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The War of the Worlds was produced by George Pal, who became the most popular name in 1950s science-fiction. George Pal had previously produced Destination Moon (1950) and When Worlds Collide (1951), big-budget science-fiction films whose virtues were colour and spectacular special effects, even if they were wooden in terms of dramatics. Pal would go onto make a number of other genre classics as producer and sometimes director. (See below for George Pal’s other titles).
The work that George Pal turned to was the H.G. Wells novel War of the Worlds (1898), which in itself was the common ancestor of all alien invader stories. Indeed, H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds was the work that produced the central image of malevolent, tentacled little green men that became a cliche throughout 1930s pulp. There had been plans to film the H.G. Wells novel for three decades, with names like Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, director of the silent classic Battleship Potemkin (1925), attached in the 1920s, Cecil B. De Mille of The Ten Commandments (1956) fame during the 1930s, and later Alfred Hitchcock, as well as producer Alexander Korda who collaborated with H.G. Wells on the visionary science-fiction film Things to Come (1936). Of course, on October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre had produced his famous radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, which caused panic due to Welles’s relaying it as a faked news broadcast that many thought to be the real thing.
In a move that has brought an outcry from many H.G. Wells purists, George Pal gave the novel a facelift. Firstly, the Martian war machines were changed from walking tripods to sleek flying manta rays. No doubt, this was for ease of special effects. Even though Pal was a stop motion animator (gaining fame with his Puppetoon shorts during the 1940s), he clearly realized that stop motion animating tripedial war machines for the film would have been expensive and time-consuming. His solution was to economically eliminate the legs on the machines, allowing them to be brought to life using models on wires.
The most important of the changes made to the story was in transporting the setting from Wells’s contemporary Victorian England to Pal’s contemporary 1950s California. Again, this upset many purists (although it should also be noted that Orson Welles gave the story exactly the same contemporary updating in his radio broadcast). The updating at least keeps intact the metaphor of hubris and shock that underlies the story. Wells’s War of the Worlds has always been seen as a parable about the might of Victorian Imperialism being brought to its knees by an overwhelmingly technologically superior force; the update becomes a like parable about US post-War nationalism – it can at once seen to be both beating its chest about national pride while also fearful of its own vulnerability in the new Atomic Age.
The massive scenes of destruction are well orchestrated, despite frequently visible wires on the models. The manta ray-like war machines have a sinister elegance and come accompanied by a particularly memorable series of sound effects. The Martians come across as the most ruthless and thorough invaders of the whole period – coldly crisping the self-appointed diplomatic corps who come waving a white flag, and bringing the whole of humanity to its knees quite literally in a potent series of images that show the blasted remains of world landmarks. The War of the Worlds was the most wide-ranging of alien invasions in the era – the others that followed did not have lavish budgets to show such widespread scenes of devastation, let alone in most cases to even film in colour.
Byron Haskin is a staid director. He takes relish in all manner of gaudy and vivid colour schemes, with the entire film seemingly lit in mauves, greens and oranges. Haskin certainly rises to the occasion during the scenes in the farmhouse where he takes the film over into horror territory – the alien’s brief appearance and its spooking of Ann Robinson is something eerily effective. The human side of things was never given much attention in George Pal’s films. And The War of the Worlds is certainly encumbered by the woodenness of both Gene Barry and Ann Robinson. But then this is not a film where one is paying much attention to the romance. For that matter, there were few in the way of characters or much development in the H.G. Wells novel – the narrator, for example, was an anonymous figure who was never even given a name. The film is a show being run by the effects people and as such it achieves rather well.
What is also now present in the story is a religious subtext that defies belief. (Although it does produce the memorable image of the priest walking out to confront the war machines while quoting the 23rd Psalm). When H.G. Wells ended the book with the statement that the Martians were “defeated by the smallest thing in God’s creation” (bacteria) he was making an expression of irony, not one of religious belief. (Wells was a renowned atheist). The sense of irony is a small matter that seems to slip by Pal and scriptwriter Barre Lyndon. Instead, they take the statement with a deadening literalness and allow the religious subtext to take over the film to an appalling extent. At one point, Ann Robinson states “I always knew if I hid in a church and prayed, my true love would find me there” – and of course Gene Barry later does exactly that. At the end, the Martian ships are finally brought symbolically crashing down outside the door of the church and afterwards humanity is shown singing hymns in thanks for their delivery. George Pal’s films always seem caught between extraordinary leaps of imagination and a tremulous religious fear – Pal himself was a Catholic. See his Conquest of Space (1955) for a perfect example of this lunatic religious fear overrunning a potentially good film. Nevertheless, The War of the Worlds puts its finger exactly on the pulse of 1950s anxiety, of the imminent sense of the world about to collapse and of America as a nation clinging to its belief that is blessed by the Lord in hope for its delivery.
George Pal’s other genre films are The Great Rupert (1949), Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951), The Naked Jungle (1954), Conquest of Space (1955), tom thumb (1958), The Time Machine (1960), Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961), The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964), The Power (1967) and Doc Savage – The Man of Bronze (1975).
Byron Haskin worked with George Pal on several other occasions including The Naked Jungle, Conquest of Space and The Power. Haskin also directed a number of other genre films including Tarzan’s Peril (1951), From the Earth to the Moon (1958), Captain Sindbad (1963) and Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), as well as episodes of the classic science-fiction anthology series The Outer Limits (1963-5).
The film was later sequelized as a routine tv series War of the Worlds (1988-90), which only had the name in common with the film. Here the invaders had abandoned their war machines and were standardized alien body snatchers being fought by a human resistance a la V (1983). Although the idea was mentioned several times particularly during the immediate post-Star Wars (1977) boom, there had never been any cinematic remake of War of the Worlds up until 2005. However, 2005 suddenly saw no less than three different adaptations of the story with Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster War of the Worlds (2005), the independently produced The War of the Worlds (2005), which claimed to film the H.G. Wells novel as written and was set period, and The Asylum’s low-budget modernized War of the Worlds (2005), which produced a sequel with War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave (2008). All versions return to H.G. Wells’s image of tripedial war machines. Spielberg, like Pal, updates his version to the present, while the second version shot the story in Victorian period and is extremely faithful to the book, and the third was another modernized version seeking to capitalize on the success of Spielberg’s film. There was also Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds (2006), a dvd-released version of a stage performance of the best-selling 1977 musical album. Other related films include the Polish War of the Worlds – Next Century (1981), which is not related to the Wells novel but is in fact a story about Martian invaders imposing media censorship, and The Night that Panicked America (1975), a tv movie depicting the hysteria surrounding the Orson Welles radio broadcast.