Kevin Brianton
Strategic Communication Senior Lecturer, Melbourne: Australia.
Nuclear fears of annihilation haunted the 1950s. This depressing view of world destruction continued in George Pal’s next film: When Worlds Collide. Many science fiction films had dealt with the destruction or breakdown of society, but the physical end of the planet was virtually a new area.[1] Cecil B. DeMille had originally been slated for the film in a much earlier period. The rights to the story by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer were originally bought in 1933 by Paramount, when director DeMille was planning a related project called “The End of the World.” DeMille had hoped to rush the project into production after filming wrapped on This Day and Age (1933), but the script was never even written and the studio scrapped the project.
In When Worlds Collide scientists discovered that a new sun and its planet were spinning across the galaxy toward earth. The planet would move close to the earth, causing tidal waves and mass destruction, and then the new sun would engulf the earth. The only hope for civilisation was a small spacecraft which could hop planets just before the fatal collision. The film opened with biblical saying:
And God looked upon the earth and behold it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth … And God said unto Noah, ‘The end of flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and , behold I will destroy them with the earth…[2]
This was remarkably close to the vision of evangelist Billy Graham who, after President Truman had announced a nuclear weapon had been exploded in the Soviet Union, had preached in 1949 that the choice for America was now between religious revival and nuclear judgement. The choice was between western culture founded on religion, and communism which was against all religion. The country had abandoned the ten commandments and faced judgement for its misdeeds.[3] In 1949, he delivered a sermon on the fate of the United States which rang with biblical doom.
Let us look for a moment at the political realm. Let’s see what is happening – not only in the city of Los Angeles, but in the western world. The world is divided into two sides. ON the one side we see so-called Western culture. Western culture and its fruit had its foundation in the bible, the Word of God, and in the revivals of he Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Communism on the other hand, had decided against God, against Christ, against the bible, against all religion. Communism is not only an economic interpretation of life – Communism is a religion that is directed and motivated by the Devil himself who has declared war against almighty God. Do you know that the Fifth Columnists, called Communists, are more rampant in Los Angeles than any other city in America? We need a revival.[4]
Just as God had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, Pompeii, and the Roman empire, he would destroy the United States, and Los Angeles in particular, if it strayed any longer or further from the moral path. The nuclear threat was a biblical judgement for moral failings. These speeches were the catalyst which launched Graham to become a nationwide media celebrity.
Graham’s apocalyptic vision of nuclear judgement resonated throughout When Worlds Collide. The conclusion of the film showed the earth burning as it approached the surface of he new sun. Nuclear-like explosions ripped from its surface as it was absorbed. This image must have terrified the American public of the 1950s with its connotations of nuclear destruction. The most chilling part of When Worlds Collide was the inevitable nature of the destruction of the earth, just as the cold war promised an inevitable nuclear conflagration. The film may have reassured an American public at one level by showing that life would continue in some form after nuclear destruction. However, with its biblical judgement of corruption and the inevitable nature of the world’s destruction, it was an uncomfortable film to watch.
[1][1] The theme had been used before in a film called The Comet (1910) and two German films Himmelskibet (1917) and Verdens Undergang (1916). The two German films probably reflected some of the gloom as the First World War dragged on. A few science fiction films saw the collapse of society such as the British film Things to Come (1936). See the introduction to Phil Hardy, (ed.). Science Fiction: The Complete Film Sourcebook, William Morrow, New York, 1984 for a discussion of the trend.
[2] When Worlds Collide Paramount (George Pal), 
Sidney Boehm, (d) Rudolp Mate.
[3] Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War II, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1988, p. 65.
[4] William Graham, Revival in Our Time: The Story of Billy Graham Evangelistic Campaign Evangelistic Campaigns, Including Six Of His Sermons, 2nd edn enl. Van Kampen Press, Wheaton, Illinois, 1950, pp. 72-73.
Cinema history 