Saturday Matinee: Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever

Summary

History Daily Podcast Summary

Podcast Information:

• Title: History Daily
• Host/Author: Airship | Noiser | Wondery
• Episode: Saturday Matinee: Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever
• Release Date: March 8, 2025

Introduction

In this engaging episode of History Daily, host Lindsay Graham delves into the rich tapestry of science fiction cinema, focusing specifically on the 1953 film adaptation of H.G. Wells's seminal work, War of the Worlds. Through insightful discussions with esteemed guests Keith Williams and Ian Scott, the episode explores how this iconic film reflects and critiques the sociopolitical climate of its time, particularly the Cold War era.

Overview of the Episode

The episode titled "Saturday Matinee: Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever" investigates the 1953 adaptation of War of the Worlds, examining its historical context, thematic depth, and enduring legacy. Hosted by Lindsay Graham, the discussion features Keith Williams, a Reader in English Literature at the University of Dundee, and Ian Scott, a Professor of American Film and History at the University of Manchester. Together, they analyze the film's departure from the original Victorian novel, its portrayal of contemporary anxieties, and its influence on subsequent science fiction narratives.

Discussion Topics

1. H.G. Wells and War of the Worlds Background

   • Keith Williams underscores H.G. Wells's pivotal role in shaping modern science fiction, describing him as "the grandfather of modern science fiction" ([05:11]). He elaborates on how Wells's works, particularly War of the Worlds, serve as foundational texts that critique Victorian society and imperialism.

2. 1938 Radio Play by Orson Welles

   • The episode touches upon Orson Welles's groundbreaking radio adaptation of War of the Worlds ([12:01]). Ian Scott highlights its innovative use of the medium, presenting the invasion as a series of disruptive news bulletins that blurred the lines between fiction and reality, thereby amplifying public panic and showcasing the potential of media to influence society.

3. 1953 Film Adaptation

   a. Themes and Cold War Context

   • Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, the 1953 film adaptation mirrors the era's pervasive paranoia and anti-communist sentiments. Ian Scott notes, "In 1953, America was in a state of very, very severe flux" ([16:56]), describing how fears of communism and the threat of nuclear warfare permeated American consciousness and were reflected in the film's narrative.

   b. Differences from the Book

   • Keith Williams contrasts the film with Wells's original novel, emphasizing the shift from an internal critique of British imperialism to an external threat symbolizing Soviet communism. He observes, "If we see the book as a satire of British colonial policy... the film is projecting things out externally" ([19:08]).

   c. Representation of Religion and Science

   • The film juxtaposes faith and science, portraying scientists as heroes while religious figures are depicted with ambivalence. Keith remarks on the character of the curate, who embodies Victorian religious dogma, ultimately meeting a tragic end ([05:14], [34:37]). This dichotomy reflects the era's tension between scientific progress and traditional beliefs.

   d. Depiction of American Society

   • The film presents an idealized version of American life, set in a quintessential Californian town. Ayesha Khan points out the absence of diverse racial representation, noting, "there's a kind of a native slash, you know, Mexican person in the film, which is quite rare for films at this time... he doesn't last very long" ([23:57]). This reflects the 1950s American societal norms and the burgeoning civil rights movement on the horizon.

   e. Special Effects and Legacy

   • Celebrated for its innovative special effects, the 1953 adaptation won an Academy Award, though subsequent transfers degraded its quality. Ian Scott emphasizes the restoration efforts, stating, "the 4K version... the effects are given a real lease of life" ([42:29]). The film's legacy endures, influencing countless subsequent sci-fi works and setting a benchmark for special effects in cinema.

4. 2005 Spielberg Remake

   • The discussion transitions to Steven Spielberg's 2005 remake of War of the Worlds. Keith Williams initially viewed the film as lacking thematic cohesion but grew to appreciate its critique of the "war on terror" and the overreaction to external threats ([43:41]). Ian Scott praises Spielberg's focus on common people in extraordinary situations, paralleling the original film's themes of individual struggle and resilience ([46:29]).

5. Legacy and Influence on Later Films

   • The guests explore how the 1953 film has influenced modern science fiction, citing examples like Independence Day and J.J. Abrams's Star Trek series. Keith highlights Spielberg's nods to the original adaptation, while Ian draws connections to Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, noting the philosophical undertones that echo Wells's original themes ([49:40], [50:18]).

6. Recommendations by Guests for Further Viewing

   • Ian Scott recommends John Frankenheimer's 1962 The Manchurian Candidate for its incisive deconstruction of American societal threats from within ([52:43]). Keith Williams suggests the Ray Bradbury-scripted It Came From Outer Space, emphasizing its unique portrayal of extraterrestrial perspectives and human reactions ([56:22]).

Notable Quotes

• Keith Williams: "His role is absolutely pivotal. Of course... War of the Worlds is one of the absolutely pivotal, well, foundational texts of modern science fiction." ([05:11])
• Ian Scott: "It's a real state of turmoil at that particular time." ([16:56])
• Keith Williams: "If we see the book as a satire of British colonial policy... the film is projecting things out externally." ([19:08])
• Ayesha Khan: "It's very interesting because the two kind of... you know, it critically deals with both empire, colonialism and... religion." ([22:26])
• Keight Williams: "It's certainly echoed in the Spielberg in various ways." ([49:03])
• Ian Scott: "Spielberg's great affinity with his audience is also the thing that generally critics don't like about him so much." ([46:29])

Conclusion

This episode of History Daily offers a profound exploration of the 1953 War of the Worlds film, situating it within its historical context and dissecting its thematic elements. Through the expert insights of Keith Williams and Ian Scott, listeners gain a deeper understanding of how science fiction serves as a mirror to societal anxieties and political climates. The discussion not only honors the legacy of H.G. Wells but also traces the enduring impact of his work on generations of filmmakers and audiences alike. Whether you're a sci-fi aficionado or a history enthusiast, this episode provides a compelling narrative that bridges the past with the present, illustrating the timeless relevance of speculative fiction.

