The War of the Worlds 9781844578115, 9781838713669, 9781844578139

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BFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our website: www.bloomsbury.com/bfi ‘Magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry.’ Uncut ‘A formidable body of work collectively generating some fascinating insights into the evolution of cinema.’ Times Higher Education Supplement ‘The series is a landmark in film criticism.’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video ‘Possibly the most bountiful book series in the history of film criticism.’ Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Comment

Editorial Advisory Board Geoff Andrew, British Film Institute Edward Buscombe William Germano, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Lalitha Gopalan, University of Texas at Austin Lee Grieveson, University College London Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound

Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck College, University of London Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick Dana Polan, New York University B. Ruby Rich, University of California, Santa Cruz Amy Villarejo, Cornell University

The War of the Worlds Barry Forshaw

To Kim Newman, Paul McAuley, Christopher Fowler and Stephen Jones, for many a fruitful and argumentative film discusssion

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain by Palgrave in 2014 Reprinted by Bloomsbury in 2018 on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk

The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Barry Forshaw, 2014 Barry Forshaw has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. Cover design: Graham Humphreys Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1952), © Paramount Pictures Corporation; Destination Moon, © George Pal Productions Inc.; Things to Come, London Film Productions Ltd; Island of Lost Souls, © Paramount Productions; Citizen Kane, © RKO Radio Pictures; When Worlds Collide, © Paramount Pictures Corporation; The Time Machine, © Galaxy Films; Invasion of the Body Snatchers, © Allied Artists Pictures Corporation; It Came from Outer Space, © Universal Pictures Company; Independence Day, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation; Mars Attacks!, © Warner Bros.; War of the Worlds, © Paramount Pictures/© DreamWorks Pictures.

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978-1-8445-7811-5 978-1-8445-7813-9

Series: BFI Film Classics

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Contents ‘The War of the Worlds’

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Credits

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Bibliography

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‘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

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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

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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 latenineteenth-century symphony orchestra) by Leith Stevens (also responsible for the scores to Pal’s earlier, similarly apocalyptic When Destination Moon (1950)

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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. 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-mediumbudget 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

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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

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(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

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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

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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

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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 London, even though Wells sees the growth of the capital’s infrastructure as a confusion of casual accidents – or even the process of disease. Readers should ignore the nineteenth-century cobwebs that still undoubtedly cling to the novel – a little patience will glean rewards. However, the real fulcrum of Wells’s immortality as a writer lies in another field, though he may have chafed at the idea. Despite the claims to the title of such early progenitors as Jules Verne and such later masters as Philip K. Dick (with his existential questioning of the nature of reality), few would dispute the fact that Herbert George Wells is the greatest and most influential of all science-fiction novelists – and that encomium is leaving aside his achievement in the mainstream literary field, his influence as a social commentator and his status as one of the great public writers of his day, alongside such contemporaries as Henry James and Arnold H. G. Wells and his novels (Pall Mall Magazine)

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Bennett. After Wells’s death in 1946, a slew of biographies appeared, attempting to put into perspective a truly protean life which was not without its controversial aspects. These included his aforementioned sexual adventures (considered profligate by some of his peers), his Socialism, his Fabianism and his interest – shared by such fellow writers as Virginia Woolf – in controversial theories of eugenics. But it is his innovation in the field of science-fiction writing which concerns us here – an achievement that makes such books as The Time Machine and The Invisible Man (1897) as provocative, vivid and mesmerising today as when they were written. Wells was generally considered to be a proponent of the positive, ameliorative aspects of science, and the film of his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come (as Things to Come, directed by William Cameron Menzies in 1936) encapsulated this positivism; it is now precisely the aspect which renders the Menzies film (for all its virtues) something of a dated artefact, while the much darker vision Things to Come (1936)

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of the Erle C. Kenton film of his 1896 novel The Island of Dr Moreau (as Island of Lost Souls [1932]) seems to reflect the desperate, despairing vision which we now perceive as one of the writer’s most modern traits. It is ironic that Wells disapproved of the latter film and had little problem with its banning on the grounds of blasphemy, a view which to modern audiences seems eccentric; as the reputation of the Wells-sanctioned film Things to Come has waned, the film version of Moreau, a vision of an obsessed scientist tampering with evolution on an island of beast men, now seems like an authentically subversive film maudit. Wells’s own writings, including his autobiographical, historical and political work, unsurprisingly burnish the image of the writer that he was anxious to present to the world; his contemporary Thomas Hardy attempted a similar finessing in the ghost-written autobiography ascribed to his second wife, in which Britain’s greatest tragic novelist inadvertently presented himself as a rather boring social butterfly mixing in stultifying aristocratic circles. But what is most apparent from Wells’s novels, notably the ‘scientific romances’ (as he described them), was the conflict between an idealised, optimistic vision of humanity and the underpinning: a more jaundiced, dystopian mindset. Wells’s books by no means tell the whole story of his philosophy, and his attitude to humanity was as dispassionate (when it was not dyspeptic) as that of Virginia Woolf, both writers sharing an unflinchingly rigorous attitude towards the great mass of individuals who spurned education and lived (to quote Thoreau) unfulfilled ‘lives of quiet desperation’. For all his undoubted charisma – and the weight his opinions were accorded (opinions, like those of his fellow Fabian George Bernard Shaw, which he lost absolutely no opportunity to propound) – Wells’s accomplishment was akin to that of another Victorian novelist, Charles Dickens, but with an interest in science more fitfully evident in the latter social reformer. Wells’s books are distinguished by an almost existential engagement with the chaotic nature of human existence,

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and that tearing away of the appurtenances with which we protect ourselves was a crucial integument of his writing, along with his limitless inventiveness. Wells, like Dickens, never forgot the poverty in his past and constantly strove for societal betterment – plus the fullest realisations and development of human possibility (which in different ways might be said to be what finally confronts the nameless time traveller in The Time Machine). But The War of the Worlds, with its massive panoply of destruction and desolation, is less interested in individual achievement than in simple survival in the face of overwhelming odds. Science may often be presented in Wells’s work as full of possibility and promise, but in his most famous science-fiction novel, it is technological force that lays waste to the complacency of Victorian society. But is this Wells’s lament for a comforting lost order or a cleansing that prepares the way for a new dispensation, with human sympathy replacing empty pieties? Island of Lost Souls (1932)

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While such social comedies as The History of Mr Polly speak with less relevance to modern readers, the scientific romances have lost none of their lustre, and The War of the Worlds remains perhaps the writer’s signature book. Wells’s fascination with the essential principles of Darwinian evolution was the wellspring for his literary invention, and his equally enthusiastic engagement with Socialism (along with a clear-eyed view of the complacent nature of religion) fed into his fiction, although such notions generally lay beneath the surface. Unlike such contemporaries as Henry James, who was interested in the unexpressed nuances of human behaviour, Wells unashamedly exploited the terror and wonder of popular fiction with his magnificent horror stories (such as ‘The Cone’ [1895]) and groundbreaking science fiction, elevating those despised genres to a level of achievement they had not previously enjoyed. The Invisible Man (1897) is basically a mordant and wry examination of megalomania, treading a tightrope between fascination with – and fear of – the possibilities of science, as evinced in the grim fate of the doomed scientist Griffin, and in which the very fabric of society is shown to be tenuous. In this book, society is at the mercy of one madman, while The War of the Worlds extrapolates the danger from The Other, an alien menace threatening ordered British society from the outside, which might be read in the twenty-first century as a prescient metaphor for the rise of fundamentalist religion in the Middle East, with its readiness to establish a different order in other countries. A more straightforward reading of Victorian imperialism, however, is also serviceable here. The novel was published in serial form in 1897, and collected into a book a year later. Early visual representations of the Martians included not only the famous Frank R. Paul version for Amazing Stories but also the illustrations by Warwick Goble for the original magazine serial in Pearson’s; the latter were presented in a watercolour wash and have less drama than the carefully delineated Paul work. Another artist to tackle the material was Henrique Alvim Corrêa, whose dreamlike imagery in 1906 was effective, though the

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rather quaint ‘tin hats’ on the war machines suggest Frank Baum’s Oz rather than H. G. Wells. The plot of the novel is relatively straightforward, and the ending is now well known (hence no spoiler alerts here): creatures from Mars land on Earth with a view to colonising it after the slow death of their own planet. The narrator hero moves through the subsequent conflagration, separated from his wife, and watches as the military does all it can to destroy the invaders, to no avail – the rout of planet Earth is complete, signalled by the evacuation of London. But the invaders are not to be successful, as ordinary microbes – to which the human race has slowly acquired immunity – destroy both them and their dream of world conquest. Earlier writers such as George Chesney in The Battle of Dorking (1871) had mined similar territory, but without an invading force from another world. And this planet’s vaunted technological advances are made to seem (by contrast with the visitors) almost like the artefacts of a primitive village. The panoply of societal collapse in the novel remains impressive and utterly compelling to this day, as is Wells’s masterly orchestration of the destruction. The tradition of Armageddon novels inaugurated by H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds has had a varied clutch of offspring, from John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids through John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) up to J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), all forcing the reader to speculate on how they would personally survive in a society in which everything from social order and policing to the supply of food has collapsed (Ballard’s waterlogged contribution to the genre now seems prescient in a recently flood-besieged Britain). Perhaps stimulated by the threat of climate change, the genre is in rude health and is even (like the global climate) undergoing a variety of transformations: for instance, merging with the crime novel to produce a slew of books setting a detection narrative against apocalypse. Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer (2010, floods again) is a striking example, as is Ben Winters’s Countdown City (2013). Louise Welsh contributed to the field with

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A Lovely Way to Burn (2014), although its basic premise (Britain at bay as a bubonic plague-like virus lays waste to the populace) seemed to owe more to the 1970s Terry Nation TV series Survivors than it did to the literary heavyweights mentioned here. Wells made very detailed use of British locations in his novel (such as Horsell Bridge and Chobham Road), so it is hardly surprising that when an illegal edition of the book appeared in America with the setting changed to the US (George Pal was not the first to utilise this kind of geographical tweaking), the writer objected strongly and complained about ‘this manipulation of my work in order to fit it into the requirements of the local geography’ (as Wells cabled to his American representative in 1938) – leading one to (correctly) suppose that he would be less than happy with subsequent adaptations. The notorious Orson Welles radio broadcast of the novel (to be discussed in the next section) occasioned similarly dyspeptic remarks from the writer: ‘I’m deeply concerned about the effect of the broadcast. Totally unwarranted liberties were taken with my book.’ It is clear that Wells was concerned with the destruction of the country he knew best, England, and the cataclysmic violence visited upon that land channelled memories of imaginary battles played out at his childhood haunts in Bromley in southeast London. The novel builds slowly and inexorably within this utilisation of familiar places and things, shoring up the verisimilitude of the narrative and making the fantastic events that ultimately take place more persuasive. But The War of the Worlds was not intended as a straightforwardly exciting adventure (although it certainly functions supremely well on that visceral level). The theme of the displacement of complacency – a notion also echoed by Alfred Hitchcock in The Birds (1963) – is evident in the narrator’s observations in the novel’s epilogue: It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefits for men; it has robbed us of that serene

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confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of mankind.

