Back to the Wells, Part 1:
The Time Machine
by Matthew R. Bradley
I have enjoyed the work of Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) on page and screen for as long as I can recall, his filmography encompassing such notable names as Bert I. Gordon, Ray Harryhausen, Byron Haskin, Nathan Juran, Nigel Kneale, George Pal, James Whale, and Philip Wylie. I graduated from the oversized trade paperbacks of The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898) bought at grade-school book fairs—which I am unable to identify—to the uniform, mass-market Berkley Highland editions (1964-1967), most with striking covers by Paul Lehr. I have not read them in decades, so in this series, I will revisit six major H.G. Wells novels, comparing each with my favorite film version.
Along with editor Hugo Gernsback, Wells and Jules Verne (1828-1905) are often called “the father of science fiction,” their respective first and last writing decades overlapping. An immediate success that decisively ended an upbringing in poverty, The Time Machine (1895) was Wells’s first novel, one of four seminal works that, incredibly, he produced in as many years, followed by The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). And, for you bibliophiles, it’s the only one of the seven volumes in the Berkley boxed set (of whose existence I only recently learned)—containing all of the novels I’ll be discussing, as well as the unfilmed In the Days of the Comet (1906)—with cover art credited to the legendary Richard Powers.
“The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him)” explains his theory to his friends Filby, a Psychologist, Provincial Mayor, Medical Man, Very Young Man, and the unnamed narrator. As “experimental verification,” he produces “a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock,” a model time machine that took two years to create, and—using the Psychologist’s own finger to preclude trickery—presses a lever that makes it vanish into the future, or perhaps the past. In his laboratory, he shows them an unfinished larger edition of nickel, ivory, rock crystal, and “twisted crystalline bars” of apparent quartz; on this, “I intend to explore time….I was never more serious in my life.”
He is late to their next Thursday dinner in Richmond, the returning Psychologist, Doctor, and narrator joined by a Journalist, a Silent Man, and Blank, “the Editor of a well-known daily paper.” The Time Traveller arrives—dirty, disheveled, shoeless, pale, and haggard, with a limp and a half-healed cut on his chin—and, after cleaning himself up and wolfing down some mutton, agrees to tell his story, if uninterrupted. He relates that the machine, finished that morning, “began its career” at 10:00, and as the lab goes dark, servant Mrs. Watchett enters without seeing him, but “seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket,” and after a dizzying trip through time, he stops, the impact throwing him from the saddle.
Beside the overturned machine, the Time Traveller finds himself amidst a hailstorm in a garden, with a White Sphinx of marble on a bronze pedestal looming beyond, and as the sun breaks out, he is approached by a beautiful and graceful but frail four-foot-high man. Unafraid, humankind’s distant descendants speak in “a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue,” and as they examine the machine, whose dials record a date of 802,701 A.D., he prudently unscrews and pockets its control levers. Childlike, indolent, frugivorous, and oddly lacking in interest, they bring him into a huge, dilapidated hall, where he is fed and begins learning the language of “humanity upon the wane,” however Edenic their setting.
“Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness,” the success of “the social effort in which we are at present engaged” having removed our salutary challenges. After a walk, our hero finds his machine gone, apparently taken into the pedestal, but unable to effect ingress, he must be patient; befriending Weena, whom he saves from drowning, he learns that the Eloi fear the dark. Ventilating shafts and deep wells dot the land, and watching a small white, ape-like figure descending into one, he discovers metal foot and hand rests that form a ladder, deducing that humanity “had differentiated into two distinct animals”—one subterranean.
The Eloi and Morlocks, whom the Time Traveller believes took his machine, seem to be the ultimate separation of the Capitalist and Labourer, the Haves and Have-nots, an idea familiar to viewers of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)…which Wells, ironically, trashed in a New York Times review (April 17, 1927) as “the silliest film.” Overcoming the Eloi’s contagious disgust, he enters the well, whence emanates a hum of machinery, noting that the Morlocks, who flee his dwindling matches, are carnivorous. Barely escaping, he goes back to the surface, seeking nighttime safety for himself and Weena in the far-off Palace of Green Porcelain from the Morlocks, for whom he believes the Eloi are “fatted cattle.”