Additional Recommendations:

• John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
• Ray Bradbury's It Came From Outer Space

For more detailed discussions and to follow the podcast's journey through every single sci-fi film ever, be sure to subscribe and leave a rating or review. Share the episode with fellow history and sci-fi enthusiasts to spread the knowledge of how these narratives shape and reflect our understanding of the world.

Transcript

[Narrator]

There are more ways than ever to listen to History Daily ad free. Listen with Wondry plus in the Wondery app as a member of Noiser plus at noiser.com or in Apple Podcasts. Or you can get all of History Daily plus other fantastic history [e-mail] if history is the study of the past, what then is the study of the future? Well, it's futures study, or futurology, defined as the study of postulating possible, probable and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. But is this discipline any better than gazing at a crystal ball worth any more than a tarot reading? What separates the science of the future from science fiction? I am not qualified to answer, but there is a curious feature in our thinking about the future. We've always been doing it. We have a long history of futurology, and our evolving thoughts on the future can tell us a great deal about ourselves throughout history. So let me introduce today's Saturday Matinee from a podcast that seeks to write a history of the future as told in the past, a show titled Every Single Sci Fi Film Ever. Today we're investigating the 1953 film adaptation of the War of the Worlds, based on the seminal H.G. wells book from 1897. So what can we learn about history through a Cold War era telling of a Victorian story? I hope you enjoy. While you're listening, be sure to search for and follow every single Sci Fi film ever. Put a link in the show notes to make it easy for you.

[Keith Williams]

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[Narrator]

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[Orson Welles]

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 Earth, comes the War of the World.

[Ayesha Khan]

Hello and welcome to every single sci fi film ever. I'm Ayesha Khan. Today we'll be talking about 1953's War of the Worlds, which was directed by Byron Haskin and produced by George Powell. They would go on to work together in 1955's Conquest of Space and 1960, 68's the Power. And then George Powell would go on to direct the time machine in 1960. Both the war of the World and the Time Machine are based on works by H.G. wells. To put things into context, the year prior, in 1952, the highest grossing film was the Greatest show on Earth. It was also the year Singing in the Rain was released, as well as one of my personal favorites, High Noon starring Gary Cooper. I just wanted to mention, if any of you are now looking to go into physical media like I am, then there is a wonderful service provided by Scarecrow Video, which someone recommended to me on social media. Unfortunately, it is USA based, so it does not help me. But if you are in the USA and you would like to receive DVDs and Blu Rays like it's the 1990s, you can check out their website and they have multiple copies of a lot of the films that we are and will be talking about. So do check them out. On to my wonderful guests. Keith Williams is a reader in English literature at the University of Dundee, where he runs the science fiction program. He's also the author of H.G. wells Modernity and Movies. Welcome back to the show, Keith. How are you?

[Keith Williams]

I'm very well, but wonderful to be back.

[Ayesha Khan]

Wonderful. Ian Scott is a professor of American film and History at the University of Manchester. He has written extensively on film and politics in Hollywood. Welcome to the show, Ian. How are you?

[Ian Scott]

I'm very well. Thanks very much for having me.

[Ayesha Khan]

Okay, I wanted to start first with Keith, who is a big HG Wells enthusiast. Is that fair to say, Keith?

[Keith Williams]

Yes, I think that's fair to say.

[Ayesha Khan]

Can we talk a little bit about his place in science fiction history to begin with? Because he has this kind of very long shadow is the way I would describe it.

[Keith Williams]

Yes. I mean, his role is absolutely pivotal. Of course. You know, people talk about him being, I don't know, the grandfather of modern science fiction and that there's a certain amount of truth in that, although it requires kind of heavy, heavy qualification because he's also very much a product of his time and, you know, he's writing in a context where there are other scientific romances, as they would have been called at the time, who are, you know, feeding in and out of his work that, you know, he's also influenced by, but, you know, kind of outpacing in many respects as well. And of course, the War of the Worlds is one of the absolutely pivotal, well, foundational texts of modern science fiction.

[Ayesha Khan]

Something that's, you know, throughout the kind of 20th century and beyond, it carries on having an impact. I wanted to quickly mention the fantastic tripod Martian machines because they're not actually in the 1953 film, but, but they just feel like such a visionary kind of like what an imagination to come up with these kind of metallic, tripod, quite terrifying beings. And the drawings, which I will add on, actually I'll have to add it on Instagram, are really fantastic from, from that period.

[Keith Williams]

Yes, they are astonishing. And they're sort of quasi organic. You know, some science fiction historians regard Wells as, as it were, sort of foreshadowing the notion of cyborgism because the Martians are so much so integrated with their machines. I think they're described as wearing different bodies according to their needs. So their whole sort of biological makeup is enhanced physically and in terms of sort of their senses and their consciousness by this kind of integration into the machine.

[Ayesha Khan]

And if we can touch upon the book to begin with, because that is where the film originates, it's very. There's like a lot of commentary in there which I think obviously is missed in the film. But can you talk a bit about empire and religion and the various things about culture that are in the original text?

[Keith Williams]

Absolutely. Well, the text isn't just a kind of ripping science fiction yarn that, you know, shifts the, the Victorian invasion novel genre onto an interplanetary plane. It's also a full on assault on Victorian society and on its key institutions. You know, so the, it's made very pretty explicit right from the beginning of the narrative that, you know, the imagining a world on the other side of this Martian invasion has caused a kind of collapse in what's taken for granted in Victorian society and that kind of high imperial ideology at the time. I think the narrator refers to it as the Great Disillusionment. And a lot of the characters are essentially personifications of Institutions that Wells is putting under the microscope and finding wanting. So the curate, for example, who seems to personify a. A kind of creationist perspective that's being trashed by this new kind of Darwinian cosmology and the artilleryman who represents the British military and its kind of asymmetrical advantages against colonized peoples.

