The influence of Robert Wise is all over the place in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Which is a bit of a surprise since Wise is not one of those directors with a signature style that translates to any genre and across the span of a long career. For instance, he is not known for his composition of natural grandeur or for his long takes or overlapping dialogue or sensitivity to stories about women. What Robert Wise excelled at was knowing the right approach to being to each individual film.
This is why West Side Story is that rare musical shot on location. Or why The Set-Up is renowned for its gritty cinematography. Or the claustrophobia of shooting in confined space that enhances the paranoid terror in The Haunting. Or the snowy fairy-tale like quality of Curse of the Cat People. The genius of Wise’s direction of this science fiction classic is his realization that it would work best if presented as realistically as possible.
One reason that the film has managed to outlast almost every science fiction film of its era is that it isn’t hamstrung by woefully outdated special effects. While the effects that are featured are primitive by today’s standards, its greatest special effect is still every bit as powerful: Gort, the giant robot. The casting of that role is an example of the influence of Robert Wise since it was he who personally chose the actor cast as Gort.
More importantly, however, are the actual film-making decisions made by Wise. The opening that leads to the arrival of the spaceship carrying Klaatu and Gort stands out from all other similar movies by virtue of being shot in semi-documentary style. Shooting in black and white only intensifies this effect, but the intelligence of this directorial choice is made absolutely clear by comparing it with other films of the era which featured flying saucers arriving in America. Every single one of those films put the onus on special effects to heighten interest. That was fine at the time, but today those effects just laughable. So instead, the arrival of the first aliens from space is presented as if it were an actual news story. Wise even goes to the length of featuring well known broadcasters of the time playing out the arrival as if it really were a news event.
Another example of Wise’s instinct for matching style and content is the visual representation of the paranoia that is a permanent aspect of Washington, DC. Abandoning the documentary realism of the opening sequences, Wise reaches into the bag of tricks he learned shooting film noir like Born to Kill and The House on Telegraph Hill. The same use of low-key lighting and expressionistic shadows translates seamlessly into the world of science fiction as a means of visually expressing the natural sense of fear, suspicion and paranoia that would be engendered by the arrival of a flying saucer with a giant robot.
Equally as important as the cinematic language that Wise used is the language he did not use. The Day the Earth Stood Still is so clearly structure as an allegory of Christ that industry censors complained the film was blasphemous. These protestations of sacrilege make the influence of Wise’s decision not to overplay the Christian parallels all the more significant. The most overt connection is the name that Klaatu takes while living undercover as a human to learn more about them: Carpenter. A lesser director might gone well beyond into the realm of halos or Biblical quotations retooled to fit the plot or else might have in the other direction by subtly but insistently filming Klaatu in ways that made the connection with Christ utterly impossible to miss.
The influence of Robert Wise in the adaptation of the short story source material into film is abundantly clear not due to any signature style with which a film can be immediately identified with Wise, but as an example of what Wise did best. He was a master at knowing what style worked for a film and what elements would detract. The Day the Earth Stood Still perhaps demonstrates that elusive ability more than anything else in his body of work that runs the gamut from film noir to horror to war films and from the intimacy of The Haunting to his adventurous epics like The Hindenburg and the first big screen version of Star Trek.
