The Day the Earth Caught Fire: Stop the presses
Sometimes the end comes not with a big bang, but in a series of slow-rolling disasters.
I have wanted to be a journalist for most of my life, even dating back into my teens. Growing up in Ohio, I believed I had a very clear-eyed view of my future. I ran the newspapers both in high school and college. I worked everywhere I could. My heroes weren’t Woodward and Bernstein, but tough-guy urban columnists like Breslin, Barnicle and Royko. I was going to cast myself in their image, prowl the police stations, courtrooms and city hall corridors, be that ink-stained wretch with a great story in one hand and a whiskey in the other.
From afar, daily newspapers seemed to be irresistible places, buzzing hubs of frenetic activity where everything happened all at once. Where fast-talking men and women swapped jokes, chased scoops and made a little history, all in the day’s work. Go home to your squalid apartment. Wake up. Do it again.1
That, of course, was purely a romantic fantasy. Even then, I had read too many books and seen too many movies. The reality was this: I didn’t break into the business at all until I was 30. (I practiced law for a spell.) I didn’t join a mainstream publication until I was 40.
Still, my heart pounded when I walked into the Tribune Tower in Chicago for an interview, and it pounded some more months later when I got the job. I wasn’t Breslin or Royko, but I was sitting in courtrooms and writing for a great American newspaper. True, it was in Washington, not Chicago. But it felt like a dream fulfilled, albeit momentarily.
And then, a year after I was hired, the company was sold, the Tribune’s Washington outpost was decimated and then merged with the Los Angeles Times’ bureau. Reporters were frog-marched into a small, windowless room and told point-blank whether they were staying or going. I was kept. I was lucky.
Thus endeth the romance.
More than 15 years later, I remain in the game, even as the ground in the industry continues to give way. Just in the last few weeks, my former colleagues at the Trib staged a walkout to protest wages. The LA Times handed pink slips to 200 newsroom employees last month and pretty much wiped out its DC bureau. Time magazine, a staple in my teenage house and another place where I once dreamed of working, laid off 15% of its editorial workforce. A new kid on the block, The Messenger, folded completely, done in by a combination of hubris, profiteering and incompetence.
The digital economy has eviscerated most of what made this job special and silenced thousands of reportorial voices that will never be heard again. Those who remain in the business spend our days clinging to the wreckage.
What does any of this have to do with a British science-fiction film from 1961 that seeks to chronicle the destruction of the world? Because The Day the Earth Caught Fire is a newspaper movie, through and through, from beginning to the End.
Strange things are afoot in London. It won’t stop raining. Even stranger, note the wry denizens of newsroom of the Daily Express, one-time star reporter Pete Stenning has actually returned to the building after spending much of the afternoon in the pub next door.
He has a reputation: “Dogs bark, cats meow and Stenning drinks,” says a government source Stenning tries to seduce at one point.
Stenning has talent but a divorce has him on a downward spiral. “I think you’re going to have to try a bit harder,” an editor tells Stenning. “This paper isn’t built for passengers.”
The rain gives way to blistering heat and then an odd fog that settles around the city. There are reports of climate disasters around the world. An extended drought makes London almost uninhabitable, and the city slides slowly into a dystopia filled with riots over water. The affluent flee to the country, the poor suffer in a baked, empty city. All of it has the feel of a series of biblical plagues.2
Eventually, Stenning breaks the story of all stories: Near simultaneous nuclear tests by the United States and the Soviet Union have thrown the Earth off its axis, causing it to tilt. Even worse, the planet’s orbit has shifted. Within months, all life will be eradicated. WORLD TIPS OVER screams the banner headline in the Daily Express.
That’s the set up for a little-known film that was part of the wave of movies in the early 1960s that began to deal with the existential threat posed by the nuclear-arms race. While films about post-apocalyptic dystopias are common now, that was not the case then. In the United States, we weren’t still too far away from creature features such as Them! and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman that treated the threat of nuclear annihilation as a joke.
The spin in The Day the the Earth Caught Fire is a bit different than most nuclear yarns, Here, mankind suffers not from fallout but because the tests upset the balance of the cosmos itself, the heavenly mechanics of the Solar System that allowed Earth to prosper. Our short-sightedness turns the very climate of the planet against us. Imagine that.
In a way, that’s sort of what has happened to the newspaper industry. It wasn’t vaporized in one massive atomic blast. Instead, it’s been a series of low-level disasters, smaller plagues: Corporate greed, big tech siphoning ad revenue, rampant editorial mismanagement, a failure to adapt. When that happens and the end finally does arrive, it feels like less of a shock than an inevitability.
Until that end, journalists will press forward, as they always do in the face of adversity. Just like the stalwart, stiff-upper-lipped staff of the Daily Express in the film’s last act. With London in ruins and doomsday approaching, a few staff members refuse to leave the building. It’s their job, of course, to cover the end of the 'world. Who else but them?
“The paper lives forever,” one of the staffers says.
If only that were so.
WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: The Day the Earth Caught Fire is rentable on VUDU, Amazon Prime and Apple. It’s also available on the highly recommended Criterion Channel.
HEY ISN’T THAT: I don’t have a good one here, but will note that Arthur Christiansen, who plays the editor of The Daily Express, was an editor at the actual Fleet Street paper for 24 years. He comes off as quite authentic, so it was a surprise to read afterward that he had tremendous trouble remembering his lines.
DUST CLOUDS: Could a couple of nuclear bombs shift Earth’s orbit? The scientific consensus on this appears to be no. The planet is far too large and has far too much rotational energy to be affected by some small nukes. That did not stop U.S. Congressman Louis Gohmert of Texas from asking, in a very Louis Gohmert way, during a 2021 hearing whether mankind could alter the course of the Earth or the moon in order to reverse the effects of climate change. In response, Scientific American calculated that it would take dropping one atomic bomb every second for 500 years to move the planet. So maybe that can’t be “Plan A.”
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 9/10. The ending is open to some interpretation.
WHAT ELSE HAVE I BEEN WATCHING: TV: The Sopranos (S. 6, Max); Monsieur Spade (S1, AMC). Movies: The Kid Detective (Morgan, 2020). Designing Woman (Minnelli, 1957).
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NEXT ENTRY: Atomic Blonde (2017). We send Charlize Theron across the Iron Curtain and get nothing back in return. Seems unfair.
Suffice it to say, this worldview did not make me much of a desirable romantic partner.
The director, Val Guest, uses a yellow filter very effectively in the apocalyptic scenes, making them differ from those set in the “before” time and anticipating techniques used by directors such as Steven Soderbergh in Traffic.