[Ayesha Khan]

And before we judge of them too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought. And then he goes on to talk about the Tasmanians and that's. It just feels like a very, you know, like a very harsh criticism for kind of a Victorian era writer.

[Keith Williams]

Oh, absolutely. The book itself caused a tremendous shock. It wasn't just as it was, you know, sort of read because it was sensational and exciting. But, you know, it's published or serialized in the year of Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. So, you know, this idea that the British Empire is going to be knocked off its perch as sort of planetary top dog and subjected, as it were, to a kind of table turning in which, you know, the very heartland of the empire is subjected to, you know, the experience that colonized peoples might have experienced at the expanding frontiers, I think is really not pulling its punches and it's kind of easily lost. You know, that critique, as it were, of the state or the nation, you know, is easily lost in some of the more effects rich and ideas poor adaptations that have taken place subsequently.

[Ayesha Khan]

It is interesting because you talk about the curate because. So the curate is some kind of religious figure who is. I mean, H.G. wells are spared. No. Kind of like he's such an annoying character that you can't help but absolutely despise him. But at the same time he does go on to. Towards the end, he goes on to pray for his wife. So I think there's. Is that a balancing of. I mean, people talk about issue Wells as a secularist. Now, did he have a personal faith or was it just one of those things that it was of the time or is he just desperate that he's, you know, praying? What. How do you read that?

[Keith Williams]

I think it's a mixture of all of those. In a sense, you know, Wells own trajectory is agnostic, but he's, you know, as his writing career develops, you know, he does retain a strong sense of kind of awe at, you know, whatever it is that lies behind the cosmos, whatever it is that set, you know, sort of creation and life going. But, you know, he's also part of that kind of Darwinian assault on a creationist cosmology. And the curate appears to Kind of personify the sort of the shortcomings of that. Which, of course, are right at the heart of the great intellectual crisis of the 19th century. We see it reflected in Victorian literature and culture at just about every level.

[Ayesha Khan]

Thank you for that. I just wanted to go on to the War of the Worlds radio play by Orson Welles. We'll touch upon it briefly because we also touched upon it in the Invisible man episode. Actually, let's go to Ian now, because, Ian, I think you were saying that each War of the Worlds rendition has its own kind of political landscape. What was happening around the time of the Orson Welles play in 1938?

[Ian Scott]

Yeah, I think one of the things that was most important, wasn't it for the radio play, somebody like Orson Welles was very attuned to the way in which the media and the technology was changing so rapidly. It was going to kind of influence people. It was going to change the kind of landscape of the way in which entertainment, the arts worked. So, you know, Wells was Wells, which Wells was almost as much ahead. Yeah, exactly. Wells was almost as much ahead of his time as Wells. I mean, they famously met, I think, a couple of years later, didn't they? Is that right?

[Keith Williams]

1940, 41.

[Ian Scott]

Yeah, yeah. So they sort of had a quick meeting a few years later at sort of Swapp Notes with each other, and I think there was a clear sort of simpatico there between them and understanding, you know, I mean, one of the great dilemmas, of course, for film in wanting to option a book like War of the Worlds was there just wasn't the technology there to film it for a long period of time. The thing about the radio play and. And if you hear it, the thing that's so clever with Wells, is it any conventional take on it would do a kind of narration of the story. And he's not doing that. What he does is he sets it up like it's a sort of everyday evening broadcast and there's music and conversation going on, and he interrupts it periodically with these ever more hysterical headlines of what's happening outside.

[Orson Welles]

Ladies and gentlemen, I've just been handed a message that came in from Grover's Mill by telephone. Just one moment, please. At least 40 people, including six state troopers, lie dead in a field east of the village of Grover's Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition.

[Keith Williams]

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[Ian Scott]

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[Keith Williams]

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[Ian Scott]

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[Keith Williams]

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[Ian Scott]

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[Keith Williams]

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[Ian Scott]

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[Ian Scott]

So easy to see then, isn't it? Why suddenly people arriving at their radio who hadn't heard the start, which was saying, this is a broadcast of H.G. wells. It's war of the World. Then thinking, well, what's going on here? Why does the program keep getting interrupted? What on earth is this reporter telling us? What's going on in New York at the moment? So, you know, he was very, very sharp in the way that he could conceive of technology reaching into people's homes and stirring their imagination right from the off. That's the genie. I mean, it's a 60 minute program, you know, and it's disproportionate influence over the years is, is just, you know, tremendous. And it's just an influence on so many other ways of constructing that sort of scenario, that sort of disaster scenario. Everybody's copied it in science fiction film, in other radio plays. Wells himself said he owed a debt to a few other radio shows that had kind of done a bit of what he'd done already. So, yeah, I mean, tremendously influential and a big effect on, on the media. You know, I mean, this is an era where in politics, Franklin Roosevelt was using fireside chats. The radio was a means to propagandize politics and society, to influence people, to reach into their homes in a way that you simply hadn't had an opportunity to before. Wells understood all of that and what was coming next, particularly in the war.

[Ayesha Khan]

Okay, so let's talk about the climate of 1953 now. So we've covered the book, we've covered 1938, and now we are in 1953. So I'm going To switch it around this time. Ian, tell us a bit about what the US was like in 1953 in.