In the Palace, an ancient museum, the Time Traveller finds a weapon (a lever snapped off a corroded machine), more matches, and camphor to serve as makeshift candles. Hoping to penetrate the Sphinx the next day, he plans to traverse and sleep beside a nearby forest, protected by fire, but a blaze he starts to cover their retreat turns into a forest fire, routing the photophobic Morlocks and leaving Weena—who faints amid the chaos—missing and presumed dead. Returning, he unexpectedly finds the pedestal open, yet as he enters and approaches the Time Machine, the panels clang shut, and surrounded by the Morlocks in the dark, he is barely able to fit the control levers over their studs by touch and activate it.
Escaping further into the future, the Time Traveller finds a huge, red sun, “the salt Dead Sea…poisonous-looking…lichenous plants…thin air that hurts one’s lungs [and] monster crab[s]…” (This follows a deleted section Wells reluctantly added at the behest of editor William Ernest Henley, in which he encounters kangaroo-like creatures, possibly human descendants, and a giant centipede.) Finally, more than 30 million years hence, he spots “a round thing, the size of a football perhaps [with] tentacles…hopping fitfully about” in the snowy and silent desolation and decides to return home, with the machine reappearing in his lab “the exact distance from my little lawn to the pedestal of the White Sphinx…”
Despite his audience’s skepticism, the Doctor admits, “I certainly don’t know the natural order of these flowers,” produced from the pocket into which Weena had placed them, à la Zuzu’s petals. The next day, carrying a camera and a knapsack, our hero vows that if given half an hour, he’ll “prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimen and all”; suddenly remembering an appointment, the waiting narrator enters the laboratory just as the machine vanishes with its inventor, like a phantasm. “I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned,” he writes, speculating about his fate in an epilogue…
Displaying a rare commitment to SF and fantasy, George Pal (1908-1980) produced, and often directed, a dozen features that had a profound impact on the genre; many had their origins in literature, notably his Wells adaptations The War of the Worlds (1953)—more on that one later—and The Time Machine (1960). Born Marincsák György to Hungarian stage parents, the unemployed architect was employed by Budapest’s Hunnia studio as an apprentice animator. Marrying and moving to Berlin, Pal next rose to the top of the UFA studio’s cartoon department until the Nazis’ rise to power drove him out of Germany, and then resided and worked in various European countries before he immigrated to the U.S.
Pal earned an honorary Academy Award in 1944 for developing the “novel methods and techniques” in his Puppetoons animated shorts. His debut feature, The Great Rupert (aka A Christmas Wish, 1950), was among the first that combined stop-motion and live-action footage, but following this transitional effort, directed by actor Irving Pichel, Pal focused solely on live-action efforts, although animation still featured in many of his productions. Also directed by Pichel, Destination Moon (1950) was adapted by genre giant Robert A. Heinlein from his own young adult novel Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), and set a cinematic standard rarely equaled, dramatizing the lunar flight with scrupulous scientific accuracy.
Based on Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s 1933 novel, Rudolph Maté’s When Worlds Collide (1951) was the first of five films Pal made for Paramount, including the biopic Houdini (1953) and collaborations with director Byron Haskin on The War of the Worlds, The Naked Jungle (1954), and Conquest of Space (1955). With the fantasy tom thumb (1958), Pal moved to MGM, where he would remain for the next decade, and assumed the directorial duties he retained on his next four efforts. As with those of Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds, and tom thumb, the special effects of The Time Machine, by Gene Warren and Tim Baar, also received an Academy Award.
The largely undistinguished screenwriting career of David Duncan ranged from Monster on the Campus (1958), a low point for director Jack Arnold, to being one of four credited on Fantastic Voyage (1966), which earned Hugo and Academy Awards. In an interview with Tom Weaver, he said, “Like most of Wells’ science fiction novels, [it] was as much a social document as a tale of science adventure….[By then] this forecast of the future no longer carried any plausibility—if it ever did. Labor unions were strong [and high wages and] fringe benefits had moved most blue-collar workers into the middle class.” Instead, air-raid sirens drive the Pavlovian Eloi into the shelters built by the Morlocks’ ancestors.
Duncan clearly had his work cut out for him, since the brief novel’s characterization and dialogue are minimal, and the film’s visuals are unsurprisingly its greatest strength. Cast as the Time Traveller, known as George (a plate on his machine reads, “Manufactured by H. George Wells”), was Rod Taylor, co-star of World Without End (1956), a time-travel film sufficiently similar to inspire legal action by the Wells estate. The film opens at the second dinner as Mrs. Watchett (Doris Lloyd) admits David Filby (Alan Young) with Dr. Philip Hillyer (Sebastian Cabot), Anthony Bridewell (Tom Helmore), and Walter Kemp (Whit Bissell); on George’s arrival, we then flash back five days, to December 31, 1899.
