As previously noted, I never owned the Berkley Highland edition of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) with Paul Lehr’s cover art, having purchased my long-gone, oversized trade paperback—now identified, with the aid of my main man Gilbert Colon, as a 1969 Elephant Edition from Pendulum Press—at a grade-school book fair.

   Since my 1986 Signet Classic edition has an afterword by SF legend Isaac Asimov, I don’t exactly feel short-changed. He notes, “Wells was well-grounded in the science of his day and he was always careful, in his science fiction tales, to draw upon actual science as much as he could,” e.g., American astronomer Percival Lowell’s book Mars (1894), which suggested intelligent Martians, based on the later-discredited observations of “canals” on its surface.

   What Asimov calls “the very first tale of interplanetary warfare the world had ever seen, the first story of an invasion of Earth by alien beings” returns to the first person after The Invisible Man (1897). “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s… Yet across the gulf of space…intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.” Writing early in the next century, the unnamed narrator joins an astronomer, Ogilvy, at an observatory in the Surrey village of Ottershaw, and sees a “jetting out of gas” from Mars.

   After the first falling star is seen rushing over Winchester, Ogilvy—certain that a meteor has fallen on nearby Horsell Common—is surprised to find that “the Thing” is a cylinder with a 30-yard diameter, whose circular top begins to unscrew.

   Mentally linking it with the flash on Mars, he fetches London journalist Henderson from Woking, yet upon their arrival, the signs of life have ceased; alerted by his newspaper boy to the presumed “dead men from Mars,” the narrator hastens there from his home in Maybury, finding it equally inert. Later, the pit surrounded by a crowd of hundreds, the end of the screw comes out, and what emerges is not the man-like occupant they expect, but a many-tentacled horror.

   The pulsating, bear-sized “rounded bulk [rises] slowly and painfully…due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth”; it has “oily brown skin [that] glistened like wet leather [and two] immense eyes [with] extraordinary intensity [above a] V-shaped mouth…the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva.” It is joined by another, and as the crowd scatters in horror, a shopman accidentally pushed into the pit vanishes while trying to climb out, shrieks, and is heard no more. A Deputation including Ogilvy, Henderson, and Stent, the Astronomer Royal, advances waving a white flag in an attempt to communicate, only to be incinerated by the Heat-Ray from a “black, domelike object.”

   Returning home after his terrified flight, the narrator reassures his wife that the Martians’ limited mobility will confine them to the pit, yet inside it, a noise of hammering betokens the machines they are making ready, and another cylinder falls by the Byfleet Golf Links.

   Soldiers arrive, and with the Heat-Ray coming too close for comfort, he takes his wife to her cousins in Leatherhead, renting a cart from the Spotted Dog’s landlord. As he departs in a violent thunderstorm, a third cylinder falls, while the lightning reveals a “monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside…a walking engine of glittering metal…articulate ropes of steel dangling from it…”

   Crashing the cart as a second appears, emitting puffs of green smoke from its joints and a deafening howl of “Aloo! Aloo!,” the narrator makes his way home on foot, stumbling on the landlord’s body en route. He offers refuge to a passing soldier, who relates their rout by the hooded tripods—also equipped with Heat-Rays—then himself sees Weybridge and Shepperton laid to waste: “Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and universal.” Fearing a “disastrous struggle” around London, he plans to take his wife out of the country from Leatherhead to Newhaven, detouring via Epsom to avoid the third cylinder, yet nearly loses his life in the Thames as the Heat-Ray boils it.

   As cylinders fall daily and more artillery is arrayed, having felled one tripod, the narrator presses on toward London, paddling downriver in an abandoned boat, and while he lies dozing, exhausted, on the Middlesex side, he is joined by a curate fleeing Weybridge, his mind shaken by what he has seen.

   Meanwhile—with news slow to travel—his brother, a medical student, is among the Londoners unaware of the gravity of the situation until the approach of the “boilers on stilts” and a poisonous Black Smoke that stifles the gunners. The end of organized opposition leads to “the great panic” and a mass exodus, with the narrator’s brother saving two ladies from a gang trying to steal their “little pony-chaise.”

