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Comentario
FOR ME, the terror—the real terror, as opposed to whatever demons and boogeys which might have
been living in my own mind—began on an afternoon in October of 1957. I had just turned ten. And, as
was only fitting, I was in a movie theater: the Stratford Theater in downtown Stratford, Connecticut.
The movie that day was and is one of my all-time favorites, and the fact that it—rather than a
Randolph Scott western or a John Wayne war movie—was playing was also only fitting. The
Saturday matinee on that day when the real terror began was
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
, starring
Hugh Marlowe, who at the time was perhaps best known for his role as Patricia Neal's jilted and
rabidly xenophobic boyfriend in
The Day the Earth Stood Still
—a slightly older and altogether more
rational science fiction movie.
In
The Day the Earth Stood Still
, an alien named Klaatu (Michael Rennie in a bright white
intergalactic leisure suit) lands on The Mall in Washington, D.C., in a flying saucer (which, when
under power, glows like one of those plastic Jesuses they used to give out at Vacation Bible School
for memorizing Bible verses). Klaatu strides down the gangway and pauses there at the foot, the
focus of every horrified eye and the muzzles of several hundred Army guns. It is a moment of
memorable tension, a moment that is sweet in retrospect—the sort of moment that makes people like
me simple movie fans for life. Klaatu begins fooling with some sort of gadget—it looked kind of like a
Weed-Eater, as I recall—and a trigger-happy soldier-boy promptly shoots him in the arm. It turns out,
of course, that the gadget was a gift for the President. No death ray here; just a simple star-to-star
communicator.
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