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Sci-fi terror movies, a popular 1950s genre, are mostly forgotten today, but THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL is still memorable.

Unlike the low budget indie films about creatures attacking from the ocean depths or outer space, DAY was a 20th Century-Fox production with a big budget for its time of $1.2M. It was a serious story reflecting the political paranoia prevailing during the Cold War. DAY also addressed how mankind would fit into the universe in the new Atomic Age and what the consequences of extending violence into space could mean for the Earth.

DAY, which opened Sept. 20, 1951, starred Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal & Hugh Marlowe. It was directed by Robert Wise, who directed THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944) and had such blockbusters in his future as WEST SIDE STORY (1961) & THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965). Its score was by Bernard Herrmann, who later scored many top films, including VERTIGO & NORTH BY NORTHWEST for Alfred Hitchcock.

Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck gave producer Julian Blaustein a green light for DAY, after which screenwriter Edmund North adapted Harry Bates’ 1940 short story “Farewell to the Master.” In the movie, an alien humanoid, Klaatu, lands on Earth in a spacecraft with a giant robot, Gort, to deliver a message from their world to the entire human race.

Gort was played by Lock Martin, a doorman at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, who stood 7′ 7″ tall. Because of Martin’s very confining and hot robot costume, Wise could only shoot him for 30 minutes at a time and then had to edit those short scenes into longer sequences.

Although Martin was unusually tall, he wasn’t very strong and couldn’t carry Neal as some scenes required. Wise used concealed support wires to solve the problem. In other shots, Martin was carrying a lightweight dummy rather than the actress.

Rennie was cast as Klaatu because he wasn’t well known to moviegoers and, therefore, seemed more believable as an alien. Zanuck originally showed Spencer Tracy the script and Tracy wanted to play Klaatu. Blaustein, however, took the risk of being fired by disagreeing with Zanuck. He argued that if moviegoers saw a big star like Tracy emerge from the spaceship, they’d jump to conclusions about what was going to happen.

Luckily, Zanuck agreed. He then proposed Rennie, whom he’d previously cast in some smaller roles at Fox. Wise, who’d seen and liked Rennie on Broadway, agreed he’d be perfect as Klaatu.

Without revealing how the movie version of DAY ends (no spoilers even after all these years), it’s not with the twist Bates used to end his story. Bates had a newsman ask Gort to tell something to its master, Klaatu — to which the robot replied that the reporter was mistaken because he, the robot, was the master!