Science, Wells reminds us, is simultaneously a potential source of human advancement and destruction – but how it is used (as seen through the metaphor of the marauding aliens) must be informed by the necessity for the human race to work together in order to facilitate a more consensual realm of human behaviour. It is interesting to speculate what Wells would have made of the advances (and otherwise) of the human race in the twenty-first century. Wells’s inauspicious beginnings (which involved such unpromising careers as working in a shop, an experience used in his novel Kipps) belied his formidable energy and his readiness to embrace the challenges that confronted him. The writer’s knowledge of science was crucial to his achievement in The War of the Worlds, but equally important was the geographical exactitude to be found in his realisation of a very ordinary Surrey, the canvas on which the fantastical events of the narrative take place. On various walks with his brother along the lanes of Kent and Surrey, it was Frank Wells who one day declared: ‘Suppose something from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly and began laying about them here?’ – and it is generous of Wells to ascribe the genesis of the novel to his sibling rather than himself. The structure of the novel also has a more accelerated, fractured mien than its predecessor, The Time Machine, with the cool disquisitions on society and humanity delivered (most of the time) on the hoof, as is a total picture of Britain, from the lazier aspects of village existence to the metropolitan perspective which is presented later in the novel. The narrator, the perfect conduit for the reader with his intelligent eye and sharp powers of observation, investigates the cylinder from space which has landed near Woking. We (like him) are initially apprehensive before the swift arrival of chaos, as the cylinder is surrounded by a crowd of curious onlookers (described in banal

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terms as a ‘couple of cyclists, a jobbing gardener, … two or three loafers and golf caddies who were accustomed to hang about the railway stations’). Soon havoc is wrought by the heat rays which destroy human beings and forests, along with the ‘black smoke’ – noxious fumes that gas all those who encounter them (which might be read as a prescient description of the atmospheric pollution with which a century or so after the novel’s publication we are all too familiar). The appalling loss of life is inspired by the horrors of war, along with the description of hideously mutilated bodies burned to a crisp in such comfortingly familiar settings of suburban Shepperton. The uselessness of religion is perfectly encapsulated by the destroyed mosque which (as Wells says) looked ‘as if a 100-ton gun had been at work upon it’. And the use of the mosque is another example of the carefully located English settings; while a mosque may have been relatively exotic to Wells’s original readers, from our twenty-first-century perspective, it now seems ever more apropos in presenting a total picture of Britain. With the narrator’s house destroyed, he makes his way to a London in ruins, traversing the Thames and sheltering from the invaders in a wrecked suburban house (in which he encounters a curate whose proffered consolations of religion are of little use in the face of the disaster that has overtaken the world). It is clear that as the Martians make their way across the face of the planet eliminating all opposition, a colonial parallel is to be drawn here. And the fact that the catastrophe begins from a secure market town (with its golf links and smallholding stores) makes its overarching consequences all H. G. Wells (Pall Mall Magazine)

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the more striking. Perhaps most memorable is a description of one of the greatest capital cities of the world lying in ruins, with the carefully name-checked locations: Kilburn, St John’s Wood, Hampstead, Shoreditch, Highbury and Hoxton, all alarmed at the coming catastrophe. (‘The first breath of the coming storm of fear blew through the streets. It was the dawn of the great panic.’) And before mankind’s rescue by microscopic allies we did not know we possessed, we are shown that if ever the world were to be laid waste by alien invaders, no reporter, however skilled, could describe it as vividly as H. G. Wells himself. One of Wells’s cleverest ploys is to withhold a description of the Martians until halfway through the book (we have only had an account of their destructive machines), and despite expectations of their grotesqueness, Wells is able to match (and exceed) that expectation, such are his descriptive powers: ‘The head of the thing was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature heaved and pulsated convulsively.’ There is also, surprisingly, a description of the inner workings of their bodies after they have been dissected, and the entire eco-structure of the planet may be seen through the invented characteristics of these alien beings. What’s more, Wells is even prepared to move into their evolutionary processes, so prodigal is his invention. What is particular interesting is that the author draws analogies between the Martians and our own species (‘To me,’ says the narrator, ‘it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by gradual development of brains and hands’). But among Wells’s many talents was this ability to conjure up creatures which terrified us precisely because they were so closely linked to (and yet horrifyingly different from) the human race; the bestial, cannibalistic Morlocks who populate the subterranean world of the future in The Time Machine are another example of this syndrome. But it is these rigorous scientific underpinnings as much as the anthropomorphic connections that give such credibility to his

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inventions. Finally, of course, it is Wells’s sheer mastery of narrative and language (the latter – as mentioned earlier – shot through with a genuinely poetic strain) which most characterises his achievement. While the novel received praise, its more horrific aspects were criticised in slightly prim terms, and the sheer brutality of the book – precisely, in fact, the elements which distinguish it from more anodyne work of the period – was not to every taste. There are, of course, caveats, such as the pawky cockney humour which seems more intrusive here (and has perhaps not worn well in his writing, even in novels in which it is central, such as The History of Mr Polly). And perhaps the attempt to draw a comprehensive picture of society via a series of character ‘types’ seems schematic. Other things, though, remain brave for the time, such as the presentation of the Church in an unsympathetic light – notably the weak-willed, ineffectual curate whom the narrator encounters, and whose response to the invasion is crass. (The curate’s line ‘How can God’s ministers be killed?’ is particularly ironic – and even more so later when the first victim in Pal and Haskin’s version of the novel is a clergyman, though the filmmaker lacks the novelist’s astringent view of religion.) The War of the Worlds is not about violent revolution which precipitates the overthrow of the existing order, but it should be noted that the turmoil of the late nineteenth century had as backdrop Darwin’s controversial theories (widely perceived as an attack on religious pieties). Karl Marx’s notion that a corrupt regime would inevitably fall under the weight of its own inertia was another key line of thought, and both of these themes might be detected in Wells’s The Time Machine. That novel may have had science as the basis of the hero’s odyssey over the ages to an exhausted world of the far future, but the underpinnings were essentially about humanity’s trajectory to extinction (to which the traveller finally journeys) and in which natural resources have been used up – a particularly prophetic vision. Wells was much concerned with the future of the human race from both an ideological and philosophical standpoint, and addressed such issues in The War of the Worlds.

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But he was essentially as much a poet as a storyteller – a glance at the paragraph which opened this study reveals a poetic rhetoric that can match Coleridge or Auden, a predilection which also found expression in such passages as the description of the keening noise to be heard in London’s Primrose Hill as the last living Martian expires; it is a poignant and indelible concept which has defied cinematic realisation (although George Pal and Byron Haskin present the death of the last Martian in their film in a peculiarly moving fashion, even as we are repelled by the suppurating green skin of the dying creature, its arm weakly extending from the toppled war machine – as we will see). But perhaps above all else, what distinguishes the original novel (and it is a constituent not to be found in any of the subsequent adaptations) is the very personal voice of the narrator, not unlike (as far as we can surmise) Wells’s own: full of determination to survive, and obscurely stimulated by the horrors around him that threaten to take both his own life and the lives of those he loves. It is not hard to see Wells’s single-mindedness in the survivor scrabbling to avoid the relentless mass murderers destroying humanity. And as the Martians stride about our world, the narrator is not the only individual struggling to avoid the Armageddon they have brought with them; the novel is peopled with sharply etched portraits of briefly seen characters, such as a near-senile old man trying in vain to rescue his orchids as the world comes to an end, refusing to believe in both their inevitable fate – and his own. While writing the book in 1896, Wells wryly noted the ironic contrast between the world-shattering events and the banal specificity of the area he had chosen for the beginning of the destruction. He wrote to his friend Elizabeth Healey: I’m doing the dearest little serial for Pearson’s new magazine, in which I completely wreck and destroy Woking – killing my neighbours in painful and eccentric ways – then proceed via Kingston and Richmond to London, which I sack, selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity.

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It is precisely this quotidian quality – locating his horrors in a setting that would have been very familiar to his readers – that is lost to some degree in the Pal/Haskin film, in which the obliteration of the new location, Los Angeles, while impressively staged, acquires an almost operatic quality (even for the American viewer) that takes it into a more generalised realm. I took a trip to Woking recently and was struck by the sheer ordinariness of Wells’s chosen locations, which can still be seen today. One may stroll up a lane to Britain’s first mosque (that early target of the Martians), and to the sandpits in which the first Martian cylinders land – in which now children play ball games. Ironically, one post-The War of the Worlds artefact is a towering metallic facsimile of a Martian war machine in the centre of the town, surrounded by pound shops and burger bars, with women pushing prams beneath this ignored relic of a book they may have never read – and may never read; the ordinary people, in fact, whose lives are destroyed in the novel rather than aristocratic blue-blooded types whose fates we assume will be the same – but who are clearly of less interest to the novelist. Wells by Welles: the broadcast that panicked America The US radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds listened to by millions on 30 October 1938 is one of the best-known examples of mass hysteria in history, and few would argue that it was one of the most famous broadcasts ever made. Under the aegis of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air, this much-altered version by Howard Koch was produced by (and featured) the youthful wunderkind who was to astonish Hollywood with his debut film, Citizen Kane (1941). Shortly after the broadcast (which led so many Americans – in a simpler age – to believe that an actual invasion was taking place), a sequence of interviews by Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, with the Complete Script of the Famous Orson Welles Broadcast, appeared in 1940. The interviews were conducted under the auspices of Princeton

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University and definitively established that the famous panic was no manufactured story, but a genuine phenomenon which terrified wide swathes of America; it was estimated that over one million listeners (which would have been more than 10 per cent of the radio audience) believed they were listening to a documentary report of an actual invasion from space. Cantril’s study indicated that any accusations that Welles and Koch were attempting to pass the broadcast off as some kind of actuality report had no basis in fact. Although the adaptation was divided into a series of ever more frantic newscasts, alert listeners would have noticed the telescoping of time, converting the events of hours into minutes. The second part of the broadcast was even specifically identified as taking place several days later, which – one would have thought – might have tipped the wink that these events were not happening in real time. (The 1975 TV movie written by Nicholas Meyer and directed by Joseph Sargent, The Night that Panicked America, slightly finessed this scenario.) The American journal The Daily News ran a headline in 1938: ‘Fake Radio “War” Stirs Terror through US’. The begetter of this panic? The actor/writer/producer/director Orson Welles, whose adaptation of The War of the Worlds had simulated the style of the ‘breaking news’ broadcasts that American listeners were used to, leading people across the US to believe that the country was under assault by invaders from another planet. The broadcast had both a positive and negative impact for Welles: the scandal was in some ways the perfect launching pad for a sensational career as a theatre Orson Welles

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and film star, but it also inspired a contemporary wave of intense dislike for the man (although the latter reaction has largely been forgotten with the passage of time). But in 1938, the whole incident very quickly assumed the proportions of a cultural phenomenon, and has become the model for any discussion of the effects of the media in alarming the public (a similar audience response to a fictitious broadcast occurred in Britain following the screening of the supposedly authentic Ghostwatch by the BBC in 1992; it was, in fact, a drama in documentary form written by Stephen Volk). Both at the time and subsequently, there were those who believed that Welles was more than happy to have deceived his listeners, and that this was always part of his agenda – even though there is much evidence to the contrary. The fury over the broadcast was further exacerbated by rumours that some panicky listeners had in fact committed suicide rather than be killed by the Martians, though these rumours were never substantiated. Perhaps most significantly, the whole incident was eloquent about the naivety of the radio audience of the day – although it must be seen in the context of the contemporaneous fear of attack from foreign nations. Welles had long cherished a dream to broadcast a version of the book and had been considering the best way to dramatise it (a similar obsession with another British literary classic, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, led to an abortive film long before Francis Coppola’s version of the novel, Apocalypse Now [1979]). Welles and his associates (who included the celebrated producer – and, later, actor – John Houseman) felt that the notion of simulating live radio broadcasts would give the adaptation an immediacy that a more linear dramatised reading couldn’t provide. Actors were coached in presenting breathless ground-level views of the Martian attacks, and listeners were lulled into a false sense of security by a weather report followed by music, which was suddenly interrupted by the news that mysterious lights had been seen on the planet Mars. As listeners heard details of the invasion now sweeping through the US, an

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Americanised version of the strategy that H. G. Wells had employed to create verisimilitude in his novel was adopted: the use of the real names of American cities (one of the targets was Grover’s Mill, a small New Jersey town near Princeton). Such details were particularly persuasive for those who had switched channels at 8.15 p.m. and missed the beginning of the transmission (when the broadcast was introduced as a dramatisation). Across America a hysterical reaction quickly set in. In Baltimore there were reports that women had fainted as men began to make plans for evacuation, while The New York Times switchboard (along with switchboards throughout the country) was jammed with terrified callers, principally people who were attempting to warn friends and relatives about the invasion. A hospital in Newark, New Jersey, reported that it had been treating people for shock, while several broken arms and legs were recorded by people who had dashed in panic out of their homes. Later calculations suggested that between four and six million people had heard the broadcast, although there are figures which suggest even higher numbers. Over 70 per cent of those quizzed talked of their panic – and their belief that they were listening to a genuine broadcast. Why were so many people convinced that they were listening to the real thing? One factor simply cannot be denied: with Welles’s already established genius as a dramatist and producer, and Howard Koch’s intelligently written dramatisation, everything was in place for what might be described as the first cultural/entertainment phenomenon of the modern age, in which the dividing line between fiction and reality was erased. Many listeners describe their intense fear at the radio journalist’s description of a creature emerging from a hole in New Jersey. A calculated ploy to channel the paranoia swirling about concerning another monster – Hitler, and his brutal path to power in Germany? The notion of a second world war was in many people’s minds, and the fact that the invaders were from another planet rather than another continent was not such a great stretch for a contemporary audience as it might be today.

