War of the worlds is a 1953 science fiction film based on the H.G Wells novel and directed by Byron Haskin. Science Fiction films are often used as a vehicle for social commentary and reflect the concerns or fears of the time in which they were produced. War of the worlds is a post WWII film which portrays the cold war paranoia which existed in America during this era. This was also a time when man was able to enter into space for the first time. As a result films such as war of the worlds began to take on anti communist themes with aliens adopting the qualities of the red threat.
Synopsis for The War of the Worlds(1953) Producer George Pal and director Byron Haskins' landmark adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic novel that focuses on the invasion of the earth by Martian war machines. A strange fireball streaks across the southern California skies and lands in a gully in the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles. Firemen quickly extinguish the fire that has broken out, but authorities are puzzled by the long, cylindrical object that fell to earth and started the fire. The object attracts tourists--and also the attention of Dr. Clayton Forester of the Pacific Technical Institute. While everyone else regards the object as anything from a tourist attraction to a potential treasure trove, Forester knows that something is wrong: the object did not come down like an ordinary meteor, and was much more lightweight than any meteor ever reported. What's more, the object is not only hot, but also radioactive.
Forester stays in the nearby town at the home of Pastor Matthew Collins and his niece, Sylvia van Buren. While everyone in town is at a social, three special deputies watch as a hidden lid on the cylinder unscrews, and a long-necked probe rises out. The three try to approach the probe, declaring their friendly intentions--and the probe spits out a heat ray that incinerates the men and starts another fire. At the same time, power and telephone service fails in town, and everyone at the social discovers that his watch has stopped. Forester determines that the watches have been somehow magnetized, and also notes that someone's pocket compass points not to the north, but to the meteorite. Forester returns to the site with the sheriff and another deputy. They find the ashes of the three men, and then the probe attacks again, killing the deputy as he tries to drive away. Forester then determines that they are dealing with something from another planet and need to call in the military, especially as another fireball lands nearby as he is talking to the sheriff. While everyone waits for the soldiers to arrive, Forester appears on a radio program and deals with the increasing speculation on the otherworldly origin of the cylinders. A consensus arises that the cylinders come from Mars, now at its closest approach to Earth.
Marines from El Toro Marine Base roll in and surround the site, and an Air Force plane drops a flare on it from above. The long-necked probe fires its heat ray at the plane, and then sweeps the area, destroying a radio truck. That prompts the Marine colonel to call for reinforcements, and the 6th Army Command arrives, with artillery and tanks. Major General Mann, the commander, tells Forester that other objects like the one they are surrounding have landed in cities all over the world, and that all communication fails after that. Then the probe rises again, and we now see that it is part of a swan-like magnetically levitating low-altitude craft. Two other such craft rise out of the cylinder to join it. The officers give the order to prepare to fire, but Matthew Collins objects, saying that no one has tried to offer them peace before. Disregarding his own safety, he walks toward the three metal swans, reciting the 23rd psalm--and before his niece Sylvia's horrified eyes, the lead swan burns him to death. At once General Mann and Marine Colonel Heffner give the order to fire.
The soldiers unleash a barrage of artillery and missile fire--and none of it is effective. The swans possess a magnetic force shield that deflects any bombardment. The swans quietly take the measure of their opponents and then start to return fire, with heat rays and meson-disrupting energy bursts that disintegrate anything they touch. Forester urges Mann to inform Washington that conventional military forces would be outmatched. Mann leaves, and Heffner fights a holding action before finally ordering a complete retreat--and being disintegrated in mid-order.
