The War of the Worlds (1953) Directed by Byron Haskin. Written by Barré Lyndon, based on novel of the same name by H.G. Wells. Starring Gene Barry, Ann Robinson, and Les Tremayne.
Before we begin, a word about the importance of careful translation.
In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli pointed his telescope at Mars. He was looking at the Red Planet’s surface, studying the large areas he described as “seas” and “continents,” as well as the linear features he described using the Italian word “canali.” “Canali” means “channels”—that is, Schiaparelli was comparing what he saw to natural waterways. But when the report was translated into English, the word was translated as “canals,” which is used primarily for manmade waterways, which implied something Schiaparelli never intended.
At the time, there was a lot of speculation about whether Mars might support life. But the majority of astronomers did not take the mistranslation of Schiaparelli’s findings at face value; those who studied the Martian surface generally accepted they were seeing natural features, such as river channels that changed across seasons, not artificial constructions.
One notable exception was American astronomer Percival Lowell. Lowell read about Schiaparelli’s observations and seized upon the idea of there being a civilization on Mars with unmatched fervor. He built Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and dedicated years of his life to studying Mars, drawing countless maps and writing multiple books to support his theory that the “canali” were evidence of intelligent life.
He was wrong about that, of course, but Lowell has the curious legacy of having been wrong about a great number of things—while at the same time, the tremendous effort and resources he poured into astronomy opened the doors for numerous genuine and important discoveries. For example, he was also fascinated by the existence of a mysterious Planet X beyond the orbit of Neptune that perturbed Neptune’s and Uranus’ orbits. It was while searching for this unknown planet that Clyde Tombaugh, an astronomer working at Lowell Observatory, discovered Pluto. (Pluto does not perturb the orbits of Uranus and Neptune as astronomers once believed, but that’s what sent Lowell and others looking for it. Astronomy is full of charming accidents.)
In the 1880s and ’90s, most astronomers were skeptical of this possible Martian civilization, but Lowell’s work was wildly popular with the public. Of course it was! We were getting our first good looks at our neighboring planets, and it is human nature to let our imaginations run wild with the possibilities.
Among those with plenty of imagination ready to run was writer H.G. Wells, who was educated in science and eagerly kept up with new scientific developments. In 1896 Wells wrote a piece for The Saturday Review titled “Intelligence on Mars,” in which he discussed what scientists believed to be true about Mars at the time and what that meant for the possibility of intelligent life. In that piece, he references a piece published in Nature in 1894, which describes how astronomers at the Nice Observatory spotted an unusual light that seemed to come from Mars. The article suggests that the light might be a signal, the brief article states, and it might be worth trying to reply—although, of course, the light from Mars could be a forest fire.
The unusual light was also seen from Lick Observatory and written up by the observatory staff. It was a real phenomenon, and the astronomers at Lick explain, with a tone of vague exasperation, that they have seen this before, and the light is probably the result of sunlight reflection from clouds.
Please excuse me this lengthy and roundabout way of getting into today’s movie. I promise I do have a point.
It’s not that everybody believed there was abundant life on Mars, but it was considered within the realm of possibility. Everybody was looking at Mars and trying to make sense of what they saw, and their ideas were based on extrapolation from what we have here on Earth. That has always been the conundrum of planetary science—we have direct access to a single data point, and it’s a weird one—but it was even more pronounced when telescopes were just good enough to get everybody interested but not quite good enough to clarify some important details.
That is the context in which H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in the final decade of the 19th century. The novel was serialized in 1897 in both Pearson’s Magazine in the United Kingdom and Cosmopolitan in the United States. (Yes, Cosmopolitan, the same one that exists today. It was at the time a wholesome family magazine regularly featuring pieces from beloved literary figures.) It was then published as a complete novel in 1898 and became a critical and commercial success.
