by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The two films shown at last
night’s Mars movie screening in Golden Hill (http://marsmovieguide.com/) were
unusually good given some of the crap we’ve been presented before — though much
of the crap was the sort of Mystery Science Theatre 3000-type fare that while inept as filmmaking has camp
entertainment value simply by being so
bad. The first was a film called The War of the Worlds: The True Story, whose odd conceit was that the war between Earth and Mars
described in H. G. Wells’ classic 1897 novel actually happened and the last
survivor of it, Bertie Wells (Floyd Reichman), was interviewed and videotaped
in 1965 reminiscing about it. Hines, who apparently wrote the script as well,
also assumed that in 2006 a cache of contemporary film footage of the actual
war of the worlds was unearthed in a safe in a vault of a building that was
about to be torn down, and so his film supposedly intersperses footage from the
interview with Bertie Wells done six months before he died with the newsreel
and documentary film of the actual war. What Hines really did was take a whole
mass of stock footage, including newsreels from both world wars, as well as scenes from feature films of the
classic era either made or set in times a few decades later than the 1900 date
given of the actual war of the worlds.
He quite artfully patched in newly
created effects footage of the Martian war machines and grafted them into his
stock clips, though some of the clips themselves were so recognizable from
their original contexts they were jarring and disconcerting: the Odessa Steps
sequence from Eisenstein’s Potemkin,
representing Londoners fleeing from the Martian onslaught; the famous sequence
from Buster Keaton’s The General in
which a train attempts to cross a burning bridge, the bridge gives way and the
train collapses (the sequence Keaton insisted on staging with a real train
really crashing into a river from a real collapsing bridge; the train remained
in the river at his Oregon location from 1926 to the early 1940’s, when it was
extracted so the metal could be used as scrap in World War II); a scene from Meet
Me in St. Louis with Judy Garland clearly
recognizable sitting on a couch; and other scenes with Shirley Temple and other
actors from classic-era Hollywood (one imdb.com “trivia” poster recognized
William Shatner, though I didn’t). Part of the conceit was that Hines used not
only the basic plot of Wells’ The War of the Worlds but also much of the actual prose from Wells’ novel, split
between Bertie Wells in character and a third-person narrator (Jim Cissell) who
sounded like the kind of voice actor they got for “audio-visual” movies they
showed in schools in the 1960’s. The result was a fascinating movie but also a
quite dull one at times, and I tend to agree with the imdb.com reviewer who
said that through a lot of this movie you are more amazed at the skill of
Hines’ technique than moved or grabbed by the story. According to the Wikipedia
page on the film (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_%E2%80%93_The_True_Story),
which is a lot more informative than
its imdb.com entry (imdb.com only lists five of the actors in the film, while
Wikipedia gives the full cast), Hines’ inspiration was the 1938 Orson Welles
radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds,
which updated the story to Welles’ own time and presented it as if it were an
actual news event being broadcast in real time. (The famous panic that ensued
as many people listening to Welles’ broadcast thought the Martian invasion was
really happening was the subject of the other movie on our double bill.)
He
wisely cast two actors as Bertie Wells, Floyd Reichman as the older man
recounting the Martian invasion from 1965 and a younger actor (not listed on
either imdb.com or Wikipedia) playing him in the supposed documentary footage —
which actually features a lot of “cheating,” showing scenes no cameraman could
possibly have been there to film (though there are a few sequences in which a
character appears using the hand-cranked film cameras of the early days on
screen — it wasn’t unknown in the real days for a newsreel producer to send
several cameramen to shoot a major battle or public event and have one
cameraman get into another one’s shot). Hines actually made an earlier version
of The War of the Worlds in 2005,
though it’s unclear whether the 2012 release we were watching was cut down from
that first one or whether the two were different projects by the same
writer-director and some of the same actors; according to Wikipedia, Hines
originally planned a War of the Worlds
film in 2001 that would relocate the story to modern times, then abandoned it
after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
made that seem tasteless and commercially dubious. He apparently got a version
into release in 2005 but complained that he couldn’t get it shown in theatres
because that was when Steven Spielberg’s version, starring Tom Cruise and
released by Paramount, came out, so it went direct-to-video instead (along with
another one, directed by David Michael Latt for The Asylum — a company that
specializes in ripping off major-studio productions of public-domain stories or
easily replicated premises — they put out their own adaptation of Edgar Rice
Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars just
before Disney released John Carter, and
their other films include titles like Ghosthunters and The Fast and the Fierce), so he went to the Wells well again and came up with this
version in 2012. It was a highly capable movie but, as the imdb.com reviewer
noted, one comes away more admiring the filmmaker’s ingenuity than being
absorbed, moved or entertained by the story.
