Soul of the Future: War of the Worlds

Let's talk about something else...as this Soul of the Future series continues.

An enemy armed with nuclear bombs, so soon after the realities of World War II, inspired anxieties and fears in the American public.  In addition to the atomic monster movies, these fears were expressed in subtexts to two other types of popular science fiction flicks of the 1950s: the alien subversion films, and the alien invasion films.

The fear of anything Other exacerbated by the focus on atomic adversaries that director Jack Arnold identified and consciously used in his "gill-man" monster films, extended not only to scary Russian supermen and their unknown technology but to other Americans, or at least beings who looked and acted like the folks next door.

This was the 1950s of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, the Hollywood Blacklist and J. Edgar Hoover, perennial director of the FBI, loudly warning of "Communist subversion."  However warranted some concern might have been, historians can point to numerous examples of overreach, much of it deliberate, and the systematic creation and exploitation of hysteria for political purposes.

(One example of the mood may suffice: Louis Armstrong was a beloved musician and iconic American around the world.  When Arkansas officials prevented black children from integrating a Little Rock public school, Armstrong suggested that President Eisenhower should personally take the children by the hand and escort them into the building.  For this, Armstrong was suspected of being a Communist, and an FBI investigation and file was started that lasted for the rest of his life.)

Dana Wynter and Kevin McCarthy in The Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (1956)

There were several 1950s movies in which aliens either disguised themselves as humans and replaced known townspeople, or "took over" actual people.  An example of the first is Jack Arnold's 1953 It Came From Outer Space, in which the aliens turn out to be benign beings only stalling for time while they repaired their spaceship, though their strangeness evokes suspicion and fear.

 The best example of the latter is the now iconic 1955  Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Seigel, from a story by Knox College alum Jack Finney.  In this film, aliens "take over" people by duplicating them in large seed pods, turning them into passive but functioning humans.

Jeff Goldblum, Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy
in the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers

This was a movie everyone at the time eventually saw.  Some insisted the alien takeover was a metaphor for Communist subversion, but the prevailing view came to be that "the pod people" represented 1950s conformism. (That's what it seemed to me the first time I saw it, and that's what the director intended.)

 In any case, the movie was as much an effective horror film as sci-fi.  A 1978 remake by Philip Kaufman was unique in being as good--and as scary--as the original.  In many ways, these films are precursors to contemporary zombie stories.

Presaging the generation gap of the 1960s, Village of the Damned (UK) and Children of the Damned (US) were about sinister children taken over by alien influences and given subversive ideas.  The obverse of these movies was one of Jack Arnold's best and least appreciated films, The Space Children, in which unseen space aliens use intelligent children to destroy atomic warheads by mind power.  Along the way, some of the crassness and cruelty of ordinary 1950s domesticity and mistreatment of children are revealed.

Grant Williams in 1957 The Incredible Shrinking Man

Another sort of taking-over with a more direct connection to the Bomb is 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man, once again by Jack Arnold, in what many regard as his masterpiece. (An exception is John Baxter in his respected Science Fiction of the Cinema, who asserts it's The Space Children.)

In this film, a man relaxing on a boat in the ocean is suddenly engulfed in what appears to be sparkly remnants of a nuclear bomb test.  This begins his physical transformation--his long journey of shrinking and his attempts to cope with it, until he is on the verge of ultimately disappearing.  It's not a big metaphorical leap to see this as suggesting humanity has met its match in the Bomb, and has become as hopeless a victim of it as the smallest lifeforms.

But by far the dominant form of 1950s atomic age sci-fi movies were the space invasion films.  Again, these exploited the facts that there was no face on the Soviet threat, but there were ominous suggestions of secret powers greater than ours.  The imaginative leap to space aliens was a short one.

The best and most interesting of these films was (again) one of the first: the 1953 Technicolor movie of H.G. Wells' famous story, The War of the Worlds, produced by the legendary George Pal.  On the substructure Wells provided, the Pal film built a classic movie that richly expresses atomic anxieties in deeply emotional terms.