People loved it, in large part because it combined the scientific fervor of the day with a popular type of speculative story: invasion fiction, which imagines how various types of invasions might play out. These days we might slot most invasion fiction into alternate or speculative history, as most was realistic in tone and fueled by anxiety about European politics. It wasn’t much of a stretch for Wells to take those themes and add then-popular ideas about Mars. Wells was writing about contemporary politics, in his own way; he would later link The War of the Worlds and its resource-hungry Martians to deliberate criticism of British imperialism.
The War of the Worlds is, in so many ways, the template for alien invasion stories. It’s about as close to a truly genre-defining work as anything can be. But it didn’t start out that way, not really. It was popular, but lots of books are popular. It wasn’t until a few decades later, with the arrival of the first performance adaptation, that The War of the Worlds launched into a position of truly enduring cultural impact.
In 1938, twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles was a co-founder, actor, and director with Mercury Theater, a repertory theater company in New York. The company also had a radio anthology series: Mercury Theater on the Air, a weekly, hour-long radio program that ran through the summer and fall of 1938. Every week, Welles produced and performed an adaption of a beloved work of literature such as Dracula, Jane Eyre, and Oliver Twist.
On October 30, Welles broadcast his adaptation of The War of the Worlds. It was written to begin like a live new broadcast—which was a known and fairly common way to dramatize fictional radio shows at the time. Much as H.G. Wells had borrowed the tropes of realistic invasion fiction to bring his Martians down to Victorian England, Orson Welles borrowed the format of other radio plays to emulate realistic-sounding broadcasts. In fact, Welles and his Mercury Theater co-producer, John Houseman, and co-director, Paul Stewart, had decided to make a radio play in the style of a news broadcast before they acquired the rights to The War of the Worlds. Houseman would later say that he didn’t think Welles had even read The War of the Worlds before they picked it. The radio play, written by Howard Koch, moved the nexus of the story from England to New Jersey, bringing it closer to home for the American audience of the Mercury Theater on the Air. (Koch would later be a co-writer on Casablanca before being blacklisted from Hollywood for a few years following investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.)
Contrary to popular belief, Welles’ The War of the Worlds broadcast did not incite widespread panic across the country. For one thing, Mercury Theater on the Air was not a popular enough program to have widespread impact on anything. The fake broadcast made a few people anxious, and an even smaller number did react dramatically without realizing it was fake, but for the most part everybody who tuned in knew it was a fictional story meant to be exciting and scary. The actual panic happened on the front pages of American newspapers, who seized on unverified and anecdotal tales of mass hysteria and shared them around in very large headline fonts. The story about widespread panic became ingrained in American public consciousness a couple of years later when Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril published a not-very-well-researched book on the matter called The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, which gave the whole thing a veneer of scholarly respectability.
We’re not here for a deep dive into American news sensationalism. What matters here is that the splashy newspaper headlines following the 1938 radio broadcast pushed both Orson Welles and The War of the Worlds to a high level of mainstream fame, and without it, Wells’ story might not have become one of the more enduring influences in the history of science fiction. But it did, and here we are, at the far end of a consistent through-line that stretches from H.G. Wells’ inspirations in Victorian invasion literature to Orson Welles’ fake news broadcast, from the Technicolor glory of the 1953 film to the gritty apocalyptic flavor of Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation, with all manner of other adaptions, parodies, and interpretations along the way.
Paramount first acquired the rights to adapt The War of the Worlds all the way back in 1925, possibly with the idea of having Cecil B. DeMille direct it. But the adaptation sat around gathering dust for decades; other directors considered for adaptations at various times include Sergei Eisenstein (the legendary Soviet director of Battleship Potemkin [1925]) and Alfred Hitchcock. Let’s take a moment to imagine what a DeMille, Eisenstein, or Hitchcock version of The War of the Worlds would have looked like.
…Maybe we need a slightly longer moment.
The mind boggles, so we shall move on.
