The War of the Worlds

Barry Forshaw

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781839020766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The War of the Worlds was one of a handful of high-prestige science fiction productions in a low-budget era, and initiated modern cinema's reliance on screen-filling special effects. Barry Forshaw analyses and celebrates this key science fiction film of the 1950s, exploring its literary origins and numerous film progeny.

‘The War of the Worlds’

Introduction

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water … Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

It is not just that H. G. Wells’s name is prominently rendered above the striking scarlet titles of the 1953 George Pal/Byron Haskin film of his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds that firmly locates the English novelist as the onlie begetter of this updated, streamlined, relocated cinematic version; it is the fact that Wells’s superbly poetic opening paragraph, redolent in its cosmic fatalism of the author’s contemporary Thomas Hardy, is intoned in the film’s opening scene (in sonorous fashion) by the English theatrical knight Sir Cedric Hardwicke. As the premise of what we are about to see is elegantly articulated, we are shown a series of tableaux: impressive astronomical paintings of the planets by the celebrated illustrator Chesley Bonestell, considered, and rejected, by the invaders before settling on our Earth (the camera panning to give the illusion of a tracking shot across awe-inspiring alien landscapes). Needless to say, Wells’s text is filleted and tweaked (not least in updating the century), but it was – and is – rare for a literary work to be granted this kind of respect when adapted for a piece of popular entertainment as the Pal/Haskin film was undoubtedly intended to be. What perhaps the film-makers didn’t realise was that as well as creating a supremely efficient piece of commercial cinema, for all its occasional missteps – such as its bland protagonists and a very un-Wellsian piety at the end – they were both elevating the often under-regarded science-fiction drama above the low-budget parameters of the 1950s and creating a template for alien invasion films that was to continue to serve over the decades – and still does (as we shall see) today. The film is a consummate demonstration of cinema as spectacle, utilising every element, from groundbreaking special effects to impressive orchestral score and (notably) a Foley track of memorable sound effects, to forge an immersive audience experience – a strategy which has now become the norm in contemporary cinema. Wells may have been the instigator of the concept, but the insertion of the notion of an invasion from outer space into the DNA of the science-fiction genre owes as much to this pioneering film as it does to the English writer who created the source material.

But it is not just the footling attempts at resistance by an overmatched planet Earth that are rendered in exhilarating detail by the film-makers, but the ambitiously realised canvas of a devastated planet, laid waste to by its pitiless invaders, which has been similarly much imitated. And the movie’s notion of the collapse of society – and the attempts by the human race to survive when every comfort and certainty has been inexorably stripped away – has infused many a film since, much in the way that Wells’s original novel spawned a host of similar visions of Armageddon (including such enduring pieces as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids [1951]).

The Hungarian producer George Pal, who was later to film an intriguing version of another Wells literary classic, The Time Machine (1895), had previously inaugurated the science-fiction boom of the 1950s with the faux-documentary-style Destination Moon (1950), and was the perfect film-maker of the era to realise a cinematic version of Wells’s epic novel, even though the compromises and finessings which were de rigueur for the day and genre require a certain patient indulgence when regarded in the more sophisticated twenty-first century. Pal handed the actual direction of the film to the talented journeyman Byron Haskin, though Pal himself would subsequently handle director’s duties on The Time Machine (1960). Although the film is a refutation of the auteur theory of directorial primacy – unless one might occasionally regard a producer rather than a director as the key creative talent – there is no gainsaying the brisk efficiency of Haskin’s skills here. Perhaps it should be stressed at this point that the suggestions throughout the following text that it is Pal’s film more than Haskin’s recognise the fact that The War of the Worlds represents its very hands-on producer’s vision more than it does its director’s. Other plus factors include the screenplay by British playwright Barré Lyndon, best known for The Man in Half Moon Street, filmed in 1944, and an urgent orchestral score (utilising a late-nineteenth-century symphony orchestra) by Leith Stevens (also responsible for the scores to Pal’s earlier, similarly apocalyptic When Worlds Collide [1951] and Destination Moon). The composer must have been ruefully aware at an early stage that the film’s groundbreaking and fortissimo Foley mix would (in its total sound picture) inevitably favour the radical use of otherworldly sound effects, notably the pulsating – and terrifying – noise of the destructive heat rays from the Martian war machines.

