50's American Horror Part Nineteen

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
(1951)
Dir - Robert Wise
Overall: GOOD
 
An influential and top-class work in science fiction, The Day the Earth Stood Still remains one of the genre's seminal films from the Cold War era.  Screenwriter Edmund H. North and director Robert Wise prove well-adept at bringing Harry Bates' short story "Farewell to the Master" to life, as do a solid cast who all take the material seriously and forego various tropes that had and would continue to stagnate alien invasion movies.  Of course this is not an alien invasion movie in any tradition sense, but instead a cautionary tale where Michael Rennie's slightly exotic Klaatu and his hulking, mechanical, zero-nonsense enforcer Gort have come to both warn and plead with earthlings to forgo their international squabbles and atomic weaponry lest it lead to certain disaster.  The fact that Klaatu can be seen as a Christ figure adds further layers to an already sophisticated be it simple tale that is easily digestible and made engaging due to its humanist agenda that focuses on relatable characters instead of just scientists and military people prattling on in boardroom meetings.  It may lack the suspense or flashy special effects of the best allegorical sci-fi that the 1950s produced, but it delivers as a direct and intellectual counterpart.

THE MAN WHO TURNED TO STONE

(1957)
Dir - László Kardos
Overall: MEH

Released on a double bill with Zombies of Mora Tau, (also produced by Sam Katzman), The Man Who Turned to Stone, (The Petrified Man), is a forgettable B-movie cheapie for Columbia Pictures that mixes women in prison and mad scientist motifs.   A group of insensitive doctors run a Detention Home for Girls where they stage their inmate's suicides in order to utilize their victim's life essences in prolonging their own immortality.  Cockamamie, pseudo-science nonsense that is no more or less ridiculous than the kind that is utilized in any other hackney genre movie from its era, it is presented in a talky fashion with only a couple of deaths and close-calls scattered in to liven things up.  The villainous grand scheme is reveled early on so that there is no mystery to uncover, but the handful of character actors do their best with the bare-bones and campy material that they are given, (authored by blacklisted screenwriter Bernard Gordon), with six foot seven, Austrian thespian Friedrich von Ledebur making an imposing enough, sunken-eyed title monster for what its worth.   Predominantly though, the movie wears its minuscule budget on its sleeve and looks like the low-grade affair that it is.

THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL

(1959)

Dir - Ranald MacDougall

Overall: GOOD

 

Though its racial themes may be simultaneously heavy-handed and anti-climactic for some tastes, The World, The Flesh, and the Devil is still a slick doomsday production.  Writer/director Ranald MacDougall based his script off of two sources; The Purple Cloud novel by M.P. Shiel and the "End of the World" story by Ferdinand Reyher, adding an interracial love-triangle into the mix which made it relevant for the era.  Released five years into the American Civil Rights Movement, its depiction of a post-nuclear fall-out world where a black man, white woman, and white man are ultimately the only three survivors shown on screen was one that the cast and crew were adamant in exploring.  In the lead, Harry Belafonte is shown to be the most noble yet also, (and understandably), the most sensitive to his skin color, with Inger Stevens feeling like a trophy prize between he and Mel Ferrer who is more concerned with the whole being romantic with a lady angle than anything related to nationality.  All three characters are dealt with complexly which is a plus, yet the outcome of their predicament is presumably resolved in an over-simplified manner that does not seem worthy of the build up.  That said, the film works much better as an examination of societal conditioning and how difficult it is to such things shake off in even extreme circumstances where logically, it should hold no further merit.