   On the Essex coast, the trio secures passage aboard an Ostend-bound paddle steamer, and after the vividly described chaos—with its torrent of real locales adding verisimilitude—“Book One: The Coming of the Martians” concludes as the torpedo ram H.M.S. Thunder Child destroys two tripods before being sunk.

   “The Earth under the Martians” resumes the narrator’s attempt to reach Leatherhead, when he and the curate see a Martian picking up people and tossing them in a metallic carrier. A cylinder hits the house where they are foraging for food, burying them under the ruins with a sentinel tripod nearby, and from concealment therein, they have a unique opportunity to observe the enemy at close range.

   During their days of imprisonment, the narrator sees a spidery “handling-machine” in the pit remove and assemble pieces of an apparatus from the cylinder. The Martians, which he believes communicate telepathically, are sexless and never sleep, have evolved largely into brain, and obviate digestion by injecting “fresh, living blood of other creatures…into their own veins,” hence the human-harvesting. “Micro-organisms, which cause so much disease and pain on earth, have either never appeared on Mars or Martian sanitary science eliminated them ages ago. A hundred diseases, all the fevers and contagions of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such…never entered the scheme of their life.”

   Now insane, the curate resists rationing the food, loudly proclaims that God is punishing humanity, and forces the narrator to silence him with the butt of a meat chopper, too late to prevent alerting a Martian; as he hides in the coal cellar, a tentacle pulls the curate out to his death.

   On the 15th day, he escapes, finding the unoccupied pit overrun by Mars’s red weed and containing aluminum bars refined from the clay. Raiding gardens for food, he feels like “an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel,” amid great swathes of destruction and the weed choking the Thames and the Wey, which finally “succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread…due, it is believed, to the action of certain bacteria…”

   On Putney Hill, the narrator encounters the artilleryman he’d sheltered, who believes the Martians are learning to fly; if so, “It is all over with humanity,” destined to be bred for food, made pets, or trained to hunt one another.

   He parts from “this strange undisciplined dreamer,” who envisions the ablest humans surviving underground in drains and tunnels, preserving their knowledge in books, ultimately capturing tripods to turn their Heat-Rays against the Martians. Traversing dead London, the narrator hears a wailing of “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla” from a stationary tripod, then stilled, and finds the wrecked handling-machine whence “a pack of starving mongrels [competes over] a piece of putrescent red meat…”

   Other motionless tripods, with hungry birds pecking at “lank shreds of brown” hanging from their hoods, reveal that the Martians had succumbed to “the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared…slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, had put upon this earth.”

   As the joyful news spreads around the world and relief pours into London, the unwitting narrator is taken in, wandering and raving, by kindly people who inform him that Leatherhead has been destroyed. Yet soon after he returns home, his wife and cousin arrive to seek him, and he marvels “that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.”

   The War of the Worlds (1953) was one of four collaborations between producer George Pal and director Byron Haskin (1899-1994); The Naked Jungle (1954) was based on Carl Stephenson’s “Leiningen Versus the Ants” (Esquire, December 1938), which resembles Wells’s “The Empire of the Ants” (The Strand Magazine, December 1905). The woes of Conquest of Space (1955) are legendary, and their reunion on The Power (1968) fared no better. In the interim, Haskin directed From the Earth to the Moon (1958), shifting from Wells to Jules Verne, and Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), an update of Daniel Defoe’s classic, also contributing to the seminal SF series The Outer Limits in various capacities.

   From 1922 to 1937, Haskin was primarily a cinematographer, with occasional directorial credits, and in the second phase of his career, through 1944, he worked mainly in special effects. Nominated for four consecutive Academy Awards in that category (1940-1943), after winning the 1939 technical achievement award for the development and application of the triple head background projector, he was thus ideal for the effects-heavy War of the Worlds. Ironically, it earned Gordon Jennings the special-effects Oscar that had eluded Haskin; War was also nominated for film editing (Everett Douglas) and sound recording (Loren L. Ryder), and received a 2004 “Retro Hugo” for the Best Dramatic Presentation.