Destination Moon (1950)

Perhaps the film’s weakest link is its players – the colourless and under-characterised Gene Barry and Ann Robinson – but an argument might be made for the avoidance of major stars in favour of relatively anonymous contract performers; the raison d’être of the film is less the appeal of its players than the awesome vision of a world destroyed. A comparison might be profitably made with the later (and, it could be argued, equally impressive) Steven Spielberg 2005 version of Wells’s novel, radically altered from the original, as was the Pal film, and obliged to accommodate the greater star wattage of Tom Cruise as the everyman hero struggling to save his family as civilisation collapses around him. (The Spielberg film is discussed later in this study.) It might be argued that The War of the Worlds is something of a tabula rasa: to different people, the title will suggest Wells’s novel, a variety of films, a highly successful concept album and one of the best-known (and most notorious) adaptations in the history of broadcasting. A study such as this is obliged to cover them all, and winkle out their interconnectivity.

After the science-fiction boom of the 1950s, it would be nearly two decades before the genre was once again considered commercially viable; the prime example here is George Lucas’s Star Wars in 1977, and – to a slightly lesser extent – Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind from the same year, in which the benign alien visitors were a specific counterpoint to Pal’s murderous Martians. In this second SF boom, the frequently low-to-medium-budget films of the 1950s were granted a dazzling makeover courtesy of technological advances in the field, although the cheerful exploitation mindset of the 50s film-makers was still at the heart of these movies. After all, such film-makers as Spielberg and Lucas had grown up with films like Pal’s The War of the Worlds. But the latter was one of a select group of 1950s movies on which a considerable amount of money had been lavished. It was a prestige product, rare in the genre, along with such fondly remembered films as Fred McLeod Wilcox’s 1956 Forbidden Planet (which also drew upon a respectable literary source – in this case, the uncredited urtext was Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and Joseph Newman’s impressive and intelligent This Island Earth (also 1956), a film sadly maligned in a Mystery Science Theater parody that crassly suggested the film was a badly written, low-budget disaster.

For those old enough to remember the film’s cinema showings (including numerous revivals), the visceral impact of the sound and vision of The War of the Worlds remains indelible. Even more than the equally influential Forbidden Planet, Pal’s film established the parameters (and possibilities) for much that was to follow. The first use of the sinister Martian heat ray, with its throbbing electronic hum, remains a seminal moment in special-effects and science-fiction cinema, while the brief, jolting glimpse of one of the invading aliens in a ruined farmhouse occasioned a famous fright moment in the cinema as the creature’s hand, with its grotesque suckers, reaches for the heroine’s shoulder. Most of all, though, it was the exhilaratingly realised destruction of Los Angeles (as opposed to London and Richmond of the original novel) which took the breath away, and would be plundered – both in terms of influence and even in the specific reuse of some of the actual footage in subsequent films. As a Hungarian who had left his country menaced by a ruthless invader, George Pal – more than many American film-makers – was able to access a personal sense of desolation and loss that underpins the thrilling destruction. There is a curious dichotomy, also present in Wells’s novel, between a fatalistic awareness of the destruction that war could wreak, along with an ambiguous fascination with modern (or even futuristic) technology. The latter is one of the keys to the film’s curious bifurcated appeal. Shifting the original narrative to the years of the cold war and bringing in a theme of atomic destruction (a threat shrugged off by the virtually invulnerable invaders) ensured that the film – like much of the best popular art – is about several things at once. One element might be a foreigner’s (i.e. Pal’s) presentation for American audiences of just how fragile the advances and achievements of that slightly smug society might be, questioning even the notion of humanity as the lords of creation, a theme also to be found in Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), where the hero perceives the mark of the beast on the faces he sees in the streets of London.