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Welles always claimed that he had had no intention of deceiving his audience and maintained that his schema – as with all his work – was to give a total experience, something provocative lifted out of the rut of most radio drama. It would also seem that the young Welles was totally unprepared for the reaction that his adaptation inspired – and he was certainly not attempting to deceive. Looked at with modern eyes, it’s hard to remember a time when so much trust was invested in broadcast media, and when radio was considered to be a reliable conduit for veracity (the notion is particularly distant in an age where social media invites a much deeper scepticism about any broadcast reports which claim to be truthful). The corollary effects of the broadcast were many. Initial public anger at Welles took some time to recede, and various politicians attempted to draft draconian new censorship laws to prevent such a panic recurring. Proposals included an abortive attempt to grant the federal government final say over what programmes radio networks might broadcast. Welles and Houseman were bumped into defending their production, but contemporary reports suggest that these grillings were exhausting and tense experiences for the two men rather than an opportunity to bask in this newfound celebrity. Welles was hectored with such questions as ‘How does it feel to be responsible for the deaths of so many innocent people?’, an enquiry that neither he nor Houseman addressed (it was only later that the idea of mass deaths due to the broadcast were dismissed). After interrogation sessions lasting for several hours, and punctuated by horrific new reports of mayhem, the two men were asked when they planned to turn themselves into the police. Welles’s principal defence was simply that he had written what he considered to be a straightforward radio broadcast for his own company, and that it was just one in a series of adaptations that the company had been undertaking once a week for several months. Previous broadcasts (as was this one) were up against the phenomenally popular ventriloquist act Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy, a show which in its day was virtually

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unrivalled; the Mercury Theatre adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities had enjoyed respectable audiences, but nothing like their wooden rival. Aware that they had to come up with something special in the face of lacklustre ratings, Welles, Houseman and Koch modernised the Martian invasion of the original novel, resulting in its catastrophic reception. After the interrogation, there were rumours that the police were on their way to arrest the principal producers, and CBS employees were sent out to the studio to retrieve every copy of the script they could find. Several of these were destroyed. When the questioning was brought to an abrupt end, a grateful (and exhausted) Welles and Houseman were spirited away from the building via a rear exit; Welles was later to say that the taste of fresh air was something (after his relentless grilling) he would remember for the rest of his life. But the director had perhaps unconsciously proved two things: that with the right trigger, ordinary people can be made to believe almost anything. He also demonstrated that H. G. Wells’s original story was clearly timeless, relevant and iconic – and was ripe for further adaptations, as it was to enjoy a decade or so later. The invasions that never happened In any discussion of the George Pal/Byron Haskin film of The War of the Worlds, the most oft-remarked aspect of the adaptation is the transformation from Wells’s Victorian London to (then) modern-day California, with a knowing (and cannily commercial) nod to the flying saucer obsession of the day; the stylisation of the Martian war machines owed something to popular perceptions of the extraterrestrial visitors’ modes of transport. And with the more generous budget that Pal was able to draw on (despite the various cost-cuttings he was obliged to undertake), the crucial aspect of special effects was more persuasively convincing than in previous films – and certainly more impressive than in the low-budget fare of the day which was to be the film’s principal competition.

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But George Pal was not the first who had tried to bring Wells’s novel to the screen. The rights had already been purchased by the legendary director of diverting Hollywood religious kitsch, Cecil B. DeMille, for Paramount in 1952. And had DeMille made the film, there is no doubt that he would have created an impressively spectacular panoply of Armageddon (something of a DeMille speciality – see, for example, the destruction of the Temple in Samson and Delilah [1949]). DeMille was attracted by this aspect of the novel, but another predilection of the director was the ladling on of religious moralising. In DeMille’s films, audiences were treated to copious lashings of sex and violence, albeit with the civilising, censorsoothing overlay of pietistic finger-wagging (after we’d been allowed to enjoy the eroticism, of course) – a notion that would have been less relevant in any Wells adaptation, though Pal still (to some extent) played the religion card. It is interesting to speculate whether or not DeMille would have retained the Victorian setting for his version, as he was not temperamentally disposed to modern-day subjects. However, his updated colour version of The Ten Commandments (1956) demanded all his energies, and his Wells project was stillborn. Other possible adaptations had been mooted over the years. In Britain, the respected writer and producer Ivor Montagu (who shared Wells’s Socialism) had ambitious film-making plans – and a lot of the right connections. Among his targets was the burgeoning Hollywood film industry of 1930. Montagu was acquainted with Wells’s son Frank (the two had attended Cambridge together), and suggested the possibility of a film production company. The duo’s attempts to obtain financing bore fruit with an American producer, who tentatively agreed, with the proviso that Frank Wells’s father might be persuaded to create three humorous stories as a basis for film treatment. The author was not averse to this suggestion, as he had shown an intense interest in the medium of cinema and was also keen for his son to succeed in the film industry. Into this intriguing mix was introduced one of the greatest film-makers of all time, the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, who had been responsible for such

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classics as Battleship Potemkin (1925). Eisenstein was tempted by the prospect of making films with all the resources of Hollywood at his disposal, and suggested to Ivor Montagu (to whom he had been introduced) that the two might work together. Montagu approached Wells about the possibility of working with the illustrious Russian film-maker, along with Wells’s friend George Bernard Shaw. Both writers, well aware of the Russian director’s talent, offered him potential options for properties to be filmed in the US; Shaw suggested his play The Devil’s Disciple (1897), while Wells thought that Eisenstein’s epic sensibility would be appropriate for The War of the Worlds. Armed with such impressive assurances, Montagu made his way to Hollywood, but quickly encountered a problem. It appeared that Wells had in fact sold the rights to his book to Paramount in perpetuity, but had clearly forgotten the fact (it is unlikely that he would have attempted anything mendacious, not least because of the involvement of his own son). Similarly, Montagu had problems interesting producers in Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, which would not be made into a film for several decades (it finally appeared in a version starring Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier [1959]). However, the cachet of Sergei Eisenstein’s name was tempting for the studio, which had long kept a weather eye on foreign talents (Hollywood had for some time realised the value of importing the best foreign film-makers to work in the US). But sadly, Eisenstein’s The War of the Worlds was to be one of the legion of unmade films, and the director instead began work on his unfinished project Que Viva Mexico! (1931), of which at least something was shot. However, interest in the project was to resurface, this time (as mentioned above) involving Cecil B. DeMille, with Robert Fellows as producer. Fellows was an associate of DeMille, and the prospect of a version of Wells’s novel produced by him was (according to Steve Rubin in Cinefantastique magazine in 1977) an ongoing project until Fellows was persuaded to work for Warner Bros. as a unit manager, where he produced over fifty films throughout the 1930s.

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Wells was the target of constant requests from other sources keen to adapt the novel. And another egregious might-have-been took place during the writer’s trip to Nice in 1930 when he had a meal with a promising young British director eager to do a film version. In the teeth of Wells’s opposition to the notion of modernising the book, the youthful director – one Alfred Hitchcock – maintained that he could do full justice to a present-day version. But Wells was unconvinced. Ironically, it would be decades later before Hitchcock was to make his own great end-of-the-world film with The Birds. In 1934, the celebrated Hungarian producer Alexander Korda (responsible for such great fantasy films as The Thief of Bagdad [1940], on which Michael Powell was a co-director) discussed with Wells a film of a later novel, The Shape of Things to Come, which (shorn of the first three words of the title) was to become the first bigbudget film adaptation of the writer’s work, and one in which he himself took a keen interest. Wells was involved in the writing of the screenplay and was even instrumental in the hiring of the leading British composer Sir Arthur Bliss to write the memorable score (with its famous march). With William Cameron Menzies as director, a high-prestige film was guaranteed, with special effects that made most contemporary fare seem antediluvian. At a party at DeMille’s ranch in California in 1935, Wells discussed with the director/producer how the film of Things to Come was progressing and made it clear that he was keen to work in the medium, which (with his interest in technological development) he saw as a potential new way of expressing his ideas. But nothing further was to come of the meeting, and as the looming threat of world war cast its shadow, it became clear that an adaptation of Wells’s novel would not appear in the 1930s and 40s. The writer died in 1946, and did not live to see a film version of his most dramatic novel. But the script, which had been prepared and was languishing unread in Paramount’s story department, would be dusted off by another Hungarian, a producer who was finally able to bring about

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what none of his predecessors had succeeded in doing: creating a film version of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Wells refashioned: the George Pal movie George Pal and Byron Haskin’s The War of the Worlds was one of only a handful of expensive, high-prestige science-fiction productions (in an era when low-budget economy was the status quo for such fare) and might be said to have single-handedly initiated modern cinema’s reliance on groundbreaking, screen-filling special effects (not to mention spectacular wholesale destruction). Its effect is achieved via a combination of sophistication and hucksterism, with immense subsequent significance for commercial cinema. The film explores a very modern paranoia, with its insistence on the essential futility of technological might. The Pal/Haskin film also became a template for virtually every alien invasion film that was to follow – not just Steven Spielberg’s impressive reimagining but such box-office

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hits as Independence Day (1996) and even the superhero epic The Avengers/Avengers Assemble (2012). However, Pal’s version of H. G. Wells’s novel is by no means a simple popcorn movie that irons out the subtext of Wells’s political novel, but reinvents the narrative and freights in undercurrents and nuances of its own about American society that can be fruitfully examined today. The director Byron Haskin was born in 1899, not long after Wells’s novel made its impact. Haskin was a survivor of the great San Francisco earthquake, which he always talked about as one of the defining moments of his life – and which perhaps provided a suitable preparation for the destruction he was later to stage-manage in the film of The War of the Worlds. Working initially as a cameraman in Hollywood, he quickly showed an interest in editing, and his skill in this area was evident in the highly professional cutting of his films. Early work included unimpressive crime dramas such as Too Late for Tears in 1949 and a solid version of Stephenson’s Treasure Island a year later. He would come to the attention of the producer George Pal when the latter was putting the final touches to his production When Worlds Collide, which, with its destruction of planet Earth, might be read as a dry run for the Wells adaptation. For the War of the Worlds script, Pal commissioned writer Barré Lyndon, who had written the screenplay for the melodrama The House on 92nd Street (1945), which had impressed the producer. Initial treatments which did not bear fruit included one that involved an airborne oil prospector as hero, but Pal was keen to give the protagonist a scientific background and suggested that Lyndon create another character; hence, the stolid Clayton Forrester of Pacific Tech, a nuclear physicist who (we’re told) is ‘the man behind the new atomic engines’. The notion of the hero as a married man (as in Wells’s novel) was never going to find its way into a 1950s film such as this; the suturing of a boy/girl relationship into the narrative was a given for the period. Pal experienced some studio dissent over his idea for the film (not least budgetary nervousness), but his early work (notably

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Where Worlds Collide) had been praised by film-makers such as DeMille (no stranger to spectacle, as noted above), and Y. Frank Freeman, the tough president of Paramount, was persuaded. Freeman sanctioned the project, signing off on a budget of $1 million. Pal, though apprehensive, was ready to begin his magnum opus, and had confidence in Byron Haskin (not least because of the latter’s expertise in special effects, which would be such a crucial element of the film); he was also impressed by the director’s suggestion that the audience should be immersed in the viewpoint of the central character – in other words, experiencing the invasion (as it were) at first hand (this particular approach was pursued more assiduously in the Spielberg version). Pal and Haskin had hoped to secure top box-office actor William Holden in the lead, but the film’s budget would not stretch to such a major star, and contract player Gene Barry was assigned the role instead. Cost-cutting was an issue in other areas, and at one point some of the budget had to be siphoned off to settle a union legal dispute, necessitating some economies in the making of the film. When Worlds Collide (1951)

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Crafting an invasion: the creative team After his considerable input into the screenplay, George Pal was (with reservations) satisfied with the work he had achieved with Barré Lyndon, and was prepared to synthesise the various requisite elements. There were, however, many hurdles still to face, not least the resistance of studio executive Don Hartman who (according to Pal, when discussing the film later) was ‘very good at developing different types of films but had no appreciation whatsoever for science fiction’. Pal would clash again with Hartman over his next film, The Naked Jungle, in 1954, best remembered for its horde of killer ants. In fact, according to Pal, if Hartman had had his way, the romance between stars Charlton Heston and Eleanor Parker would have been foregrounded, with the film’s most memorable element – the ravenous ants – minimised or removed altogether. Finally, however, the studio heads took George Pal’s side in the dispute and greenlit the film he wanted to make. (This welcome executive decision was apparently

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influenced by the encomium provided by DeMille, who was impressed by George Pal’s energy and dedication.) Pal was always aware that a crucial element in the making of this film would be the design of the Martian war machines, and had discussions with the art director Al Nozaki, whose brief was to visualise the producer’s ideas. The original designs still featured the articulated legs of Wells’s original novel, but the sketches demonstrated that (within the more limited resources of 1950s film technology) this concept would prove difficult and expensive to film. Ironically, a very similar notion to Wells’s original idea – gigantic machines on stilt-like legs which would dispatch destructive rays – would finally appear in George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy, but with a considerably larger budget than that accorded to George Pal. There was another problem, which involved the flexibility and mobility of the machines: given the demands placed upon them within the scenario, the notion of articulated legs would not be feasible. While this initially appeared to be insoluble, Pal had already hired another crucial member of the creative team: the director Byron Haskin, then aged fifty-three. Haskin had been in charge of Warner Bros. special effects department, and he also acknowledged the impossibility of realising the walking Martian war machines. But it was to be Al Nozaki who eventually cracked the problem. Nozaki had emigrated from Japan to the US at a very young age, and had studied architecture but found it difficult to break into that profession. The film industry proved to be more accessible, and his initial work as a set dresser led him on to more general jobs in that department, where he worked with DeMille on The Crusades (1935). Nozaki was interned as a potential enemy alien during the dark period of the Second World War and was forbidden to work in California but found employment as an industrial designer. The variety of challenges he had encountered in his career finally led him to finding a way to solve the problem of the war machines: he hit on the notion of a design which resembled a manta ray and showed this concept to George Pal, using a small model he had constructed – Pal and Haskin were impressed.