[Ian Scott]

A couple of words. Paranoia, panic, conspiracy theories beginning to abound. Communism, anti communism. The investigations, of course, by the House on American Activities Committee. You know, it was in a state of very, very severe flux. You know, this, this was a nation that felt itself battling, you know, good versus evil in, in an absolutist sense. You know, not just in a sort of metaphorical, you know, we're, we're, you know, we're, we're on the side of, of the angels and, you know, everything that's been constructed in the post World War II fabric of society is what we're aiming for. They thought that, you know, the Soviet Union and, and Communism was out to completely ruin the, the whole infrastructure of society life as we know it. So it was a kind of battle of good versus evil. And when you throw into that, you know, the, the symbolism and metaphor that you can use for a whole series, particularly of cinematic genres, you know, you don't just need to, and as you know, you don't simply need to turn your attention to science fiction, say, think about a classic American cinematic genre, the Western. Plenty of anti communist allegories going on in Westerns at the time, film noir. Plenty of things happening there that are touching on evil, on the kind of divisions happening in society. Throw California into the mix and you've got an even more interesting kind of atmosphere going on at the time. You know, you're just past the point in which HUAC visited Hollywood. The inquisitions in Hollywood had led to blacklisting. The divisions in the film industry were very acute in the early 1950s. And you're barely a year away from the army hearings that Joe McCarthy is going to start running on Capitol Hill in Congress. It's a real state of turmoil at that particular time.

[Ayesha Khan]

Keith, can you tell us a bit about, because you mentioned earlier, the difference between the book and the film. And so the film now takes a very different turn, I think, from. Can you talk a bit about those themes that have been flipped around?

[Keith Williams]

Yes, absolutely. If we see the book as a kind of satire of British colonial policy, if you are going to make a film adaptation where the Martians are kind of coded as the Soviet threat, whether that's in Korea or whether that's in Europe, then you're sort of projecting things out externally. The threat comes from outside rather than from the dehumanization that results from kind of imperialistic policies that kind of affects us all. So I Think there's a sense in which, at least on the surface, this particular adaptation is drawing a kind of moral immunity to the subtext and kind of, as it were, trying to keep the symbolism ideologically in line with what Ian has just been talking about in relation to moral absolutism. America is a providential nation with a manifest destiny, as it were, and then there's this kind of external threat from godless communism. And we're talking about moral absolutes here, good and evil, in the way that we might have been able to talk about them in relation to Nazism ten years before that, before the Cold War. So it's not that Welles isn't channeling topical sort of references to the contemporary arms race between the Great Powers, between Britain and Germany. There are touches of that in the War of the Worlds which are very explicit. The initial news reports of the landing in Woking, we're told in the book, excite less interest than they would do if an ultimatum had been issued between the British and the Germans. So that kind of external threat is also there. And it's very much part of the invasion novel genre that Wells is drawing on and which he's sort of, if you like, undermining the jingoism in. But I think in the 1953 film, you know, there is a kind of modern equivalent to that jingoism, you know, sort of being reinstated within the context, the very febrile context of the time, if that makes any sense.

[Ayesha Khan]

Yeah, it's interesting because the two kind of. You know, it critically deals with both empire, colonialism and. Well, those are the kind of the same thing, and religion. But in the 1953, it's very much like, you know, it kind of does a little nod to the uk, so it has the. Has the Parliament there and going. Well, you know, they held out as long as they could, and now we're going to the us, to a. To a village in California, I think.

[Keith Williams]

That's right.

[Ayesha Khan]

And then it's like the new World power is there and. Yes, but it's kind of like this is. This is good. We. We are good. The new World power is great and. And religion is also very, very good. And it's interesting how both those themes are completely flipped to me.

[Keith Williams]

Yes, they're kind of unquestioned, at least on the surface of the film. Although I think the California setting, which Ian has just also referred to, is rather interesting in relation to the westward expansion of the States as a kind of inland empire. And there may be one or two sort of hints or sort of residual bits of that, you know, left in the film because of the setting that it's given, you know, in. In what would have been Greater Mexico, but which became part of. Part of the. Part of the state. We're also talking about a territory that would have been, you know, inhabited by indigenous peoples before, you know, the Spanish or the Americans took it over. So there is an imperial history there which is perhaps buried or repressed under the surface, but which may be a bit like the Martians coming out of the sky, but also sort of emerging from under the ground, is nonetheless not completely bottled up or at least has a kind of ambiguous resonance in the way the film works.

[Ayesha Khan]

And there is a kind of a native slash, you know, Mexican person in the film, which is quite rare for films at this time, which tend to be very, very whitewashed. But he doesn't last very long.

[Keith Williams]

No, he's vaporized as part of the peace delegation. But again, I think it's worth bearing in mind that one of the really interesting. You almost have to go to Woking to sort of realize this when you sort of walk about the district of the town where Wells lived, where he was writing the War of the Worlds. The district is called Maybury, and it had very unusual features in the 1880s and 1890s because there was an Oriental college there which attracted colonial people from all over the empire. It's essentially the embryo of the School for Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. And there's also one of the oldest mosques in Europe, which is still there.

[Ayesha Khan]

And that's mentioned in the book as well.

[Keith Williams]

Yeah, absolutely, several times. So on the streets of Mayberry in Woking, Welles would have been encountering the colonial other, as it were, on a mundane basis. He would have been very aware of those sort of imperial connections, as it were, coming home to sort of leafy suburban Surrey. So, again, if you set that alongside the Californian context of the film, there's something. There's a kind of absent presence there which is very intriguing.

[Ian Scott]

I think it's really interesting what Keith's saying, because I think that's absolutely right. There's a slight inversion in a way, because, of course, the California model, the California dream, is all about people going out west. The Manifest estimate, the idea. Keith just mentioned it. And that sense of being able to reinvent yourself in a way, you know, so that you get pictures in the film of a sort of multitude of different people. Of course, not a multitude of different races, particularly in any way, but you get kind of working People who are farmers and you get well to do people. And of course you got a scientist who works at a sort of invented American college there as well. But that's all part of that sense of a melting pot in California that has that dream paradise at its core. And therefore when it's threatened, that threatens something very instrumental, very systematic about the American dream overall. You know, here is the American way of life, the perfect American way of life in California being threatened by what goes on. The only thing I'd add from a cinematic point of view, I mean, there are pragmatics here of course, aren't there as well the industries in California? So therefore you start to film on location thinking, well, I can't really call it, you know, I'm not in New Jersey now, I spent a lot of.

