“The 27^th Day” is a science fiction movie set during the Cold War. An alien visits Earth and abducts five people (temporarily) to his spaceship. He tells them he has chosen them as a representative sample of the various people of Earth and gives them each a small container which has capsules that can kill people without harming anything else. The five people include a European scientist, an American Journalist, a Russian soldier, and two women (whose occupations, if they had any, we don’t learn), an English woman and a Chinese woman. The alien tells the people that the weapons he has given them will destroy the earth, but if they don’t use the weapons within 27 days, they will become unusable. He says he believes they will destroy themselves, because the aliens have been watching them for a while and believe them to be irredeemably violent. He then sends them home.

The obvious solution seems to be to just say nothing, but the alien immediately takes that off the table by making a general announcement to all the world saying what he’s done and naming the five people. Now the first thing that struck me about this movie is that, in spite of a mostly sexist attitude towards the women (perfectly ordinary for the period and better than some movies), in my opinion the two women take the most intelligent actions. The Chinese woman, knowing exactly what would happen if she was ever discovered, kills herself. (No one else can open the containers.) The British woman (Eve Wingate, played by Valerie French) promptly throws her container into the sea. They separate themselves from the containers and thus make them unusable by any authorities. Eve is sneered at by the American (Jonathan Clark, played by Gene Barry) for this action. He says she has taken the coward’s way out. I found his reasoning inexplicable.

The Russian soldier declines to open the container and is arrested and tortured. While I have no doubt that in Russia that is exactly what would happen, the propagandist nature of the film implies that the ‘nice’ western powers wouldn’t do that. They try to talk Clark and the scientist (Klaus Bechner, played by George Voskovec) into opening the containers, but they never even threaten to harm them. There is no way that would happen, either during the Cold War or now. So it’s a nice fiction for a movie of the time, but hardly a realistic depiction of how events would turn out.

It’s a well-directed and acted movie, doing a good job with a limited budget. The decision to keep the aliens as human-looking, and to minimise the alien paraphernalia, mostly to a decent interior setting on the alien ship, was a wise one and avoided the usual poor effects that take the viewer out of the experience. The cast are all very good. Azemat Janti as the Russian soldier has possibly the most difficult role as the character is tortured and manipulated into divulging the secret of the weapon. The rest of the cast are fine in their respective roles, though on the whole they were mostly fairly standard characters and there was little acting to do.

A realistic touch is the general hysteria and panic, with mobs attacking people who they think might be one of the five with the weapons. The movie is trying to make a point about man’s capacity for violence and does get many things right. The authorities, East or West, are most concerned with what ‘the other side’ might do and obtaining access to the weapons first. They take the containers away from Bechner and Clark, and refuse to let Bechner have his container back so he can study it. They act as if the people may have been brainwashed – under the circumstances, I do think that this is a reasonable fear and probably the only reasonable action of any of the authority figures in this film.

There is also a level of racism in the film, though more subtle than I have seen elsewhere. The alien says he has selected representatives of the entire planet. However there is no African, and therefore no threat to an entire continent. What about the Pacific region, or South America? The ‘powers’ are concerned with one-upping each other, but according to the alien they will only take the planet if the humans are completely wiped out, which is unlikely even if the weapons are used. The Northern hemisphere would be, certainly, but the Southern hemisphere would be unaffected. The Chinese woman is swiftly disposed of, and in fact has no dialogue at all. This leaves the safety of the world in the hands of white people.

Bechner is constantly making excuses for the alien. The alien claims to being unable to harm others but has no issues with giving others the means to destroy themselves, and stirring the pot to goad them on. This does not make him a good guy in any sense of the word. He says his kind is at risk and they want to take the planet. They are threatening invasion and annihilation, even if they don’t want to get their own hands dirty. Bechner keeps on acting as if what the alien has said is okay, but I don ‘t really agree. One of his fellow scientists postulates that the weapons are fake, an elaborate bluff, and the intent is to foment war by more conventional means. He’s got a point – at this stage of the story it’s just as possible as anything else.

Warning – there will be spoilers. The solution to this problem, seen as a victory, has very concerning moral implications. Bechner, finally given a chance to examine the capsules again, has had some thoughts about the inscriptions on the containers, and on what the alien said. Without telling anyone else, he activates the weapons. They eliminate every ‘enemy of freedom’ on the planet, ushering in an era of peace and freedom. Enemies of freedom according to who? How many people have just died? What were their crimes? We see the war-mongering Russian general die, and this is supposed to be representative, but this is by no means a certainty. Surely the nice Professor Bechner is a mass murderer.

They end at the United Nations, attempting to contact the aliens to invite them to the planet anyway, saying they are happy to share. The alien responds and says he greets them from a federation of thousands of worlds. So … was his world really dying? It didn’t sound from that remark as if they needed the earth at all. So, he lied about the whole thing, and we can assume it was some kind of test. The problem is this – they’ve lied about that, what else have they lied about? How can we be sure the aliens are remotely benign given the mayhem they’ve instigated with their experiment? I would be wondering about this.

Ultimately “The 27^th Day” is both a good and a bad movie. Good, in that it is a better example for the period of science fiction than many ridiculous movies that were being made (such as “The Giant Claw”).  It is bad in that the plot has many holes, and extremely questionable morality. I think, if you enjoy science fiction of the period, it is worth a watch. Be prepared to be left feeling decidedly uneasy about the attitudes being portrayed.