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It was quickly decided that the best way to move the machines was to treat them like string puppets, building miniatures and manipulating them from the roof of a sound stage. This tied in with Pal’s earlier career as an animator on his fondly remembered ‘Puppetoons’ series, and demonstrated that the project was gaining impetus. With the involvement of other members of the special effects crew, the film’s crucial attack sequences began to take shape, and technical maestro Gordon Jennings commissioned Paul Lerpae to handle the complex optical effects. The machines themselves were created by props master Ivyl Burks, utilising copper as a constituent element, which usefully supplied a scarlet tint reminiscent of the red planet from which the invaders had come. As the ambitious electronics of the film began to take shape (involving literally miles of expensive circuitry and wires), it quickly became apparent that there was a certain inherent danger involved in utilising this ambitious technology. An early idea for replacing the mechanical legs with wires connected to the machines, through which thousands of volts of electricity would be fed, had to be abandoned when Pal and his associates realised that sparks from such a system could be incendiary. The piano wires suspended above the machines remained, and it has to be said that this is one of the most dated elements of the special effects, as they are all too clearly visible in many sequences – if the film were ever to be treated to a full-scale restoration (and why not?), there is little doubt that these offending elements of trickery would be digitally removed. In British showings of the film (when it was re-released in a curious late-1960s US/UK double bill with Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960]), the more sophisticated audiences of the day chuckled at these antediluvian special effects. The Martian creature briefly glimpsed in the film was played by the diminutive Charles Gemora, who was born in Manila and had worked as a make-up specialist at Paramount for many years. Successful in a variety of fields, Gemora had worked on the production design for the cathedral set for the Charles Laughton Universal version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); he was

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later to become the ‘go-to guy’ when a producer required someone in a gorilla suit, and appeared in such films as the 3-D Warner Bros. Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954). The Martian costume – certainly his most memorable creation – was constructed with very basic resources; the sophisticated techniques available to current make-up artists were not accessible in the 1950s. The costume was fashioned from chicken wire, latex and tubing, then given the appropriate green and red paint finish. The fingers were articulated, and although (by all accounts) the costume looked distinctly unpromising, it made an instant impression on both George Pal and Al Nozaki, who were able to visualise how it would look in the film. The Martian scream was not produced by Gemora but by recording the voice of an actress contracted to the studio, slowing it down to drop the pitch and then speeding it up again. The effect was suitably otherworldly. The three lenses forming the war machine scanner device, designed to be seen in close-up, were fashioned from plaster on a considerably larger scale than the version utilised on the mobile models, with electrically operated shutters and a fan to create the suggestion of flickering; the extraordinary effect of the heat rays was produced by using heated welding wire on a miniature stage, which (as it melted) had air blown at it in order to create the effect of sparks. The impressively realistic miniature sets were constructed by Nozaki with a canny use of the limited resources available to him; only occasionally does a certain lack of detail suggest their minuscule size. But Pal was aware that although the stars of the film would be the special effects, a degree of intelligence had to be used in the casting. And while the two principals are relatively colourless, he was able to surround them with various solid character actors. Casting In another pre-echo of Alfred Hitchcock’s vision of Armageddon The Birds (for which the British director claimed that rather than recognisable actors, he wanted the birds to be the stars of the film),

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Pal – perhaps making a virtue out of necessity – had said he also wanted lesser-known actors for his principals. Gene Barry had enjoyed some success on Broadway and was later to become a television fixture in a variety of roles in such popular shows as Burke’s Law (1963–5); he was even to develop into an appreciable character actor in such works as the Broadway musical La Cage aux folles. Pal was satisfied with his tests and cast Barry as Dr Clayton Forrester. For his female lead, the producer chose as an audition piece the farmhouse sequence in which the Sylvia character talks about her childhood experience of being abandoned, and Ann Robinson (only twenty-four at the time she was cast) impressed both Pal and Haskin. The actress had appeared in George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951) and proved to be more than adequate in the part, while perhaps lacking the acting chops to make her character more than a stock figure. As a couple, Clayton and Sylvia are representative of an Eisenhower-era ideal. But, as in later films such as The Time Machine, Pal demonstrated his canniness in using the best character actors to give verisimilitude and lend colour to the scenes involving his leads. Les Tremayne had long been a highly successful actor in a variety of mediums from radio to film and was cast in the part of General Mann of the Sixth Army Command. Along with Gene Barry’s character, he would function as the voice of authority, filling in both characters on the screen and the audience as to precisely what was happening (such as a description of how the Martian war machines were forming into groups of three before moving across America). The audience are completely convinced by his commanding presence, and by the voice actor Paul Frees (also to work with George Pal on The Time Machine, where he was the voice of the futuristic ‘talking rings’). On this occasion, Frees appears on screen, and the actor remarked how Pal’s use of him was virtually talismanic – the producer felt comfortable to know that Paul Frees was somehow involved with one of his films. In fact, Frees is the first voice we hear in the film, as he urgently describes the effects of war in the

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pre-credits montage before Cedric Hardwicke’s more considered tones. Frees later appears on screen as the radio announcer who broadcasts from the site of an A-bomb detonation. Laying the groundwork Some of the most crucial preproduction work was carried out by Byron Haskin, though it might be argued that his creative input was different from (and more constrained than) that of fellow craftsmen such as Don Siegel or Anthony Mann, who were able to transform pre-existing projects and channel a very personal vision; Haskin was – despite his skills – a hired hand, with the auteur perspective of the film belonging to its very creative producer. Haskin found himself having to cope with a reduced budget and more circumscribed locations than those posited in Lyndon’s original screenplay. The director was also obliged to rely on stock footage to depict the planet as it begins to fall under the Martian yoke, and it is this The Time Machine (1960)

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footage (though reasonably well incorporated) which now strikes a false note with audiences – particularly as the newsreel shots often conflict with the very personal and sometimes surrealistic visual style of the film. The necessary involvement of the army (given the crucial part it plays in the scenario) also proved to be problematic, with the California military expressing unhappiness at the depiction of their rout at the hands of a technologically superior opponent (retrospectively, one might detect a sense of humour bypass here – did none of the military personnel consulted for the film smile at the notion of Martian death rays and war machines as a potential enemy?). Eventually, following negotiations, Haskin was permitted to film a variety of night-time shots of armoured columns and soldiers desperately readying themselves for the confrontation. Military units in Phoenix proved to be more amenable than their counterparts in California. Other location photography included footage of the population preparing for the explosion of the futile A-bomb retaliatory attack on the invaders, and subsequent process work made the modest-sized crowds appear larger. Other crucial work included shooting in Los Angeles at a weekend to create the illusion of a ruined city (supplemented by more shooting on a standing city set). The scenes utilising this footage, in which the scientist character searches for his missing girlfriend, were among the most successful in the film. The US equivalent of the Woking sandpit in which Wells’s Martian cylinders landed was also one of the more ambitious sets created on a sound stage. Designed to be adaptable, it could be re-dressed for a variety of different purposes. The ruined house in which Forrester and Sylvia have their encounter with the Martian was constructed on another sound stage, both full-sized and in miniature. During this process, one problem which had nothing to do with shooting conditions threatened to derail the production. Pal discovered that he had not in fact purchased full rights to Wells’s novel, only the filming of a silent property. To avert disaster, the author’s son Frank was contacted in London and he facilitated the sales of the requisite rights.

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Crucial to the success of the film was the shooting of the special effects sequences, and these were not without their problems; on one occasion, a stuntman playing a soldier victim of the Martian heat ray had to be quickly smothered with blankets to avoid major burns. For the advance of the war machines across an increasingly devastated America, detailed miniature sets created the illusion of destruction on a massive scale. Some other technical effects in the film are truly splendid, and completely belie the reduced budget (the ruined farmhouse with its prodigious amount of detail is a good example of this). And the movement of the war machines – which proved not to be as smooth as producer and director had hoped – was finessed by adjusting the shooting speed; simultaneously, numerous attempts were made to conceal the wires but (as mentioned earlier) these were only fitfully successful. Much more effective were the force fields which protect the Martian war machines against attack and which were

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created from transparent domes; the battering they received from army guns was matted in at a later date to avoid damage to these props. All of these disparate components were supervised and improved by Paul Lerpae and his optical effects team, with the threestrip Technicolor of the day being manipulated and pushed into areas that had simply not been attempted before with blue-screen work. With opticals a crucial ingredient – particularly in the movement of the war machines – Lerpae and his associates also hand-painted several thousand frames to create such illusions as the effects of the Martian heat ray and the destruction of an army tank. One of the most memorable effects in the film was the death of an army colonel who falls victim to the ray and whose skeleton is briefly visible before he is totally destroyed. Finally, a rough cut of the film was ready (with Leith Stevens’s edgy symphonic score utilising post-Stravinsky dissonance but still located within the tone poem tradition of Richard Strauss), and was given a test-screening to an audience of children. It was recorded that the audience found the film terrifying, particularly the innovative and minatory use of sound effects. After the showing, cuts were made to create a fast-paced 85 minutes, and it was this version that was premiered in Hollywood in 1953. Presciently shot in widescreen format (at a 1.47:1 ratio), and with a multi-tracked magnetic stereophonic soundtrack, its technical impressiveness was (for the day) considerable – although it should be noted that many cinemas both in the US and the UK were not equipped to show the film in its correct stereophonic form. Unsurprisingly, the film was a massive success. Audiences had simply not seen anything like it before, and George Pal’s future – already assured as a creator of impressive fantasy and science fiction – was consolidated. The narrative of the film Cedric Hardwicke’s spoken introduction at the beginning of the film – while part of an established cinematic tradition of the authoritative narrative voice laying out the parameters of the story for the viewer –

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is granted gravitas by the actor’s cultured British tones; this, we realise (whatever part of the world the viewer hails from), is a different, more measured explication then the dramatic American voices we will hear throughout the film, even from Gene Barry’s scientist (who is the equivalent of Wells’s narrator figure). The panoply of Chesley Bonestell images at the beginning of the film affords the viewer a godlike perspective on the universe – a universe cold and unwelcoming in its uningratiating beauty, and devoid of life. Even before a single human being is displayed on the screen, we are granted a sobering image of the immensity of the universe (and, accordingly, our modest place in it – particularly as we, the human race, do not appear in this introductory series of tableaux). It might be argued that this opening sequence is one of the purest expressions of cinema which has been accorded the viewer, an experience quite unlike any we will encounter in other film contexts. In this parade of the planets, concepts that we may already nourish of time and space are eroded and we are allowed a glimpse of the solar system which is both beautiful and disturbing. The trajectory of the Martian war machines across the blasted heaths (into which they render Earth’s terrain) is both immensely menacing and strangely graceful and elegant; these dispensers of death, their appearance suggesting (as mentioned earlier) denizens of the aquatic deeps, are exquisite objects of design, and certainly the first of cinema’s engines of destruction which can boast an aesthetic appeal. Their inexorable progress is accompanied by the groundbreaking Foley sound design, with its copious use of minatory hissing noises. The resemblance of the ships to biological organic creatures in fact lends them an air of cruelty – the kind of cruelty so often found in the animal kingdom (and in the human race) but which cannot be ascribed to machines. In this respect, the war machines are more akin to the gigantic monsters made of flesh and blood (however impervious they are to atomic blasts) which strode wrathfully across the science-fiction screens of the 1950s. And the sound canvas presented here is perhaps the most impressive in all the

