The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951/Fox Blu-ray)
Picture: B*
Sound: C+ Extras: B Film: B-
I am no
fan of the work of Robert Wise and even consider his best works
problematic. The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) is one of his better films, his
breakthrough work and its still drags and has aged in uneven ways. Some of it is pandering, some of it tired,
some of it boring, but when it kicks in, it has some very memorable and
visually iconic moments. It is also
celebrated for being one of the rare Sci-Fi films (especially of the era) that
had intelligent, peaceful aliens (though still dangerous if they needed to be)
and it took the use of the electronic instrument the Theremin (first used to
great effect as a representative of paranoia in Hitchcock’s 1944 classic Spellbound) and made it iconic in
Sci-Fi music language for decades.
The story
begins with the extraordinary event of a spaceship arriving in Washington, D.C.
and an alien (fluent in English!) comes out of it talking in a forward manner. Unfortunately, this is too ambiguous and one
of the military soldiers gets surrounding the landing (along with hundreds of
shocked observers) fires his gun when the visitor pulls out a device that he is
unsure about. Then comes a second
visitor, who zaps and vaporizes guns, tanks and worse. The remainder of the film becomes a struggle
between good and evil within the human race, the individual, the other and the
result is a film we still talk about 57 years later as the remake arrives in
theaters.
Though
the film is not endlessly inquisitive, Edmund H. North, who later co-wrote Patton with a young Francis Ford Coppola,
delivers a screenplay (based on Harry Bates book) that has more than its share
of moments. You can also feel Wise still
feeling his way as a director long after his days as an editor at RKO and that
helps him at some points here. Michael
Rennie is terrific in his defining role as Klaatu, who helped to permanently
establish the idea of the serene, super-intelligent alien with nerves of steel. As good as the cast is, he steals just about
every scene in the film and rightly so.
He would repeat this in the darkest way possible as a more vicious
character on the TV classic The Invaders
and appropriately lent this tone to the villain The Sandman on the Adam West Batman.
Other
casting includes Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe (Gunga Din, Ben-Hur
(1959)), Billy Gray (Bud on Father Knows
Best, Werewolves On Wheels) and
Frances Bavier just more than a decade shy of playing Aunt Bee on The Andy Griffith Show. Sadly, the flying saucer never visited Mayberry
and it’s too late for Ron Howard to direct that one.
*The 1.33
X 1 digital AVC @ 26 MBPS, black and white, High Definition image can
be uneven with some footage looking poorer than others and showing its age, yet
there are many shots here that are some of the best black & white we have
ever seen anywhere. It may not be as
consistent as the 1.33 X 1 Casablanca
transfer or print, but you can see some improvements in monochrome stocks ten
years later, plus the Fox look versus the Warner Bros. one. It is also more consistent than the Fox
Blu-ray for Young Frankenstein, but
that 1974 film is trying to look more like 1934, so that does not always work
as a comparison. It does look better than
the Blu-ray for Fox’s 1962 hit The
Longest Day, but the champ of consistency for later black and white films
on Blu-ray is Warner’s Jailhouse Rock,
despite the distortion CinemaScope lenses add.
It is also less grainy than the three black and white Ray
Harryhausen-effects-laden films Sony just issued on Blu-ray from their Columbia
holdings: Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers,
It Came From Beneath The Sea and 20 Million Miles To Earth, but part of
that grain is from the way effects were processed and from the way Columbia
monochrome was versus Fox. Longtime
Director of Photography Leo Tover did some of his best work here on Day and
much of this disc does great justice to that; that should put our picture
rating into perspective.
The original theatrical monophonic sound is here in Dolby
Digital 2.0 mono as it has appeared before on DVD, but the DTS HD Master Audio
(MA) lossless 5.1 mix is an upgrade that is here is better with some occasional
stereo separation that is not bad for its age.
However, the sound still shows its age and monophonic origins, but Fox
did a nice job here. Bernard Herrmann
continued the innovative use of the Theremin that Miklos Rozsa first used to
great effect in Hitchcock’s
Spellbound as a sound representing
paranoia and the mysterious in his great scoring here, but instead of reducing
it to a genre convention as too many would later, Herrmann uses it in
conjunction with an effective thriller score.
This is more obvious when you play the film back with its isolated music
track, which we recommend after you watch the whole film this way.
Though menus are usually fine as they stand or even
annoying, I have to make special note of the unusually clever menu they came up
with here. If you like the film or this
kind of filmmaking, you’ll get a big kick out of it.
Extras include the feature length audio commentary by Wise
& Nicholas Meyer from the DVD, the Blu-ray exclusive Interactive Theremin that lets you create your own sounds from the
classic electronic instrument, all-new feature length audio commentary by film
and music scholar/historians John Morgan, Steven Smith, William Stromberg &
Nick Redman, Isolate Music Score Track, trailers, stills, interactive
pressbook, 1951 Fox Movietone newsreel on the film and more new featurettes including
The Mysterious, Melodious Theremin,
Main Title live performance by Peter Pringle, a making of featurette, Decoding “Klaatu Barada Nikto”: Science
Fiction as Metaphor, A Brief History
of Flying Saucers, The Astounding
Harry Bates, who wrote the short story this film is based on, a reading of
that story, Race To Oblivion
documentary short, Edmund North: The Man
Who Made The Earth Stood Still and a sneak preview of the 2008 remake that
you can read more about at this link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/8447/The+Day+The+Earth+Stood+Still
All in
all, Day is a classic that is a must
for any serious Blu-ray collection or collector. Fans of the film and genre will be
particularly happy with the all-around upgrades Fox has added. We hope more films will get the same A-level
treatment from all the studios. For more
on this original film, you will want to check out its analysis in one of our
earliest reviews, when the film was issued on DVD:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/245/The+Day+The+Earth+Stood+Still
- Nicholas Sheffo
