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It's the midpoint of the twentieth century. The war in the Pacific had ended a few years earlier in the heat of nuclear fire, leaving us in the chill of the cold war: the prospect of mutually assured destruction; children being taught to duck and cover; Senator Joseph McCarthy's relentless pursuit of communists, imagined or otherwise... tension and fear. Hollywood would produce many anti- nuclear films - Failsafe, Seven Days in May, Dr. Strangelove - but the earliest and clearest spoken was disguised as science fiction; released in 1951, it's The Day The Earth Stood Still.

The film opens with reports and images of a remarkable flying craft circumnavigating the world traveling at the astonishing speed, for 1951, of four thousand miles per hour. Director Robert Wise (who would return to the genre years later with the first Star Trek film) cleverly intercuts newscasts featuring notable broadcasters of the day - Elmer Davis, H.V. Kaltenborn, Drew Pearson, and Gabriel Heatter - with footage of what we instantly recognize as a flying saucer. The craft lands in Washington, D.C., and the military reacts by surrounding the craft with tanks and artillery. It apparently doesn't occur to them that any race capable of constructing an interplanetary or interstellar spacecraft most likely could have annihilated the capital with ease had the occupants wished to; the nuclear paranoia of the time prevails. When the alien Klaatu (Michael Rennie whose unusual bone structure alone was a casting masterstroke) emerges from the craft, he receives a less than cordial welcome; he's shot. This prompts the appearance and retribution of Gort (Lock Martin), an eight-foot tall robot with an integrated weapon capable of vaporizing a tank.

Klaatu is taken to a hospital, apparently with Gort's blessing, where he meets with Mr. Harley (Frank Conroy), who is described as the President's Secretary in the film and the Secretary of State in the commentary. Klaatu explains that his people have learned the Earth's languages by monitoring radio transmissions, and that he's traveled over two hundred and fifty million miles (another astonishing number in 1951) to address the world's political leaders. (Wonderfully naive, the film suggests that reputable scientists agree that Klaatu must have come from Mars or Venus, since they are habitable.) Klaatu asks that the world leaders be assembled for an address; the future of the Earth is at stake. Harley explains that world tensions and national rivalries make such a meeting unlikely. Klaatu is appalled, but decides that it might be prudent to move among the Earth's people to discover for himself why such tensions and fears exist (I guess our radio and television transmissions weren’t clear enough). He escapes from his guarded hospital room and finds his way to a boarding house where Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her son Bobby (Billy Gray) rent rooms.
 
Klaatu assumes the name of Carpenter and spends some time with the boy, allowing his mother to go on a picnic with beau Tom Stevens (Hugh Marlowe). Klaatu finds Bobby's lack of guile and sincerity helpful, and ultimately asks him a simple question. Who is the smartest man he knows? That's easy, Professor Jacob Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe as an Einstein surrogate complete with unruly hair). Klaatu leaves a unique calling card in the absent professor's study, one that ensures an audience. He will convince the famous theoretician to assemble the best minds in the world for his address; science may have its rivalries, but it's a more cooperative family than international politics. Barnhardt convinces Klaatu to arrange for a dramatic demonstration that avoids doing harm. The alien delivers, but it has two effects; it certainly attracts the world's attention, but it provokes a harsh response from the American military. Klaatu is to be hunted down and destroyed.

The cast is uniformly excellent. In a plot that could have come across as just so much more science fiction melodrama, the filmmakers and players offer such a low-key and realistic approach that the unlikely story seems quite plausible. The Day The Earth Stood Still represents a Genie's lamp rubbed. At a time when no foreseeable relief from mankind's violence in an atomic age seems possible, the wish fulfillment of surrendering autonomy to obtain security was very appealing. I suspect that such a trade remains appealing today, a half century later. Klaatu's message remains true: mankind’s violence, inhumanity, and barbarism simply won't do.

