Was rather amazed that you, apparently close to my 70-years of age, found the original 1951 The Day The Earth Stood Still film was "commie propaganda, pure and simple" in any way, form or fashion.
So, went to you FR Homepage and read this: "As a shop steward, business agent and labor organizer I bought into all the mythologies of the left, and then one evening in the early 1980's I had an epiphany when a visiting professor from East Germany told me and a number of friends at a party for the SEIU that all the guys in the Solidarity Labor Union should be marched in front of firing squads and shot. And from the that night on it became more and more clear to me that lefties make a lot of noise, but they really don't care about working people at all."
I cannot recall any day in my life when I was not a Conservative Republican, especially after I started reading Robert A. Heinlein with his 1957 novel Citizen of the Galaxy when I was 10-years of age.
Now, answer me this, if you say you knew the true truth of Pravda from within and then without, how can you ever say that the plot of The Day The Earth Stood Still was Communist propaganda?
I grew up in the 1950s and as I remember from those days, the film was very accurate in portraying what the general feeling was about the Soviet Union at the time and a realistic look at just how the politicians and general public of that day and age would most likely react to Klaatu and friend landing a flying saucer in DC--
Thusly, your call of "commie propaganda," in my humble opinion, is pure and simply wrong. Yet I would like to hear just exactly how you came to that belief?
Virtually none of the characters are sympathetically portrayed except for Helen Benson, her son, and the bogus "Einstein" Barnhardt. (Einstein, not coincidentally, a famous leftist who could never bestir himself to so much as mildly criticize Stalin for his crimes against humanity.) Klaatu's desire to go among the American people to understand their "unreasoning suspicions and attitudes," is pure Soviet era agitprop, suggesting by slimey insinuation that the communist conspiracy against America was the result of "unreasoning" paranoia.
Apparently, you've bought into that nonsense.
But the truth is, there was no "red scare" and there was no communist "witch hunt." McCarthy was right. The OSS, (later CIA) and State Department were thoroughly infiltrated with communists, and the then mainstream American belief that the Soviet Union was an implacable enemy bending its nearly every resource toward our destruction was motivated by realism, not fear.
Contemporaneous KGB documents of the time and throughout the Cold War referred to America as "The Main Enemy." Against this backdrop the film, from a Hollywood already dominated by Dalton Trumbo and The Hollywood Ten and their ilk, turned the thoroughly justified distrust of the times into countless metaphors of American "paranoia."
Your claim that the fictional US administration's response to Klaatu is a realistic view of how US politicians and civilians would have reacted to the landing of a flying saucer is preposterous. Americans have welcomed strangers from other places into their hearts, homes, and nation more warmly than any other people.
But even if it were not so, the unprovoked attack on Klaatu that opens the movie would be idiotic as a matter of self-preservation, something that US military and political leaders would clearly have understood, and no US soldier would have fired on even a perceived enemy without direct orders to do so.
From the moment he steps off the ship, Klaatu is attacked by brutal, unthinking idiots, a staple product of 50's science fiction that has exactly zero relationship to a US military that smashed totalitarian dictatorships and kept the faith of American liberty despite fecklessness and outright backstabbing by politicians--usually leftists--for over forty years of protracted conflict. He is derided by people who don't know him and murdered in the street. If this is the view of America that your conservatism raised you with, I'm glad I came to the cause as a convert, because it's 100% BS.
His closing speech is a model of anti-American propaganda, which refers to the struggle between human freedom and communist enslavement as a "petty squabble." It's not surprising that he thinks that, since the solution he and his pathetic kind have chosen is not the liberating engagement of free peoples in mutual interest, trade, and contracts, but rather, the complete subordination of their own government to a legion of mindless, all-powerful robots.
Gort is kewl to a 10 year old, but if you've lived as long as you say you have, you ought to find the philosophy that created him--even a fictional one--to be terrifying, because he's an instrument of oppression and murder, and Klaatu tells us that our only future in the universe is in bending the knee to his overlordship.
No thanks.