Cast: Paul Hubschmid (John McLaren), Fiorella Mari (Mary McLaren), Madeleine Fischer (Katy Dandridge), Ivo Garrani (Professor Herbert Weisse), Dario Michaelis (Peter Leduq), Peter Meersman (General van Dorff), Jean-Jacques Delbo (Sergei Boetnikov), Massimo Zeppieri (Dennis McLaren), Sam Galter (Randowsky), Annie Bernal (the lab assistant)
According to IMDB: Gérard Landry, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart (Stuart), S. Louis Casta (a doctor)
When The Day the Sky Exploded hit the Italian screens in September 1958, it didn’t exactly make great waves. The takings were modest and the critical reaction lukewarm; the clever use of found footage and newsreels was just about the only aspect of the production that was looked on with any favour. Over time, though, the film gained in importance for two specific reasons, neither of which really have much to do with it’s qualities as a piece of cinema (or lack thereof).
Firstly, because it was a very early, if not the first, attempt to make an authentic Italian science fiction film. There had been some previous Italian productions which had included science fiction elements – such as Marino Girolami’s 1952 film Noi due soli, in which Walter Chiari dreams of being one of the few survivors of a nuclear experiment gone wrong – but they were few and far between, and the genre elements were generally buried way down in the mix. After this, though, the trickle of Italian science fiction films gained in volume and, although they never became as popular as the spy films or the westerns, they at least constituted a recognisable genre. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly – it’s hard to think that the science fiction genre wouldn’t have taken off without The Day the Sky Exploded – it would appear that, despite the accreditation of Paolo Heusch, this was actually the directorial debut of Mario Bava.
When assorted international space agencies join forces to launch the X/Z rocket, a new type of experimental atomic spacecraft, things don’t go exactly to plan. The take off is fine but, as it approaches the moon, the X/Z runs into technical problems and loses contact with mission control. The lone astronaut, John McLaren (Paul Hubschmid), is forced to eject in an emergency capsule, leaving the nuclear powered engines of the rocket to explode harmlessly in space. Or so it seems. But he arrives back on earth safely and, after a cursory medical examination, is reunited with his wife, Mary (Fiorella Mari), and son.
It soon becomes apparent, though, that the failure of the mission is having some unforeseen results. Animals begin to behave strangely, migrating inland in phenomenal numbers, mysterious balls of light are visible in the sky and a weird mirage appears over New York. The explosion of the X/Z, it would seem, has dislodged a group of huge rocks from the Delta Asteroid Belt, all of which have joined together into one big meteorite, the size of a small planet, and it’s heading straight towards the Earth. The collision, which is due to occur in only a few days, is likely to result in wholesale devastation, tidal waves, hurricanes and – inevitably – a huge number of deaths.
As the whole world breaks out into chaos, the scientists behind the X/Z come up with a cunning plan. If all the governments of the world were to shoot their entire armoury of nuclear missiles at the approaching meteorite, it could possibly blow it of course and thereby save humankind from imminent destruction…
As with Hercules, The Day the Sky Exploded represents a certain shift in the industry that was happening at the time: for the first time since much earlier in the century, Italian filmmakers were drawing inspiration from American cinema and making films that were of mass appeal internationally as well as domestically. Influenced, obviously, by the boom in US science fiction films from the 1950s, not to mention the two UK Quatermass movies, The Quatermass Experiment (55) and Quatermass 2 (57), the results aren’t entirely successful – The Day the Sky Exploded feels distinctly stodgy compared to some of the genre productions being made elsewhere – but at least it stands as an attempt to try something different.
The main reason for its failure is that the ambition on display far outstrips the skills of those involved, and although trying to be distinctly ‘new’ it actually plays like a more old-fashioned release than several other productions of the time (it feels, for instance, like it could have been made five years before Hercules). This is partly because of the black and white cinematography, which veers wildly between being invigorating and frankly dull, but also because of the script. Although it has a novel idea at its heart (for the time, anyway) and theoretically anticipates the more recent likes of Meteor and Deep Impact, it’s unable to really make anything that interesting out of it. This is primarily because it tends to become too tied up with the personal dramas of the characters involved – McLaren’s difficult relationship with his wife, a young scientists wooing of his frosty female colleague – at the expense of the bigger dramas being portrayed. Things do pick up as the narrative progresses, but by then the interest of the audience has already been challenged to breaking point.
In fact, apart from the clever use of newsreel footage, the whole thing plays out rather like a chamber piece, and could quite easily have been played out on stage rather than on screen. Almost all of the film is made up of interior shots, primarily set in the boffin’s laboratory, and it feels constrained by this; when it does shift to show people panicking in a bunker it actually gains quite a bit of power. It has to be suspected that the whole film was constructed around the news footage, with the main story being something of an afterthought, and treated as such by both the director and cinematographer. As a result, it never really managed to become as tense or thrilling as it could have been.
One thing that is interesting is that it seems to have a strangely optimistic political viewpoint, showing all the goverments of the world joining forces to fight a common cause. Considering that it was made at a time of considerable tension in the cold war – not to mention just after the launch of the Soviet Sputnik missiles and the first intercontinental ballistic missiles – it has to be suspected that this such co-operation would have been seen as unlikely by most people at the time, especially by the habitually cynical denizens of Cinecitta.