[Ayesha Khan]

Budget on special effects. We need to go somewhere local.

[Ian Scott]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. I'm not going to build a set that looks like Chicago, so we might as well just call it small town California. So there's a bit of pragmatics there too, but allowing for that as well, you know, it's no coincidence, is it, that many other films surrounding War of the worlds in the 50s make something of that notion of the perfect Californian town and Californian landscape, but also that something, you know, something slightly disturbing is going on under the surface. So in them you've got giant ants and nuclear tests and things going on that the, the local populace don't know about. An Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You've got pods appearing in people's greenhouses and the town being taken out. So that, that sort of sense. Again, we're back a little bit to anti Communism, aren't we? Not just the physical but the mental inversion of the idea that your perfect democratic, freedom loving libertarian life is being challenged in some way.

[Keith Williams]

That kind of parochial microcosm of America is a very double edged thing. And I mean Wells certainly again, if you look into the background of his novel, he's also mounting a kind of assault on the sort of parochialism of suburban, of suburban Britain, which as in other texts like the Invisible man, is often very sort of closed minded and very repressive. I mean, Welles was living in sin with the woman who would become his second wife while writing the War of the Worlds and they came in for a lot of sort of snide and unfortunate behavior from their landlady and neighbours and so on. So that small mindedness is very much part of the kind of imaginative revenge that Wells is wreaking on his neighbors. He wrote letters that were very gleeful about that.

[Ayesha Khan]

Yeah, it's really interesting and a lot of these films and I'm really enjoying them, but I think this one really stood out in how very, very white it was. And I think it's because when you go to the end and he's searching for Sylvia amongst church to church and he's going around the town, I don't think there's a single non white face. And you just think, well, this is 1950s America. The Civil rights movement is about to start. And, you know, it's just a product of its time is what we kind of have to accept. Yeah. And not just with race, but also with sex. Because Sylvia, although she's, you know, she seems to have done a lot of scientific study. Her. Her two main jobs tend to be screaming hysterically or making hot tea for the army people who are around.

[Ian Scott]

You know, one of the very interesting things, Ayesha, about this portrayal of particularly Los Angeles film is very good at documenting the city's history and reinvention. It's constant and persistent changes that are taking place. One of the things that you see in the film as Gene Barry's character is running, you know, through what I perceive are, you know, streets closed on very early mornings and traffic closed off and stuff. And it's really effective, isn't it? It looks like that disaster zone and the city's been wiped clean of its population, etc. Etc. But you can see one of the things that was changing the evolution of the city, which also kind of is pinpointed a little bit in the film by the fact that then the highways outside Los Angeles are completely crowded and people are running away in their cars. You can see the trolleybus lines which were about to become extinct. The trolleybus was the main thoroughfare and arterial routes through the city in the 1910s, 20s and 30s. And almost everybody associates Los Angeles with the car because from the 1930s onwards they built highways through, around, over and about the city. And the trolleybus went into just decline very, very rapidly over only a couple of decades or so. But the trolleybus line stayed there for quite a long period of time, and they're still there. And they feature really fantastically and very poignantly in a number of films through that, through that period. But the link to that also is transportation was key in the way in which race and class broke down in the city. And it was true. You didn't necessarily see particular groups of people in particular parts of the city. The east side barrios Often had Mexican immigrants instilled us today. Although the multicultural nature of Los Angeles has completely changed. And of course South Central, which people would know and associate today with a different kind of Persona and atmosphere from the 90s through the 2000s was where the black population first came to reside. But places like Watts were middle class neighborhoods in the 1940s and 50s that then would only become ghettoized as the majority white population moved out to the west side. So that breakdown of city that, I mean the film's not really making much of a play on that, but it is there and you can see a reasoning why you get particular groups of people congregated together. You know, certain people were out of bounds on, on the city and not allowed there. And it's a very white anglicized church population that you see within the, the premises of the, of the churches that the, the Barry's character goes chasing after his, his group of scientists, doesn't it?

[Ayesha Khan]

Yeah. It's interesting because up until that point he seems to smile through the whole film like they're being attacked by aliens. That. So it's Dr. Forrester who said they're being attacked by aliens. They're blowing up a nuclear bomb to try and kill them. There's absolutely no hope that you know everything. And he's got a big GR face all the way through almost until towards the end I'm like he doesn't see, you know, maybe it's just because he's the hero. Nothing phases him until he, he loses the. Loses the potential love of his life. But I wanted to talk about the kind of this, the science, religion dichotomy briefly. So a lot of these sci fi films have evil scientists. And it's interesting because we've got the hero as a scientist in this film. And two episode, two episodes ago we covered the Thing from Another world in which Dr. Carrington is the one who, just like the priest in the War of the Worlds, wants to go and appease the aliens and make friends with them.

[Orson Welles]

And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

[Ayesha Khan]

But in the Thing from another world, Dr. Carrington is a very bad man. And in this the pastor who does exactly the same thing. We're supposed to feel a lot of empathy for him. Do you guys feel empathy for him? What are your thoughts?

[Keith Williams]

He's certainly presented as sort of admirable if slightly wrong headed because we all know what's going to happen. Even though he has this naive belief that the Martians will be higher beings also created by the Christian God, he's instantly vaporized. But there is something sort of noble about him in a way that there isn't an ability about the curate who's very querulous, who eats most of the food, who, you know, bursts into hysterics and actually endangers them both because there's a Martian base right next to where they're, right next to where they're hiding. So, you know, sort of religion and religious figures are kind of quasi rehabilitated.