Pal and Haskin eschew the non-professional narrator’s voice of the original novel which firmly placed the reader in the consciousness of the beleaguered hero as he attempts to find his wife; instead, the film-makers adopt a more distanced, Olympian approach, and to some degree Gene Barry is simply there as an identification figure for the viewer, while describing for us what is going on (he is transformed into a scientist in the film, the default profession for protagonists in 1950s SF). But Barry’s uncharismatic turn does not vitiate the film’s effectiveness; its resonance over the years has been enhanced by other elements, such as the still-impressive production design, notably Albert Nozaki’s remarkable Martian war machines with their sleek, manta-like shape, their articulated legs from the original novel replaced by pulsating energy rays. These machines have been presented in many visualisations over the years, including Frank R. Paul’s memorable 1927 version for Amazing Stories magazine, so Nozaki would have been well aware that he had to create a design which both paid homage to his predecessors but also forged something original and distinctive – a task he accomplished in the most adroit fashion. The war machines’ heat rays, mounted on weaving cobra-like heads, sported an aperture divided into three separate coloured lenses – and viewers were subsequently able to note that the design was based on the organic vision of the invaders themselves, when we are afforded a glimpse of the memorable Martian creature from one of the machines.

The film’s structure is a canny alternation of accelerando and largo sections rather than a steady and inexorable building of tension, but Pal and Haskin are careful to show us the various comforting elements of (then) modern society which would be swept away by the invaders, such as an unsophisticated country dance. The first, shortly-to-be-incinerated, victim of the Martians is a priest. And this human target – as will be seen from a discussion of the original novel – is an appropriate objective correlative for the initial victims, also religious, in Wells’s English-set novel. The place of religion itself is fairly central to Pal and Haskin’s film, as opposed to Wells’s more sceptical view – while the agnostic writer would undergo intermittent periods of tenuous religious belief, and even penned a now largely forgotten tract, God the Invisible King (1917), his conception of God was as unorthodox as that of William Blake. How Wells would have reacted to Pal and Haskin’s conventionally pietistic conclusions is not hard to guess, with the film-makers happy to ascribe the destructive effects of bacteria to divine intervention (admittedly taking their cue from Wells, but flattening out any nuance). In the final analysis, George Pal and Byron Haskin’s film of The War of the Worlds is about technology – its potential and its limitations – as opposed to the consoling effects of religion. But before any consideration of the film, it is necessary to discuss one of the three or four most important science-fiction novels ever written by one of England’s authentic literary geniuses.

End of the world: the original novel

What do we remember the author H. G. Wells for in the twenty-first century? Forging almost single-handedly all the great themes of science fiction, including such prescient notions as a dying Earth, an ozone-less cinder at the end of The Time Machine? The optimistic future of The Shape of Things to Come (1933)? Or the pioneering, and – in its day – shocking pleasure in sex (what the author called ‘the urgency of the body’), in both his life and novels, with Ann Veronica (1909) famously featuring the first female orgasm in serious literature? Something, however, for which Wells is barely celebrated today is social comedy, the great novels that were once massively influential but are now, sadly, regarded as fusty and/or twee, and seldom read. It’s something of a scandal – and a different kind of scandal dogged Wells, the sexual iconoclast (Ann Veronica) and the comic entertainer to match Charles Dickens (the still-charming The History of Mr Polly [1910] and Kipps [1905]). But the book that seems most prescient about modern Britain is Tono-Bungay (1909), with its vision of empty celebrity and the worship of something utterly worthless (the fraudulent patent medicine of the title – which suggestively promises ‘vigour’ … Viagra, anyone?). Wells’s caustic analysis of class conflict resonates from the beginning of the last century to the present day, and the author burns with an anger stoked by his own passionate meritocracy; after thrashing a blue-blooded bully, the reluctant conman hero snarls, ‘I felt this softness in him, realised all that quality of modern upper-class England that never goes to the quick, that hedges about rules … that claims credit for things demonstrably half done …’ It is an anger that informs the author’s hatred of a disorderly instinct of acquisition and the broad, slow decay of the great social organism of England. But this is counterbalanced by the whiplash energy of the characters, as well as the book’s heartfelt, vivid celebration of...