Forester takes Sylvia with him in an Army plane. Flying low to avoid the Air Force jets flying in to try their hand, he clips some trees and crash-lands. He and Sylvia barely have time to escape before a squadron of swans surround the plane. General Mann returns to the city, where skeptical reporters cannot believe his reassurances--and of course he knows better, because nothing has proved effective. Alone in the brush, Forester and Sylvia take shelter in an abandoned farmhouse. There Sylvia confesses her fears and her deep sense of loss following her uncle's death. In the middle of this tender conversation, another cylinder crashes into the side of the house. Hours later, Forester wakes up, and a terrified Sylvia tells him that the house is surrounded. Forester works diligently to clear a way out, while also trying to observe as much as he can. The Martians lower a different kind of probe, an eye-like camera; Forester, at first taking this for yet another weapon, chops the camera head from its extender, which swiftly withdraws. Then a Martian crewman enters the house and touches Sylvia on the shoulder; Forester blinds it with a flashlight and then throws an ax at it, putting it to flight. When Forester realizes that he is holding a scarf now stained with Martian blood, Sylvia loses all control, and Forester has to shout at her to calm down. They then escape, just before the Martians burn down the house.
As more cylinders come down all over the earth, the Martians' goal becomes painfully clear: to drive all of humanity before them and eventually to kill us all. In Washington, the Secretary of Defense prepares to order the dropping of an atomic bomb on the Los Angeles-area nest. Forester and Sylvia finally arrive at Pacific Tech and turn over the alien camera and the blood-stained scarf. The blood turns out to be anemic, and the camera yields little insight other than that the Martians perceive color a lot differently from humans. At the time, Pacific Tech officials think all this is a moot point, because the atom bomb is going to stop them anyway. But even the atom bomb proves ineffective against the Martians' magnetic force fields.
General Mann, clearly frustrated, orders an evacuation of Los Angeles. Forester tells his colleagues that now the anemic blood is important, because only biological weapons will stop the Martians now. The plan is to take as many lab instruments as possible into the mountains and set up another laboratory. But that plan comes to nothing, as looters seize the Pacific Tech vehicles and scatter or beat up all the personnel, including Forester, Dr. Dupre (the pathologist who found the anemia), and Sylvia. As the swans arrive and start systematically burning every building in sight, Forester rushes about, going from church to church, hoping to find Sylvia waiting there, as she once waited after running away as a child. He finds church pastors everywhere praying for deliverance, comfort, or both, and at one church he even finds two of his colleagues. At last he finds Sylvia--and as the two rush toward one another, a nearby swan burns out a stained-glass window, frightening everyone inside.
But the attacking swan abruptly heels over, fires only two more seemingly half-hearted bursts, and then crashes into a building and falls to the street. Dead silence descends. Inside the church, Forester leads the people out into the street to see what has happened. They find the downed swan, and as they watch, a door opens and a Martian arm appears, trying to move out. Another swan crashes on the other side of the street and, as Forester watches, the Martian arm turns a mottled gray and falls still. Forester touches it and pronounces it dead.
And in fact, this story is repeating itself everywhere. The Martians had very underdeveloped immune systems, and as soon as they breathed Earth air, they became infected with germs that a human barely notices, but which proved uniformly fatal to Martians. The metal swans stop and fall where they are, and the invasion is over even more swiftly than it began. Sylvia: They seem to murder everything that moves. ----
Forrester: If they're mortal, they must have mortal weaknesses. They'll be stopped, somehow. ----
Radio Reporter: All radio is dead, which means that these tape recordings I'm making are for the sake of future history - If any. ----
Duprey: I have never seen blood crystals as anemic as these. They may be mental giants but, physically, by our standards, they must be very primitive. [first lines] Radio Reporter: [voiceover] In the First World War, and for the first time in the history of man, nations combined to fight against nations using the crude weapons of those days. The Second World War involved every continent on the globe, and men turned to science for new devices of warfare, which reached an unparalleled peak in their capacity for destruction. And now, fought with the terrible weapons of super-science, menacing all mankind and every creature on the Earth comes the War of the Worlds. ----
[last lines] Commentary: [voiceover] The Martians had no resistance to the bacteria in our atmosphere to which we have long since become immune. Once they had breathed our air, germs, which no longer affect us, began to kill them. The end came swiftly. All over the world, their machines began to stop and fall. After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things, which God, in His wisdom, had put upon this Earth. ----
