A meteor shower blinds most of the world's population and spreads spores that cause triffid plants to become animated. Bill Masen, a merchant navy officer, escapes the catastrophe after spending the night in a hospital with his eyes bandaged. At a railway station, he meets Susan, an orphaned schoolgirl who also avoided the blinding. They flee the chaotic streets and set off in an abandoned car to reach Masen’s ship, but are attacked by a triffid along the way when the car becomes stuck and barely escape.
Elsewhere, scientist Tom Goodwin and his wife Karen, isolated in a lighthouse, learn of the global disaster via radio. After a triffid invades their lighthouse and is apparently killed, they discover the plants can regenerate themselves. They barricade themselves in and begin searching for a way to stop them.
Masen and Susan reach the docks and, after hearing troubling news over the radio, travel by boat to France. There they meet Christine Durant, who leads them to a château sheltering blind survivors. During a supply run with Mr Coker, a worker at the castle, they discover dozens of the plants and Coker is killed by one. Later, escaped convicts invade the château, allowing triffids to overrun it during the chaos. Only Bill, Susan, and Christine survive, fleeing in a prison bus.
As they head toward the American naval base in Cádiz, they encounter a blind couple, Luis and Teresa de la Vega, and help her deliver a baby boy. Luis tells Masen that the Cadiz base has been evacuated by submarine since those who were underwater didn't get blinded by the meteor shower. Masen gets de Vega's radio transmitter, which relays news of a final naval evacuation in Alicante. That night, after deciding to leave in the morning, he tries to electrify the villa’s fence, but it fails due to weak electrical current. When triffids attack, Masen fends them off with a makeshift flamethrower and uses a noisy clown car to lure them away so the others can escape. He is then rescued by a naval dinghy.
Back at the lighthouse, triffids break in, forcing Tom and Karen to retreat upstairs. In a last-ditch effort, Tom turns a salt-water fire hose on the plants, causing them to dissolve in clouds of green smoke. He realizes that seawater is lethal to triffids and kills the rest of the plants in the lighthouse.
In the final scene, the narrator declares that humanity has triumphed over the triffids by turning to the very element that gave it life: the sea. Survivors from the submarine disembark and head to a church to give thanks for their survival.
In June 1960 it was announced Frank and John King would make the film from a script by Phil Yordan having just finished Gorgo.[3]
The movie was made in September 1961 by Security Pictures, a company of Yordan. It was made for Rank at Shepperton Studios.[4] Much of the finance came from Allied Artists.
It was the first British film for director Steve Sekely.[5] Howard Keel recalled Sekely as "a lovely man with a thick Hungarian accent and a habit of offering a direction and walking away from you, so you caught very little of what he said. But somehow you knew what he wanted. We all loved him and his humor."[6]
Keel said "The script was awful and was rewritten by the producer and his wife, which only made it worse."[6] Keel said filming was cut short as the producers ran out of money before they had the chance to film a lighthouse sequence where his character learns how to kill the Triffids.[7]
Reshoots
When the final film was assembled it ran for only 60 minutes. One of Yordan's regular writers, Bernard Gordon, was called in to come up with extra material. Gordon later said Yordan blamed the producer and director for the film running short, but Gordon "believed the real trouble came from Yordan’s unwillingness or inability to spend the money required to shoot the major action and special effects sequences that had been planned for Spain. But he was also constrained by the need to spend most of the money in England to qualify for a government subsidy under the Eady Plan."[8]
Allied executive Bernard Glasser blamed the fact the triffids did not look good in Cinemascope.[9]
Gordon was asked to devise a new storyline which added thirty minutes of screen time but did not involve the original cast as they would be too expensive to bring back. He could use two characters in an isolated setting.[10] Gordon came up with a plot that took place in the lighthouse with Kieron Moore. This was directed by Freddie Francis over five weeks. Francis recalled, "We didn’t make it a good film, but at least we made it acceptable to the people who were going to put money in."[11]
In August 1962 Glasser said "I am pleased with the film now. But it's an experience I'll be happy to forget."[9]
The movie was not released in cinemas until May 1963.
Although the film retained some basic plot elements from John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids, it is not a particularly faithful adaptation: "It strays significantly and unnecessarily from the book and is less well regarded than the BBC's intelligent (if dated) 1981 TV serial".[12] Unlike in the novel, the triffids arrive from a meteor shower, some of the action is moved to France and Spain, and an important character, Josella Playton, is deleted.[13] Most seriously, the screenplay supplies a simplistic solution to the triffid problem: salt water dissolves them and "the world was saved".[14]
The film version is enjoyable, luring the effective-looking Triffids away with music from an ice-cream van and some other good action scenes. The Triffids' death-by-seawater climax is weak and contrived though. But it would still rank in my all-time top 100 films.[15]
Halliwell's Film Guide claimed the film was a "rough and ready adaptation of a famous sci-fi novel, sometimes blunderingly effective and with moments of good trick work".[16]
Filmink argued "It’s a shame that when Rank finally dipped its toe in sci-fi waters... the result was such a mess.... People love this movie, but we don’t think even its most rabid fans would call it well made."[17]
After the film's initial run, the rights to the picture reverted to producer Philip Yordan, who eventually transferred them to screenwriter Bernard Gordon and his business partner, Richard Rosenfeld. In an effort to generate quick income from the picture, they sold non-exclusive home video rights to a number of discount VHS labels.
This move incensed film restoration expert Mike Hyatt, who had been a fan of the picture since his youth. Hyatt was able to obtain the well-worn original negative from Gordon, while Rosenfeld, still short of money, sold Hyatt the North American theatrical and home video rights. Hyatt then began an arduous and decades-long effort to restore the film, resorting to manually using a jeweler's loupe and a needle to pick specks of dirt out of the emulsion side of the negative. Hyatt eventually had an interpositive struck from the restored negative which in 2010 was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. By the fall of 2014 Hyatt had obtained the majority of the worldwide rights to the film and had planned to arrange a 4K digital scan of the negative.[19] The status of the project was unclear when Hyatt died in February 2024.
↑ See the description of the original artwork that was auctioned in 2012: "The Day of the Triffids (Allied Artists, 1962). Joseph Smith Original Movie Poster Art (22" X 27.25")". Dallas, Texas: Heritage Auctions. Retrieved 23 October 2017.. This artwork has also been attributed to Reynold Brown. Brown's own records indicate that he worked on the campaign for The Day of the Triffids: "Movie Campaigns, A Listing". Archived from the original on 23 April 2012. Retrieved 12 March 2013. The narrative accompanying the sale of the original artwork in 2012 by Heritage Auctions looks to be conclusive, and supports the attribution to Smith.
↑ Bartok, Dennis; Joseph, Jeff (2016). A thousand cuts: the bizarre underground world of collectors and dealers who saved the movies. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN978-1-4968-0773-1.
Bibliography
Keel, Howard (2005). Only make believe. Barricade.
McGilligan, Patrick (1997). Tender comrades: a backstory of the Hollywood blacklist. St Martin's Press.
Warren, Bill. Keep Watching the Skies, American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, Vol. II: 1958–1962. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1986. ISBN0-89950-032-3.
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