'The Day the Earth Caught Fire' explores climate crisis, man's inhumanity

Decades before global warming heated up media and governmental discussion, it was the cinematic — not scientific — community that warned of the dangers of a scorched earth policy.

In the summer of 1962 I sat front and center at the Broad Theatre in North Philadelphia. As the temperatures soared outside, it was Val Guest who brought the heat: His 1961 British sci-fi thriller "The Day the Earth Caught Fire" — released here a year after its U.K. debut — was as chilling an examination of global climate gone awry as had ever been confronted on screen or off. The 90-minute black and white film — with flares of color seeping in at the ending to suggest the fire to come — was rated X, not for its one steamy, sweaty sex scene (bold at the time) but for its insight as to what the horrors of man's inhumanity to man could evince.

The flick had an end-of-the-Earth premise dealing with the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the USSR, a premise that influenced other films of the time. But it was its incendiary warnings about global warming-cum-incineration that attracted audiences' interest in the endgame of simultaneous Soviet and American nuclear tests that jarred the planet from its axis and sent it hurtling toward the sun, a trajectory that went beyond burning a hole in the ozone to imminent immolation.

As alarming and as alienating the plotline — and despite its sci-fi genre — the film was a searing and sophisticated exploration of mankind's cruel indifference to the trauma trailing his every unthinking decision. The scenes of lush London-turned-dry bed soaked only by the characters' sweat in futile and furious pursuits of water sources remain as chilling in memory as the depicted climate was sultry.

The movie's insightful sense of global chaos as cities worldwide caved to the calamity of a meteorological man-induced mess garnered some attention on its release as well as a 1962 BAFTA screenwriting award for director/writer guest and co-scripter Wolf Mankowitz. As for the success of the movie's mythical scientific community's solution — trying to rectify the Earth's nutation (axial movement) before its disastrous solar smashup — all hope rests on the two nations whose machinations made for the meteorological morass: Nuclear explosives are set off in Siberia in the crossed-fingers hope that somehow the resultant explosion will readjust the planet's direction and stop its cataclysmic course.

The movie's relevance has never been lost on me, especially now, 60 years later, as nations try to realign global handling of a warming trend-turned-inevitable tragedy.

Even back then, in 1962, at the Broad Theatre, the implications of a movie that took the temperature of global warming and its attendant cataclysmic climate changes made me think long after the saturnine Saturday matinee was over. "The Day the Earth Caught Fire" was sci-faction of what could happen if the Earth stood still in light of climate attitudinal indifference. Its impact even caught the attention the following week of one of my teachers, who asked why I seemingly had become so suddenly sullen.

I explained how this movie had caused me nightmares and why I was so shaken by it.

She laughed and offered this well-intentioned if not ultimately instructive guidance, which I will never forget: "Oh, Michael," she chuckled.

"It's only a movie."

Michael Elkin is a playwright, theater critic and novelist. He lives in Abington.

This article originally appeared on The Intelligencer: Climate movie 'The Day the Earth Caught Fire' explores our inhumanity