[Orson Welles]

From the evil that grows ever nearer from the terror that soon will knock upon the very door of this, thy house. O Lord, we pray thee, grant us the miracle of Thy divine intervention.

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[Keith Williams]

A Reese's Peanut Butter cup sound experiment. We're looking to find the perfect way to hear Reese's so you'll buy more of them. Here we go. Reese's, Reese's, Reese's, Reese's, Reese's. Hey, get out of here, you little stinker.

[Ian Scott]

Reese's, Reese's.

[Narrator]

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

[Keith Williams]

That breathy one sounded very creepy, am I right? Since we've been talking about churches, that's exactly where the film ends. You know, whereas all churches and the mosque, you know, the Martians are ecumenical in their atheistic destruction of religious buildings. You know, human belief systems just don't mean anything to them. Whereas this film ends with people taking refuge in a church and realizing that, you know, by a kind of miracle the Martian craft are crashing outside it because, you know, the Martians have been exposed to earthly bacteria. The film obviously does use a voiceover at that point, which quotes Welles's words from the text. You know, humanity was saved. The Martians were slain by, you know, the smallest things that, you know, God in his wisdom have put upon the surface of the earth. But it's very filleted that particular speech is sort of decontextualized. And it's really interesting that, you know, on the subject of science, Forrester, when he's with the other scientists in the laboratory and they're looking at the Martian blood cells, has actually realized prior to that that they are dangerously anemic. That particular plot line could have gone either way really, because Forrester, I think is at one point, you know, when he's set upon by a crowd on his way to construct a kind of biological weapon against the Martians. That plotline is derailed. And instead we get this kind of the sort of faith of the American people in their manifest destiny is kind of is what saves them.

[Ian Scott]

You know, you're in a period now where that uneasy alliance between science and faith is being tested in American society quite substantially. You know, the, the film's faith in the atomic bomb being the ultimate weapon is proven false, of course. And it links a little bit, doesn't it, to, you know, everybody now has seen Christopher Nolan's film, but only a few might have known what Robert Oppenheimer's trajectory was in the post war years after the atomic bombs that ended the Pacific War. And Oppenheimer by now was dead set against the development of things like the hydrogen bomb. He'd been the superstar scientist on the COVID of Time magazine in the post war years. Now he was becoming this discredited figure. And it's very interesting what was going on in California again because the, the Pacific tech is meant to be, I one presumes Caltech by another name, California, Stanford as well, the University of California, all getting major money from the Defense Department and from the military in these years to develop weaponry, to develop new scientific discoveries. It's the birth of Silicon Valley. But what's so interesting about some of those scientists and some of those leading people who were right at the birth of Silicon Valley and where the technology industry was going was they also became associated with all sorts of dubious immoral practices. You know, this is where questions of eugenics came up in California society, which was a movement that had its, had its time in the post war years for a period of time. So that clash of these kind of belief systems, again, you might overplay it to suggest the film is very aware of those things. Things. But there's a hint of it in some way. You know, the military relies on the scientist at the end and the scientist knows, just as Keith was saying, the scientist knows. There's a, there's a weak link in the chain here. For the Martians and just hasn't, in the end, got the chance to exploit that. But, of course, then biological weaponry opens another can of worms, doesn't it? Where does that take you? You know, once you've got an atomic bomb and a hydrogen bomb and a biological weapon, then aren't you talking about the end of the world, whether you've got Martians coming or not? You know, and those questions are pretty pertinent for a whole host of these films during this period.

[Ayesha Khan]

Yeah. And it's interesting to see that 1953, America isn't really wrangling so much with its use of the nuclear bomb, because they're so happy to just roll it out again and how many. It's like 10 times stronger, I think, is what they say. And then they all sit and watch it as it goes off and does absolutely nothing to the Martians.

[Ian Scott]

Los Angeles people, residents were coming out in the middle of the night in the. In the late 40s and early 50s for the nuclear tests that were taking place in Nevada, which lit up the Southern Californian sky. You know, this was. Yeah, almost like it was the northern lights, you know, and we should go out and, you know, enjoy the spectacle coming along. Forget where, you know, the radiation might take us in future years.

[Ayesha Khan]

Very interesting. Thank you. Okay, let's talk a little bit about the look and feel of the film. So we don't have tripods. We have. And we also don't have flying saucers. There's a lot of flying saucers around, and they made a conscious decision to not go with the flying saucers.

[Keith Williams]

The manta ray, like Martian craft, the tripod legs are sort of still there in the film.

[Ayesha Khan]

They're supposed to be invisible, aren't they?

[Keith Williams]

But. That's right. They've been turned into kind of electromagnetic forces that these craft are sort of hovering on. I think they're rendered briefly visible at one point. But, you know, the film deliberately sort of bucks the flying saucer trend without quite letting go of it at the same time. And obviously strives to kind of modernize, you know, Wells biomechanical walking machines, and actually comes up with something that is really quite iconic, you know, quite beautiful, in a sense. Although Wells also imagined manta ray like flying machines in other texts, there's one in the War in the Air, for example.

[Ayesha Khan]

Very interesting. And this film did win an Academy Award for its special effects.

[Keith Williams]

Yes.

[Ayesha Khan]

But Ian was saying that I think he saw some kind of slightly dodgy renditions of this film, because if you don't see it in its full Glorious Technicolor original. Apparently there's some kind of degradation of the effects.

[Ian Scott]

There absolutely is, yeah. I mean the transfer of the print over the years onto video and television companies brought it up, you know, definitely kind of contributed to the film having that rather more grainy B movie feel to it. But actually if you now see it in the restoration, in the 4K version, you actually see how impressive it is. That's actually very true of. Of a lot of movies that have been, you know, not assigned classic status and not necessarily made by, you know, so called auteur directors that actually the quality of filmmaking, the quality of the cinematography, even on movies that didn't. I mean War of the Worlds did comparatively cost a little bit of money. Much of it was going into special effects. But you actually see real quality filmmaking going on there. And by going back to the original remastering the print, it looks pretty impressive actually. I mean the effects are given a real lease of life I think, aren't they?