After H.G. Wells invented modern science fiction with The Time Machine, and (arguably) modern scientific horror stories with The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man, he wrote the first space aliens invasion tale in The War of the Worlds--all in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

The War of the Worlds had a specific inspiration and a moral spine, an empathetic basis that became vital to later science fiction. Wells was walking with his brother Frank in the peaceful Surrey countryside, when the conversation turned to the native inhabitants of Tasmania, an island south of Australia, who were eradicated when the English transformed the island into a prison colony. What if some beings from another planet suddenly dropped out the sky, his brother wondered, and did the same to England?

In the novel's pages Wells’ chief narrator refers to the Tasmanians, who “in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

Classics Illustrated were a feature of
my 1950s childhood, and the Wells
version of The War of the Worlds was
the very first--though not the first I saw
(that was Verne's From the Earth to the
Moon.) This comic came out in 1954.

It is a passage laden with Biblical imagery, hinting at the religious fervor that hypocritically accompanied such genocides. Wells extends the analogy to American Indians, even quoting Chief Joseph’s famous “we will fight no more forever” as the Martian invaders lie dying from earth’s bacteria-- the opposite of the fate suffered by American Indians, when it was the indigenous inhabitants whose population and civilizations were largely destroyed by alien diseases brought to them by European invaders.

But the popularity of The War of the Worlds through its various versions seems largely to be its scare factor--and so each version emphasizes, almost helplessly, the chief fears of the time.

In Wells time, it was the fear of a new kind of mechanized war that was in fact approaching in World War I.  Beginning with a novel titled The Battle of Dorking in 1871, a series of stories about armed invasions, usually of England, caught the public imagination.

 Wells melded this kind of story with another popular subject: more than 50 novels were published in the 1890s about Mars or Martians, inspired by new observations of the planets with more powerful telescopes, and imaginative speculation about "canals" on the surface and potential Martian civilizations.

In 1938, with World War II an even closer prospect than World War I was in Wells' time, Orson Welles startled America with an updated adaptation of the story, in the form of radio news reports.  Enough listeners actually believed Martians were invading New Jersey to inspire stories of a nationwide panic.

The effects of the 1938 broadcast proved that Wells' story could be updated to contemporary times, something that Wells himself reportedly doubted.  It could still work in the early 1950s, especially since Mars had still only been seen through Earth-bound telescopes. It was still possible to believe in Martians.

 This contemporary immediacy was perhaps even greater in Technicolor on the big screen in 1953.  All the elements of this film combined to express--at times elegantly--many of the fears associated with the Bomb: fears of sudden attack, of aliens so different as to be inhuman, of overwhelming technology and an apocalyptic outcome.

The War of the Worlds movie was a big hit with adult moviegoers the year it was released--the highest grossing science fiction film of the year, and one of Paramount's biggest overall.  It then joined other science fiction films on the matinee circuit for younger viewers that blanketed the 1950s.  It has since been listed on the American Film Institute roster of the 100 most important films of all time, and the Library of Congress National Film Registry for culturally significant films to be preserved.  The Registry noted that it expressed "the apocalyptic paranoia of the atomic age."

I saw the Pal The War of the Worlds on a local theater big screen when I was nine or ten, probably at a Saturday matinee a few years after it was released.  Before going into the fears that it touched, I emphasize that the movie itself was (and is) suspenseful and scary.  The Martian machines were convincing, and have become legendary.  Before anything like digital imaging, the machines were models and the effects were done on the set (which is technically the meaning of "special effects." Images created by computer and other means away from the set are technically "visual effects.")

The 1953 film was directed by Byron Haskin and written by Barre Lyndon, but it is always associated primarily with its producer, George Pal, because more than anyone else, he was responsible for it.  This was not his first invasion story. Hungarian born, Pal began his animated "Puppetoons" in the Netherlands, and brought them with him to the US, when he escaped the Nazi invasion.  In a 1942 puppetoon he depicted an invasion of Holland by thinly disguised Nazi troops, but his fantasy had a happy ending when the troops were melted by the rain.

Nor was The War of the Worlds Pal's first apocalyptic film.  He'd previously made When Worlds Collide (1951), in which Earth was destroyed by a rogue star, with a small remnant of humanity reaching that star's planet in a rocket, to begin the human race again.  (Some of this earlier movie shots were reused in this one.)  And this would not be Pal's only Wells-based film: in 1960 he made The Time Machine, which included scenes of a future atomic war.

