Two Versions of the End of the World

 [Panic in Year Zero! and The Day the Earth Caught Fire]

 

     In general horror films are generally psychological in theme while science fiction tends toward political themes.  The validity of the latter generalization is clear to anyone who examines the end-of-the-world movies of the 1950s and early 1960s which reflect the anxiety over nuclear war during the era of Dulles’ brinkmanship and the policy of peace through “Mutually Assured Destruction.”  The popular culture of the time could scarcely ignore the powerful fear associated with the era of bomb shelters and “duck-and-cover” school exercises. [1] 

     A dramatic contrast of two of the films that imagined nuclear Armageddon, was pointed out by Glenn Erickson who writes that Panic in the Year Zero!, “sure seemed shocking in 1962, and easily trumped other more pacifistic efforts. The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) was for budding flower people; Panic In Year Zero! could have been made as a sales booster for the gun industry." [2]

     The basic point Erickson makes here is convincing to any viewer and scarcely requires detailed demonstration.  The ideology of each movie is all but explicit.  In Panic in Year Zero! people almost instantly lose the superego’s inhibitions and fall readily into theft and violence.  Once he realizes what has happened, Ray Milland, the director as well as the Everyman star, declares an utterly selfish, “every man for himself” attitude which he insists is unavoidable until “civilization” is restored.  His wife (played by Jean Hagen), who exhibits lingering sympathy for others and wishes to maintain vestiges at least of pre-existing moral values, is portrayed as foolishly feminine, while his son (Frankie Avalon) readily becomes so enthusiastic that his father must remind him that the lawlessness is only temporarily acceptable.  (His daughter, played by Mary Mitchell, has little role.)  When order begins to reappear in the final scene, it is only through the agency of the army and the apparent institution of martial law. 

     In the vision of Ray Milland human relationships are determined in the last analysis by power.  People are all selfish and survival is based solely on strength.  (The film’s working title had in fact been Survival.)  Americans’ descent into barbarism, once social controls of governance and police authority is gone, is instant.  Though the Soviet Union is never specified, it was at the time of the film’s appearance, the only country with nuclear capacity other than the USA, France, and the United Kingdom, so Milland’s story is clearly Cold War propaganda.  In spite of the American development and use of atomic bombs, the only one to blame is the other.  This political view is hardly surprising, since Milland was a lifelong conservative Republican who campaigned for Dewey in 1944 and for the far more reprehensible Nixon in 1968.

     Val Guest’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire, made the year before Milland’s picture in the United Kingdom, reflects a sharply different perspective.  Guest was mainly known for directing low-budget Hammer science fiction such as The Quatermass Xperiment and The Abominable Snowman.  Whereas in the American film, the United States was attacked without provocation by its enemy, in Guest’s story the earth has been thrown off its axis by simultaneous bomb-testing by Soviets and Americans.  There is no villain except the politicians of whom at one point the main character Stenning ruefully complains, “They’ve gone too far this time.” (I paraphrase, having taken no notes when watching.)  Rather than the Cold War model of the good guys against the Evil Empire, this film opposes ordinary citizens against irresponsible higher-ups. 

     Whereas in Milland’s America, everyone is heedless of others, the protest movement of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament appears several times in the British setting.  As the climatic conditions become ever more difficult (a trend eerily similar to today’s derangements due to global warming), suddenly groups of orgiastic celebrants, convinced the end of the world is near, march through the streets. [3]  While some are driven to a sort of heedless mad ecstasy and everyone is suffering, no one seems to be preying on neighbors.  Meanwhile, scientists around the world are finally cooperating for the common benefit of all mankind by working to correct the earth’s orientation through further detonations.  Apparently, harmony among the peoples of the earth is a realizable dream in this story.

     The viewer does get what looks very like a happy ending (more so in the American version than in the British one) with church bells chiming hopefully while a voice intones a kind of benediction, invoking a loving deity, “a heart that cares more for him [mankind], than he has ever cared for himself,” before concluding with “the light is sweet; and what a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to see the Sun." 

     In contrast to Milland’s allegiance to the party of Nixon, Val Guest’s co-writer Wolf Mankowitz was a fellow traveler if not an active member of the Communist Party. [4]  Though Harold Macmillan was as anti-Communist as John. F. Kennedy, the ideas of socialism and the value of human cooperation were not viewed as suspiciously in Britain as in these United States, and the difference in the films probably reveals more about the differing national sensibilities than specific ideology.

     In Panic in Year Zero the viewer sees a dramatically Hobbesian world in which the absence of strong government renders life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  Yet we know that Milland’s character Harry Baldwin before the calamity, in his presumably bourgeois and patriarchal professional and personal life had very likely exemplified the same selfish and individualistic view of human nature encouraged by American capitalism.  In contrast The Day the Earth Caught Fire portrays a world far more interesting and more promising in which people have more in common than what separates them and in which it is at least possible for problems to be solved in the best interest of all.

 

    

 

 

1.  Even several years later in Studs Terkel’s oral history Division Street America (1967) nearly all his informants mention nuclear war along with civil rights as the chief issues of the day.

2.  Available in full at https://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s1571pani.html.  The quotation noting the contrast between the two films is included in the Wikipedia article for Panic in the Year Zero!

3.  The sequence is recognized in the film’s credits with a specific composer of “beatnik music.”  Guest’s interest in hip cultural phenomena was apparent two years earlier when he made the film Expresso Bongo. 

4.  Jay Simms, who also contributed to the screenplay, had earlier written The Killer Shrews and The Giant Gila Monster.