The 1953 War of the Worlds movie is a bit of an anticlimax after the documentary on Orson Welles’ 1938 broadcast — I’ve seen quite a few War of the Worlds adaptations and also read H. G. Wells’ novel, which is a lot richer and more poetic than most of the movies even though, like a lot of Wells’ novels, it also tends to sink under the weight of its didacticism. This one began as a pet project of Cecil B. DeMille, who had Paramount buy him the movie rights in 1925. Alas, DeMille left Paramount at that time to form his own studio, Producers’ Distributing Corporation (PDC), and The War of the Worlds stayed on the studio shelf until the early 1950’s. In the 1940’s Paramount had hired a young Hungarian émigré named George Pal to do a series of “Puppetoons,” one-reel color shorts with puppets, and in 1950 Pal developed an idea for a feature film about a trip to the moon based on the writings of Robert A. Heinlein. He offered the project to Paramount first — and they turned it down. He got it made at the cheap Eagle-Lion studio, called it Destination Moon, and it was a smash hit. Indeed, when he opened it in New York it played at a theatre just two blocks from the major headquarters of Paramount, so every day the company “suits” got to see people lined up for blocks to see the movie they’d turned down.
So they wooed Pal back to Paramount to make his next science-fiction movie, When Worlds Collide — ironically, also a project they had originally bought for DeMille (in 1932, after his own studio flopped and Paramount hired him back to make The Sign of the Cross). That too was a hit, and for his next project Pal picked The War of the Worlds off the Paramount shelves and developed it with Byron Haskin, formerly co-head (with Don Siegel) of Warner Bros.’ montage department, as director and Barré Lyndon as writer. For the principal role of Dr. Clayton Forrester, the scientist who stumbles onto the Martian invasion and ends up coordinating the civilian end of humanity’s response to it, Pal and Paramount cast Gene Barry, who’d previously made only one other film — The Atomic City (1952), in which he was a nuclear scientist who successfully fought the efforts of spies from the usual sinister unnamed (but obviously the Soviet Union) power to steal America’s nuclear secrets. Barry played the role of the scientist saving humanity from the Martians in the same stoic, deadpan way he’d played the similar role in The Atomic City. They also gave him a girlfriend (of sorts), Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson, delivering the usual non-performance in a nothing damsel-in-distress role), with whom he ends up fleeing in the aftermath of the Martian invasion.
The
War of the Worlds is probably the best version of
this oft-adapted story, though that’s damning it with faint praise; none of the movies seem to have captured the sense of desperation Wells
wrote into the novel, and I suspect that had Orson Welles filmed the story (as
RKO production chief George Schaefer fully expected him to when he signed him
to his movie contract in 1940 — but Welles’ attitude about The War of the
Worlds at that point was been-there, done-that and he
wanted to do something else, first Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and then Citizen Kane) we’d have had an
unbeatably good movie that preserved the richness of Wells’ novel — just as I
rue the non-existence of a Welles film of Dracula
since his Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast of that (the first show of the series) is a masterpiece, deeper and richer
than any of the Dracula movies. As it is, the 1953 The War of the Worlds is a good action-adventure film, containing at least some of the
despair of much of Wells’ book but more interested in scaring the audience (at
which it’s quite good) than making them think. Last night’s screening was from
a new “4K” source (though we didn’t actually get to see it in 4K because the
video projection equipment isn’t equipped for it) in which the people who did
the digital transfer erased the notorious wires that originally suspended the
models of Martian flying craft when the scenes showing them were shot. (One
imdb.com “Trivia” item on the film points out that it was originally filmed in
three-strip Technicolor, which created a highly saturated color image but at
the loss of fine detail, so the wires washed out originally in the chemistry of
the process and particularly the dye-transfer fusion of the three separate
color negatives into one color positive image. The wires showed up when the
film was reprinted and reissued in single-strip Eastmancolor.)
I didn’t realize
the difference (but then this is the biggest screen I’ve ever seen this film on
— all my previous encounters with it were on TV, and old-fashioned cathode-ray
TV at that) but I did appreciate that this came
from the era in which color films were colorful
and cinematographers weren’t afraid to use the entire visible spectrum instead
of shoehorning everything into the dank greens and dirty browns that dominate
the color schemes of most movies made today. I also liked the fact that the
film showed very little of the actual Martians — just a couple of quick
glimpses of one as it menaces Gene Barry and Ann Robinson outside the wreckage
of a farmhouse where they attempted to hide — and, though the Martians in this
film are malevolent, their design influenced Steven Spielberg and his effects
person, Carol Rambaldi, in the design of E.T. in that 1982 classic. (I’ll admit
it: it’s fashionable to write off E.T. as oversentimental
sludge, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a great
film, a beautiful modern-dress fairy tale.) The Martian in The War of the
Worlds was played by Charles Gemora, who usually
played apes — he was as relentlessly cast trans-specifically as Andy Serkis is
today (after the screening I joked with the proprietor that I had been startled
to see Serkis in Black Panther playing a role that
didn’t have a non-human appearance grafted onto
him with CGI!) — and he apparently also had to design the Martian costume, of
which he made two since the first looked too big on screen.
My comment after
the screening was that I was glad H. G. Wells had been dead for seven years
when it was made because he would have hated the
ending: the famously agnostic Wells would have loathed the bit of dialogue Ann
Robinson got when someone says they estimate the Martians will have destroyed
the world in six days, and she replies, “Exactly as long as it took God to
create it.” He’d have hated even more the way Barré Lyndon turned his ending —
the Martian invasion is stopped when the Martians die en masse from exposure to earth bacteria and viruses to which they have no
immunity — into a sort of divine intervention: as the film’s narrator (Sir
Cedric Hardwicke, a fine actor but one who doesn’t do this sort of thing with
quite the panache Orson Welles did), explains at the end, “After all
that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was
saved by the littlest things, which God, in His wisdom, had put upon this
Earth.” Like a lot of otherwise good science-fiction films of the early 1950’s,
including The Day the Earth Stood Still
and This Island Earth, this
version of The War of the Worlds
is marred by this Cold War-enforced religiosity — it was the era in which our
Cold War enemy was defined not just as “Communism” but as “Godless Communism,” “In God We Trust” was slapped onto all
our money and the Pledge of Allegiance was defaced with the words “under God,”
which has engendered in me a lifetime of bitterness that unless I believe in
God, and specifically the Abrahamic “sky god” of Judaism, Christianity and
Islam, I cannot be a full-fledged citizen of the United States.