Many 1950s science fiction films began with a narrated prologue--this one actually has two.  The first appears to moviegoers to be a movie newsreel.  This was the first instance of using the 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast version technique of supposed news reporters on the scene, which helped make these incredible events credible. A couple of later scenes involving radio reporters are virtually duplicated from the 1938 script by Howard Koch.

 As the "Panic Broadcast" of 1938 proved, it is a surprisingly effective technique in making the events real enough to be scary.  I found this out for myself when I was in high school in the early 60s.  I'd read about the 1938 broadcast, and was inspired to write my own version of a contemporary Martian invasion, using the names of then current television network newscasters.  Together with three friends, I created it on audio tape, using whatever came to hand as sound effects.  When the tape was played for a high school class I was surprised at how many students were actually frightened by it.

The faux newsreel that began The War of the Worlds--all in black and white, as the newsreels were that ran before movies in the 40s and 50s--was very short and is worth quoting in its entirety, for it provides a startling point of view that in another context might get the filmmakers a visit from the FBI.

While the screen shows early 20th century images of a biplane and helmeted soldiers on horseback, an urgent newsreel voice explains, "In the first world war, and for the first time in the history of man, nations combined to fight against nations using the crude weapons of those days."

With the title World War II on the screen and images of artillery, ships and planes, the narrator continued: "The second world war involved every continent on the globe, and men turned to science for new devices of warfare, which reached an unparalleled peak in their capacity for destruction."

As a rocket fires from its gantry, the voice concludes: "And now, fought with the terrible weapons of super-science menacing all mankind and every creature on Earth, comes The War of the Worlds!"

At which point the title is stenciled in color, and the full Technicolor movie begins.

The sequence is based on an elegant conceit: from wars of the entire world to the next step, a war of  two worlds.  It's worth noting that neither world war had happened when Wells published the original novel, yet the kind of warfare that novel describes (not confined to battlefields but in countryside, then towns and cities) with powerful technological weapons, and destruction from above--these were all new things to come in these 20th century wars, which over the years Wells foresaw in greater detail.

But there is also a kind of subversive element to this narration, for its last sentence-- the terrible weapons of super-science menacing all mankind and every creature on Earth--describes and clearly refers to not just the Martian war machines but humankind's atomic bomb.

This relates to another theme of Wells' story.  When the Martian inside the machine is described (mostly a huge head, and shrunken appendages), Wells narrator compares their appearance to similar speculation that this is how human beings might evolve, made by his distant cousin named Wells.  In a sense, the humans of the late 19th century are battling their own future.

By the 1950s the developed future had arrived with thermonuclear weapons and related technologies.  Though intercontinental missiles were still a decade away, they had been foreseen and researched at the end of World War II.  The rocket in this montage clearly suggests this future.

Wells was thinking in evolutionary terms, but--especially with the term super-science-- this narration was resuscitating and reflecting the fear that science was treading into forbidden knowledge, such as the secrets of nature used in inventing the Bomb.

The movie used this illustration of Mars created by
artist Chesley Bonestell

After this brief faux newsreel, the urgent American voice (actor Paul Frees, who plays a radio reporter later in the film; in fact a notable number of radio actors had parts in it) is replaced by the calmer, slower and more mellifluous tones of English actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke, reciting H.G. Wells' first pages that describe the plight of the much older and more advanced Martian civilization: their planet could no longer sustain them, and they needed a new home.

 Harwicke departs from Wells for awhile to provide a kind of  astronomy lesson about the solar system, describing impossible living conditions on each planet (except for Venus, conveniently left out, possibly because in Wells' novel, when the Martian invasion of Earth fails, they move on to Venus as their second choice.) This prologue reminds us that this is the 1950s, before satellites and space probes. Except for excited ten year olds in the audience, the public knows very little about outer space and other planets, which have been no more real in their daily lives than Atlantis, and less perhaps than Eden or Hades.

That leads back to Wells and his eloquently chilling words concerning the Martians view of the warm green Earth: "...intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."   

Then the story itself begins, as Wells' story did, with an apparent meteorite crashing into the Earth's surface.  (Wells may have been inspired specifically by a French astronomer's report in 1994 of "strange lights" on the Martian surface which might be signals.  This caused an international sensation.  Eminent inventors, including Marconi and Edison, tried to devise a way to signal back.  In Wells' novel, the "strange lights" on Mars precede the "meteors" that fall to Earth.)