[Ayesha Khan]

Absolutely. Can we talk about the 2005 remake? I'll start with you, Keith. This time.

[Keith Williams]

Yes. The Spielberg, the post 911 version, as.

[Ayesha Khan]

It'S often, very often referred to, I think.

[Keith Williams]

Yes, that's right. Yeah. This was a kind of slow burn thing for me in the sense that I saw it originally at the cinema and thought, you know, it was that there wasn't enough of a kind of thematic critical mass for the film to really cohere or to make some kind of impressive point. But I think that over the years and on kind of re watching I've become a little bit more positive about it in the sense that again, it isn't just a film which is about an external threat. The sort of the unnamed aliens from the unnamed planet, as kind of allegorical Al Qaeda as it were, but also that notion of a kind of overreaction to terrorism, the so called war on terror, the American foreign policy which resulted in a kind of cure that was worse than the disease in sort of destabilizing large parts of the Middle east and the world and not really as it were addressing the problem. I think we see elements of that in the film and again I suppose modeled on what Welles does with the curate and the Artilleryman. We've got that figure, Tim Robbins. Yeah, the Tim Robbins figure who seems to be a kind of composite of the two. You know, he's. He's both gung ho like the Artilleryman and a kind of religious fanatic like, like the curate. And again, you know, he, he's his, his reaction his belief, as it were, that we've got to go out and take these, Mark, take these aliens head on with shotguns and whatever we've got, you know, that that kind of gung ho reaction is actually a danger to the central character and his family. It's going to make the situation worse, you know, is going to get them all killed. You know, so we see Tom Cruise but basically, you know, taking him into another room and then emerging having clearly bumped him off or whatever to prevent, you know, this kind of hysterical reaction, endangering his, you know, his family, his daughter.

[Ayesha Khan]

I think you said something similar about your kind of trajectory of, of being kind of lukewarm towards it, is that right?

[Ian Scott]

Yeah, I was, I was, I was pretty lukewarm when I, when I first saw it. I think, you know, one of the things is Spielberg's great strength and his great affinity with his audience is also the thing that generally critics don't like about him so much or they haven't liked as the years have gone on. And that is he, he likes to focus on common people. He likes to put common people in extraordinary situations and see how they deal with it. And it's true even in his sci fi films, isn't it? You know, Richard Dreyfus is this ordinary everyday Joe guy who suddenly discovers that he's having apparitions about aliens landing, you know, which is counters. Yeah, you know, ordinary family inherits an alien lives in their attic, you know, and they have to hide it away for, you know, it's that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, for E.T. so, you know, he, and so he likes grounding ordinary people in those situations. Now Cruz has a little bit of the Ethan Hunt from Mission Impossible about him. It's true, considering he's what, he's a longshoreman, isn't he? And stuff. And he really has no right to know how weapons grade material works. And now he can shoot.

[Ayesha Khan]

He doesn't run like a longshoreman, I feel.

[Ian Scott]

He really doesn't. No, no.

[Keith Williams]

You know, or a crane driver.

[Ian Scott]

No, not at all. No. But you know, in, in its own way it offers that sense that he's a bit of an everyman character and he's got an everyday family that he wants to protect. And it's about that kind of individual protection of family and home, isn't it? In that kind of sense. And actually I think I, you know, I agree very much with what Keith was just saying. You mix those patterns of people together. You know, what's interesting is when he comes across Tim Robbins character. He's, he's kind of shocked in a way that this sort of viewpoint is out there, you know, that this guy's a bit radical, really, and he's got a view of the world that clearly isn't Cruise's character. And yet they live in an approximate same place, you know, and so that sort of dawning realization that America is not the same place for everybody and the reaction to this crisis shouldn't necessarily be the same. Bit like the war on terror is quite providential and interesting in the way that Spielberg does those kind of things. And he's done them a lot in his, in his career.

[Ayesha Khan]

Thank you for that. Okay, so back to 1953, and let's talk about the legacy of this film, because it comes out right near the, you know, I mean, 1950s onwards is this huge kind of influx of sci fi films. There's a lot of similar films with a lot of similar themes. Do you think it has a legacy of its own?

[Keith Williams]

It's certainly echoed in the Spielberg in various ways. You know, there are kind of nods to it, you know, in the fact that I think the action, I think where the tripod originally surfaces is on Van Buren street, you know, taking the name of the. The love interest from the 1953 film. And the actors who play those characters actually have cameo roles as the grandparents with whom, you know, the Spielberg character and his daughter are sort of reunited at the end.

[Ayesha Khan]

I missed that.

[Keith Williams]

Just little, I mean, these are only little touches, you know, Easter eggs, as they call them in the, in the trade. So I, I think the Spielberg is certainly channeling the 1953 adaptation, but also possibly diffusing some of its jingoism. I mean, it's, it's. It's hard to say. I mean, there are, there are also, you know, there are so many films about Alien invasion that, I mean, films like Independence Day, for example, which, you know, is a kind of uncredited version of the War of the Worlds, but which also draws on the 1953 film.

[Ian Scott]

I think that's absolutely right. I mean, J.J. abraham's, you know, as a producer director, has made a career out of somehow reinventing the War of the Worlds in different settings. You know, work on things like Cloverfield and even the Star Trek series. You know, he's clearly someone who pays a debt to that esthetic treatment and, and even the ideologies behind it. And philosophically too, you know, you think of a film like Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, you know, I mean, it doesn't. It is working on a Whole different scale. Because, boy, does he as a director work on a whole different scale, you know, with the likes of June as well. But Arrival has some of that philosophy around it, doesn't it? That, that sense of anticipation, that anticipatory, you know, here are beings from another planet who are, who have come upon us and how are we to treat them and think about this as a species, as human beings, you know, Villeneuve likes those very big themes and, you know, and there's definitely a debt there, I think, isn't there?

