The War of the Worlds (1953)

Spectacular effects as aliens invade an Earth full of really dull humans.

No, you won’t find any DVDs with this cover, but it’s awesome, anyways… the Martians are coming for ARR WIMMENFOLK! From a 1951 magazine, via Wiki, public domain.

The War of the Worlds (1953). Grade: C+

Everyone probably has at least one movie which they saw at a too-young age, and it scared the living heck out of ‘em. For one of my brothers, it was Alien, and he had horrible nightmares about it until my Mom, quite sensibly, found an alien action figure he could play with.¹ That made the alien much less frightening; the other nice action figures could whup its a**.

For me, one of the movies was the original War of the Worlds. There’s a scene where our two heroes are taking refuge in an abandoned farmhouse somewhere. An alien spaceship lands outside, and sends in a tethered drone to inspect the place, sort of like a drain snake with eyes on the end.

Children can sometimes find comfort in hiding from imagined nighttime monsters in a closet or under blankets, but there’s no hiding from this thing. It will FIND you. Terrified the crap outta me.

Now, of course, I watch it and laugh at the obvious plot hole. Why would the aliens be sending a probe into the house? They’ve been vaporizing everything up until now. They end up vaporizing this house, too (our heroes having escaped in the nick of time). So the scene’s clearly there just for spook value, and to get a good scream from Ann Robinson (as we say of screaming babies, she’s got some healthy lungs — it’s LOUD).

As a kid, I was bothered by the film’s ending. The aliens have withstood bullets, artillery, nuclear bombs, and emerged unscathed. Finally, they die because of… germs? They had a bad reaction to the bacteria in our air? Seemed flimsy to me.

The ending, taken from H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel, is allegorical. The book’s about how, out of nowhere, some invaders arrive with vastly superior weaponry and start wiping everyone out; it’s meant to parallel the European conquests of the Americas and Australia. “The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

(Yes, the line is “human likeness.” Wells was a progressive for his time, yet he had his limitations, too, sometimes worshiping at the altar of technology as the ultimate solution to all of society’s problems, and he quite likely looked down on pre-industrial societies.)

So when the aliens are destroyed by bacteria, Wells is flipping the script on colonialism. Europeans brought diseases with them wherever they went (sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose), and those diseases devastated native populations. So here, it’s reversed. The natives have immunity, and the invaders don’t.

The rights to Wells’s book were sold to Paramount in 1925; attempts were made to get a film version going, and each fell through during pre-production. There was some interest from Hitchcock in developing a screenplay with Wells himself (Hitch sure lucked out on that one; it turned out later that Wells was a really lousy screenwriter). Per J. Hoberman’s Criterion essay, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was involved at one point (he was in America for all of six months); Eisenstein’s friend Ivor Montagu wanted to write an anti-American version. “What fun to drop the Martians down in the middle of America . . . and show all their blooming Navy and the Daughters of the American Revolution getting blast!”

When producer George Pal started work on this version, he discovered that Paramount’s rights were for a silent version only. So he had to get the rights for a sound film from the Wells estate. (Which one presumes wasn’t hard to do, they’d have interest in seeing the novel finding new readers.)

Pal was born in Austria-Hungary in 1908, and became a very successful animator. He eventually found work for the influential UFA film studio in Berlin, although he left when the Nazis took power, and came to America when the war began. He’d end up at Paramount, doing animated shorts called “Puppetoons.” This fun website describes his method, called the “replacement technique.” It:

“involved a separate puppet (or puppet part) for each motion, rather than hinged parts. A single walking sequence, for instance, could involve 12 pairs of legs for one character. During the peak of Puppetoons, an average feature would use 9,000 puppets. Crazy? Maybe... but the effect is spectacular, and it has many benefits in common with computer animation (such as changeable perspectives and unlimited re-use of a finished model) which is only gaining real strength almost 50 years later.”

