The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

The Day the Earth Stood Still arrives from 1951 with a flying saucer on the National Mall and a warning about the nuclear age. Robert Wise directs with documentary plainness, and Bernard Herrmann supplies a score of theremins and organs that still sounds like nothing else. The film has been preserved by the Library of Congress and appears on assorted best-of lists. It has earned its standing.

Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, walks among ordinary Americans in a borrowed suit. He visits the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington. He solves a professor's blackboard equations. The cast is white, per the casting conventions of its era, and the story makes no comment on this. Helen Benson is a widow with a son and a jealous suitor, and she is competent and central, but the film is not arguing anything about women. There is no engagement with race, no environmental anxiety, no economic critique, no interest in bodies or brains or identities. The villain is human aggression, full stop. The film's fears are atomic and geopolitical, and they are stated plainly.

Where the picture does lean forward is in its closing sermon. Klaatu gathers scientists, explains that other worlds have handed absolute power to invincible robots, and delivers a choice: peace or obliteration. The moral is announced, restated, and underlined. Variety at the time noted the moralistic wordiness. It is a lecture, delivered by a visitor with a spaceship, and it lands with the weight of a pulpit. That is the film's temperament, and it has aged better than most sermons of its decade.