Commentary: No one would have believed in the middle of the 20th Century that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than Man's. Yet, across the gulf of space on the planet Mars, intellects vast and cool and unsypathetic regarded our Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely joined their plans against us. Mars is more than 140 million miles from the sun, and for centuries has been in the last status of exhaustion. At night, temperatures drop far below zero even at its equator. Inhabitants of this dying planet looked across space with instruments and intelligences that which we have scarcely dreamed, searching for another world to which they could migrate. Commentary: Mars is more than 140 million miles from the sun, and for centuries has been in the last status of exhaustion. At night, temperatures drop far below zero even at its equator. Inhabitants of this dying planet looked across space with instruments and intelligences that which we have scarcely dreamed, searching for another world to which they could migrate. They could not go to Pluto, outermost of all planets. So cold, that even it's atmosphere lies frozen on it's surface. They couldn't go to Neptune, or Uranus. Twin worlds in eternal night and perpetual cold. Both surrounded by an unbreathable atmosphere of methane gas, and ammonia vapor. The Martians considered Saturn, and attractive world with it's many moons and beautiful rings of cosmic dust. But, it's temperature is close to 270 degrees below zero. And ice lies 15,000 miles deep on it's surface. Their nearest world was giant Jupiter, where there are titanic cliffs of lava and ice with hydrogen flaming at the tops, where the atmospheric pressure is terrible. Thousands of pounds to the square inch. Nor could they go to Mercury, nearest planet to the sun. It has no air, and the temperature at it's equator is that of molten lead.
The Backstory War of the Worlds is a durable story that lends itself well to updates, and has held a mirror to the conflicts of the day for more than a century. H. G. Wells was inspired to write the original 1898 novel by the devastation that colonial powers visited upon the colonized. Orson Welles’ superlative radio production, aired Halloween night in 1938, was faithful to the book, yet drew on the still-fresh memories of trench warfare in WWI, and foreshadowed American involvement in the coming conflict in Europe. The 1953 movie version reflects the Cold War fears of Soviet invasion and radioactive fallout, and recalls the scenes of refugees fleeing shattered European cities, while Spielberg’s 2005 movie carries haunting reminders of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Summary
H. G. Wells' chilling novel of the Invasion of the Earth by Martians and his observations dealing with panic and destruction become even more frightening when translated to the cinema. Wells' original story was updated to include the atom bomb; the science-fiction classic won an oscar for its special effects. No one who has seen the depiction of the Martian machines can forget their ominous impact-swan-shaped, ticking and hissing menacingly as they glide along leaving a wake of destruction. Back-of-the-Box
Review
(Five Stars) George Pal's Commendable version of H. G. Wells's novel of a Martian invasion-imaginatively depicted in the Oscar winning effects of Gordon Jennings….Barre Lyndon's script, focusing on research physicist Gene Barry and scientist ann Robinson, sometimes sinks into cliches, yet it unfolds with such compelling swiftness and breathless action that the invasion takes on epic proportions. One suspenseful sequence depicts a bug-eyed martian, another shows Barry Searching for Robinson through war ravaged LA. The opening prologue is beautifully rendered, with the planets described by the splendid voice of Sir Cedric Hardwicke. One of the few sci-fi classics of the cinema. The movie is one of the few science fiction films that does not talk down to the audience, as there is plenty of scientific debate, while the Martians rampage across the Earth. It is also one of few science films to show a full-fledged invasion by an extraterrestrial army, and World War II stock footage was skillfully used to produce a montage of destruction to show the worldwide invasion, with armies of all nations joining together to fight the invaders. Wells used the second half of his novel to make a satirical commentary on civilization and the class struggle. Pál did not write the satire into the movie, though he did add a religious theme to the film.
Special effects
The film's special effects are the film's highlight feature. Both audiences and critics alike have praised the effects, and are still seen as standing up to the test of time, even in spite of the claims of seeing the strings that hold up the machines. Though many fans believe that the briefly glimpsed Martians are rather weak, at least by contrast of their fighting machines. Trivia note: For many years, the distinctive sound-effect of the Heat-Ray was utilized as a standard "ray-gun" sound on children's television shows. Pal wanted to the tripod war machines. But pal did not know how a tripod walked. So he went with the flying machines. 3 Martian war machines were made for the film. Sad fate for the machines they were taken to a copper drive and melted down.
