(1951, b/w) "There's no limit to what he can do. He could destroy the Earth.... If anything should happen to me you must go to Gort; you must say these words, 'Klaatu barada nikto.' Please repeat that." Ever since, many of us as lifelong fans have repeated that untranslated phrase. In the backseat of a taxi, alien humanoid Klaatu (Michael Rennie) teaches Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) the famous words.

Nothing more need be said if you've already seen (as I have several times) one of the greatest science-fiction films of all time by director Robert Wise from a screenplay by Edmund H. North based on a story by Harry Bates with the memorable score by Bernard Herrmann.

As an unidentified flying object, traveling at 4,000 miles per hour, circles the Earth, news reporter Elmer Davis announces a message, referring to Orson Welles's 1939 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds: "This is not another flying-saucer scare." When the discus-shaped spaceship lands on ball fields in Washington, DC, a man cries: "They're here!" Following a few hours of quiescence as the military surrounds the spacecraft and a large crowd of curious spectators forms, Drew Pearson on NBC radio reports: "I think something is happening."

A spaceman emerges from the ship - "We have come to visit you in peace and goodwill" - but when he pulls out an instrument from his spacesuit, a soldier shoots him in the shoulder. A giant robot then appears, destroying military weapons with a laser stare. "It was a gift for your president," says the wounded alien: "With this he could have studied life on other planets."

Taken to Walter Reed Hospital, Klaatu explains to the government's representative Mr Harley of his having traveled 250 million miles for an audience with the representatives of all the planet's nations: "The future of your planet is at stake." Uninterested in the petty squabbling among nations - "your childish jealousies and suspicions" - Klaatu tells Harley, "I'm impatient with stupidity" when world leaders refuse to cooperate for a general assembly at the UN.

Using a salve to heal his wound, having told the doctor that he's 78 years old but looking half that age, Klaatu escapes from the medical facility and assumes the identity of Mr Carpenter. At Mrs Crockett's boardinghouse, 1412 Harvard St NW, he takes a room where he makes acquaintance with the other boarders, including Mrs Helen Benson and her preadolescent son Bobby (Billy Gray). Listening to the media's demanding the destruction of the spaceman, Helen says to the others: "We automatically assume he's a menace."

While Helen goes out with her fiancé, Tom Stevens (Hugh Marlowe), an insurance salesman, she entrusts Mr Carpenter with Bobby for the day, who takes the strangely ill-informed man ("You're a real screwball") on a tour of the capital, including Arlington National Cemetery where his father's buried and the Lincoln Memorial. Ill-informed, that is, until Bobby, who sports an active imagination, asks him about the spaceship and a reporter questions him if he's afraid: "I am fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason."

The pair make a brief stop at Prof Barnhardt's residence, who isn't at home, where Mr Carpenter leaves a message for the great scientist on his chalkboard in the form of an equation to help solve a problem in celestial mechanics. Sent for, Klaatu reveals his actual identity to Prof Jacob Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe), explaining his concern about humans' potential abuse of atomic energy for warfare beyond Earth's immediate environs: "I come to you as a last resort."

Admitting that scientists are too often ignored, the professor asks if Klaatu might perform a demonstration - "something dramatic but not destructive" - that would arrest the world's attention. When Helen tries to stop Tom, whose thoughts are only of this opportunity for personal recognition, from contacting the authorities about Carpenter's real identity, he says to her: "I don't care about the rest of the world."

The drama rather than the didacticism of the movie's anti-nuclear-weapons and save-the-planet message initially captured and held my fascination with the film; nevertheless, this time I noticed two minor yet curious lapses with regard to mathematics in the script. The equation Klaatu writes on the blackboard (already full of equations, most of which are basic differentiation and integration) begins with a word that has "Sin" for the first three letters (but not the trigonometric term "sine," possibly "Sinusoid") followed by F - F = M - 3/8 m(-a)^3 M^3, which is nonsense (though his saying to Prof Barnhardt, "With variation of parameters, this is the answer," is meaningful to any first-year calculus student); later he helps Bobby with his arithmetic homework by explaining, "First find the common denominator and then divide," which also makes no sense unless he were to say "subtract" instead of "divide."

In 1973 musicians in a Canadian progressive-rock group called themselves Klaatu (rumored to be the Beatles).

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