The War of the Worlds (1953): The Martian-Invasion Technicolor Landmark

The first time I saw The War of the Worlds it was a pan-and-scan afternoon broadcast on a television that made Technicolor look like weak squash, and even through that filter one thing came across: somebody had spent money here. Real money. The 1950s science-fiction shelf in any video shop was a wall of grey — grey monsters, grey deserts, grey stock footage of the Nevada tests — and then this. Green fire. Copper skies. A machine the colour of a beetle’s back sliding over a hillside while everything underneath it turned to ash.

That contrast is the whole reason the film still matters. Byron Haskin directed it, Barré Lyndon adapted it, and George Pal produced it for Paramount in 1953 with a budget somewhere around two million dollars — an absurd sum to hand a genre that Hollywood filed next to the serials. It won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects the following year. The award mattered less than the precedent: Paramount had proved that an invasion picture could be a prestige product, and everyone who wanted to make one afterwards had to reckon with what Pal had put on screen.

The adaptation nobody expected to survive

Wells published the novel in 1898. It is a Victorian book about Surrey — Woking, Horsell Common, the Thames valley — and it is fundamentally about the British Empire being invaded by something that regards Britain the way Britain regarded Tasmania. Lyndon’s screenplay moves all of it to contemporary Southern California and turns the anonymous narrator into Dr Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry), an atomic physicist on a fishing holiday, with Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson) as the library-science lecturer who ends up running beside him for ninety minutes.

Purists have been furious about this since 1953, and I understand the fury while disagreeing with the verdict. The relocation costs the book its argument — the colonial mirror is gone, and what replaces it is a Cold War civil-defence scenario where the United States military is competent, organised, and comprehensively useless. That trade is a real loss. What the relocation buys is immediacy, and in 1953 immediacy was the point. Orson Welles had already proved on radio in 1938 that this story detonates when you set it down the road from the listener. Pal simply applied the same principle with a camera.

The bigger change is the machines. Wells gave the Martians tripods: hundred-foot walkers on three legs. Paramount’s effects department, led by Gordon Jennings, tried to build them and could not make legs move convincingly at that scale — an honest engineering defeat that produced the best design decision in 1950s science fiction. Art director Al Nozaki drew a manta ray instead: a copper-green wing, glowing wingtips, and a gooseneck rising from the hull with a single glass eye on the end, moving with the deliberation of a cobra deciding. The machines hover. Wells’s tripods are terrifying because they stride; Nozaki’s are terrifying because they glide, silently, with no visible means of support, at exactly the height where they can look into a first-floor window.

Why the war machines still work

The effects are hanging from wires. You can see the wires. Prints have been cleaned up considerably over the decades, but in some shots the suspension is plain, and the sparking discharge at the wingtips was there partly to sell the electromagnetic-leg idea and partly to burn attention away from the rig. This ought to be fatal. It is not, and the reason is worth understanding, because it is the same reason the puppet in Jaws works when it works.

The machines are almost never in a neutral shot. They arrive in the top of the frame, over a hill, in the corner of a windscreen, at the edge of a crowd — always entering, always higher than the human eye line, always briefly. Haskin cuts to the reaction before the eye can start auditing the miniature. And when they do the killing, the camera is on the target. The heat ray does not read as a beam so much as an event that happens to a human being: a man, a flash of green, an ashen silhouette, gone. There is a famous sequence early on in which three men walk towards the first buried cylinder with a white flag and a friendly speech, and the film disposes of them with a brutality that has nothing to do with gore. It is the abruptness. Wells’s Martians are not cruel; they are indifferent, and indifference on screen is a matter of timing.

The other half is a genuine skeleton beam — a second weapon that dismantles rather than incinerates — and here the film shows its hand as a piece of design thinking. Two weapons, two visual grammars, so the destruction never becomes monotonous. Compare almost any modern invasion film, which has one beam and forty minutes of it.

The sound is the special effect

Ask anyone who saw this young what they remember and they will not describe a shot. They will make the noise. The heat-ray sound is the single most reproduced piece of audio design in the genre after the Psycho strings, and the account that has followed it for seventy years is that Paramount’s sound department built it from electric guitars recorded and played backwards, layered and treated. Whatever the exact recipe, the result is a sound with no mechanical referent at all — nothing in it suggests a gun, an engine, or a fire. It suggests an intention. It rises before it strikes, which means the film can start killing you a full second before the image does anything, and Haskin uses that lead time constantly.

The war machines’ hum works the same way. A vehicle that hovers should have an engine note; this one has a tone, closer to a struck wine glass than a turbine, and it means the sound editors can bring the Martians into a scene with no cut and no shadow. In a film whose visual effects were state of the art and are now visibly of their moment, the sound has not aged at all. That is usually how it goes. Craft in the mix outlives craft in the optical printer.