But this time the meteorite lands not in the English countryside but outside a small town in California.  We see Technicolor townspeople outside a movie theater look up to see the brilliant shooting star.  We are immediately placed in the small town America we recognize partly from experience but mostly from the movies and television.

There are those who see this movie's Martians as a metaphor for the Soviet Communists, and of course that's what evokes the fear: remorseless and technologically superior aliens bent on nothing but destruction, which was the official US position, at least for public consumption, in order to maintain financial support for what President Eisenhower would later call the Military-Industrial Complex.  But it's more complex that this, as the newsreel prologue suggests.  So the sweet, naive townspeople (though some are eager to cash in on this meteor) may represent the American Way of Life threatened by Communism, but they may also suggest the distance between ordinary life and the things "super-science" is up to.

I'm not going to recount the whole story, only make observations about a few scenes.  When the Martians first reveal themselves, they do so to three men from the town who volunteered to watch the meteor overnight.  They are a white businessman in a suit, a young white man who is likely of lesser status, and a Latino man, probably a Mexican-American.  They treat each other with the absolute equality that characterizes Hollywood films and TV of the period more than reality, but they do represent that self-image and yearning.  They provide one of the film's biggest laughs (allegedly a deliberate one) and the film's first moment of horror.

When they realize the top of the meteor is unscrewing and something is emerging, they reason that it is from outer space, and the young men mentions that Mars is particularly close to the Earth at this time (which is also true in Wells' story.) They decide to greet the Martians, but what will they say?  "Welcome to California," they decide, and this invariably got a laugh.  It is also characteristic of Californians that they welcome people to their special state, rather than--in this case--to the planet or even the country.

But their innocence is rewarded only with being turned into ashes in the dirt by the Martian heat ray--one of the iconic images from this film.

This is the first of a series of defeats as the power of the Martian machines is revealed.  Nothing--good intentions, the most advanced scientific weapons, even religion (when a reverend approaches them with the Bible) can either get through to them or stop them.

All the military activity in fact climaxes with what is very likely the first atomic bomb explosion simulated for film, which is dropped on one of the now many nests of Martian machines, but literally doesn't touch them (Martian "super-science" has provided their machines with invulnerable force-fields.) Earth's ultimate weapon turns out not to be so ultimate.

 Until now the military was confident that each escalation--from artillery to the Air Force and finally to the ultimate A-Bomb would prevail.  Hubris--and perhaps the hubris of science above all--is revealed.

But like all these science fiction treatments, there is the other side to this negative portrait of the military and scientists.  The military (of all nations) fight honorably and bravely, and the film's hero is a scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester (played by Gene Barry in his second film.)  The film follows Forrester and the young woman he just met, a teacher with an interest in science, Sylvia van Buren (played by the 19-year old Ann Robinson in her first screen role--producer Pal wanted unknowns in key roles to add to the verisimilitude.)  Their encounters with the Martians and their escapes provide much of the film's drama, especially when they are trapped in a farmhouse, surrounded by Martians. (This results in another of the movie's iconic images--the Martian hand on Sylvia's shoulder.)  

Eventually the military can do nothing but evacuate Los Angeles as the Martian machines approach, while Forrester and Sylvia retreat to Pacific Tech to confer with other scientists on a method to defeat the Martians.  Forrester suggests that since they can't defeat the machines, they should try to defeat the Martians themselves.  They have a sample of weak Martian blood, and will relocate in a safer area to pursue "a biological approach."

This group of scientists is interesting.  They are more realistic than the usual sci-fi depictions, and older (including an older woman scientist, rare in sci-fi films.) Several have German names and accents but they don't look like ex-Nazi rocket scientists but rather Jewish scientists who came to America to escape the Nazis (as did a number of actors, directors and writers who ended up in Hollywood, including some then on the Hollywood Blacklist.)

In most 50s movies of this kind, the scientists would indeed find a solution, and this is what as a kid in the audience I expected.  But something else happens--they must drive through Los Angeles with their lab equipment, where mobs are attacking trucks and hijacking them.  The scientists are stopped and at least one is seriously injured, their equipment destroyed.  "They're cutting their own throats!" Forrester cries.  These scenes of street violence were to me, even at age 10, among the most frightening in the movie.

