If the apocalyptic thriller The Day the Earth Caught Fire teaches us anything, it's that guys during the Mad Men era (the film was released in 1961) will talk to and treat women as sex toys even while the planet plummets toward the sun. Part newspaper movie and part scary science fiction built around stock news footage of anti-nuke protests and nuclear tests and the like, the cautionary tale purports that simultaneous tests by America and Russia of nuclear bombs could throw Earth off its axis. As the planet hurtles toward the sun, we follow the efforts of a London newspaper staff to get to the bottom of the disaster story while governments waffle on telling people the truth. The script hangs its hat on the struggles of a glib, cynical and alcoholic reporter (Edward Judd) to redeem himself at work while not losing the tolerance of his friend and mentor (Leo McKern), and while, more improbably, trying to win over a serious-minded receptionist (Janet Munro) with an obnoxious patter he regards as wooing. There would be little reason to find Judd's character sympathetic under ordinary circumstances, but with the globe's temperature rising and rising, it's even trickier. That aside, as an entry in the Cold War-era vogue for end-of-the-world movies, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is a taut winner by Val Guest, a former actor turned director who got his start making shorts for the British government and then turned his attention to such science fiction classics as The Quatermass Experiment and The Abominable Snowman. Drawing from the same playbook as America's Roger Corman, Guest resourcefully patches together a narrative from sundry documentary sources and fictional scenes of a city coping with bizarre weather and climate changes, such as deep fogs and bright orange skies. As things get worse and worse, Judd's self-sabotaging protagonist does grow more focused and becomes a voice for sanity—perhaps a symbol of the seriousness much of humankind needs to avoid self-annihilation. Strongly recommended. (T. Keogh)