Instead, they will give humanity a chance to annihilate itself, by providing each of these five with three capsules capable of wiping out all human life within a 1,500-mile radius. In toto enough to leave the entire planetary surface vacant for its prospective new tenants, these devastating weapons are, for now, sealed in containers that will open only at the command of these five people. But once the lids are opened, anybody with possession of the capsules can send them speeding to any target in the world.

All these five have to do is resist their own darker natures, and the pressure of their respective governments, for the 27 days it will take for the capsules to become inert and harmless.

With these rules in place, the Alien believes, it's only a matter of time before the capsules start flying. Chinese peasant Su Tan (Marie Tsien), whose life has already been devastated by war, takes her own human weakness out of the equation by immediately committing suicide. British citizen Eve Wingate (French) also resolves the issue right away, by tossing her box into the English Channel. Famed German professor Klaus Bechner (Voskovec) is hit by a car, which takes him out of commission for a while.

Cynical American reporter Jonathan Clark (Barry) simply resolves to keep his own box a secret until the 27 days are up, a plan that becomes more complicated when the Aliens tell the world the names of the five people they've contacted; he and Eve go into hiding together, an arrangement that ends with them falling in love despite a complete dearth of sexual tension between them. The real problem, though, is Soviet soldier Ivan Godofsky (Azemat Janti), a decent sort who also wants to keep the capsules a secret but who, in a moment of weakness (following considerable torture), surrenders control of his capsules to his nation's murderous premier ...

A forgotten story of power and fear

Were The 27th Day more widely remembered, we would now be using this space to declare that time has not been kind to a film with a powerful reputation.

We would also note its many flaws, including among them chauvinism of both the national and sexual varieties. The five are, after all, awfully white—the one non-Caucasian of the bunch is a Chinese woman who considerately offs herself right away. Eve's simultaneous decision to simply toss away her box may be an accurate reflection of the truism that women have more common sense than men, but it also effectively removes her from the all-male power struggle that follows—and demonstrates that the aliens are idiots, as the problem of dealing with such ultimate power should be more of a challenge to us stupid Earthmen than that. (A simple provision that the boxes could not be thrown away would have left these hapless protagonists with a persuasive dilemma, and us with a better story.)

There are other problems, among them an easy-to-spot poverty-row budget, some awfully schematic characterizations and a heroic lead, in the person of Gene Barry, who does nothing of substance throughout the film. The worst element is a last-minute cheat of a plot twist that makes hash of the story's setup by declaring that the capsules had a potential second purpose all along. Talk about pulling an ending out of a hat—let alone an ending that transforms the story's overarching message from the Gandhian "We must all learn to live with one another or die" to the more Bushian "We must do this by first totally annihilating all the 'enemies of human freedom.'" The resulting climax involves an act of mass murder that the world embraces as a good thing, without any moral qualms on the part of anybody.

These are, of course, all things we'd be saying about a film whose reputation had survived the decades intact. But posterity was never that kind to The 27th Day. It never became a cult classic on the level of Forbidden Planet or The Day The Earth Stood Still. It is only rarely shown and even more rarely discussed. So it actually deserves far more than we've given it. We must therefore note that it's more thoughtful, and literate, than almost every science-fiction film of its era, let alone our own ... and that it deserves credit for accomplishing what films of this genre rarely manage, which is to say, use its fantastic premise to tell a story that hinges upon the very contradictions of human nature.