   For years, I lamented that, unlike in his Wells adaptation The Time Machine (1960), Pal had updated the story to the present with a script by Barré Lyndon, who wrote the twice-filmed stage play The Man in Half Moon Street (1939). He adapted the 1944 version of The Lodger and the Thriller episode “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (4/11/61) from well-known works about the serial killer, and was one of the writers on the ill-fated Conquest. But I grew to see the wisdom of giving it an immediacy with a modern setting, following in the footsteps of Orson Welles, whose Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast (10/30/38) sparked the furore re-enacted in the TV-movie The Night That Panicked America (1975).

   In his Directors Guild of America Oral History interview with Joe Adamson, Haskin said, “The threat to humanity…was an antiquated machine looking like a water tank tottering around the country on creaky legs, blowing whiffs of smoke, frightening a cast directly out of Agatha Christie—the vicar and the butler and other rural characters….[But] we had to consider the atomic bomb and the impact of that technology…I thought surely we should modernize it, which meant a new story, with new characters. [So w]e ignored the people and the complications of the [Wells novel] and created a new story line with new characters and complications,” headed by physicist Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry).

   Among the illustrious names who had been attached to the property, or expressed interest in adapting it, since Paramount had acquired it in the ’20s were Cecil B. DeMille, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander Korda, and Pal’s old Puppetoons colleague Ray Harryhausen, who even animated test footage of the Martian emerging from the cylinder.

   The film opens on a literal high note, with Leith Stevens’s enthusiastic main-title theme, and multi-colored credits punctuated by flashes of lightning. Depictions of the planets by astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell—like Stevens a frequent Pal collaborator—underly a commentary by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, some of it taken almost verbatim from the novel.

   By the marquee for a reissue of DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson) and her pastor uncle, Dr. Matthew Collins (Lewis Martin), see the initial “meteor” fall near Linda Rosa, starting a blaze soon brought under control. As it cools, the lookout suggests that some Pacific Tech scientists fishing up at Pine Summit check it out, so Forrester remains while Pryor (Bob Cornthwaite) flies Bilderbeck (Sandro Giglio) back in Forrester’s plane. Sylvia, who teaches library science at USC, is familiar with his work and meets him at the crater, where Forrester detects radioactivity, prompting Sheriff Bogany (Walter Sande) to post some deputies, and infers that the meteor must be hollow.

   Forrester is invited to stay with Collins while it cools further, but as he joins Sylvia for a square dance in the social hall, Wash Perry (Bill Phipps), Salvatore (Jack Kruschen), and Alonzo Hogue (Paul Birch) see the cylinder unscrew, immolated with their white flag by a cobra-like appendage that emerges. At the dance, the lights, phone, and watches all go dead; with his watch magnetized and a compass now pointing to the gully, Forrester has Bogany alert the military after they see the men’s ashes and another cylinder descending. Marine Colonel Ralph Heffner (Vernon Rich) surrounds the gully as Canada’s Professor McPherson (Edgar Barrier) confirms the reports of cylinders falling in European nations.

   After much activity in the gully and the arrival of Major General Mann (Les Tremayne), with reports of mass destruction spreading worldwide, the Martian war machine arises, a manta-ray-shaped craft made of copper and designed by co-art director (with Hal Pereira) Albert Nozaki, supported by three invisible legs of energy.

   Seeking to communicate with an advanced civilization he presumes is “nearer the Creator,” Collins approaches, a Bible held high, reciting Psalm 23, only to be mown down. During a fruitless attack, exploding shells reveal impenetrable electromagnetic domes; as Mann races to warn Washington of their meson-neutralizing energy beam, Heffner is killed leading a doomed holding action.

   The military plane in which Forrester and Sylvia are fleeing crashes, so they take refuge in a deserted farmhouse, where she relates wandering off as a child, waiting in a church for “the one who loved me best,” Uncle Matthew, to find her. As in the novel, the house is hit by a falling cylinder and penetrated by a tentacle; Forrester chops off the tri-colored electronic eye it bears and scares away the diminutive, spindly Martian (Charles Gemora) that touches her shoulder. During “the rout of civilization [and] massacre of humanity,” with its torrents of refugees, Washington is the only “unassailed strategic point,” at which Mann is informed of the decision to use the atom bomb, to be monitored by Pacific Tech.