Synopsis for
The War of the Worlds (1953)
Producer George Pal and director Byron Haskins' landmark adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic novel that focuses on the invasion of the earth by Martian war machines.
A strange fireball streaks across the southern California skies and lands in a gully in the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles. Firemen quickly extinguish the fire that has broken out, but authorities are puzzled by the long, cylindrical object that fell to earth and started the fire. The object attracts tourists--and also the attention of Dr. Clayton Forester of the Pacific Technical Institute. While everyone else regards the object as anything from a tourist attraction to a potential treasure trove, Forester knows that something is wrong: the object did not come down like an ordinary meteor, and was much more lightweight than any meteor ever reported. What's more, the object is not only hot, but also radioactive.
Forester stays in the nearby town at the home of Pastor Matthew Collins and his niece, Sylvia van Buren. While everyone in town is at a social, three special deputies watch as a hidden lid on the cylinder unscrews, and a long-necked probe rises out. The three try to approach the probe, declaring their friendly intentions--and the probe spits out a heat ray that incinerates the men and starts another fire. At the same time, power and telephone service fails in town, and everyone at the social discovers that his watch has stopped. Forester determines that the watches have been somehow magnetized, and also notes that someone's pocket compass points not to the north, but to the meteorite. Forester returns to the site with the sheriff and another deputy. They find the ashes of the three men, and then the probe attacks again, killing the deputy as he tries to drive away. Forester then determines that they are dealing with something from another planet and need to call in the military, especially as another fireball lands nearby as he is talking to the sheriff. While everyone waits for the soldiers to arrive, Forester appears on a radio program and deals with the increasing speculation on the otherworldly origin of the cylinders. A consensus arises that the cylinders come from Mars, now at its closest approach to Earth.
Marines from El Toro Marine Base roll in and surround the site, and an Air Force plane drops a flare on it from above. The long-necked probe fires its heat ray at the plane, and then sweeps the area, destroying a radio truck. That prompts the Marine colonel to call for reinforcements, and the 6th Army Command arrives, with artillery and tanks. Major General Mann, the commander, tells Forester that other objects like the one they are surrounding have landed in cities all over the world, and that all communication fails after that. Then the probe rises again, and we now see that it is part of a swan-like magnetically levitating low-altitude craft. Two other such craft rise out of the cylinder to join it. The officers give the order to prepare to fire, but Matthew Collins objects, saying that no one has tried to offer them peace before. Disregarding his own safety, he walks toward the three metal swans, reciting the 23rd psalm--and before his niece Sylvia's horrified eyes, the lead swan burns him to death. At once General Mann and Marine Colonel Heffner give the order to fire.
The soldiers unleash a barrage of artillery and missile fire--and none of it is effective. The swans possess a magnetic force shield that deflects any bombardment. The swans quietly take the measure of their opponents and then start to return fire, with heat rays and meson-disrupting energy bursts that disintegrate anything they touch. Forester urges Mann to inform Washington that conventional military forces would be outmatched. Mann leaves, and Heffner fights a holding action before finally ordering a complete retreat--and being disintegrated in mid-order.
Forester takes Sylvia with him in an Army plane. Flying low to avoid the Air Force jets flying in to try their hand, he clips some trees and crash-lands. He and Sylvia barely have time to escape before a squadron of swans surround the plane. General Mann returns to the city, where skeptical reporters cannot believe his reassurances--and of course he knows better, because nothing has proved effective. Alone in the brush, Forester and Sylvia take shelter in an abandoned farmhouse. There Sylvia confesses her fears and her deep sense of loss following her uncle's death. In the middle of this tender conversation, another cylinder crashes into the side of the house. Hours later, Forester wakes up, and a terrified Sylvia tells him that the house is surrounded. Forester works diligently to clear a way out, while also trying to observe as much as he can. The Martians lower a different kind of probe, an eye-like camera; Forester, at first taking this for yet another weapon, chops the camera head from its extender, which swiftly withdraws. Then a Martian crewman enters the house and touches Sylvia on the shoulder; Forester blinds it with a flashlight and then throws an ax at it, putting it to flight. When Forester realizes that he is holding a scarf now stained with Martian blood, Sylvia loses all control, and Forester has to shout at her to calm down. They then escape, just before the Martians burn down the house.