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films of this genre in the decade, apart from Fred McLeod Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet, which has the most creative and innovative use of sound of the era (not least in Louis and Bebe Barron’s electronic score, as opposed to the more conventional symphonic underscoring fashioned for Pal by Leith Stevens). The symbiotic, organic relationship between the Martians and their ambulatory machines is suggested both verbally and physically, with the contrast between the virtually indestructible transport mechanisms and their weak and (as we shall see) disease-prone operators. When Forrester succeeds in severing one of the mechanical periscope-like ‘eyes’ that the creatures use for surveillance, he subsequently discovers blood on the cloth in which he has wrapped the device, suggesting that the machines have the capacity to bleed, and are somehow organically linked to the bodies of their masters. But certainly, science is presented in the film in a more ambiguous fashion than in Wells’s novel. In the Pal/Haskin version, the technology of the day almost immediately deserts the characters when the aliens begin their onslaught, all technological aspects of the town in which they landed rendered instantly defunct. And the subsequent use of an atom bomb in an attempt to destroy the aliens also proves futile. What’s more, human energy is presented as similarly ineffectual in dealing with the threat; at a dance which is interrupted by the aliens at the beginning of the film, Forrester remarks: ‘If you could gather all the energy expended at just one square dance we could send that meteor back where it came from.’ However, the suggestion that the aliens possess a superior mastery of technology is set against their unimpressive bodies; the Martians exhibit no Lawrentian balance between mind and body; hence, their vulnerability. A certain religious quality undoubtedly infuses the film, and it is to some degree embodied in the female lead, the librarian Sylvia played by Ann Robinson. In many ways she is the embodiment of the passive, vulnerable (and not particularly intelligent) female character expected by audiences of the day, providing the necessary hysterics in

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the face of the monstrous invaders. Her character is invested with the spiritual qualities the film subtly trades in, and she relates to the hero Forrester the story of how, abandoned as a child, she went to a church to pray that someone who loved her would rescue her. This motif is continued and embodied in the present-day narrative of the film, as Clayton goes to three separate churches in order to find her. The state of grace thus attained is reflected in the narration provided once again by Cedric Hardwicke, who speaks of the bacteria that has destroyed the aliens (as Clayton visited the churches) – the bacteria which (we are told) ‘God in his wisdom had placed on Earth.’ (Clearly, God had his favourite species – or at least favoured those who prayed to him.) The scepticism of H. G. Wells and Orson Welles is not on offer here, although it might be argued that the film implicitly criticises the priest – one of the Martians’ early victims – when he claims that the invaders ‘are more advanced than we are and therefore nearer to the creator’; if this is so, it is a ruthless Old Testament creator. Finessing Wells The original intention was that Clayton Forrester, no longer Wells’s everyman hero, should perform a variety of functions as protagonist in the film: a scientist making educated guesses about what the Martian invaders are up to, acting as important military liaison, default police chief (with suitably authoritative manner) and a variety of other organisational roles. Some of these functions were elided in the finished film, but he is still super-capable (in marked contrast to the Tom Cruise character in the later version of the novel), and it seems that Forrester has access to numerous forms of transport so that he can be at the centre of the action throughout, even as society (and its modes of transport) collapses around him. The original description in Lyndon’s screenplay of the Martians laying waste to Main Street in Linda Rosa (including details such as blazing petrol pumps, explosions, fire trucks roaring through at speed, and running, screaming crowds) might have the viewer wondering if Hitchcock (in

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his failed attempt to film the Wells novel) had such scenes in mind when he created very similar mayhem for the town of Bodega Bay in The Birds. Indeed the original screenplay (as did Wells’s novel) contained graphic detail of death and charred bodies, with carrion subsequently picking at the corpses. No doubt aware of the censorship restrictions of the day, Pal converted much of the more explicit violence aimed at the body into violence against buildings and machines, whilst retaining several memorable deaths (notably the priest who walks hopefully towards the war machines intoning the 23rd Psalm and is promptly incinerated for his pains, and the destruction of the army colonel later). These fatalities stood in as an index for the utter ruthlessness of the invaders. This decision meant that the film had a relatively easy ride with the censors. Interestingly, the syndrome (that is, the annihilation of the human body) was to be repeated in the Spielberg/Tom Cruise remake for similar ratings reasons, as we shall see in a discussion of the later film. The first major indication in the Pal/Haskin film that we will be given a media-led commentary on the inexorable advance of the Martians (which both echoes the Orson Welles broadcast and may now be seen as an intriguing forecast of our 24-hours-news society) is a description of the invaders’ landing site. We are not accorded a view of this by Pal/Haskin, but instead hear an urgent live commentary from a reporter (played by Ted Hecht) who is broadcasting from a communications vehicle. A flare is dropped over the Martian nest, and Lyndon’s screenplay closely follows Wells’s original novel in its description of the cylinders disgorging the invaders and the construction of the striding war machines, which raise themselves from the pit and begin their work of destroying the human race. In Pal’s original conception, the war machines were of a tripod structure with articulated legs – and it is interesting that despite the iconic use of gravity-defying rays in the film, Wells’s original tripod design remains the most pervasive in terms of popular imagery (such as John Christopher’s novels The Tripods [1967–8 and 1988] and

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subsequent TV series [1984–5], essentially a War of the Worlds for young adults, and in the subsequent Jeff Wayne rock musical based on the novel, which similarly channelled the original design). A crucial component of the Pal/Haskin concept is the defensive force field that protects the Martian war machines (described as ‘magnetic umbrellas which expand to cover the cylinder and themselves’) as air force jets begin their vain attack. Inevitably, the Martian heat rays make short shrift of the army defences. Lyndon and Pal had discussed a variety of other modes of attacks (including a naval one), but these were eliminated, sometimes for budgetary reasons – although the impressive confrontations in the film were unlike anything cinema audiences of the time had seen, and if certain effects now appear dated to more sophisticated audiences, there is no question that these sequences can still hold their own even against modern CGI technology. Lyndon and Pal eliminated the limited successes of the British Army that Wells had allowed in the novel, instead establishing the implacable force of the Martian invaders from the very beginning. One of the most celebrated sequences in Wells’s novel is the narrator’s encounter with a demented curate in a ruined house in Sheen en route to Mortlake. Pal and Lyndon wisely retained a version of this sequence, whilst eliminating the curate; similarly, Spielberg would subsequently utilise the scene, replacing the curate with a more contemporary (but equally deluded) figure: a rifle-toting survivalist played by Tim Robbins. In the novel, the house is destroyed when a cylinder lands nearby, leaving the narrator and curate hiding in the debris; in the film, it is the characters played by Gene Barry and Ann Robinson who take refuge in the ruined house and have a terrifying encounter (of the third kind) with one of the invaders. Through a hole in the ruined walls, the couple look on in horror as the Martians examine their territory and continue the construction of the war machines – until an articulated tentacle forces its way into the house seeking them out. Lyndon and Pal identified this episode in the novel as an opportunity to finally afford

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audiences one (of two) brief glimpses of the Martians themselves. It was clearly to be a key sequence – and had to be carefully handled, to keep derision at bay. The appearance of the probing mechanical tentacle is updated from Wells’s original, and its steady, menacing crawl through the ruined building is directed with effective tension by Haskin. The director, however, was reserving his big shock moment for later in the scene. The encounter between Ann Robinson’s character and one of the monstrous invaders outside of its machine will perhaps have little impact on an audience of today, inured to such things by a thousand similar scenes. Viewers in the 1950s, however, were lifted from their seats, as a thin tentacular arm reaches towards the heroine’s shoulder, extending three grotesque suckers. In the scene as originally written, Forrester intervenes, shooting the creature and attacking it with an axe; in one of several examples of the softening of violence in the film, the axe blow remains, but not the gunshots. The scene remains effective, however, as it is based on a tried and true premise, much utilised in the 1950s but largely jettisoned in later films (although Ridley Scott’s Alien [1979] initially uses some of the same tactics): withhold the sight of your monster from the audience for as long as possible, thus building up an expectation of something truly horrendous – which, of course, few film-makers are actually able to deliver. It has to be said that the grotesque creature created for the Pal/Haskin film (with its tri-coloured eye echoing that of the heat ray) manages to pull off one of the most tricky pieces of sleight of hand when it comes to the depiction of such visitors. Although the actor Charles Gemora is in the suit, it doesn’t appear possible for a human being to simulate this bizarrely shaped creature. Following their escape from the house, the increasingly dirty and dishevelled protagonists witness the army’s last throw of the dice: a futile atomic attack on the creatures which is unable to penetrate their force fields. For such sequences, many films of the 1950s utilised existing bomb footage, but such is the attention paid by Pal and Haskin to a total vision for the film that the colourful and

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vaguely surreal special effects utilised for the A-bomb (which in fact is nothing like a real detonation) provide one of the most effective moments in the film. After the couple are separated, Forrester searches for his companion through the chaotic streets of a rubbish-strewn Los Angeles where law and order has totally broken down. More than the special effects, these sequences are particularly effective, showcasing in persuasive incidental detail the collapse of society. A later British science-fiction film, Val Guest’s ominous The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), sported similar sequences (this time in Wells’s London setting) with some success, but the Pal/Haskin film was the first to achieve such effects on a large scale. Forrester finally tracks down Sylvia in a Lutheran church, and as they clutch each other, a war machine staggers into view, then crashes against the building. The couple encounter another war machine, but its destructive ray appears to be malfunctioning, and a third machine

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tangles with overhead wires outside the church and collapses. From one of the downed machines, a Martian’s arm extends feebly, life clearly ebbing away. Its green/brown skin has turned dun, and appears to be puckering and suppurating. H. G. Wells’s ineluctable bacteria have done their worst, and it is Cedric Hardwicke’s voice which accords us the religious ending: ‘… and thus, after science fails man in the supreme test, it is the littlest things that God in his wisdom had put upon the Earth that save mankind’. Apart from the conventional reading of the film’s ending as pietistic, there is also perhaps the sense of an unspoken unity between the human beings who scrabble across the surface of the Earth and every form of life (even down to the most infinitesimal microbes) which might possess a semi-relationship to the planet. Thus the defeat of the Martians is not necessarily due to the intervention of a Gaia-like Earth spirit but via the identification of the human race with the planet whose resources we may squander, but with which we are inextricably linked.

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Spawn of Mars: offspring, offshoots and other versions The template which had been established by H. G. Wells and which was consolidated in the most authoritative of fashions by the George Pal/Byron Haskin film (whatever the latter’s limitations) was not only to prove influential and much-imitated, but was also to function as the blueprint for virtually all succeeding films on the theme. In fact, those successors might be considered (in their different ways) a reaction to (or spin on) the tropes laid down by Wells/Pal/Haskin. If one were to consider films from the 1950s such as Invaders from Mars (1953) and those from later eras such as The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1963) and the more modern blockbusters Mars Attacks! (1996) and Independence Day, despite the addition of a variety of new thematic filigrees and ornamentations, certain shibboleths appeared to be established: the first signs of the invasion would be treated with scepticism by those not in the immediate firing line; implacably superior technological force would render any opposition on this planet virtually useless; and (against all the odds) the protagonists – or some act of nature – would triumph, the alien invaders experiencing a genocide similar to the annihilation they had planned for the inhabitants of Earth. It might even be argued that the template is being observed in the defining cinematic trend of the early years of the twenty-first century, the superhero movie. Although films such as Marvel’s Avengers Assemble, while still a version of Wells’s invasion story, set in opposition to the murderous invaders a group of superpowered protagonists rather than the more vulnerable heroes and heroines of earlier films who only had their wits to carry them through. In this section, it will also be necessary to talk about a variety of films in which the source of incursion may not be the red planet (for instance, Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space [1953] and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956]), but which fruitfully demonstrate the protean nature of the theme, allowing for the exploration of notions other than those dealt with by Wells (and in a more simplified form by Pal/Haskin): identity, conformity, the paranoid mindset of the cold war. Any examination of the film of The

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War of the Worlds must be seen in the context of the 1950s SF genre to which it belongs. An appreciation of its virtues is finessed by observing the contrast with how it tackles similar themes. And these stablemates of Pal’s movie, often fascinating pieces in their own right, illuminate the myriad ways in which the ‘invasion from space’ scenario might be tackled. Back in the first great era of science-fiction film in the 1950s, at least one other cinematic threat from the red planet wore an even gaudier livery than the poster colours with which George Pal and Byron Haskin illuminated their vision. The production designer and director William Cameron Menzies provided a colourful canvas for the hidden bolt-hole of his marauding Invaders from Mars, looking forward to Spielberg’s underground invaders in his remake of The War of the Worlds. The Menzies film owed more to Salvador Dali than to such traditional science-fiction illustrators as Frank R. Paul. The identification of a distinctive visual style is always crucial to SF movies, given that a worthwhile entry into the field has to establish something individual and innovative while trading in some of the standard features of the genre. One consistent element of this syndrome is the contrast between the quotidian appearance of Earth and the human race and the futuristic trappings of the invaders. But in Invaders from Mars, Menzies transformed both our own and the alien settings to truly disorienting effect. Apart from the grotesque appearance of the Martian visitors, even the perspective of the principal protagonist – a small boy – is distorted and informs what we see: a police station in his hometown becomes as surreal and alien as anything in the Martian hideout, and the Martian mastermind – a dome-headed, tentacular creature with a permanently immobile expression enclosed within a translucent globe – seems to bear little relation to anything possible within the realms of acceptable science, owing more to the fantasy-oriented visions of such illustrators as Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. Although this is integrated into the theme of personality takeover which (as will be shown) became a crucial staple