[Keith Williams]

The Villeneuve film, I think, is philosophically very complex. I mean, it may not be channeling the pal so much as films like the Day the Earth Stood still, that kind of idea of a benign alien intervention that's kind of trying to tell us something about ourselves. It's also sort of alluding to the War of the Worlds in ways that some of these other films that go for the kind of high tech mayhem rather than the kind of ideas that underlie it. Because, you know, the aliens, for example, are cephalopods, as the Martians are. Wells did rework them, by the way, as a kind of for the purposes of a more benign intervention In a late 1930s novel called Star Begotten, you know, where the Martians again are trying to kind of take over the Earth, but they're trying to do it by sort of altering us genetically so that we are more like them, helping us to address some of our kind of terrestrial problems in the drift towards the Second World War.

[Ayesha Khan]

Brilliant, thank you. So we like to end the show with a recommendation for listeners on what you would like them to pair with the film. Ian, you go first.

[Ian Scott]

So I would pair and recommend another film for listeners, but not another sci fi film. In a way. I'm sort of going to lead you back and tempt you with a little bit of that unknowing, slightly conspiratorial paranoia thing that's hidden away a bit in War of the Worlds and End of the World, End of American democracy and society. So I'd pair it and recommend listeners to go forward a decade and go and have a watch of John Frankenheimer's 1962 film the Manchurian Candidate, which is a brilliant, brilliant deconstruction of the threats to American society, of the threats to its democracy, of that threat from the inside as well. You know, the sense that your trust and faith in institutions, politicians, the media is starting to be severely tested in a way, it's a good sign of the way in which both American cinema but Also, American society was changing so rapidly inside a decade. So Manchurian's Candidate, it's about political assassination, it's about media advertising, it's about selling of politicians. Go figure, you know, in the world we live, selling of politicians who might not be everything they seem to be. Who would have known, who would have thought that would come to pass?

[Ayesha Khan]

But it does feel like those. Those themes are very sci fi in themselves.

[Ian Scott]

Absolutely they are, yeah. You know, you can. And in a way, the story of Manchurian Candidate plays itself out in a number of sci fi films where, you know, the hunt for some other, some sort of lurking person, creature, organization is there within the subtext of American life and institutions, and you just don't know when it's going to appear and rear its ugly head.

[Ayesha Khan]

Thank you very much, Keith.

[Keith Williams]

Well, I was going to suggest, if I may, a couple of things. I don't know how aware the public is that the War of the Worlds is not the only Martian invasion narrative to appear in 1897. You wait centuries for someone to invent an alien invasion narrative and two suddenly come along all at once. So what I'm referring to there and again, it's the satire of the imperial policy of the nation state in which it's written is called Lasswitz's Auf Zwei Planeten, known as Two Planets in English, but not translated into English until the 1970s, although it was a text that was very well known in Germany. You know, it's a complementary narrative to Welles's because in that Martians are humanoid and they have a kind of colonial mission. You know, they're a bit like colonial ideologues who seek to persuade those that they wish to colonize of the benefits, as it were, of as it were joining their civilization. You know, kind of being raised up to their technological and moral standards. So it's kind of more about hegemony, control of ideas than the sort of ruthless domination that we see in Wellesley's novel. And it's one of the most extraordinary moments of synchronicity, really, in literary history, because neither Wells nor Lasvitz knew each other, neither of them had any kind of contact and probably never read each other's texts.

[Ayesha Khan]

Maybe they came across the same Martian, who knows?

[Keith Williams]

Well, it's possible they ran into the same Martian, but I think what's probably more the underlying explanation is probably that they're both symptomatic of that sort of high moment of European colonialism and the way that science fiction, as what someone called the kind of ethics, horizon of science Kind of engages with that. So you get these critiques, as it were, of German imperialism and British imperialism using an extraterrestrial invasion as a kind of way of getting us to think about ourselves in a very different way, to kind of put us under a kind of alien gaze, particularly in relation to how we're treating other humans.

[Ayesha Khan]

Okay, great. Thank you so much. Did you say you had another one there?

[Keith Williams]

Oh, sorry. Yes. The other one was a rather favorite film of mine from the 50s, which tends to get sidelined a bit. And that's the Ray Bradbury script for It Came From Outer Space.

[Ayesha Khan]

We're going to cover that one.

[Keith Williams]

Oh, you are right. Well, that's absolutely brilliant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I won't spoil too much, but I think the intra diegetic representation of the alien's point of view in that is just so unusual and so disarming of kind of crowd reactions to otherness that many of these science fiction films are trying to stimulate.

[Ian Scott]

And just to say, I mean, Keith would know this far better than I in many ways. But again, science fiction writers in America like Bradbury, like Philip K. Dick, are sort of changing the landscape not only of how sci fi, but. But also how writing about future societies and. And a future kind of world is. Is looking and very kind of symptomatic of the way in which the world was rapidly changing in all the ways we've been talking about today. So, yeah, it's. It's a really good, good shout. Great writer as well.

[Ayesha Khan]

Brilliant. Thank you so, so much, both of you for coming on the show.

[Keith Williams]

Thank you for having me.

[Ian Scott]

It's been great. Thanks very much.

[Ayesha Khan]

Great. That's it for this episode. Next episode we will be talking about It Came From Outer Space, which Keith just mentioned. So if you want to find out where you can watch that, you can check out the show notes if you do have time, if you could leave a rating or a review, or if you wanted to share the podcast with people who like really old science fiction films and a bit of history, that would be amazing. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you again next time. Bye Bye.

[Orson Welles]

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[Ian Scott]

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[Orson Welles]

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[Ian Scott]

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[Keith Williams]

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