Posted on 07/20/2025 6:59:25 AM PDT by Twotone
There was a small renaissance in science fiction movies in the early '50s, aside from the space operas and creature features there were politically resonant, to include big budget titles like Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. How and why science fiction films took themselves seriously isn't hard to understand if you just look at the headlines from the moment the film began production to after it hit theatres.
Screenwriter Edmund North was working on the script for the film in the first two months of 1951, at the beginning of the first full year of the Korean War. The year began with Chinese and North Korean forces capturing Seoul, and on January 11th a report was delivered to U.S. president Truman by the National Security Resources Board recommending the expansion of the war to the bombing of China and even a potential nuclear strike on the USSR.
Just two weeks after North delivered his final draft, the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg began; the Soviets had detonated their first atomic bomb just a year and a half earlier, and they would test two more weapons in September and October of that year. Two days after filming began on April 9, Truman relieved Gen. Douglas MacArthur of his command of the Korean War. As filming was wrapping in May, the U.S. was testing its first thermonuclear warheads at Eniwetok Atoll. Just a few days after production wrapped Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the Soviet Union.
That year, the U.S. Census department took delivery of the UNIVAC 1 computer from Remington Rand and the USSR sent two dogs, Dezik and Tsygan, on a sub-orbital spaceflight.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
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Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still was communist propaganda.
Klatu Barada Nicto
Yup. I remember Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal and Sam Jaffe.
Yup
i read somewhere that they had to keep reshooting that scene because Patricia Neal kept bursting out laughing when she was to say that phrase...,i can def see why she laughed.
Yeah she thought the entire script was a joke and the film silly, until she saw the finished edit. She was always one of my favorites. Smouldering, intelligent sexuality.
It’s okay. “The Thing” was its healthy antidote.
I loved sci-fi when I was younger, but I looking back it seems so much was trying to “send a message”. Usually about the futility of nuclear war, but still a veiled political message. Today, the movies want to “raise awareness” about this or that leftist trope, but it is the same thing.
Didn’t Patricia Neal have a terrible stroke that left her paralyzed? She had to claw her way back from that to become the great actress again...
There are some good audio books on amazon and you tube. But a lot of trash also.
I saw that movie before I was in my teens and liked it.
Yes, she recovered. I think here part in “In Harms Way” with John Wayne was filmed after she recovered. Great WW II movie.
From someone who didn’t see the film, or someone who is just clueless. Comparing the film to communism is like comparing apples to uranium. There was never a commie controversy, much less a coherent connection. But there was a Christian connection that viewers and critics saw.
Thank you. Some people just have no clue whatsoever. Communist propaganda? Lol....
“apples to uranium”
I’m stealing that.
I liked Cleese’s performance in the remake
This film was shown on TV in the 50’s or early 60’s - something like Saturday Night at the Movies. It was a huge event. It was like a first run movie. I remember our whole neighborhood of kids came inside to watch it. I bet more people saw it that one night than attended it in all the movie theaters ever. It was the talk of the school on the Monday following.
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