Sitting alongside it is a prologue that would be laughed out of a modern development meeting: Cedric Hardwicke narrating a tour of the solar system over astronomical paintings, explaining planet by planet why the Martians had to come here. It is a lecture. It works because it is a lecture — it establishes, before a single character appears, that the film’s authority is scientific rather than dramatic, and it borrows the visual dignity of Chesley Bonestell’s space art, which was doing more for the public imagination of space travel in 1953 than any film had managed.

The case against

The people are cardboard. Forrester is a pipe and a briefcase; Sylvia exists to be frightened and to say the thing about her uncle. Wells’s narrator has an interior life and a marriage that the book takes seriously; the film’s romance is contractual. When the picture pauses to let its leads talk, the air goes out of it, and Haskin plainly knows this, because he pauses as rarely as he can get away with.

Its politics are also of their moment in a way that grates. The military response is presented as noble and rational, the crowd panic as the real disgrace, and there is a strain of civil-defence propaganda running under the surface that is a great deal more comfortable with authority than Wells ever was. The film is missing the novel’s coldest idea entirely: the artilleryman’s speech, the vision of humanity living in drains and being farmed. Nothing that bleak survived the adaptation.

And the ending — the ending is doing something the novel refuses to do, which we will come to below the line.

What it fathered, and what it inherited

The real ancestor here is Pal’s own production line rather than any other invasion film. He had made Destination Moon in 1950 and When Worlds Collide in 1951, and the through-line is a producer who believed the audience wanted the apocalypse rendered accurately and in colour. When Worlds Collide is the direct technical parent — same studio, same effects department, same conviction that a matte painting of a drowning city is worth more than a monster suit.

The interesting sibling is the film Pal did not make. Two years earlier, The Day the Earth Stood Still had put a saucer on a Washington lawn and delivered a sermon about human violence; the same year as Pal’s Martians, Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space proposed aliens who wanted nothing from us at all. 1953 gave the genre both answers simultaneously, and the fact that the frightened one made more money tells you which way the decade was heading. Three years on, Invasion of the Body Snatchers moved the invasion indoors and made the effects budget irrelevant.

For the Wells idea done with actual intellectual nerve, the film to chase is Quatermass and the Pit, which buries the Martians in the archaeological record and lets them explain us to ourselves. Pal’s picture has none of that ambition. What it has is the image, and the image was strong enough that Steven Spielberg spent 2005 arguing with it, and gave both Gene Barry and Ann Robinson a cameo by way of paying the debt.

Where to find it: Paramount has kept it in print continuously, and the restorations have been kind to the Technicolor, which is where the whole argument lives. Watch it in colour or do not bother.

Spoilers below

The Martians lose to bacteria. Wells wrote that in 1898 as the sharpest joke in the book — the invaders are undone by “the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth,” and Wells, a biologist by training, meant the microbes as biology. The machines fail because Mars has no immunity, and the point is that the universe is not organised around anybody’s intentions, ours included.

The 1953 film keeps the bacteria and changes what they mean. The final act drives Forrester through a burning Los Angeles looking for Sylvia, and he finds her in a church, in the third church he tries, because that is where the survivors have gone. The machines come down over the city, one falters, a wing dips, a hatch opens, a hand fails. And the narration closes on the same line about the humblest things — with God moved to the centre of the sentence and given the credit.

That is a substantial theft from Wells, and I have gone back and forth on it for years. It converts a piece of Darwinian irony into providence: humanity is saved by prayer with a bacteriological delivery mechanism. Wells would have loathed it. The bells over the ending, the choir, the congregation standing in the rubble — it is a 1953 American picture doing 1953 American things, and the honest reading is that Paramount wanted the audience to leave comforted.

Here is why I still defend the sequence. It is staged as exhaustion rather than triumph. Nobody wins anything. The armies did nothing; the atomic bomb, dropped from a flying wing onto the machines in one of the film’s genuinely great images, did nothing at all — the fireball clears and they simply walk out of it, and the film lets that failure sit for a long, quiet beat. By the time the hatch opens and that grey hand crawls out and stops, the last hour has methodically removed every human capability from the board. Whatever you make of the church, the film has earned the position that we were not saved by anything we did.

The Martian we actually see — glimpsed once, in a farmhouse, in a mirror, and once more at the very end — is the other reason the ending holds. It is a fragile, three-fingered, tri-coloured thing that looks like it would break in a strong wind. All that armour was hiding something that could not survive a cold. Wells’s joke survives after all, buried under the choir.