   Forrester and Sylvia finally arrive with the eye and her scarf, soaked with Martian blood that Dr. Duprey (Ann Codee) says is extremely anemic. Bilderbeck attributes their light-sensitivity to Mars’s weaker sunlight, noting that “everything about them seems to be in threes”; Dr. James (Alex Frazer) connects the eye to a projector, so they see themselves from the Martians’ distorted viewpoint.

   With all radio dead, reporter Paul Frees, later of The Time Machine, makes tape-recordings for the benefit of posterity, “if any,” and as the bomb is shrugged off, L.A. is evacuated, with Mann vowing to fight on with whatever the scientists can develop—but their instrument-filled truck is seized en route to the Rockies.

   The impressive scenes of the exodus alternate the spectacles of streets choked with cars and people, literally heading for the hills, or empty and strewn with debris, while the mob separates Sylvia from the scientists. Forrester searches for her as the Martians decimate the city, with extremely detailed miniatures, and finally finds her, as he knew he would, in the Reverend Bethany’s (Russ Conway) church; suddenly, silence breaks out as a war machine crashes into the street, a sight that we learn is swiftly repeated around the world. Forrester watches its hatch open above the rubble and an arm bearing three digits—each tipped with what looks like a suction cup—slowly emerge, pulsate briefly, then lie limp.

   Hardwicke explains, “The Martians had no resistance to the bacteria in our atmosphere to which we have long since become immune [so they] began to kill them”; his closing line, again almost verbatim from Wells, completes a religious motif.

   Said Haskin, “I was as responsible as anybody for a lot of the major turns [from sometime atheist Wells]. The constant re-occurrence of the religious note came from having nobody solving our final dilemma but God. It became expedient to ring a few church bells to get some kind of ominous feel to the goddamn thing.” When Bilderbeck says, “the Martians can conquer the Earth in six days,” Sylvia points out, “The same number of days it took to create it.”

   Although DeMille chose not to make the film himself, he heartily endorsed his friend Pal as producer, rendering every support possible; Pal and associate producer Frank Freeman, Jr.—another of his champions, and the son of Paramount head Y. Frank Freeman—have cameos as bums listening to a radio news broadcast. The grateful Pal also asked DeMille to narrate, but in declining, he suggested Hardwicke, a veteran of Wells’s Things to Come (1936) and an apt choice to read his fellow Englishman’s words. In an early, and perhaps wisely abandoned, plan, the last portion of the film was to have been shot in 3-D, with the audience donning their glasses as the cast did their protective goggles before the a-bomb.

   In 1988, in dubious homage, Trace Beaulieu debuted as mad scientist Clayton Forrester on the perennial Mystery Science Theater 3000, while the two-season syndicated series The War of the Worlds premiered; Robinson returned as Sylvia in this continuation of the film, positing that the aliens—retconned as coming from Mor-Tax, not Mars—had been in suspended animation.

   She and Barry also had cameos as the grandparents in Steven Spielberg’s big-budget 2005 remake with Tom Cruise, which restored elements such as the red weed, the harvesting of blood (to fertilize it), and an analog of the curate. Yet it seems safe to say that as the granddaddy of alien invasions, this War will go on forever.
      
   

Up next: The First Men in the Moon
   

Sources/works consulted:

Asimov, Isaac, afterword to The War of the Worlds, pp. 206-215.

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).

Haskin, Byron, Byron Haskin: A Directors Guild of America Oral History, interviewed by Joe Adamson (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1984).

Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb)

Von Gunden, Kenneth, and Stuart H. Stock, Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films (New York: Arlington House, 1982).

Warren, Bill, Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (2 volumes; Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1982-6).

Wells, H.G., The War of the Worlds (New York: Signet Classic, 1986).

Wikipedia
   
   

Online sources

https://archive.org/details/the-war-of-the-worlds_202301.

   

   Portions of this article originally appeared on Bradley on Film.