The early 1960s were golden years for British big screen SF. Although there were still monstrosities like the delirious Konga (1960), the bizarre Gorgo (1961) and the eminently forgettable What a Whopper! (1961) and Paradisio (1962) to contend with, there was nevertheless a slow but encouraging move towards an identifiably British strain of gritty, realistic SF that would flourish briefly in the 60s in response to a range of key social concerns.

As the 1950s came to an end, they gave birth that peculiar and frequently exasperating demographic, the teenager, whose wayward, American-influenced excesses caused much concern for mainstream British middle-class society, a concern expressed in films like Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1960), Joseph Losey’s excellent The Damned (1961) and Anton M. Leader’s Children of the Damned (1963) in which our children were alien, uncontrollable, dangerous. The erosion of national confidence and identity in the wake of Suez found expression in films like It Happened Here (1963) (a remarkable pseudo-documentary documenting a Nazi invasion of the UK during World War II), Lord of the Flies (1963) (in which the nation’s youth, its future, deprived of its cultural roots and social context, reverts to savagery) and the early James Bond films, which suggested that despite the humiliation of Suez and the gradual weakening of the country’s grip on its fading empire, Britain was still a major player in international affairs.

And then, of course, there was the big one, the fear that dominated the lives of just about everyone in those turbulent days, the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. The power of the Bomb had been explored thoroughly, if sometimes obtusely, in American cinema for some time, albeit metaphorically in most cases. British SF was late in addressing fear of the Bomb – radiation had featured mainly in comedies like Mr. Drake’s Duck (1950) or in trashy but fun B-movies like The Gamma People (1956), Fiend Without a Face (1957) and Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959). The Day the Earth Caught Fire was the first serious attempt by British cinema to confront the fears raised by nuclear weapons since Seven Days to Noon (1950) and its timing couldn’t have been better – less than a year after its release, with the film still fresh in the minds of many who saw it, the world lurched into the Cuban missile crisis and suddenly no-one was wanting jokey trash films about nuclear weapons any more.

Ironically, Val Guest had written The Day the Earth Caught Fire eight years previously, before he’d made The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) for Hammer but found its politically charged narrative difficult to pitch to a traditionally conservative industry. But Guest had just been a bit ahead of his time and, as the success of serious minded if rather ponderous American Bomb movies like The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) and On the Beach (1960) had proved that audiences were ready for a more mature and considered approach to the subject. The fact that 1961, when The Day the Earth Caught Fire was preparing to go into production, also saw the USA and USSR resuming nuclear testing after a two year moratorium leant the film an added urgency.

Guest had been working towards a directorial style that drew heavily on documentary, giving his films a cinema verite-style realism in line with the ‘kitchen-sink’ dramas of the time. He’d already tested out his style in an SF milieu with the remarkable The Quatermass Xperiment and it’s even more impressive sequel, Quatermass 2 (1957), but it reached its zenith in The Day the Earth Caught Fire. The film’s subject matter and Guest’s desire to film it straight demanded the hard-edged verisimilitude that he’d brought to the excellent crime thriller Hell is a City (1960) and which would later inform many of the better British SF films of the decade – Unearthly Stranger (1963), The Night Caller (1965), Invasion (1966), Privilege (1967).

In The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Guest uses the technique to bring to life the journalistic milieu in which much of the film is set and to give a terrifying edge to the destruction wreaked on London by climactic changes as a result of nuclear testing pitching the earth off its axis. Although some of the newly shot special effects scenes are primitive and tend to disrupt the sense of realism (the fog that rises from the Thames is particularly poor, though a number of matte paintings of a near-deserted London are eerily effective), the use of stock footage of real natural disasters was a stroke of genius born of poverty that greatly heightens the documentary-like approach.

Also contributing greatly to this sense of “you-are-there” realism is the superb script, with its quirky characters and sharp dialogue. The lean narrative has a sense of urgency to it that was almost entirely lacking in most contemporary British SF. Framing the film in flashback certainly helped – the creepy and enigmatic opening shots, of journalist hero Pete Stenning wandering the eerily deserted London streets, sets up a tension that is never fully resolved even at the climax. The final scenes, as the Daily Express presses prepare to print the latest edition with one of two headlines (World Saved or World Doomed) ready to go in response to a last-ditch effort to reverse the damage, allowing for no easy resolution to the drama. Audiences filed out of theatres unsure of just what future Stenning faces – if any – as he disappears from the final shot.

The ending of the film has caused some controversy, even among those who profess to championing the film. Some see it as too bleak, too inconclusive to be truly satisfying. Conversely, there are those who read the ending as essentially optimistic – in his essay on the film in British Science Fiction Cinema (1999), which he also edited, I.Q. Hunter suggests that the very last image, a slow pan up to the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, is “sentimental, affirmative and audience-pleasing… (it) harks back to Britain’s survival of earlier threats to national integrity.” In truth, it’s simply the only ending the film could have had – a happy ending (World Saved) would have betrayed the carefully crafted approximation of documentary that had accumulated throughout the film, while a definitively bleak one (World Doomed) would have been too much for contemporary audiences to endure.