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of 1950s SF, when the small-town inhabitants of Invaders from Mars (such as the boy’s father) return home, with blank expressions after alien induction, this is less obviously a metaphor for Communist brainwashing than in other movies of the period. These suborned victims, photographed in heightened, artificial fashion, are thus assimilated into Menzies’s visual representation of the aliens. The characters who are taken over by aliens in the film, such as the boy’s parents, a little girl and then the chief of police, are victims of a process suggesting magical rather than scientific techniques: a red crystal is forced into the base of the victims’ necks. Menzies, who also demonstrated his prodigious visual inventiveness in such films as the earlier high-prestige Wells adaptation Things to Come, and the misfiring but intriguing 3-D fantasy/horror movie The Maze (1953), drew upon these skills for Invaders from Mars, the 3-D process reinforcing the strangeness of his vision. The film is a testimony to Menzies’s non-naturalistic notions of design. The hill on which the flying saucer lands – observed by the young hero (played by Jimmy Hunt) – is superbly unreal, with its bare trees, stylised fence and sandpits, resembling nothing other than the artificial product of a sound stage. And the expressionist production design is also in evidence in the police station, where the bizarre perspective and distorted furniture convey a small boy’s impression of its unfriendliness. Like the science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who had little interest in the ‘hard science’ elements of his SF tales, Menzies conveys a sympathetic understanding of fantasy, with a Martian mastermind reminiscent of the director’s fantastic creations for The Thief of Bagdad. Invaders from Mars was Menzies’s final film as a director, and it remains a testament to his unique, off-kilter vision. Despite similarities in its plotting, the Menzies film displayed hardly any of the political underpinnings evident in Don Siegel’s intelligent (and oft-remade) Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the period when Siegel made the movie (along with his sinewy and rigorous crime dramas), he saw himself as (and was seen as) a highly

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efficient, no-nonsense Hollywood professional, turning out a product designed to appeal to audiences on a visceral level. But after his christening as an ‘auteur’ by the Cahiers du Cinéma writers (and in the UK by the influential writers of Movie) – something that quietly pleased Siegel – a certain self-reassessment occurred and was even discernible in his later films, where the directorial credit was replaced by the legend in longhand ‘A Donald Siegel film’ – it appeared that the director now began to take himself as seriously as the French took him. This shift was apparent in his approach to the science-fiction classic of the 1950s. Most modern viewers would see the replacement of humans by aliens in this film as a metaphor for the widespread fear of Communist takeover in the 1950s – this was, after all, the era of Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts and the House Un-American Activities Committee. The sinister takeovers in the Siegel film were very similar to those in Menzies’s Invaders from Mars (as discussed above), in that the central character cannot trust anyone around him, as neither he nor the audience know who has been replaced/ conditioned by the invaders. But it would appear that latterly, Siegel was well aware of the left-leaning attitudes of his more articulate admirers, and was obliged to come up with a more acceptable explanation when he discussed the film – or at least an equivocal one. He frequently talked about the film being an attack on conformity; the ‘pod people’ (the aliens clandestinely grew human-sized pods in which the simulacra/replacements were grown) became a pet phrase, which, according to Siegel in later interviews, had come to represent Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

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unthinking conformity of the kind he frequently encountered in crass Hollywood producers. The film, Siegel maintained, was a plea for individuality – not in the face of Stalinist/Maoist brainwashing (the latter a reading which fits the film equally well) but in America’s desire to iron out ideological differences. Whichever of these two viewpoints a modern viewer of the film chooses to accept – and both are perfectly feasible – there is no denying that Siegel’s version of alien invasion – very different from that in the Pal/Haskin film – is utterly persuasive and makes a positive virtue of the fact that the spectacular special effects of the latter movie were not available to him; society in Siegel’s film will not be subjugated by force of arms but by a more insidious form of coup. Nevertheless, the film can still boast surrealist imagery (in the effects it does employ and in its jarring visual style) worthy of the Menzies and Pal/Haskin films. A good example of this is the half-grown blank figure of himself that one of the characters (played by King Donovan) discovers and lays out on a billiard table. The moment when the body comes to life, its eyes opening as Donovan’s horrified wife looks on, is truly unnerving, to be replicated later when the film’s hero (played by Kevin McCarthy) discovers a simulacra of heroine Dana Wynter in the basement of a house. Similarly unsettling are the shots of the pods splitting open as the characters try to spear them with pitchforks; given the sensitive censorship restrictions of the day, the sense of violence and bodily harm in these scenes is still remarkably potent. In fact, Don Siegel claimed that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was his favourite film among his own work, and that he remained astounded at the positive reception it received. When it was put to him that the film could be interpreted both as an attack on McCarthyism or as an anti-Communist tract, Siegel responded that there were clearly political implications in the film and cleverly sidestepped the question with the reply: ‘The fact that the world is peopled by “pods” was sufficient reason to make a picture like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, be it an attack on McCarthyism or an attack on communism.’

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Poetry of the desert Other talented directors (and several whose skills were harder to discern) were hired by producers eager to capitalise swiftly on the popularity of alien invasion movies, and among these was possibly the best director of science-fiction subjects in the 1950s, the multitalented Jack Arnold. His roster of impressive SF films (notably the bleak, existential The Incredible Shrinking Man [1957]) was virtually unmatched in the era. But it was It Came from Outer Space which proved to be his magnum opus in the alien takeover subgenre. Once again, we have the progressive replacing of human beings by alien doppelgängers, and once again an anti-Communist metaphor may be discerned in the emotionless, machine-like drones, but that is not Jack Arnold’s principal concern. The director’s relationship to the American desert, always realised in his films in slightly unreal but subtly poetic fashion, is crucial here, with Arnold conscious that audiences would examine every element of the frame for evidence of Invasion of the Body Snatchers

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the monstrous incursion that the film’s title has warned them is coming. It Came from Outer Space (which originated as a treatment by the writer Ray Bradbury) utilises the Arizona desert in allusive style, with the blank but efficient genre stalwart Richard Carlson as the man who discovers the evidence of an alien invasion. Once again, the invasion is a clandestine one (unlike Pal and Haskin’s War of the Worlds), and the budget did not extend to wholesale devastation. Instead of dramatic attack set pieces, Arnold employs atmosphere and quiet menace, retaining some sense of Bradbury’s ethos of small-town America as the repository of timeless but fragile values, even though only two lines remain from the writer’s original conception, both similarly suggestive: ‘The town, resting after its daily battle with the sun …’, and the words spoken by a man working on overhead power cables: ‘You see lakes and rivers that aren’t really there, and sometimes you think the wind gets into the wires and sings to itself.’ But such is the carefully attuned sensibility of the director that these moments do not emerge from the kind of

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It Came from Outer Space (1953)

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uncomplicated conflicts that are the bread and butter of most films of this type, but are in keeping with the mood created by the director. As a vision of this planet succumbing to an assault from an alien invader, Arnold’s film is just as potent in its way (despite its modest resources) as the big-budget and colourful spectacle of the Pal/Haskin film, whilst the concentration on locale, particularly an isolated one, presents a picture of vulnerable humanity within the vastness of the universe via the metaphor of the cosmic loneliness of the desert. The sandy wastes that provide the backdrop to the incursion of alien forces suggest that the unspoiled, austere beauty will remain untouched after any human conflicts (with opponents of whatever kind). The 1950s, however, was not the only era to extrapolate Wells’s suggestion that Martian eyes were looking enviously at us, and in the case of Maury Dexter’s The Day Mars Invaded Earth, there are even fewer special effects than in the films of Don Siegel and Jack Arnold It Came from Outer Space

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discussed above; in fact, the director consciously makes his paucity of resources a positive virtue, consolidated by a bleakness which Siegel had hoped to attain but which was compromised by studio interference. In Dexter’s film, the central characters, a scientist and his family, fall victim to the largely unseen Martian invaders and are destroyed by alien heat rays (shades of Wells); what remains of them – figures traced out in ash – is swept away in their swimming pool as the creatures that have replaced them drive away in the family car. A more modern paranoia was in the offing, with the rout of the invaders by the final reel no longer necessarily on the agenda. TV and other media An American television series (bearing Wells’s title) made by Greg Strangis for 10-Four/Paramount was screened between 1988 and 1990, and though even further from Wells than previous outings ingeniously utilised the premise of George Pal’s film, suggesting that a government conspiracy covered up the invasion (requiring something of a stretch of credulity, given the operatic levels of destruction), with Martian bodies stored in containers at a military base. But when terrorists attack the base and several of the barrels are opened, the aliens are once more unleashed upon the world (as in the subsequent Spielberg film, the creatures from space are no longer specifically identified as Martians but simply alien visitors). Viewers later learn that they were not killed by germs (as described in the earlier films), but put into a state of forced hibernation. Having the ability to take over human hosts, they proceed to do so with the terrorists who inadvertently released them. (Added to the mix here were elements from both Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the then popular TV series The Invaders [1967–8].) These reluctant human hosts have the living-dead appearance of zombies, and set against them is a carefully diversified group of human protagonists, facing the usual difficulty of simply persuading the authorities that the aliens actually exist. There were two series utilising Greg Strangis’s concept, which, though displaying a certain narrative rigour, more or

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less dispensed with everything that had made Wells’s novel (and even the George Pal film). Other media indulged in Wellsian riffs. The writer Christopher Fowler worked on a video game inspired by the book and the film, and spoke to me in 2014 about The War of the Worlds: It’s really my guiding tenet: the test of a genre classic is that it stands reinvention into any time and place, in this case that the novel involves the quite natural paranoia that occurs in the aftermath of war or civil unrest. The War of the Worlds – the video game – was amazingly truthful to its origins, if anything too cerebral, and its distribution, despite it being perfectly realised as a game, was eventually diluted by Paramount’s change of regime. The ideas and visuals in it were probably the most perfectly realised rendering of Wells’s ideas ever attempted.

Other versions of Wells’s original include the aforementioned concept album from 1977 (often revived in performance; the sixth revival is said to be the last) by the musician Jeff Wayne, with its portentous narrator. The score trades more in the familiar trademarks of prog rock than any genuine compositional originality, but has a devoted following. There is also a much-loved comic-book adaptation produced for the Classic Illustrated series (simplified versions of famous works of literature aimed at children); the series is often drawn in pedestrian fashion (despite some stellar names in illustration such as Jack Kirby), but the Wells adaptation (no. 124, Gilberton Publications, 1955) was written by Harry Miller and illustrated by the highly professional comics artist Lou Cameron, whose work for DC Comics in the 1950s was marked by a rather eccentric approach to anatomy, but energised by a truly original and innovative draughtsmanship and a pronounced sense of drama. All of these are evident in his Classics Illustrated version of the novel, which retains Wells’s original setting. The news of a new period-version film of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (2005), directed by Timothy Hines and starring

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Anthony Piana, occasioned some anticipation in admirers of the novel, given that a Victorian-set film adaptation had never been attempted. Hopes were qualified by the fact that Hines was an independent writer and director from the US who had never previously tackled such a daunting (and expensive) subject, but his avowed intent was to utilise the structure of the original novel. The subsequent problems that arose were not entirely due to such challenges, however – the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US brought about the suspension of production, as it was thought that a fictional destruction of society (even one distanced by the period) would not be well received. When the film finally appeared, there was a considerable sense of anticlimax, hinted at by the fact that it was never screened in cinemas; it was rumoured at the time that because of the imminent release of the Spielberg/Cruise film, a certain pressure had been put upon cinema owners to bury it. But the reasons for the failure of the film may actually be found elsewhere. A major problem was the lengthy running time of three hours (more suitable to television adaptations than feature films), and something it shared in common with a poorly received 2002 remake of The Time Machine (ironically, directed by a descendant of H. G. Wells, Simon Wells): namely, an apparent lack of sympathy for the material (despite protestations of enthusiasm) and the maladroit handling of actors – particularly apparent in the performances in the Hines movie. What’s more, the director was not able to furnish suitably impressive special effects, so crucial to this project, and the mayhem depicted in the film was often decidedly amateurish in execution. Hines seemed well aware of the film’s inadequacies and attempted a variety of strategies to render it a viable project (including a more slender director’s cut in 2005) and, a year later, more changes in the material and a new title – The Classic War of the Worlds – but neither of these did anything to solve the inherent problems. The director, seemingly undaunted, talked of a further attempt at filming Wells, this time focusing on a survivor of the attack – a tactic used in a 1973 Marvel comic book, War of the Worlds, illustrated by Neal Adams.

