Anchor Bay DVD release of this film restores this tinting for the first time on home video.

The inclusion of a romantic subplot, with Stenning wooing Jeannie Craig (Janet Munro), doesn't hurt the film a bit, mostly because it's handled with the same realism and is well acted. Judd delivers a finely textured performance as Stenning, a journalist who has fallen from the heights of his profession, and struggles to maintain a relationship with his son after the failure of his marriage. Guest's deft incorporation of a social-realist subplot into the science-fiction story adds depth to the film and gives us fully-realized characters to care about as they react to the inexplicable events.

Leo McKern delivers a sympathetic portrayal of a veteran journalist doing his best to cover for Stenning's drinking and shirking. And Bernard Brayden, who plays the editor of the Daily Express, actually held that position in real life. The way he handles the coordination of the paper, snapping out orders to his workers, figuring out who and how to push, is utterly believable. The investment in the characters of the piece pays off in the climax of the film as we experience the hopelessness that they feel.

Val Guest--an uncredited writer on Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and director of the Nigel Kneale-written The Quatermass Experiment and Quatermass II--is one of the great unsung British filmmakers and The Day the Earth Caught Fire is one of the best little-known science-fiction films of its era and one of the starkest critiques of the nuclear age in film.

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Directed by Val Guest
Written by Wolf Mankowitz & Val Guest

Starring:
Janet Munro...Jeannie Craig
Leo McKern ...Bill Maguire
Edward Judd...Peter Stenning
Michael Goodliffe...'Jacko', Night editor
Bernard Braden...News editor