The Day My Mind Caught Fire

Val Guest recently died at the age of 94. The British film director made many films over a long career, but for me his fame and glory rest on one particular one: The Day the Earth Caught Fire.

Premiering in 1961, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is a science fiction drama in which secret, simultaneous nuclear detonations by the United States and the Soviet Union knock Earth off its axis and send it hurtling toward the sun as the world's weather turns chaotic. The doomsday drama is told through the characters of two Fleet Street reporters.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire brought Guest and co-writer Wolf Mankowitz the best British screenplay awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. U.S. President Kennedy even asked for his own copy and showed it to 200 foreign correspondents in Washington.

This movie was one of the pivotal ones--along with tons of science fiction novels and short stories from the 1950s and 1960s--that led to my love for the genre and also helped expand my mind to encompass both the promises and the dangers that the future held. (Another notable SF movie from the same director's hand is The Quatermass Xperiment.)

Thanks, Val.


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