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The format of The Great Martian War (made for television in 2013, and directed by Mike Slee from a concept by Steve Maher) is that of an ersatz documentary-drama, suggesting that a titanic battle with the Martians took place between 1913 and 1917. It is posited that while Europe was anticipating a major war between its main powers, in 1913 extraterrestrial visitors landed in the forests of Germany. The army is dispatched to investigate but is annihilated, and Martian war machines begin laying waste to Western Europe. This spin on H. G. Wells folds in events (and footage) from the First World War, and the dramatisation is couched in documentary style with references to genuine events on the Western Front. The Great Martian War is an intriguing idea relatively well handled, with skilfully mocked-up vintage footage – though laden down with one too many talking heads (however authentic the actors playing the elderly survivors seem). Modern takes Some recent films might be identified as remakes, including, notably, Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day. The proof that the alien invasion film was still a fecund area for film-makers was to be found in a variety of movies from the modern era, such as Emmerich’s epic, with its reference in the title to America’s shaking off of its British colonial yoke – perhaps unsurprising, given that the German director shared with the star of his film The Patriot (2000), Mel Gibson, a notable lack of sympathy for perfidious Albion. The British Army in Revolutionary America in the duo’s film behave in non-historic fashion like Nazi storm troopers, burning churches full of civilians. But it’s still significant that a sequence in Independence Day much remarked upon at the time – in which the President of the United States rallies the troops before an airborne assault on the alien invaders – utilises rousing oratory full of Shakespearean rhetoric straight out of Henry V (although the breach to which the troops are being sent is in the skies). But as with previous riffs on Wells’s novel, Englishness is a commodity in short supply here; this is very much a

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carefully calculated American product designed to appeal to the widest possible international audience – a task it accomplished triumphantly. Critics may have been sniffy, but audiences loved the film and a poll conducted in Entertainment Weekly magazine in 1996 placed it as the ‘second greatest summer entertainment film’ for two decades, with only Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) ahead of it. The fact that Emmerich’s film displays a certain American jingoism is perhaps part of the reason for its success, along with its fairly formulaic plotting and wafer-thin characters; spectacle was the force majeure here. By utilising as principal star the likeable Will Smith, Emmerich was well aware that the battle for his audience was already half-won, as they were charmed by the comic-turned-serious actor and – of course – were open-jawed at the extravagant special effects. In this regard, it echoes the Pal/Haskin film with its wholesale demolition of American society (intriguingly, the audience would cheer wildly at one act of destruction shown in the trailer: when the aliens blow up the Empire State Building and the White House – in fact, the latter image was utilised for the film’s posters). Echoes of the 1950s invasion film might be discerned in the scenes of Armageddon, but all that remains of Wells (and that probably only refracted through the earlier film) is the microscopic entity that destroys the invaders – the virus in the Emmerich film is not bacteria, however, but a computer virus. The placing of this game-changing deus ex machina in the alien mother ship (by Independence Day (1996)

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standard-issue scientific figure Jeff Goldblum) is one of the many areas in which suspension of disbelief is required on an almost cosmic level by the audience. Shadow on the moon It is perhaps possible to be too poker-faced about the undemanding appeal of a film which makes no calls on the intellect (a perfectly respectable pursuit), and Independence Day is full of memorable visual coups, such as an early shot of a gigantic shadow making its way across the surface of the moon. The menacing hovering of the alien ships above the Earth inspires the much-vaunted sense of wonder which the best science-fiction films of the 1950s were able to channel. Echoes of earlier movies are to be found in quantity, and the film is something of a compendium of such reminiscences: panicking extras on the streets, toppling buildings, a variety of characters from different backgrounds to suggest the destruction of society at all levels. In Emmerich’s film, characterisation is (to put it mildly) writ large, but it might be argued that the director – like Pal and Haskin before him – was well aware that only a certain sketching in might be required of such things for the target audience before the colossal fireworks appeared (the principal reason they had coughed up their entrance money). If, during the course of the film, there is time to wonder why these technologically superior aliens had little knowledge of such things as computer viruses, there are still several imaginative touches – such as the fact that the secret government base Area 51 near Las Vegas had in fact been hiding (as conspiracy theorists widely suspected) an alien spacecraft discovered in 1948. And as in Spielberg’s later remake of War of the Worlds, the visualisation of the aliens themselves is something of a disappointment, lacking any of the charge of Charles Gemora’s lowtech stunted creature in the 1950s movie. But as a piece of popcorn cinema designed to offer audiences an uncomplicated, all-enveloping experience, Independence Day proved that there was still a considerable thirst for such spectacles.

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Bubble-gum horror: Mars Attacks! Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! was released in 1996 but was a genetic product of the 1950s. Burton, like many of his successful contemporaries (such as Spielberg, Lucas and Brian de Palma – not to mention the writer Stephen King), had grown up on the horror and science-fiction comics and films of the 1950s, and their indelible imagery was to resurface frequently in the work of these ‘movie brats’. And it should not be forgotten that the 1950s were the years of the comic book, a cultural artefact which sold in phenomenal quantities (despite repeated moral panics over the content) before the cinema became – as it is in the second decade of the twenty-first century – the default medium for big-budget extrapolations of comicbook themes. Apart from the sophisticated EC science-fiction comics written and edited by Al Feldstein and William Gaines such as Weird Fantasy and Weird Science, there was the highly ingenious – and intelligent – work of editor Julius Schwartz for DC Comics in two fondly remembered titles, Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures, in which the writers Gardner Fox and John Broome were taxed by Schwartz with finding ever more ingenious new wrinkles for Martian invasions – usually one per issue. But EC and DC Comics were not the only conduit for such fare, and the highly successful (and controversial) series of 1962 Topps bubble-gum cards illustrated by Bob Powell and Norman Saunders, Mars Attacks! (1996)

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Mars Attacks!, utilised a blood-dripping imagery redolent of the contemporaneous horror comics (with much evisceration of human victims) to convey an attack from the red planet by grotesque creatures with exposed brains. The cards’ graphic violence and bloodshed led to the set being widely banned, but by the time Tim Burton made his film some thirty-four years later, attitudes had transformed from outrage to nostalgic amusement, and it was no surprise that Burton’s film ended up as an affectionate burlesque of both the original cards and the whole notion of alien invasion films, with most of his cast (including a typically over-the-top Jack Nicholson as an idiot US President) playing their parts in the broadest possible fashion – performances, in fact, which would not be out of place in a British end-of-the-pier show. And the gruesome imagery of the cards which had caused such outrage – such as a herd of burning cows stampeding in panic after being set on fire by the callous Martians – occasioned chuckles rather than horror. But Burton’s unabashed love of the original material allowed him to maintain a pleasing synthesis between celebration and parody (unlike, say, the 1960s TV Batman series in which the makers’ derision towards Mars Attacks!

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the material was clearly evident), and the film remains shamelessly entertaining, even though its facetiousness renders it a footnote in the history of alien invasion movies. Twenty-first-century synthesis In order to survive exhaustion, a variety of film genres have often undergone a process of synthesis, in which shop-worn elements from the various genres are drawn together to sometimes chaotic – or sometimes revivifying – effect. The British crime movie underwent a period in which horror film constituents were spliced into the mix (Ben Wheatley’s Kill List [2011], Sean Hogan’s The Devil’s Business made in the same year), and the phenomenal success of a film which utilised both the ironclad superhero formula of the first decade of the twenty-first century and the spectacular alien invasion film was perhaps a natural marriage, given that the super-powered individuals required something more than ordinary crooks to test their mettle (Superman, in fact, has been obliged on two occasions to battle aliens possessing his own considerable powers – in Richard Lester and Richard Donner’s Superman 2 [1980] and Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel [2013]). But the film which took the box office by storm in 2012 with this marriage of ingredients was Joss Whedon’s Avengers Assemble. A job lot of Marvel Comics superheroes (including Iron Man, The Hulk and Captain America) were pitched against virtually indestructible alien forces. The outcome was never in doubt, but the film-maker’s skill was tested in keeping the inevitable triumph of the heroes suspensefully at bay. Whedon’s clever and energetic film traded in a variety of fantastic elements from science fiction to mythology (including no less than the Thunder God, Thor, given a memorable comic-book makeover by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee). The alien race bent on conquest here are not Martians, but the Chitauri. The latter, while possessing many of the accoutrements of their predecessors in the science-fiction genre, also provided an endlessly replenishable series of opponents for the Earth’s preternaturally gifted defenders, and far

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more of them died than in earlier films such as The War of the Worlds. There is no denying that the brilliantly orchestrated set pieces (as well as the caught-on-the-move characterisation which had been Whedon’s speciality) were cleverly melded with the brisk plotting to maximum effect. The fact that the final battle appeared to last almost as long as a feature film in its own right (an accusation also levelled at Snyder’s Man of Steel) ignores a modern audience requirement: since the George Lucas Star Wars films, an apocalyptic finale leaves viewers feeling that they have had their money’s worth – but it might be argued that the Pal/Haskin War of the Worlds was similarly almost a feature-length battle. If the blowing up of buildings and assaults by technologically powerful aliens are perhaps overfamiliar now, Avengers Assemble shows that, with the correct finessing, such ingredients can still mesmerise audiences. The Spielberg version Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film of The War of the Worlds is as much a riposte to George Pal’s version as it is another Americanised spin on Wells’s novel. Spielberg’s remake – or, as he would prefer, ‘reimagining’ – utilises all the resources of modern cinema with just as much authority as its 1950s predecessor, and demands to be seen to best advantage on the biggest possible screen available. The film arrived at a time when its star Tom Cruise was on the receiving end of some notably bad press both for eccentric behaviour on television and for his espousal of the controversial religion of Scientology. His previously unassailable box-office acumen began to suffer, but there were those who were able to put such distractions aside and recognise the star’s skills as an actor (whatever his personal beliefs and despite his jumping up and down on TV chat show sofas). The trick was to judge the film as a discrete entity – and as a piece of work by one of the most respected directors in current cinema, Steven Spielberg. Despite Cruise’s dipping popularity, early word on the film was positive, suggesting that the director had come up with an innovative

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approach to this familiar material. In fact, the film was quickly recognised as one of the director’s most cogent pieces of work, and further proof that Wells’s novel could provide the basis for numerous renewable cinematic extemporisations. The director talked about attempting ‘hyper-realism’ on the film, despite its fantastic subject matter, and certainly the low-key documentary approach was a world away from the poster colours of the George Pal/Byron Haskin film, with even the orchestral score by Spielberg’s long-term collaborator John Williams initially echoing this restrained mood. So that when an alien-generated cataclysm explodes in blue-collar New Jersey, the effect is notably disorienting. And this first large-scale sequence is to be matched by other coups de théâtre, such as a flaming train hurtling through a station and, drifting from the sky, the remnants of the clothing of obliterated victims. But to single out these moments hardly conveys the director’s particular skill for rendering the impossible with maximum verisimilitude, a talent he had been demonstrating since his earlier science-fiction films such as Close

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Encounters of the Third Kind, the latter film’s benevolent aliens now replaced by a more traditionally homicidal variety. This version of Wells’s novel is distinguished by its intelligence and the sense of personal drama that Spielberg is able to bring to the troubled family at the centre (the latter a particular speciality of the director) and certainly eclipses the sketchily written personal elements of the earlier version. Made in 2005, it is perhaps inevitable that the director (who became more political as he approached middle age) should point up the real-life analogies of the situation, notably a scientifically superior society attacking another using ‘shock and awe’ tactics, with a view to utilising its resources; this leftof-centre subtext (unsurprising in Spielberg) hardly needed to stress the parallels with America’s involvement in Iraq, a conflict then in full flood. Other remakes of classic science-fiction films of the 1950s have conspicuously fallen flat (such as Tobe Hooper’s dispiriting new take on William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars in 1986), while reinventions of the theme such as Emmerich’s Independence Day War of the Worlds (2005)

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ladled on the conflagration but provided virtually no thoughtful or interrogative perspective, something that Spielberg (who had already tackled more ambitious non-science-fiction material such as Schindler’s List in 1993) was clearly keen to do. The director begins his narrative in a shipping yard in New Jersey where Ray Ferrier (well played by Cruise as a somewhat irresponsible artisan whose marriage has ended in divorce) is resentful that he is obliged to look after his equally unhappy children, Robbie and Rachel (played by Justin Chatwin and Dakota Fanning). His ex-wife Mary (Miranda Otto) has a new husband to occupy her, so the re-establishment of Wells’s hero as a happily married man is only taken so far in this film. We are given a carefully detailed picture of ordinary working-class life and less-than-happy families – all standard territory for Spielberg, modern chronicler of such canvases – until the invaders strike. But the extraterrestrial attack does not come from the sky as in Wells’s novel and previous films, but from a subterranean source. The street cracks open to reveal the massive alien tripods with their death-dispensing heat rays; it is suggested that War of the Worlds