The Criterion WOTW disc has a “making of” feature showing a clip from one of Pal’s Puppetoons, Tulips Shall Grow. (Here’s a YouTube link.) The short has happy peaceful Dutch people suddenly invaded by goose-stepping, Seig Heil-ing “Screwballs,” machines that set about laying waste to everything. Eventually the main character goes into a church for refuge, and the skies open up to rain on the Screwball machine army. They are all stopped by rust.

There’s a lot of churches and God in this movie, too; the heroes are saved while praying in one. Which would not have pleased Wells’s ghost. Janne Wass’s brilliant website SciFist² points out why; it’s because religion is what separates good America from the evil Soviets. (The 1952 movie Red Planet Mars had the same theme.)

Wass can tell you everything you might want to know about the production, too, and I found his essay much more interesting than the Criterion “making of” ones. About the coolest thing in those special features is Ray Harryhausen’s test footage for a proposed earlier version of the movie. (Harryhausen’s first animation job had been working on Pal’s Puppetoons.) I’ll save you the trouble of finding the clip, since a friendly YouTuber already did:

The octopus-like creature here is closer to what Wells described in the book. (And used in this fun 1927 book illustration.) In the film, we only see a Martian twice; once at the end, a shriveled-up arm. And a full Martian in the farmhouse-hiding scene. After the probe comes in and our hero smushes it, a Martian appears, too, created by makeup artist/gorilla suit performer Charles Gemora and his 12-year-old daughter Diana. Wass writes:

“‘[Charles] had done six months work on the alien, only to be told that it was too big to fit in the set of the house where the protagonists were trapped. He had now torn it apart and had to redo the whole thing – in one night. Diana and Charles worked frantically through the night with a wooden frame, chicken wire, plaster bandages, foam latex, tape, electronics, paint and glycerine and had the thing done by eight in the morning. However, the the latex hadn’t cured properly yet, and as they wheeled the thing out of the studio bits and pieces were falling off and the whole Martian was barely holding together, “a big mound of taped-up Jell-O.’”

Wass captions this “The alien. With Charles Gemora somewhere underneath.” As Mrs. twinsbrewer pointed out, it also resembles the old “Simon” musical-memory toy.

The big head and (you can’t see those here) spindly arms remind me a little bit of E.T. And Spielberg had shown War of the Worlds in his family house when he was little, charging for popcorn! He’d eventually go on to do his own version, which has some fine scary effects, but it also has a David Koepp script and Tom Cruise and any movie with those things is batting with two strikes.

This one doesn’t have a particularly good script, either, credited to one Barré Lyndon — a name that doesn’t bode well. (It was the pseudonym of British writer Alfred Edgar Frederick Higgs.) And the acting is… well, it’s 1950s B-movie acting. Which is to say, clunky, yet in a rather fun way. Gene Barry is a scientist who’s in the area when the first spaceship lands, and Ann Robinson is the young lovely who joins up with him.³ She gushes all about this famous scientist who’s headed their way, and she knows his work because she wrote a thesis paper on famous modern scientists; it turns out to be him. (And what did she do with her science education? Work in a library. Hollywood’s idea of Nerd Girls from the era always work in libraries or bookstores.)

(By the way, Barry’s scientist is named Dr. Clayton Forrester, for you MST3K fans out there.)

Barry just happened to be in the area, on a camping/fishing trip with some other science buddies… so naturally after he’s had a first look at the strange sky object, he winds up at a square dance, and has a square dancing outfit. All scientists bring one of those along on their fishing trips. Hilariously, the famed Edith Head did the costumes — why? It must have been a slow week for costume pictures at Paramount.

Three guys are left to guard the landing site, and that’s when the Martians start shooting. Then they start landing in droves. Why did one ship land before all the others? It’s not a scout or anything. Maybe the ships were pre-scheduled to launch and one of the Martians got AM and PM mixed up. Hey, I’ve done it with post scheduling, sometimes.

Then it’s a matter of sitting back and watching as the military brings bigger and bigger weapons to throw at the Martians, and none of them work. There’s a lot of stock footage of planes flying and artillery shooting and such, and one guy who catches on fire (one of the first times this effect was ever in a movie… and yeah, the guy got singed pretty good).