Paramount hung onto the rights, but the film didn’t get any traction until after World War II, when they gave project to George Pal. Pal had gained attention as a sci fi film producer in the early ’50s with his independent film Destination Moon (1951) and his sci fi disaster film When Worlds Collide (1951). His style, which we have already seen in The Time Machine (1960), is a strong example of that straightforward, earnest approach that characterizes so much of the “serious” sci fi of the ’50s: taking a sci fi idea and shaping a story around how it might actually happen, or at least how Americans in the 1950s wanted to think it might actually happen, with noble men who behave rationally, beautiful women who swoon a lot, and a moderately convincing amount of sci fi technobabble to give it all a convincing logic and sensibility. (Pal was born in Hungary but emigrated to the United States in 1939 and became a U.S. citizen shortly thereafter.)
It’s a style that can feel very dated today, but as with so many other things, the context of its era is so important. The War of the Worlds was the first of Pal’s collaborations with director Byron Haskin, and it was a hugely successful film, both commercially and critically, and its influence on sci fi was immediate and tremendous. The special effects and the sound design, for example, look and feel familiar to us now because so many films and television shows followed in their footsteps. The oddly shaped alien machines (designed by artist Albert Nozaki), the distinctive and distorted sound effects of the alien ships and weapons, the force fields and disintegrations, all of these things garnered a lot of praise when the film was released and were incorporated into other sci fi works as soon as possible.
You know I love those grand old ’50s practical effects, but I’m not going to get into the details of the production here. However, there is one thing I want to note, because it’s a curious historical artifact that has affected the way a great many people—myself included—remember initially seeing this movie.
Depending on when and how you first saw this film in the seventy-one years since its release, you might have a memory of it being visually washed-out and dull, with embarrassing moments of visible wires holding up the aliens and that sort of thing. And you wouldn’t be wrong, exactly, but the truth is a bit more complicated.
The movie was filmed in Technicolor, specifically in three-strip Technicolor, in which the film camera uses prisms and beam splitters to simultaneously expose three strips of black-and-white negative, each sensitive to a different color (red, green, and blue). The Eastman Museum has short videos explaining how the cameras worked and how the dye transfer process created prints of the film. Technicolor prints of movies are incredibly vibrant; there is a reason Technicolor blew everybody’s mind when it was introduced to cinema. It really does look that good.
The Technicolor print of The War of the Worlds was what people saw in theaters in 1953. But that’s not what they saw in the versions that were played on television and distributed on VHS (and later DVD) for decades afterward. Those later versions were printed on different film stock (Eastmancolor rather than Technicolor) and specifically brightened to be viewed on home televisions, which results in things like the color layers not quite overlapping correctly, the lighting not being balanced the way it was intended, and those pesky special effect wires sharply showing where they would have been blurred or hidden in the original. The movie was tweaked, adjusted, and restored in various ways over the years, but it wasn’t until 2018 that there was a full restoration working from the original three-strip Technicolor prints. The sound was also remixed to recapture the impact that had been lost in various versions over the years.
And it’s beautiful. It really is. I had a moment of shock at the start, because I’ve seen this movie before but I didn’t remember it looking so pretty. So if you last watched the movie prior to 2018—perhaps at home on your enormous wood-panel console television as a kid—I would encourage you to take a look at it again. The colors are glorious and there are no wires visible anywhere. It looks great, and it’s a fascinating case of how film preservation and modern restoration techniques can help us see older movies as they were meant to be seen.
So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of moviegoers in 1953. WWII is over, the Cold War is underway, and the movie opens with an in-your-face reminder of the state of the world, using newsreel footage and a voiceover to remind everybody that humanity keeps expanding the scale of its potential for destruction. The film then shifts into a brief tour of the Solar System, narrated by Sir Cedric Hardwicke and illustrated with paintings of the planets by Chesley Bonestell. The narrator tells us that an advanced civilization on Mars has depleted that planet’s resources, and they are looking for a new planet to exploit. The survey is a charming look at mainstream knowledge about the planets in the early ’50s. (I don’t know why they left Venus out. It’s true that very little was known about Venus at the time, as it would be some years before Mariner 2 got close enough for a good look, but it seems a bit impolite to ignore it entirely.)
