The Day the Earth Caught Fire – 1961 | 98mins | Drama, Science-Fiction | Colour

Plot Synopsis

In 1954, two years after Britain exploded its first atomic bomb, the director Val Guest wrote a screen treatment about American and Russian nuclear tests throwing the Earth off its axis and sending it on a collision course with the sun. His scenario was unusually serious and ‘adult’ for a British science fiction film. Although Guest had a proven track record in the genre, having prompted the British SF boom with The Quatermass Experiment (1955), The Day the Earth Caught Fire was rejected by several companies before Michael Balcon and British Lion agreed to back it in 1961, with Guest putting up part of the finance.

Guest completed the screenplay with Wolf Mankowitz, who appears to have contributed the dialogue and details of the journalistic milieu. The result, critically acclaimed at the time, remains one of the finest British science fiction films and a minor classic of the genre. Although seemingly little known outside Britain despite its initial success in America, The Day the Earth Caught Fire has kept its reputation: a recent, albeit wholly unscientific, poll of cinephiles classed it among the top 100 British films.

The story is told in flashback through the eyes of Peter Stenning (Edward Judd), a journalist at the Daily Express, who is a stereotypical semi-alcoholic reporter: his marriage has failed, his talents are going to waste, and he cares only for his young son, who lives with Stenning’s estranged wife and her new lover. Reports start to arrive in Fleet Street of bizarre weather all over the world: blizzards in New York, floods in the Sahara, tornado’s in Russia. Britain experiences first heat, then fog and finally drought. Stenning and the Express’s science correspondent, Bill Maguire (Leo McKern), discover the truth hidden by the official explanations: simultaneous nuclear tests by America and Russia have tilted the Earth’s axis and diverted its orbit towards the sun. Stenning is passed this information by Jeannie (Janet Munro), a telephone operator at the Meteorological Office with whom he is having an affair. Jeannie is arrested as a traitor, but she is later released and found work at the Express. As the Earth swelters, emergency measures are declared, water is rationed and people are evacuated from the cities. Panic ensues around the world, and in Chelsea beatniks run riot, looting and overturning cars. Finally all nations unite in a desperate plan to explode four giant bombs to restore the Earth’s orbit. On the day of detonation Stenning dictates a last story on the future of mankind. The Express prepares two front page pulls bearing the headlines ‘World Doomed’ and ‘World Saved’, but the sound of bells ringing in St Paul’s as Stenning walks through a deserted London suggest that the attempt has succeeded and that the Earth will survive.

Filming took place across the capital: in Battersea Park, where fog machines created the mists that sweep down the Thames; in Fleet Street, where the police allowed Guest to film for three minutes at a time before the traffic was let through again; and in Trafalgar Square, where the actors mingled with demonstrators at a real anti-nuclear rally. Cameras were invited into the foyer of the Daily Express building and into some of its offices and corridors, but most of the interiors were shot in a replica of the editorial rooms built at Shepperton Studios. Guest, who had been a freelance journalist and British editor of The Hollywood Reporter, aimed at a cinema verite style of realism in his genre films. His approach was influenced by Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950).