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

The film's original aspect ratio of 1.37:1 is presented in full screen in a transfer compressed with the AVC CODEC. I really expected these visuals to be little improved over the DVD; this was a low budget film from nearly sixty years ago and I thought the film elements would be too soft to yield noticeable improvements. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the images are very much better. An effort to restore this classic science fiction film is clear. This is an excellent transfer with fine shadow detail and exceptional small object detail. Finely grained textures are more visible here than on the DVD, made very clear by the weaves of fabrics and their patterns. The print has been processed to clean up flaws that could not have been removed in the film's chemical restoration and it appears remarkably clean. Halos are only occasionally visible and never intrude. I don’t know why this should be true, but unlike the slightly unnatural grayscale gamma on the DVD, vaguely reminiscent of the appearance of a Kinescope, the BD looks more like film. This is a surprisingly good presentation.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

Robert Wise voiced a rather interesting opinion concerning surround effects in his conversation with Meyer during the commentary; Wise doesn't believe in them. "Nothing should take your attention away from that screen." He must have felt very comfortable with the monaural sound he produced for this film, but I wonder what he would have thought of these remixes. The DTS-HD Master 5.1 track has more obvious surround sound effects than heard on the DVD; these become audible when the sound mixer could isolate them. Dialog is surprisingly good, with only modestly distracting distortion for loud sounds. Sound effects fare a bit worse, suffering from the dynamic range and frequency response limitations of a half-century ago. Distortions are most audible during loud, complex mixes of different sound elements. Bernard Herrmann's eerie score is given the full stereo treatment; the score for brass, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, organ, and an electronic instrument called a Theremin is wonderful but suffers the most sonically. It has unavoidable distortions and sounds a bit nasal. For those who may be interested, a modern re-recording conducted by Joel McNeely was released on Varese Sarabande (302 066 314 2). Like the visuals, I didn’t expect much of an improvement in the sound from the BD, but I was wrong.

The alternate languages are in French and Spanish, both in Dolby Digital 5.1. Subtitles are available in, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, for which there are also Closed Captions.
 
The Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has assembled a delightful array of new extras for this fan favorite. The disc opens with an elongated preview (7:49, 2.35:1, HD) of the 2008 remake of the film starring Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly.

The first film-specific supplement is a screen-specific audio commentary by Robert Wise and Nicholas Meyer. Meyer acts as interviewer, lobbing questions for Wise to field. This is a delightful blend of screen-specific revelations concerning the making of the movie and a conversation between two filmmakers who share their approaches to directing. Meyer's experience inspires exceptionally germane questions. With a few exceptions, I'm pleased to report that the commentary does not duplicate the information found in the featurettes. I found it consistently fascinating and informative. Very well done.

For this new release, you’ll find a new commentary by film and music historians John Morgan, Steven Smith, William Stromberg, and Nick Redman. This is a little less interesting than the first. I’m an orchestral film score buff who has accumulated over five hundred score CDs. And yet, I found this discussion to have entirely too much depth and breadth. It almost overanalyzes the music and the film.

The Mysterious Melodious Theremin featurette (5:40, 1.78:1, HD) is a short about the odd electronic musical instrument that is played by waving the hands in the vicinity of its antennas. Peter Pringle hosts; he both explains and demonstrates the instrument. He reviews its history and describes it use in numerous motion pictures.

And in the very next featurette, The Day the Earth Stood Still Main Title: Live Performance by Peter Pringle (2:17, 1.78:1, HD), he gets the opportunity to show off his musical skills on this difficult instrument.

Exclusive to the BD is a Create Your Own Score BD-J application in which you can stitch together eight one-second notes and one-second rests. The composition can be as long as thirty seconds. Cute, but I wish they had also allowed for note duration. The Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back didn’t sound quite right rhythmically.

Also exclusive to BD is the Gort Command! Interactive Game. This is a rather lame first person, uh, first robot shooter game. Use the cursor controls to put police and soldiers in Gort’s crosshairs; the object is to vaporize them with your enter key before Gort runs out of energy.

Next is The Making of The Day the Earth Stood Still featurette (23:52, 1.78:1, HD). The initial emphasis is on producer Julian Blaustein, who was the force behind transforming a short story into this classic science fiction film. Blaustein and director Robert Wise are both heard in vintage audio interviews. We learn about the artistic style, documentary-like, to convey extraordinary events from the points-of-view of ordinary people. The short spends some time outlining Wise’s biography. The casting of Michael Rennie is discussed. Can you imagine Spencer Tracy as Klaatu? It could have happened. Surviving key cast member share their experiences. Location shooting, special effects, and the score come next. Well done.

Decoding “Klaatu Barada Nikto”: Science Fiction as Metaphor featurette (16:13, 1.78:1, HD) makes the point that this film is a reflection of its time. Tensions were very high between the United States and the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, China. The threat of nuclear war and the obliteration of civilization and mankind overwhelmed the national psyche. The mistrust at the time was frighteningly palpable. The feature film condemns human violence and suggests that to continue on our present course would reduce our planet to a cinder, hence the metaphor.

