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THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE
Rating:  ½
UK. 1961.
Director/Producer – Val Guest, Screenplay – Val Guest & Wolf Mankowitz, Photography (b&w) – Harry Waxman, Music – Stanley Black, Special Effects – Les Bowie, Art Direction – Anthony Masters. Production Company – British Lion/Melina-Pax.
Cast:
Edward Judd (Peter Stenning), Janet Munro (Jeannie Craig), Leo McKern (Bill Maguire), Arthur Christiansen (Editor)
Plot: Coincidentally the Americans and the Russians both detonate hydrogen bombs at the North and South Poles at the same time. Soon after, Britain begins to experience a freak heatwave. Peter Stenning, a journalist at The Daily Express, receives a tipoff from his girlfriend, a switchboard operator in government offices, and uncovers the fact that the explosions have caused an 11 degree tilt of the Earth’s axis. He prints an article. But then comes the even more disturbing announcement that the explosions have knocked the Earth out of its orbit and sent it on a course towards the sun. All over England there is panic and rioting as The Thames dries up and water rationing and communal showers are instituted. The only hope lies for scientist to try and detonate further nuclear weapons in the hope that these might jolt the Earth back into its correct position.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire was one of a host of films that came out in the early 1960s confronting the possibilities of nuclear war full-on. This grimly real genre had been started by On the Beach (1959) and still ahead would be the likes of Panic in Year Zero! (1962), Dr Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Fail-Safe (1964) and The War Game (1965). The Day the Earth Caught Fire was mounted as a personal project of director Val Guest, best known within the genre for The Quatermass Xperiment/The Creeping Unknown (1955) and Quatermass II/The Enemy from Space (1956). Guest found some difficulty mounting the project and eventually ended up financing it in part with his own money.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire is much more of an science-fiction film than many of the aforementioned end of the world films. Their concerns with the nuclear situation fell well within the possibilities of contemporary technology, while The Day the Earth Caught Fire concerns itself with the sweeping climactic changes of an entirely hypothetical (and scientifically rather ludicrous) situation. But whatever the film lacks as science, it more than makes up for with the entirely credible social portrait of the situation – water-riots, images of queues for communal showers, people buying water on the blackmarket just to tend their garden. The film is made on a slim budget, but Val Guest manages extraordinary things with it. The epic scale of the devastation and disaster is shown with a remarkable economy. Les Bowie creates some striking matte shots of a dried-up Thames and the cracked, parched earth outside the Taj Mahal and the like. Particularly good is Val Guest’s ability to incorporate stock footage of desiccated desert, of forest and building fires and of emergency services rushing into operation. Even more striking is when he pans away from them to reveal the names of English landmarks to the extent where you are never sure what is real and what is not.
Guest also scored the coup of being able to shoot The Day the Earth Caught Fire in and around the offices of the real Daily Express newspaper and even obtains an appearance from then editor Arthur Christiansen playing himself. It is something that, along with Guest’s soberly documentary-like depiction of such an environment, manages to quite credibly ground the film. Certainly there are few films which manage to convey a basically scientifically nonsensical premise – in truth the detonation of the entire modern nuclear arsenal would barely even cause an earthquake that would be felt across the other side of the American continent, let alone move the Earth from orbit – with such an absolute and thorough conviction. The backdrop is crafted with some surprisingly good characterizations as we follow Edward Judd’s hero from down-and-out alcoholic to gaining his feet again. The dialogue is sharp and well-written, being in large part stolen by a wryly cynical Leo McKern.
Perhaps the most interesting part of The Day the Earth Caught Fire is the ending, which ends on a deliberate note of ambiguity rather than a resolution. People sit about waiting for the outcome of the attempts to correct the Earth’s orbit but instead of offering a resolution, Guest in the last shot pans away to reveal two different copies of the next day’s newspaper headline – one saying ‘Earth Doomed’, the other saying ‘Earth Saved’. The film then fades out, leaving the world’s fate uncertain. As with On the Beach and its fade-out on the banner “There is Still Time ... Brother”, the film makes an earnest and movingly heartfelt plea for the hope of humanity in spite of mankind.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2002
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