The Day the Earth Stood Still / The Next Voice You Hear…
- This is a past program
Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Telegrams from the Edge: The Message Picture in the Age of Noir. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Simultaneously sober and deeply out there, Robert Wise’s classic science fiction parable is virtually synonymous with 1950s Cold War anxiety and kitsch. After one of the era’s most iconic effects sequences, an outer space emissary disembarks from a flying saucer in Washington, D.C., with a simple message: Start getting along or humanity is headed for a permanent timeout. Backed up by Gort, a gargantuan, planet-killing robotic body guard, the alien (Michael Rennie) appeals to our better nature with mixed results until a child (Billy Gray) takes him on a surreptitious tour of both our problems and our promise. Wise wraps his nuclear-age fantasy in documentary realism that lifts and drags on the proceedings but never feels false.
35mm, b&w, 92 min. Director: Robert Wise. Screenwriter: Edmund H. North. With: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe.
The Next Voice You Hear… (1950)
The whole world tunes in when God launches a daily radio show with the divine impact registered through the experiences of a suburban, blue collar family led by James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (later Reagan). Made for less than $600,000 in 18 days by director William A. Wellman under a new MGM “experiment” in low-budget production, The Next Voice You Hear… still represented a risk for producer Dore Schary. A vocal advocate for Hollywood’s responsibility to “provoke thought” as well as to entertain, Schary acknowledged in his book, Case History of a Movie, that “message pictures” and “religion” rarely made for box office success. With Voice, he wrote, “We would have both.” Schary and Wellman nevertheless persisted because “a lot of people needed the assurance and comfort.” The result is as sincere a bit of oddballery as a major studio has ever produced.
35mm, b&w, 82 min. Director: William Wellman. Screenwriter: Charles Schnee. With: James Whitmore, Nancy Davis, Gary Gray.
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