A Brief History of Flying Saucers documentary (34:00, 1.78:1, HD) is a reasonable synopsis of the UFO phenomenon since the late ‘40s. It runs the gamut from the first sighting that provoked the phrase flying saucers, to the hysteria of the ‘50s, to the Government’s investigation programs, to people who claim to have been abducted, to the Government’s denial attempts, and to the conspiracy theorists who claim that we’re not being told the truth. It’s a fascinating short for those who are not familiar with UFO lore; it’s not very reveling for those who are well- versed. I found it interesting that as the featurette wound down, the point was made that a belief in UFOs as extraterrestrial in origin is a matter of faith, and that man seems to have some instinctive need to believe in something bigger than himself. The irony is that Klaatu was intended to be a Christ figure subtly named Carpenter, a man coming to Earth with a message of peace, killed by man, resurrected, and then “offering” man a powerful, all-knowing, overseeing body. I suppose that means that Gort is a pope figure, the strict rules against violence equivalent to church dogma, and the severe punishment for transgressions an inquisition.

The Astounding Harry Bates featurette (11:02, 1.78:1, HD) begins with the fathers of modern science fiction, Jules Verne and H.G. Welles, and a brief description of the evolution of the genre. Harry Bates is among the hundreds of sci-fi authors that were published in the 20th century, but perhaps can be better classified as an author of sci-fi pulp. In addition to his own writing, he was one of the creators of Astounding Stories, a ‘40s magazine devoted to the genre. It published early works of authors who would gain great prominence in the field. When the magazine failed, he went on to write for other publications. The relevance of Harry Bates is that in 1940, he wrote “Farewell to the Master,” the short story on which The Day The Earth Stood Still is based. This short differentiates the plotline of the story from the film’s screenplay. More interesting is his vintage audio interview and the poignant fate of his work.

Edmund North: The Man Who Made the Earth Stand Still featurette (14:43, 1.78:1, HD) puts the spotlight on the film’s screenwriter. I had not realized that the man who wrote the screenplay for Patton and other prominent films was the same man who wrote the script for this science fiction classic. The short is biographical, describing his success in the Army during the Second World War. But that experience transformed him into an anti-war advocate, and this colored his writing, most obviously in this film.

In 1982, late in Edmund North’s career, he was responsible for a strong, nuclear disarmament public service film hosted by Burt Lancaster. Race to Oblivion: A Documentary Short Written and Produced by Edmund North (26:41, 1.33:1, SD) is bleak and disheartening, but no less germane today as it was over a quarter of a century ago. It cross-cuts an interview by Lancaster of a Hiroshima survivor and excerpts from speeches made at a disarmament event. It remains as a strongly stated warning that the first nuclear war will be the last nuclear war. Note that the source elements are so soft that producing a high definition transfer would not have looked any different than this MPEG-2 transfer; this is true of other SD supplements, as well.

“Farewell to the Master” A Reading by Jamieson K. Price (1:36:56 audio only) is a great way to learn about and enjoy the short story that inspired the film. The significant differences between the two almost ensure that you won’t get bored.

An episode of Movie Tone News (6:21, 1.37:1, SD) from 1951 highlights the tensions between the West and the Soviet Union and includes a very short article about the film.

You’ll find both the feature film’s teaser trailer (1:01, 1.37:1, SD) and its original theatrical trailer (2:09, 1.37:1, SD). And speaking of trailers, the 2008 remake’s trailer (1:48, 2.35:1, HD) is here as well.
 
Also on this disc is an isolated music track in DTS-HD Master 5.1. This is a conventional approach that forces the viewer to sit through the whole film, enduring long stretches of silence to hear the unencumbered score.

Last is The Stills Gallery, which offers an extensive array of many dozens of pictures, drawings, photographs, and reproductions for: Interactive Pressbook; Advertising; Production; Behind the Scenes; Portraits; and, Spaceship Blueprints. The full shooting script may also be found in this section.

The 92- minute film is organized into twenty-four chapters.

Final Thoughts

This is a splendid presentation of a wonderful film; its underlying morality remains relevant today. Despite the overt science fiction premise, most of the film is an examination of the irrationality of human society. The disc offers extensive supplements of substance rather than fluff, the video presentation is very good, and the audio is quite acceptable. This release is highly recommended.