As more cylinders come down all over the earth, the Martians' goal becomes painfully clear: to drive all of humanity before them and eventually to kill us all. In Washington, the Secretary of Defense prepares to order the dropping of an atomic bomb on the Los Angeles-area nest. Forester and Sylvia finally arrive at Pacific Tech and turn over the alien camera and the blood-stained scarf. The blood turns out to be anemic, and the camera yields little insight other than that the Martians perceive color a lot differently from humans. At the time, Pacific Tech officials think all this is a moot point, because the atom bomb is going to stop them anyway. But even the atom bomb proves ineffective against the Martians' magnetic force fields.
General Mann, clearly frustrated, orders an evacuation of Los Angeles. Forester tells his colleagues that now the anemic blood is important, because only biological weapons will stop the Martians now. The plan is to take as many lab instruments as possible into the mountains and set up another laboratory. But that plan comes to nothing, as looters seize the Pacific Tech vehicles and scatter or beat up all the personnel, including Forester, Dr. Dupre (the pathologist who found the anemia), and Sylvia. As the swans arrive and start systematically burning every building in sight, Forester rushes about, going from church to church, hoping to find Sylvia waiting there, as she once waited after running away as a child. He finds church pastors everywhere praying for deliverance, comfort, or both, and at one church he even finds two of his colleagues. At last he finds Sylvia--and as the two rush toward one another, a nearby swan burns out a stained-glass window, frightening everyone inside.
But the attacking swan abruptly heels over, fires only two more seemingly half-hearted bursts, and then crashes into a building and falls to the street. Dead silence descends. Inside the church, Forester leads the people out into the street to see what has happened. They find the downed swan, and as they watch, a door opens and a Martian arm appears, trying to move out. Another swan crashes on the other side of the street and, as Forester watches, the Martian arm turns a mottled gray and falls still. Forester touches it and pronounces it dead.
And in fact, this story is repeating itself everywhere. The Martians had very underdeveloped immune systems, and as soon as they breathed Earth air, they became infected with germs that a human barely notices, but which proved uniformly fatal to Martians. The metal swans stop and fall where they are, and the invasion is over even more swiftly than it began.
Sylvia: They seem to murder everything that moves.
----
Forrester: If they're mortal, they must have mortal weaknesses. They'll be stopped, somehow.
----
Radio Reporter: All radio is dead, which means that these tape recordings I'm making are for the sake of future history - If any.
----
Duprey: I have never seen blood crystals as anemic as these. They may be mental giants but, physically, by our standards, they must be very primitive.
[first lines]
Radio Reporter: [voiceover] In the First World War, and for the first time in the history of man, nations combined to fight against nations using the crude weapons of those days. The Second World War involved every continent on the globe, and men turned to science for new devices of warfare, which reached an unparalleled peak in their capacity for destruction. And now, fought with the terrible weapons of super-science, menacing all mankind and every creature on the Earth comes the War of the Worlds.
----
[last lines]
Commentary: [voiceover] The Martians had no resistance to the bacteria in our atmosphere to which we have long since become immune. Once they had breathed our air, germs, which no longer affect us, began to kill them. The end came swiftly. All over the world, their machines began to stop and fall. After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things, which God, in His wisdom, had put upon this Earth.
----
Commentary: No one would have believed in the middle of the 20th Century that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than Man's. Yet, across the gulf of space on the planet Mars, intellects vast and cool and unsypathetic regarded our Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely joined their plans against us. Mars is more than 140 million miles from the sun, and for centuries has been in the last status of exhaustion. At night, temperatures drop far below zero even at its equator. Inhabitants of this dying planet looked across space with instruments and intelligences that which we have scarcely dreamed, searching for another world to which they could migrate.