Urged to offer his inventive skills to the government for the Boer War, George laments to David (named by Pal in Duncan’s honor), people “call upon science to invent new, more efficient weapons to depopulate the Earth.” Composer Russell Garcia’s dramatic flourish accompanies our first look at the iconic full-sized machine designed by MGM art director Bill Ferrari, a wondrous creation resembling a sled with a rotating clockwork disc behind the saddle. George’s voiceover clarifies the action, while numerous devices visualize the transitions (e.g., a time-lapse candle and flowers; a window mannequin wearing changing fashions), hindsight enabling Pal to depict two World Wars before an atomic one in 1966.
Stopping in 1917, he encounters uniformed James Philby (Young), whose father, killed in the war, refused while serving as George’s executor to allow the sale of his house, certain he would return someday. This poignant encounter considerably humanizes the story, but the elderly James’s return as an air-raid warden, just before London is destroyed, evoking nature’s volcanic retaliation, is less successful. The film is almost half over when George arrives in 802,701; the limited skills of inexperienced Yvette Mimieux (which reportedly improved enough for some of her earlier scenes to be reshot) made eminently suitable her casting—at Pal’s insistence—as Weena, who with rampant implausibility speaks English.
Weena shows George the Talking Rings (voiced by Paul Frees), which supply exposition about a 326-year “war between the East and West” that filled the atmosphere with germs, and the Eloi/Morlock division. Duncan conflates the encounters with the latter (executed by William Tuttle, MGM’s makeup wizard for more than twenty years and, like Frees, a frequent Pal collaborator) into a climactic descent as George seeks both his machine and the somnambulic Weena. Brawny, blue-skinned, long-haired, and more imposing than in the novel, they are a better match for Taylor’s two-fisted hero as he seeks to reawaken the spirit of self-sacrifice among the Eloi, whom he leads into a fiery, subterranean rebellion.
Separated when the panels close, George is unable to bring Weena back to his own time, and while attempting to rejoin her on his next trip, from which he never returns, he takes three unidentified books, with which he hopes to help the Eloi rebuild their world. Pal’s biggest box-office success, the film was remade for television with John Beck (and, in a different role, Bissell) in 1978 and as a feature with Guy Pearce in 2002, as well as being ripped off on countless occasions. Pal long hoped to direct a sequel and, in 1981, shared a posthumous byline with Joe Morhaim on Time Machine II, novelizing an unproduced script featuring a second-generation Time Traveller, the offspring of George and Weena.
After Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961), a letdown on every count, Pal collaborated with Charles Beaumont on The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), co-directed with Henry Levin, and 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964). Even a reunion with Haskin could not save The Power (1968) from friction with MGM’s régime du jour, which dumped it with minimal promotion; his final film, Doc Savage—The Man of Bronze (1975), showed how sadly out of step he had fallen with current tastes. Abortive projects included an effort to adapt William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s novel Logan’s Run (1967) and, in his last years, two with Robert Bloch, The Day of the Comet and The Voyage of the Berg.
Up next: The Island of Dr. Moreau
Sources/works consulted:
Batchelor, John Calvin, introduction to The Time Machine and The Invisible Man (New York: Signet Classic, 1984), pp. v-xxiii.
Baxter, John, Science Fiction in the Cinema: 1895-1970 (The International Film Guide Series; New York: A.S. Barnes, 1970).
Brosnan, John, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978).
Gunn, James, editor, The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Viking, 1988).
Hardy, Phil, editor, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995).
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb)
Warren, Bill, Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (2 volumes; Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1982-6).
Wells, H.G., review of Metropolis (The New York Times, April 17, 1927), reproduced by Don Brockway on his (then) Time Machine Home Site (December 25, 2002),
https://erkelzaar.tsudao.com/reviews/H.G.Wells_on_Metropolis%201927.htm.
—-, The Time Machine, in The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, pp. 1-103.
Weaver, Tom, Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers: Writers, Producers, Directors, Actors, Moguls and Makeup (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988).
Wikipedia
Online source:
https://archive.org/details/the-time-machine-1960_202203.
Portions of this article originally appeared on Bradley on Film.
