The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: Wages of Fear (1953), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Bombtrack" by Rage Against the Machine

       Not much comes to mind in the preamble. I’ve already talked about the enormous influence the French people have had on the creation and development of film as an artistic medium, and that they’re just about the only non-English speaking country I can rely on for a science fiction film or an animated movie that isn’t China or Japan, so I don’t feel like repeating myself like usual. Rather I will just say that this film has been on the radar as far back as the start of this blog if I recall right, and I’m glad that I can finally cross it off the old bucket queue. A bucket queue, to be clear, is like a bucket list but a lot nerdier, and with less Morgan Freeman.

       Released in 1953, The Wages of Fear was directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, written by Clouzot and Jerome Geronimi and produced by Raymond Borderie, based on “Le Salaire de la peur” by Georges Arnaud. Yves Montand stars as Mario, a French lothario and immigrant stuck in a town somewhere in South America, which like many South American towns is incredibly poor, underdeveloped and currently being exploited by a U.S. oil company. With no jobs available to make money and thus no money to leave, Mario wiles away his days bumming around with the other immigrants, stealing cigarettes from the local tavern and shtupping the local barmaid. With the arrival of the elder, cool and collected Jo (Charles Vanel) however, Mario finally has a fellow Frenchman to spend some time with, not to mention a man who has the wherewithal to make enough dough to get them out of that hell hole and back to France. Of course Jo doesn’t have any money either, having dropped the last of it on his plane ticket to get there, but it’s only a matter of time before something comes along.

        Then, miraculously, something does come along in the form of a horrific pipeline explosion. The guys running the pipeline conclude that the only way to curtail the fire is by using a large amount of nitroglycerine to snuff the fire out with an even bigger explosion. Thing is, the only way to get the nitroglycerin to the location is transporting it by truck, and given the state of the roads (part of that whole ‘forcibly underdeveloped’ thing) any driver who takes a pothole the wrong way or zigs when they should have zagged runs the very real risk of violent death. But hey, that’s why you have a reserve pool of labor, am I right? Just offer the right amount of money, 2,000 dollars for example, and you’ll have people lining up around the block to sign up for your suicide mission. So it is that four men -- Mario, Jo, the coincidentally named Luigi (Folco Lulli) and the stoic Bimba (Peter Van Eyck) are chosen to drive the two trucks. To collect their...wages of fear.

        The Wages of Fear is a film built on a foundation of suspense. If you’ve ever watched a scene in a movie where somebody is running away from a vicious killer who seems to appear around every corner, or they have to deactivate the villain’s superweapon before it unleashes chaos upon the world, imagine that scene spread out over 70 percent of the movie. Every bump in the road or engine shudder could be the prelude to death, and events which in any other scenario would be minor hurdles or inconveniences are almost insurmountable obstacles. That’s an insane amount of pressure, and the film is built around how our four characters deal/degrade under that stress. All of which Clouzot presents with this stark intensity that would make Sergio Leone nod his head in approval.

        Of course suspense works best when the audience sympathizes with the characters, but I don’t know if Wages of Fear does that. Mario and Jo are toxic shitheads at the start of the movie and turn that toxicity towards each other as the movie goes on, and even if it tries to turn that around and imply a genuine bond by the end of the film it never rang true for me, because while Imay not have wanted them to die I actually was not invested in their success. In fact Clouzot ends up watering down his ‘corporate indifference to human suffering in the pursuit of profit’ message to a less engaging ‘everything sucks’ angle; Everyone is ignorant and callous, and the few people who aren’t are derided and punished for it. It’s a very dour film, with the kind of ending that Ingmar Bergman would’ve been proud of. All of which would have likely been regarded as rather profound in the post-WWII period when that generation was still reeling from collective shellshock, but nowadays seem to exude an air of juvenile nihilism. Rather than making me think it feels more like it’s making me check and see if I refilled my antidepressant prescription.

        I guess I didn’t though, because despite my eagerness to watch this in the beginning I find I have nothing really to say about it. The Wages of Fear has one thing that it does very well, I’ll give it that, but connecting with the film on an emotional level (at least for a first viewing) didn’t really happen. The acting was fine, the music was fine, the cinematography was damn good, but I didn’t really feel anything by the end of the film except the mild dissatisfaction one gets from calling a scene minutes before it happens. Damned by simplicity.

        I can still recognize why it's regarded as highly as it is however, so I’m letting it pass with a mild recommendation. If you’re a film major in college you might have a time with this, maybe namedrop it in class to get some points with the professor, or if you need a different kind of thriller then you might pop this in, but I can’t say for sure that this is a movie I feel like coming back to any time soon. That’s just the way she goes sometimes, although not too fast or she’ll fucking explode.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: The Hitch-Hiker (1953), directed by Ida Lupino

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Hitchin' A Ride", by Vanity Fare

       I guess the reality of filmmaking existing largely as a boy’s club doesn’t really settle in until pretend to review movies for a living like yours truly. I mean I’ve covered over a hundred films now on this blog and it wasn’t until I was compiling the list for this year that I realized that I had only reviewed around 6 movies in total that had been directed by women, an incredibly small amount even for the niche field of genre films. Worse yet, aside from the Wachowski’s Matrix, none of them were movies that I had actually liked, which is just the way it goes sometimes but something that still sent me down the rabbit hole of self--reflection for a while. So this year I’ve made a conscious effort to get more women and their movies in the Marathon, the first being Rachel Talalay’s Tank Girl (which didn’t turn out that well), and now with Ida Lupino. While not a household name these days back in the 50s she was pretty well known as an actress, and pretty unique for stepping behind the camera and directing some films herself. So why not just reach into the proverbial bag and pull one out?