Commentary: Mars is more than 140 million miles from the sun, and for centuries has been in the last status of exhaustion. At night, temperatures drop far below zero even at its equator. Inhabitants of this dying planet looked across space with instruments and intelligences that which we have scarcely dreamed, searching for another world to which they could migrate. They could not go to Pluto, outermost of all planets. So cold, that even it's atmosphere lies frozen on it's surface. They couldn't go to Neptune, or Uranus. Twin worlds in eternal night and perpetual cold. Both surrounded by an unbreathable atmosphere of methane gas, and ammonia vapor. The Martians considered Saturn, and attractive world with it's many moons and beautiful rings of cosmic dust. But, it's temperature is close to 270 degrees below zero. And ice lies 15,000 miles deep on it's surface. Their nearest world was giant Jupiter, where there are titanic cliffs of lava and ice with hydrogen flaming at the tops, where the atmospheric pressure is terrible. Thousands of pounds to the square inch. Nor could they go to Mercury, nearest planet to the sun. It has no air, and the temperature at it's equator is that of molten lead.
The Backstory
War of the Worlds is a durable story that lends itself well to updates, and has held a mirror to the conflicts of the day for more than a century.
H. G. Wells was inspired to write the original 1898 novel by the devastation that colonial powers visited upon the colonized. Orson Welles’ superlative radio production, aired Halloween night in 1938, was faithful to the book, yet drew on the still-fresh memories of trench warfare in WWI, and foreshadowed American involvement in the coming conflict in Europe.
The 1953 movie version reflects the Cold War fears of Soviet invasion and radioactive fallout, and recalls the scenes of refugees fleeing shattered European cities, while Spielberg’s 2005 movie carries haunting reminders of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Summary
H. G. Wells' chilling novel of the Invasion of the Earth by Martians and his observations dealing with panic and destruction become even more frightening when translated to the cinema. Wells' original story was updated to include the atom bomb; the science-fiction classic won an oscar for its special effects. No one who has seen the depiction of the Martian machines can forget their ominous impact-swan-shaped, ticking and hissing menacingly as they glide along leaving a wake of destruction. Back-of-the-Box
Review
(Five Stars) George Pal's Commendable version of H. G. Wells's novel of a Martian invasion-imaginatively depicted in the Oscar winning effects of Gordon Jennings….Barre Lyndon's script, focusing on research physicist Gene Barry and scientist ann Robinson, sometimes sinks into cliches, yet it unfolds with such compelling swiftness and breathless action that the invasion takes on epic proportions. One suspenseful sequence depicts a bug-eyed martian, another shows Barry Searching for Robinson through war ravaged LA. The opening prologue is beautifully rendered, with the planets described by the splendid voice of Sir Cedric Hardwicke. One of the few sci-fi classics of the cinema.
The movie is one of the few science fiction films that does not talk down to the audience, as there is plenty of scientific debate, while the Martians rampage across the Earth. It is also one of few science films to show a full-fledged invasion by an extraterrestrial army, and World War II stock footage was skillfully used to produce a montage of destruction to show the worldwide invasion, with armies of all nations joining together to fight the invaders.
Wells used the second half of his novel to make a satirical commentary on civilization and the class struggle. Pál did not write the satire into the movie, though he did add a religious theme to the film.
Special effects
The film's special effects are the film's highlight feature. Both audiences and critics alike have praised the effects, and are still seen as standing up to the test of time, even in spite of the claims of seeing the strings that hold up the machines. Though many fans believe that the briefly glimpsed Martians are rather weak, at least by contrast of their fighting machines.Trivia note: For many years, the distinctive sound-effect of the Heat-Ray was utilized as a standard "ray-gun" sound on children's television shows.
Pal wanted to the tripod war machines. But pal did not know how a tripod walked. So he went with the flying machines.
3 Martian war machines were made for the film. Sad fate for the machines they were taken to a copper drive and melted down.