Day the Earth Caught Fire

Day the Earth Caught Fire

Despite its melodramatic title, which carried on a '50s doomsday naming convention, this taut 1961 English science fiction thriller offers an object lesson in the power of story over special effects. When both the Soviets and the West detonate nuclear tests simultaneously, the seismic double whammy jolts the earth off its axis and onto a new orbit sending it fatally closer to the sun--a fate that writer-director-producer Val Guest views from the street-level perspective of its principal characters, rather than an off-world vantage point. The street in question, however, is London's Fleet Street, the venerable hub of its newspaper and tabloid publishers, and the hard-nosed reporters growing realization that their number is up carries its own stark punch. Edward Judd is Peter Stenning, a rugged, appropriately grim reporter, Leo McKern is tough but compassionate editor Bill Maguire, and Janet Munro is Stenning's love interest, in an elfin, sexy turn that's a striking contrast to her best-known turn in Disney's Darby O'Gill and the Little People. With an effects arsenal that consists largely of a spray bottle to apply beads of "sweat," Guest and his small but crack cast are surprisingly effective, and the cold war plot hook still works, thanks to its uncomfortable proximity to more contemporary environmental terrors. --Sam Sutherland

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Unrated
Year:
1961
98
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Night Editor:
...it caused a twelve degree shift in the earth's orbit......and we're moving toward the sun.

Peter Stenning:
Anything you can split I can split better!

Peter Stenning:
Alcoholics of the press, unite!

Bill Maguire:
No woman's irreplaceable, no matter how much you love her. There will be somebody else sooner or later. London's full of somebody else's.

Editor (Jeff):
I don't care a tinker's damn about this eclipse of the sun as such; the evening papers will cane it, it'll be dead by tomorrow morning. But what I do care about is why there was an eclipse of the sun ten days before it was due. Bill, this is your department.

Bill Maguire:
I don't know why everybody regards me as Nostradamus. Your guess is as good as mine.

Editor (Jeff):
Yes, but I don't want guesses, I want facts. Try someone on top. Sir John Kelly....

Bill Maguire:
Stenning got in to see Kelly.

Peter Stenning:
He had twenty-eight armed guards around him.

Editor (Jeff):
Yes, but what did he say?

Peter Stenning:
He wouldn't even say "Good night" in case it was taken as an official comment on the future of mankind.

Bill Maguire:
It's the kid, isn't it?

Peter Stenning:
You ought to see the way they're bringing him up, Bill. It'll be the right prep school next. And then the right boarding school. And by the time they finish with him, he'll be a right bowler-hatted, who's-for-tennis, toffee-nosed gent, but he won't be MY son.

Bill Maguire:
Oh, I don't know. That bad blood of yours is bound to come out.

Sir John Kelly:
When one considers the Moon is 240,000 miles away and the Sun ninety-three million, it is an extraordinary thing that astronomers can tell with such a degree of accuracy what their movements will be many years ahead.

Bill Maguire:
Now, what does that mean?

Peter Stenning:
It means he doesn't know what it's all about.

Sir John Kelly:
As I am sure most of you will know, a solar eclipse occurs as a result of the interposition of the Moon between the Earth and the Sun.

Bill Maguire:
And that, children, is how the little bunny rabbit got his fluffy white tail.

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