Producer George Pal’s film version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was quite a shock to audiences in the early 1950s, which is why it is described as frequently as a horror movie as it is as a science fiction movie. Despite coming on the heels of Allied victory in World War II and landing right in the midst of American economic prosperity and growing international power (with its concomitant increase in tension with the Soviet Union), the film did not play up our sense of security and strength. Rather, it functioned just as Wells intended it to: as a cautionary tale about the limits of human power.

There had been science fiction movies before The War of the Worlds, even doomsday scenarios like Pal’s When Worlds Collide (1951) and Robert Wise’s cautionary fable The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Yet, neither of those films depicted with such simple brutality the human race completely at the mercy of foreign invaders, a genuine fear in the era of the Cold War. When Worlds Collide showed the destruction of planet Earth on an impressive scale, but it was under the thumb of a natural occurrence that couldn’t be stopped; The Day the Earth Stood Still suggested the power of an alien race to destroy us, but gave us the benefit of the doubt in the end. It reassured us that rationality and decency were paths to peace and survival.

The War of the Worlds had no such pretensions; in fact, when people try to act benevolent toward the invading aliens, they are summarily annihilated. The film posits the idea that an alien race of “cool and unsympathetic” intelligence could invade the planet and destroy us with impunity. In fact, screenwriter Barré Lyndon (The Greatest Show on Earth) even upped the stakes by making the alien spacecraft literally impenetrable by all of humankind’s weapons, from machine guns, to tanks, to rocket launchers, to the most dreaded of all—the atomic bomb.

Lyndon structured the story in terms of growing escalation, as meteors mysteriously crash on Earth and give way to humming, pulsating flying machines that show their vicious intentions by first vaporizing three yokels who wave a white flag and try to welcome the invaders to California and then by zapping a pastor trying to make peace by steadily approaching the craft and reciting the 23rd Psalm. If a man of God could be killed with such relentless impunity, what chance did the rest of us stand?

In its images of destruction and mayhem, The War of the Worlds is a near masterpiece. Especially given the limits of special effects technology in the early 1950s and the film’s limited budget (it was shot almost entirely on a single soundstage), the resulting imagery is undeniably impressive. The manta-like flying ships, which are given additional anthropomorphic creepiness by a snake-like extension at the top from which the heat rays are shot, cruise slowly and methodically through the world’s most recognizable cities, laying waste to everything in their path. A montage shows destruction taking place throughout the world (except the Soviet Union, which curiously goes unmentioned), but the focus is on the firestorm in the United States, particularly southern California (perhaps a stroke of Hollywood masochism?). The imagery of an American city ravaged by war and in flames, something that hadn’t happened since the Civil War, is as potent today as it was 50 years ago.

Of course, in his zeal to give The War of the Worlds the grandest possible stage, director Byron Haskin (Robinson Crusoe on Mars) and screenwriter Barré Lyndon largely ignore the humanity that’s being destroyed. More to the point, they take humanity for granted, which results in dull, cardboard characters who are more archetypes than human beings. Most of the characters are scientists and military men (typical of sci-fi in the 1950s), and the story ends up centering around an intelligent, but sensitive scientist (Gene Barry) and the young woman who fawns over him (Ann Robinson). The filmmakers’ decision to use unknown actors so that star wattage wouldn’t get in the way of the breadth of the alien invasion was a good move, but they should have paid more attention to the way the characters were developed. If The War of the Worlds had had an effective human core, one that put a face on its epic of death and destruction, it might very well have reached a pinnacle of true greatness.

Copyright © 2020 James Kendrick

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