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they have landed long ago and remained concealed underneath the surface. Not for the first time, the British science-fiction writer Nigel Kneale is referenced here (as he had already been by American directors such as John Carpenter), with the notion of a sub-surface invasion from another world prepared for and embedded years before. Here the film’s political stance perhaps becomes more sophisticated; the simple US/Iraq parallels are enhanced by the sense that the invaders are buried beneath the surface of American society – much as the ‘aliens’ who piloted the planes into the twin towers were essentially masquerading as American citizens with a view to destroying their society; in that sense, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds further delineates its congruences with the US/Middle East conflict. Ray Ferrier and his daughter have a variety of terrifying encounters with the aliens, and separated from Robbie, they find themselves hiding in a ruined room with the talkative survivalist Ogilvy (played by Tim Robbins), who in one of the film’s cleverest extemporisations on Wells provides a provocative modern-day equivalent of the curate of the novel; equally deranged (but in a different fashion), the character allows Spielberg to comment on America’s paranoid, government-hating far right, with even a certain capacity for nuance (as powerfully played by Robbins, the obsessed Ogilvy still makes some cogent points). The fact that Ray is finally obliged to kill him in order to save the lives of both himself and his daughter gives the character an edgy moral dimension not present in either the earlier film or Wells’s novel. (It might be said that the character played by Robbins is an amalgamation of two of Wells’s characters – the curate and the artilleryman – with the name taken from the astronomer Ogilvy.) There are many echoes of Pal’s film in this version, but less of the sense of a fairground ride which the earlier movie to some degree presents for the viewer; this is a much darker vision than the Pal/Haskin film, and the harvesting of humans by the invaders has a resonance not to be found in the previous version. Also retained from the novel is the ferryboat packed with fleeing city-dwellers which is

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destroyed by one of the war machines, and the Spielberg version hews more closely to the Wells original in staying within the consciousness of its increasingly beleaguered, out-of-his-depth hero. Particularly successful in this regard is a sense that the destruction of America is less important to this man than the plight of his family; thus, we can more easily identify with Ray than with the Clayton Forrester character in the earlier film. (In a nod to the original film, the stars of the first movie, Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, appear as the Tom Cruise character’s parents-in-law in the final scene; it would be Barry’s last film role – he died in 2009.) Unlike the 1950s version, Spielberg doesn’t concentrate on the rout of American military might by technologically superior alien forces. What resistance we see is cursory and ineffectual, and it is this as much as its greater intelligence that distinguishes it from other such films. In terms of the massive bloodshed and loss of life, Spielberg’s solution to the ratings restrictions was as ingenious as that of George Pal; in the younger film-maker’s case, the Martian heat rays bloodlessly destroy their human victims leaving (as mentioned War of the Worlds

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earlier) just their shredded clothing; otherwise, the harvesting of human subjects for blood is repeatedly mentioned in the film. Remnants of Wells The nemesis which destroys the invaders is once again microscopic, but the religious element is underplayed, despite a reference to God. The fact that the saturnine Morgan Freeman replaces Cedric Hardwicke as the narrator ensures the presence of a beautifully spoken, precise voice, and his repeated portrayals of authority figures do add connotations of a deity that Freeman has indeed once played. Other elements imported from the novel which made no appearance in the first film include the ‘Red Weed’, plant growths coloured by a blood-like fluid that highlight the vampiric qualities of the invaders (the Red Weed is part of the Martians’ terraforming strategy). One element, however, not utilised by Spielberg is the poison gas which in Wells is a prescient note foretelling the horrors of the First World War. There were no doubt those who – hearing of the prominence of family ties in the film – might have dreaded a lurch into twee sentimentality, but looking at Spielberg’s career objectively demonstrates that he is conscious of such dangers and generally does his best to avoid them. That is the case here; while some found the daughter played by Dakota Fanning a little too cute (and, at times, strident), there is no question of any kind of indulgence, particularly as the Cruise character is hardly presented as an admirable parental figure, even though he does undergo something of a transformation (a transformation that has a certain ineluctable dramatic logic). What’s more, Fanning’s performance has a totally persuasive quality which never depends on a simple tugging of the heartstrings. And particularly praiseworthy (given the involvement of action-man Cruise) is the lack of muscular heroics that are so prominent in many of his films; here, he is an audience-surrogate figure, just an ordinary man surviving one horror after another, and sufficiently sympathetic to ensure that the viewer remains on his side.

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Given that Spielberg – like so many film-makers of his generation – was brought up on such films as the George Pal/Byron Haskin version of The War of the Worlds, the most successful moments in his film are those which are specific to his vision; when he attempts to duplicate instances from the 1950s movie, the results are not as memorable – such as the physical encounters with the aliens themselves outside of their machines. The problems that Pal had representing the army as an ineffectual force were not an issue for Spielberg, who once again reproduces the strategies in this area of the original novel. If the spectre of 9/11 hangs over the whole film, it is perhaps unavoidable given the scar that the terrorist attack left on the American psyche. Finally, however, there is no denying Spielberg’s level of achievement. Even those prepared to deny the naysayers before the release of the film were surprised at the level of the director’s ambition. In the final analysis, the George Pal/Byron Haskin version of The War of the Worlds, for all its compromises and infelicities, remains definitive, the closest approximation of the spirit of the original book. In the twenty-first century, only a slight degree of indulgence is required on the viewer’s part to appreciate the virtues of one of the three or four seminal science-fiction movies of the 1950s. If H. G. Wells’s original concepts set down over a century ago have now become part of the lingua franca of science-fiction cinema, and the destruction of modern society something of a cliché of the genre, that is a mark of the indelible imprint the film has made.

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Credits The War of the Worlds USA/1952 Directed by Byron Haskin Produced by George Pal Screenplay by Barré Lyndon Based on the novel by H. G. Wells Director of Photography George Barnes, ASC Art Direction Hal Pereira Albert Nozaki Edited by Everett Douglas, ACE Music Score by Leith Stevens ©Paramount Pictures Corporation Production Company Paramount Pictures Corporation a Paramount Picture Associate Producer Frank Freeman Jr Special Photographic Effects Gordon Jennings, ASC Wallace Kelley, ASC Paul Lerpae, ASC Ivyl Burks Jan Domela Irmin Roberts, ASC Astronomical Art Chesley Bonestell

Set Decoration Sam Comer Emile Kuri Costumes Edith Head Makeup Supervision Wally Westmore Colour by Technicolor Technicolor Colour Consultant Monroe W. Burbank Sound Recording by Harry Lindgren Gene Garvin uncredited Paramount Pictures Head of Production Don Hartman Unit Production Managers C. Kenneth Deland Don Robb Production Manager Frank Caffey Assistant to Producer Gae Griffith 1st Assistant Director Michael D. (Mickey) Moore 2nd Assistant Directors Henry E. Brill Cliff Reid Jr Script Supervisor Dorothy Yutzi Process Photography Farciot Edouart Visual Effects Camera Operator (Technicolor) Cliff Shirpser

Gaffer Soldier Graham Key Grip Murray Young Special Effects Chester Pate Bob Springfield A. Edward (Eddie) Sutherland Barney Wolff Special Optical Effects Aubrey Law Jack Caldwell Special Visual Effects Pyrotechnician (A-bomb Sequence) Walter Hoffman Miniatures Marcel Delgado Matte Artist Jan Domela Special Photographic Effects Art Director Al Roelofs Property Master Gordon Cole Properties Romaine Birkmeyer Ivyl Burks Charles Davies Milt Olson Lee Vasque Robert McCrillis Construction Coordinator Gene Lauritzen Martian Costume Makers Charles Gemora Diana Gemora

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Orchestrator George Parrish Sound Supervisor/Rerecording Mixer Loren L. Ryder Sound Editors William M. Andrews Lovell Norman Sound Effects Howard Beals Don Johnson Tommy Middleton Walter Oberst Technical Advisers Chesley Bonestell Robert S. Richardson Unit Publicist Robert Goodfried CAST Gene Barry Doctor Clayton Forrester Ann Robinson Sylvia Van Buren Les Tremayne General Mann Bob Cornthwaite Doctor Pryor Sandro Giglio Doctor Bilderbeck Lewis Martin Pastor Matthew Collins Houseley Stevenson Jr aide to General Mann Paul Frees radio announcer Bill Phipps Wash Perry Vernon Rich Colonel Ralph Heffner

Henry Brandon policeman Jack Kruschen Salvatore commentary by Sir Cedric Hardwicke uncredited Walter Sande Sheriff Bogany Paul Birch Alonzo Hogue Edgar Barrier Professor McPherson Alvy Moore Zippy Ivan Lebedeff Doctor Gratzman Ann Codee Doctor DuPrey Frank Kreig Fiddler Hawkins Russell Conway Reverend Bethany Robert Rockwell the ranger Ralph Dumke Buck Monahan Carolyn Jones bird-brained blonde Pierre Cressoy man Charles Gemora Martian Alex Frazer Doctor Hettinger Anthony Warde MP driver Gertrude W. Hoffman newsvendor

Freeman Lusk Secretary of Defence Sydney Mason fire chief Peter Adams lookout Ted Hecht KGEB reporter Teru Shimada Japanese diplomat Herbert Lytton US Chief of Staff Douglas Henderson marine staff sergeant Ned Glass well-dressed man in looting stampede Dave Sharpe Dale Van Sickel Fred Graham looters Nancy Hale young wife Virginia Hall girl John Maxwell doctor Cliff Clark Australian policeman Edward Colmans Spanish priest Jameson Shade deacon David McMahon minister John Mansfield man Don Kohler staff colonel Wally Richard reporter

T H E WA R O F T H E W O R L D S

Morton C. Thompson cub reporter Ralph Montgomery Red Cross leader Jerry James 2nd reporter Bud Wolfe Bob Morgan civil defence officials Jimmie Dundee huge man Joel Marston MP Patricia Iannone little girl William Meader P.E. official Al Ferguson police chief Eric Alden big guy Rudy Lee boy Gus Taillon elderly man Ruth Barnell mother Dorothy Vernon elderly woman George Pal Frank Freeman Jr bums listening to radio Rex Moore bum Hugh Allen brigadier general Stanley W. Orr marine major Charles J. (Chuck) Stewart marine captain

Fred Zendar marine lieutenant Jim Davies marine commanding officer Dick Fortune marine captain Edward Wahrman cameraman Martin Coulter marine sergeant Waldon Williams boy Hazel Boyne woman who screams Cora Shannon old woman Mike Mahoney young man Mushy Callahan Fred Graham Joe Gray Bob Morgan Harvey Parry David Sharpe Dale Van Sickel Bud Wolfe Fred Zendar stunt performers Dan Dowling Jim Meservie Jeffrey Pritchard Abdullah Abbas [announced in the trade press during production as appearing] Principal photography from 16 January to late February 1952 on location in Hollywood and Downtown Los

Angeles; Pasadena and Simi Valley (California, USA); in Florence and Phoenix (Arizona, USA) and at Paramount Studios (Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA). Process and miniature work from March to May 1952 (three months). Budget estimated at $2,000,000. 35mm; 1.37:1; in colour (Technicolor) and black & white; sound (mono – Western Electric Recording); MPAA: 16011 US theatrical release by Paramount Pictures – US premiere in Atlantic City (New Jersey) on 29 July 1953; released in New York City (New York) on 13 August 1953 and on general release from 26 August 1953. Running time: 85 minutes. US theatrical re-release by Paramount Pictures in San Francisco (California) on 31 August 1977. Running time: 85 minutes. UK theatrical release by Paramount Film Service c. April 1953. Certificate: X (no cuts). Running time: 85 minutes 17 seconds/7,675 feet Credits compiled by Julian Grainger

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BFI FILM CLASSICS

Bibliography Aldiss, Brian, Trillion Year Spree (London: Gollancz, 1986). Amis, Kingsley, New Maps of Hell (London: Gollancz, 1961). Cantril, Hadley, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, with the Complete Script of the Famous Orson Welles Broadcast (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940). Clute, John and Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction (London: Orbit/Little, Brown & Co., 1993). Dickson, Lovat, H. G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times (London: Penguin Books: 1972; originally published in 1969 [London: Macmillan]). Fisher, Dennis, Science Fiction Film Directors, 1895–1998 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2000). Hammond, J. R., An H. G. Wells Companion (London: Macmillan, 1979).

Hickman, Gail Morgan, The Films of George Pal (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1977). Johnson, William (ed.), Focus on the Science Fiction Film (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972). Rubin, Steve, ‘The War of the Worlds: A Retrospective’, Cinefantastique vol. 5 no. 4 (Spring 1977), pp. 4–17, 34–47. Sobchack, Vivian Carol, The Limits of Infinity (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1980). Wells, Herbert George, The War of the Worlds (New York: Fawcett Premier/ Ballantine, 1983; originally published in 1898 [London: Heinemann]). ———, The Time Machine (New York: Fawcett Premier/Ballantine, 1983; originally published in 1895 [London: Heinemann]).