The Martians, of course, conclude that Earth is their best bet. That’s all we really learn of their motivations, because the finer details of Martian imperialist politics are not the point. In this type of alien invasion sci fi, it doesn’t really matter why the aliens want Earth. All that matters is that they do want it.
Just as Wells’ novel opens with scientific observation and Welles’ radio play opens with a fake news broadcast, the purpose of the film’s opening sequence is an appeal to realism, a way of saying, “This is a story about what could happen.”
Like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), we begin in a small town in California, the quaint sort of town that only really exists in the movies. A meteorite lands near the town, which piques the interest of the townspeople, including Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson) and some scientists in the area. Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) notes that it didn’t land quite like a meteorite should; the angle of descent is too shallow and the resulting crater is nowhere near large enough for an object that size. The townspeople are excited by the meteorite, by this rare event that has made their little town special, but nobody think it’s an alien spacecraft until the Martian war machines emerge and start vaporizing people. And setting things on fire. (I realized as I was watching that while I may be desensitized to images of alien invasion, the same is not true of images of anybody recklessly starting wildfires. I found that very stressful.)
What follows is exactly what we have come to expect from large-scale alien invasion movies. The military shows up under the command of Major General Mann (Les Tremayne) and the fight begins. The local pastor (played by Lewis Martin) tries to approach the aliens peacefully, but he too is vaporized. All of the vaporizing is accomplished using a series of matte paintings for each scene—there was a lot of painting happening in the production of this movie.
The fight is, from the start, completely one-sided. No attempt at communication gives the Martians pause; no human weapons have any effect on Martian technology. As more and more Martians land around the world, the humans grow more desperate. This is a global event, even if our perspective on it is local and specifically American. As is typical of post-WWII movies, there is emphasis on the decision to use nuclear weapons, but it’s not the philosophical or moral discussion we’ve seen in other movies. It is very much presented as a “we tried everything else, so this is our next step” sort of choice. Even atomic bombs don’t make the Martians flinch. (I am heavily side-eyeing all the people watching the bombs drop from a nearby hillside. That seems like a good way to end up in The Hills Have Eyes [1977] territory.)
When the military base is destroyed, Forrester and Van Buren try to escape in a small plane, only to crash before they get away. They hide for a bit in a farmhouse before the Martians find them. In the ensuring fight, they manage to grab part of one of the war machines and some alien blood, which they bring to scientists at “Pacific Tech.” (I haven’t looked into this, but I wonder if the fake CalTech “Pacific Tech” of Real Genius [1985] was deliberately named after this one. The buildings in this movie’s Pacific Tech are actually the Paramount studio lot.)
So the military is doing what they do. World governments are doing what they do. Scientists are doing what they do. And none of it helps. Nothing gives them an advantage or pushes the invaders back. Humanity is thoroughly outmatched. The Martians destroy cities around the world. We hear about a lot of devastation but only see the effects on Los Angeles, where social order breaks down as the city is evacuated. I find those scenes quite effective, with the angry crowd of people trying to escape, the widespread destruction, the constant bombardment… it builds up a sense of hopelessness and despair quite well.
Which is why, I think, the very end of the movie is such a fumble. It fumbles in a way that is not remotely surprising for a mainstream Hollywood movie made in the ’50s, but it still annoys me. It’s not the germs that bother me. It’s the fully verbalized deus ex machina, with churches and hymns and all, that makes me roll my eyes so hard they almost fall out of my head. It’s ridiculous in the same way the tacked-on frame and ending of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is ridiculous. It takes all that build-up, all the steps at which humans try to fight and fail, all the ways in which even doing the right things proved ineffective, and squanders it entirely in favor of patting the audience on the head with empty reassurances.