The Martian ships are pretty cool. They avoid the usual problem of seeming like bad cut-and-paste effects because they’re giant models flying playing past miniature buildings, trees, etc. In the big climax, the ships lay waste to Los Angeles, and the model work is terrific. You might recognize one of the sound effects, too. The Martians have a heat ray and a vaporizer weapon, and the vaporizer’s sound effects were recycled for “photon torpedoes” in the Star Trek television series.

There’s a cool “force field” effect we see during one of the bombardment scenes, which was done using simple glass bell jars with sparks and fireworks bounced off the things, mixed with shots of the spaceship models. And a neat opening sequence with paintings of various planets, artwork by Chesley Bonestell. It’s a little tour of the solar system, showing why the Martians rejected each one. About half the planet information is accurate, half is completely wrong. But the paintings are still wonderful, anyways.

The visual/sound effects have to carry you through this one, since the story and characters — what characters? — sure won’t. And you’re bound to giggle when you see people evacuating Los Angeles to “head for the mountains” — on foot. They wouldn’t be able to get there. You might as well hole up in a church.

(All the churches full of praying Earthlings reminded me of the only good joke in the Simpsons movie — the news hits that the world’s ending. We see a long shot of the church and the bar. Facing impending apocalypse, everyone from the bar is running for the church… and everybody from the church is running for the bar.)

The “direction” is by Byron Haskin, who’d primarily been a special-effects guy starting out. He keeps the objects in focus. He’d go on to make several more movies with George Pal, like The Naked Jungle and Conquest of Space. He also directed the very odd 1964 Robinson Crusoe on Mars, which uses Death Valley as Mars (it looks fine) with a cropped-in bright red sky (it looks awful). That movie would recycle some of the Martian spaceship models from this one. Badly. The spaceship effects in that movie are bad.

This fit the Cold War mood of the period very well (bad stuff could fall from the sky at any moment and kill everybody), so it’s a surprise the movie wasn’t a bigger success. It did alright, not great. It did better in revival screenings, although subsequent prints were brighter than the original and showed the previously-unseen wires suspending the models! (You can still see a few in the Criterion print, but you would have in 1953, too — it was hard to conceal the wires during the final “spaceship crashing” shots. So, every time a spaceship crashes during the climax, it crashes into a telephone pole; that way you’re seeing tangled telephone wires along with the tangled model wires.)⁴

I don’t think this would scare any kids today, the way it did me… but the whistling/pulsating sound the probe and the spaceship “heads” make is still pretty eerie and great. Worth a watch just for that stuff alone. Those sound effects might scare your dog, if you’ve got one. Or your cat.

There's a tabby here which was apparently pretty prolific, named “Orangey.” Appeared in over 20 movies and TV shows. It'd be the perfect ending to this post if Orangey played Jonesy, the cat in Alien. But no, cats don't live THAT long. Orangey made it to 17. Which is pretty darn good for a cat!

1. Maybe like these ones? I don’t exactly remember. It was probably something a few years earlier.

2. The intention of SciFist is to review EVERY science fiction film ever made, in any language, from the first days of cinema to the present. It’s currently up to 1958, although there hasn’t been a post since June. Hopefully Wass is just on vacation; Finnish workers all have vacations. Take me, Finland! (Finland won’t.)

3. They both have a cameo in the end of the Spielberg version, playing Tom Cruise’s wife’s parents. Robinson had a fun start in movies — she lied about having stunt work experience to get a job. And so then she actually DID stunts for about a year!

4. If you like, here’s a 1953 article written by George Pal for Astounding Science Fiction magazine, describing some behind-the-scenes stuff, and with some (poor quality) production photos. One of the effects had electric sparks shooting from beneath the spaceship models, and you can see a handful of shots with this effect early on in the movie. The effect was abandoned after some early trials, since “a million volts” and a flammable movie set were a risky combo. Credit to Pal for realizing this was dangerous!