Hunter is probably right when he reads the ending as essentially optimistic (as the final title card appears the distant sounds of church bells pealing can be heard, perhaps suggesting that the experiment had succeeded). While the larger issues (the future of Mankind) remain tantalisingly unresolved, the smaller scale, more intimate dramas are brought to satisfyingly upbeat conclusions. The film’s narrative is carried by Pete Stenning, a bitter, almost washed-up journalist whose veneer of laddish cynicism and sharp-tongued misanthropy is maintained by a steady diet of alcohol and self-loathing. Notably, unlike many of the American science fiction films of the previous decade, the hero of The Day the Earth Caught Fire has no direct link with the cause of the catastrophe. He’s not a scientist, or a test pilot or an astronaut – he’s a beer-soaked reporter as baffled and powerless as the audience. By the end, even with total obliteration staring him in the face, he finds redemption in his awkward relationship with pool secretary Jeannie. Even with catastrophe looming, ailing British society can still rehabilitate is wayward sons which is certainly in keeping with Hunter’s reading of the climax.

Key to the success of The Day the Earth Caught Fire are the exceptionally good central performances. The under-rated Edward Judd is outstanding as the embittered Stenning, moving effortlessly between the steely, hard-drinking journo and a more vulnerable persona, best seen in the affecting scene when he briefly meets his estranged wife and her new lover after a day out with his young son. What makes Judd’s performance all the more impressive is that, in the first half of the film at least, Stenning is a seemingly irredeemable bastard and first class loser – his drinking leads to him fouling up at work (he only keeps his job because of a caring colleague who keeps bailing him out); he treats Jeannie, his love interest, abysmally, betraying her trust for the sake of a story; and he’s just generally rude and abusive to almost everyone he meets. It’s his transformation and eventual redemption (he gives up the booze, shapes up at work and finally admits his true feelings for Jeannie) that ultimately makes him such an appealing and interesting character.

Janet Munro makes for a refreshingly different kind of SF heroine. She’s smart, sexy and very much her own woman, a far cry from the dim, sexually conservative scientists’ daughters who appeared in most contemporary genre films just to scream, ask stupid questions to keep audiences up to speed and be rescued from the monster/alien by a hero who has fallen in passionless love with her. Much of the fun of her early scenes lies in her refusal to be intimidated by the predatory Stenning, matching him quip for quip as he crudely tries to seduce her. The later abuse of her trust by Stenning is the catalyst for his eventual redemption and the erotically charged scene where she and Stenning, both scantily clad, flirt through a closed door in her apartment is the turning point for the world-weary reporter, the moment he realises that there is, perhaps, a better life than the one he’s been blurrily peering at through the bottom of his pint glass.

Jeannie is very much a woman of the early 1960s, very different to Stenning’s briefly glimpsed wife, who seems positively dowdy, unassertive and unstimulating by comparison. Jeannie falls into the stereotypical SF heroine role only once, when she has to be rescued by Stenning from a gang of marauding beatniks (whose ‘perversions’ seem to run mainly to forcing people to have a bath!), but for the most part she’s a welcome change of pace for such things. Munro plays the part to perfection, carefully balancing Jeannie’s toughness in the early scenes, with her later momentary lapses into uncertainty and self-doubt.

Leo McKern is, as you’d expect, superb as Bill Maguire, Stenning’s confidante, saviour (he files stories under Stenning’s by-line to save his job) and surrogate father-figure. The cynical but likable Maguire is what Stenning is on his way to becoming at the end of the film, assuming that the world survives of course. One senses that at some time in the past, Maguire had been very much like Stenning (which explains his almost fatherly interest in his much younger protege) and that, in the wake of his own redemption, he’s been rehabilitated and reformed back into mainstream society.

Some critics were suspicious of this apparently conservative streak that permeates The Day the Earth Caught Fire, though as most of these seemed to be working for left-wing newspapers whose right-wing rival, the Daily Express, features so prominently in the film, perhaps we should be suspicious of their suspicions. They saw Stenning’s redemption (and Maguire’s implied social rehabilitation) as indicative of the film’s adherence to mainstream right-wing values. The rebellious and provocative Stenning is quickly ‘tamed’, knocked back into line and his redemption is another victory for conservatism.

The policeman on the left is played by an uncredited Michael Caine.

But one of the many beauties of The Day the Earth Caught Fire is that its intellectual complexities give rise to multiple, often conflicting, interpretations and while the left-wing press were dubious about the film’s perceived conservatism, the political right were concerned with what they saw as a pro-disarmament message running throughout the film. The timing of the film’s release made it particularly sensitive to some – its UK release came hot on the heels of the arrest of several key members of anti-Bomb pressure groups and, as has already been noted, nuclear testing had been resumed. With the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament making in-roads into the mainstream political arena and with the Cuban missile crisis just a year away, these were politically volatile times and no matter how much the production team might have pleaded impartiality, it was inevitable that the film would be used as a political football by all colours of the political spectrum.

But then surely that’s the measure of the film – it rattled cages, got people thinking seriously about the unthinkable. And it retains much of its power even now – though the nuclear threat may have diminished and grown again over time (it was never eliminated entirely) it has been replaced in the global psyche by the twin threats of ecological disaster and international terrorism. Scenes of London roasting to death in tropical heat spring worryingly to mind whenever the subject of global warming is broached.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire remains one of the best examples of British big screen science fiction, a beautifully crafted, deeply intelligent film that more than holds its own against the better known and more widely seen Hollywood films of the day. It’s immediate influence was evident in the series of black and white SF thrillers that proliferated throughout the early and mid-60s and there’s been occasional murmurings about a remake ever since. It doesn’t need a remake of course – it would be difficult indeed to improve upon a film as challenging and satisfying as The Day the Earth Caught Fire.