The final scenes take place in the deserted streets of downtown Los Angeles while the Martian machines float above, destroying familiar buildings (a perfect echo of the Tokyo scenes in Gojira.) Forrester is alone, searching for Sylvia, who had been driving a bus from Pacific Tech that the mob hijacked.  She had told him that when as a child she was lost, she sought shelter in a church, and that's where he searches for her.  In the churches there are people being led in prayer, as well as people (like the other scientists) wounded by the mob or by the Martians.

The Martian machines are relentless and unopposed.  Forrester and Sylvia find each other (their pushing through crowds to get to each other inspired a similar scene in Spielberg's Close Encounters.) They are embracing in what looks to be their last moments, as the preacher asks divine forgiveness for all that humans had done that they should not have, and all that they had not done that they should have, when the congregation hear a machine crash outside, and then silence.  They rush out to investigate.

It turns out that the machines are falling everywhere, as the Martians inside are dying from exposure to Earth microbes, to which humans are now immune, but are deadly to the aliens.  It is Wells's ending as well, and he deliberately uses vocabulary to indicate he knows it is the reversal of the fate of the Indigenous people of the Americas, who were destroyed by the disease germs of the European invaders.

It is also a prescient observation of an incompatibility which might well make it impossible for humans as well as Martians to live on alien worlds, except in limited situations.  This is the premise for Kim Stanley Robinson's 2015 novel Aurora.

George Pal's movie has many Christian references, and these scenes in churches are followed by church bells ringing as Cedric Hardwick intones that, after all that humans could do had failed, the Martians had been slain by "the littlest things which God in his wisdom had put upon this Earth."   The church bells are Pal's, but the words "which God in his wisdom..." are Wells'.

The Christian themes may seem heavy-handed, though as a nice Catholic boy in the 1950s--when (in my town at least) downtown stores and offices were closed on Sundays and for three hours on Good Friday-- I wasn't bothered.  And despite the likelihood that Wells meant the microbes to be an evolutionary fact rather than a divine intervention, these scenes are both justified in the story, and evidence of another strong set of feelings than the Bomb evoked: that of sin.

The scenes are justified in a practical sense in that people probably would seek refuge in churches at such an apocalyptic moment.  They are justified in a dramatic sense also because the ultimate concerns of such places make them fitting locations for the apocalyptic climax.

But these scenes also suggest the sense that the existence of the Bomb's apocalyptic power is evidence not only of the success of humanity's science but of humanity's failure in other ways, particularly in morality, ethics and common sense.  What sort of a species consciously creates the means to destroy itself?

This response--of horror, of revulsion--was particularly strong in the years immediately after Hiroshima, when a US General suggested contemporary humans were both "nuclear giants and ethical infants." For some this meant a sense of sin, which goes beyond the transgressions of science in areas of knowledge that some believe humanity is not meant to have.  It is an attempt to grapple with the fact that human beings not only devised a way to destroy its own civilization with atomic devices, they went ahead and built them--and kept on building them until there indeed would be enough to destroy the world.

This sense of sin is an undercurrent in The War of the Worlds and recurs in other George Pal films, though Pal himself was known as a gentle and generally cheerful man.  Apocalyptic guilt as well as despair were part of the societal undercurrent as well, but they could not be talked about openly--only in monster movies and alien invasion flicks.

 In fact there was hardly a science fiction film made in the 1950s that did not refer to the Bomb or an apocalyptic war, including silly B-movies like World Without End (1956), an awkward rip-off of Wells' The Time Machine in which astronauts somehow accidentally rocket into the far future, just in time to provide the good old 1950s masculinity needed to re-start human civilization after atomic warfare had destroyed it centuries before.

With the pop culture metaphors of radiation monsters, alien subversion and invasion, the movies were clearing the air for films to deal with nuclear fears and the future more directly. The pressures of history as well as the precedents of these movies were paving the way for the next set of films in the late 1950s and afterwards, into the 1980s.  A brief review of those films next time.

For earlier posts in this series, click the Soul of the Future label here, or below, or in the label list.