We watched the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still” today. It was made in 1951 and I’d never seen it. Sena thinks she did a long time ago. You can watch it on the Internet Archive. Similar movies didn’t make much of a splash, some of which you might remember:
“The Sacking of Punxsutawney Phil”: An expose of how the groundhog gets fired because it can’t reliably predict when spring begins.
“The Loser Always Pays the Bill”: A delightful comedy about two guys who play Rock, Paper. Scissors 30,000 times to decide who pays for lunch.
“Let’s Get Stewed to the Gills”: An experimental film in which 3 college freshmen find ways to cope with higher education by pouring beer in everything they consume.
Anyway, the movie is about an extraterrestrial named Klaatu and his robot Gort who land in Washington, D.C. to warn everybody that it’s best not to blow up Earth and other nearby planets with nuclear weapons unless you want the robot cops like Gort from Venus to spank everybody in sight.
I can’t poke fun at this movie like I do with all the Svengoolie films. The story is fascinating, the acting is superb, and it’s been called one of the 12 greatest science fiction films of all time by none other than Arthur C. Clarke (according to Wikipedia). The cast includes Michael Rennie as Klaatu, Patricia Neal as Helen Benson, and Sam Jaffe as Professor Jacob Barnhardt.
It was based on a short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates, which you can read in its entirety on the web because the person who posted it says there’s no record of copyright currently on file.
I read “Farewell to the Master” and I can say I’m glad the movie used the name Gort instead of Gnut for the giant robot.
Now that I’ve seen the movie, I’m still inclined to speculate that maybe Frank E. Stranges got the idea for his book “Stranger at the Pentagon” from it, but there’s no way to prove it. If you google the name of the character Valiant Thor in Stranges book, you’ll get photographs back of a man who happens to be an Australian actor named Cody Fern who was on a TV show I’ve never seen, “American Horror Story.” He played Valiant Thor and this contributes to the lore surrounding a fictional character and tends to give it a sort of semblance of reality. Stranges contributed to the mystique by presenting the events in the story as historical fact.
But the importance of the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is the warning to the leaders of the nations of the world in the early days of the Cold War (and even today) that playing with nuclear matches is a bad idea.
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