I’m serious when I say it’s not the germs that bother me. Sure, it’s a bit silly, and it certainly happens too fast, but that plot twist has its charms, especially when we consider the source. The germs killing the aliens comes right out of H.G. Wells’ novel—where it’s definitely not presented as deus ex machina. For one thing, although Wells’ views on religion changed a lot over his life, he was pretty firmly secular in his beliefs and in his writing. The War of the Worlds was, for him, partly an exploration of Darwinism and natural selection; Thomas Huxley, one of Darwin’s most vocal proponents and allies, was among Wells’ teachers when he was studying the sciences. The idea that the Martians would have no natural defenses against pathogens on Earth didn’t happen because Wells couldn’t think of another way to end the story. It’s a key part of his approach to creating the aliens using the scientific knowledge he had at hand and theorizing how they might have evolved. It might feel silly as a plot device, but the idea that an intelligent species from another planet would have no natural immunity to Earth’s pathogens is solid science fiction speculation.
And to flip that around and make the germs an act of God—narratively designated a direct answer to human prayers—puts power and agency onto the human characters in a way that doesn’t fit with the escalating powerlessness displayed throughout the rest of the story. It also wishy-washy compared to the tone of other post-WWII sci fi, where the question of what humanity would or should do in the face of an overwhelming threat is so important. The thing is, I’m not even sure the movie is trying to be preachy; the rest of the movie doesn’t match that tone. I think it’s just trying to fit the novel’s ending into a framework that was palatable to 1950s American audiences.
This is one way in which I think Spielberg’s 2005 movie hews closer to the intent of the original novel, as it utilizes that very distinctive early-2000s post-apocalyptic feeling to explore the breakdown of society and descent into hopelessness in the aftermath of the initial invasion. On the other hand, Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996)—a variation on The War of the Worlds without being a direct adaptation—seizes on the human agency of the pathogens in the most direct way, by defeating the aliens with a man-made computer virus.
You’re probably tired of me saying this by now, but I’m going to say it again anyway: All alien stories are human stories. And The War of the Worlds-style alien invasion stories are stories about how humans act when faced with a powerful invader that overpowers both our martial and our social defenses. That’s why we keep telling this story over and over again, in different decades and different eras, always with variations that reflect the time period.
The 1953 movie meets the fears and paranoia of the post-WWII era with a desperate reassurance that things will turn out okay for the ordinary people of America. It’s an unconvincing reassurance, but it’s also a fascinating example of the way the science fiction stories we tell for ourselves and about ourselves are shaped by both what we see in the world and what we think we want to see.
I feel like I could go on forever about this version of The War of the Worlds and all the other variations, adaptations, and homages that exist out there. What do you think about this movie? What about the other takes on the story out there? Or those stories that have approached the same global-scale invasion from a completely different angle? Share your thoughts in comments!
Here We Go Again and Again and Again…
We’re taking a few weeks off over the holidays, but the Science Fiction Film Club will be back in January. And what better way to greet the god of beginnings, endings, and time than by getting ourselves mired in some time loops?
January 8 — Edge of Tomorrow (2014), directed by Doug Liman
I know we’re all embarrassed to like a movie about Tom Cruise fighting tentacled aliens, but it’s pretty freakin’ great.
Watch: Apple, Fandango, Spectrum, Plex. Check for updates in the new year.
View the trailer.
January 15 — Timecrimes (2007), directed by Nacho Vigalondo
I love a film that tells us in the title exactly what it’s going to be about. It’s going to be about time and crimes.
Watch: Hoopla, Amazon, Tubi, Apple, and others.
Here is the trailer—but don’t watch it. It gives too much away!
January 22 — Primer (2004), directed by Shane Carruth
Pretty much the posterchild for low-budget sci fi time travel mindfuckery.
Watch: Apple, Microsoft. Check for updates in the new year.
View the trailer.
January 29 — Run Lola Run (1998), directed by Tom Tykwer
I was obsessed with this movie in college, possibly due to an intense crush on neon-haired Franka Potente.
Watch: Criterion, Amazon, Apple, Fandango. Check for updates in the new year.
View the trailer.
