War of the Worlds, 1953

I watched the 1953 movie version of War of the Worlds because I read the book.

George Pal produced it, and Byron Haskin directed. Pal and Haskin also did 1955’s The Conquest of Space, a thinly fictionalized version of Wernher von Braun’s early 1950s books, Across the Space Frontier, Conquest of the Moon and The Exploration of Mars. It’s worth a viewing.

War of the Worlds has a lot of the elements that H.G. Wells’ book had: the yokels near the Martian’s landing site approach with a white flag, and get vaporized. There’s a worthless clergyman, who is not as big a burden as Wells’ curate. The hero of the movie spends the latter half of it searching for a woman he’s fallen in love with, but who is not his wife as in the book. The hero spends only a few hours trapped in a partially collapsed farmhouse next to a Martian landing site, not the weeks Wells’ narrator and the curate spent.

The protagonist of War of the Worlds is Dr Clayton Forrester, The Mystery Science Theater 3000 people appropriated the name for Trace Beaulieu’s mad scientist character. The movie’s Dr Forrester is not at all mad, he’s a 1950s figure of authority. Hardened US Army colonels and generals take his advice. All the other characters, Sylvia the love interest, the local yokels who get vaporized, the fully blooded soldiers, and the preacher, are all 2-dimensional.

The Martians are not at all the freaks Wells’ imagined, yet they, too, ultimately succumb to Earth’s microbes. Dr Forrester really doesn’t have much to do with defeating them.

I wonder if that’s why he’s held up as an absolute genius by other characters at the beginning of the movie. Forrester’s alleged genius is the only reason for the camera to follow him. The Martians literally vaporize all the 1950s technology that’s brought to bear on them, artillery, tanks, flights of jet fighters, even an atomic bomb dramatically dropped from the Northrup YB-49 flying wing. Just like in Wells’ Victorian original, Mars technology wipes the floor with Earth weapons.

This is said to be the first movie adaptation of Wells’ book. I’d says its successful, and surprisingly true to the book.