       Released by RKO in 1953, The Hitch-Hiker, our film begins with a murder. Several murders in fact, all committed by a man named Emmett Myers under the role of a hitch-hiker. A tragedy to be sure, but one that leaps from the newsreels into reality when Gilbert and Roy, two camping buddies that took a last minute detour to Mexicali, pick up a hitch-hiker who happens to be Emmett Myers. Myers has a burning need to get to the town of Santa Rosalia, a 500 mile trip, and in lieu of gas money he’s brought a loaded revolver pointed as their heads. It’s the proverbial road trip from hell, as Gilbert and Roy struggle under the heel of Myers, knowing every moment that each step closer to Santa Rosalia is a step towards their own grisly demise. Based on a true story, so the film’s opening says, but then aren’t they all these days?

       So yeah, a scary hitch-hiker movie about two decades before Ted Bundy made everyone assume all hitch-hikers were serial killers, pretty ahead of its time in that regard. It’s also interesting to see how...I don’t know the proper word, ‘natural’ it feels, that Lupino were aiming for a recreation of actual events rather than just being a noir film. Things such as having scenes where the Mexican characters are just having conversations with each other with no attempt to translate it for the audience beyond context clues, or having the Mexican and American authorities planning things out. It ends up making The Hitch-Hiker feel less like a true crime film, years before true crime was a proper genre, and more an extended cut of the live action sequences in Unsolved Mysteries.

       The thing that would make true crime so popular wasn’t just about recreating actual events however, it was in taking those events and crafting a narrative around them. In the premier true crime novel for example, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Capote crafts this detailed profile of the killers, giving you an insight into the kind of people they are and why they did what they did. Not to say that isn’t done with Myers, but by and large it’s a very black and white (natch) view of things, where he does bad things because he’s bad and that’s as far as one needs to think on the matter. Which might work if you just need an antagonist, but if you’re trying to make a real person then you’re going to have to go a bit deeper than that.

       There’s also the issue of tension in the film. Of course you have the overarching issue of Myers holding Gilbert and Roy hostage which is the crux of the film, but the film doesn’t often push beyond that initial suspense. By which I mean the points of emotional peak, where the scheme is on the brink of being discovered, Myers is about to kill someone, etc. Again like with Myers, those scenes are there, but Lupino never lingers on them, drawing out the tension. You get the impression of them and then they’re gone. Missed potential, but it’s got that kind of charm that films of a certain place and time exude. A movie that could only have been made in the 50s, you know the type.

       The Hitch-Hiker is a no-frills crime thriller, giving you some crime and some thrills in a nice package and not a cent more. In that regard, I have no problem recommending it, it’s simplicity makes it easily watchable. Like I’ve said before with other movies however, if you’re not a fan of the older filmmaking styles there’s nothing here that’s going to blow your mind. Give it a try this Halloween, and while you’re at it look into the other films by Ida Lupino as well.

The Thunderbird Double Feature: Stanley Kubrick

       When I first started doing this blog I had always intended to avoid big names. Movies, directors, actors, what have you, I always wanted to keep at least a step or two out of the mainstream. So rather than doing the original Universal Frankenstein film for example, I did the relatively obscure Bride of Frankenstein, and when I felt like covering The Transformers I steered clear of anything resembling Michael Bay. The greats have already been talked about after all, the books have been written, the podcasts recorded, the blogs written, so what would throwing one more opinion on the pile really accomplish in the grand scheme of things? You had to get weird and obscure and cult, my mind told me, because that was where the action was, that was the way to get attention that I so desperately craved. Write about the movies that no one else is talking about and by default you gain a monopoly on the subject. For better or worse, I mean The attention my review of Ralph Bakshi’s Coonskin has gotten over the years has always made me feel a little paranoid.

Of course nothing ever lasts forever, and sooner or later some bigger and bigger names started creeping in. David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, John Carpenter, et cetera, I’ve grown such an obsession for film over the years, and since I rarely watch films anymore without reviewing them, I couldn’t help but dip my toes into that inviting water. Not that I thought that my worthless opinion would be the deciding factor in someone seeing Vertigo mind you, but that such historic films would provide a great backdrop for me to stretch the mind muscles a bit and work my way through a thought that I might not have a chance to otherwise. That’s why I write movie reviews in general I suppose, even if they’re shit and the only people who’ve read them are a couple of bots that hit the right string of key words in the search algorithm: It’s self-expression, just as painting a picture or performing a song is self-expression for someone else. I like writing and I like cinema, and it makes me happy to combine the two. Nuff said.

In the past I’ve used the Double Feature model to showcase some of those big names I’ve mentioned (and also the folks who made Dollman) and since it’s been so long since I’ve used it I figured it best to dust off the proverbial cobwebs with one of the biggest names of all: Stanley Kubrick, director of a good portion of the most iconic movies in American film history, making his debut appearance on this blog. Narrowing things down to just two was a bit of a hassle, but in the end it seemed appropriate to go with his very first feature film, 1953’s Fear and Desire, and his last (not including the stuff he did for A.I.), 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut. You can’t judge a decades long career on only two movies, like reading the first chapter of a book and then skipping to the last page, but I’m interested to see what, if anything, got its start in ‘53 and what managed to stick around until ‘99. Who knows, maybe I’ll unravel that vast web of conspiracies that Kubrick apparently shoved into all of his movies, if that documentary on The Shining is anything to go by. Who knows, maybe it’ll turn out that he staged the Moon landing after all. Guess I’ll see.

Fear and Desire (1953)

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "This is War", by Thirty Seconds to Mars

While his filmography technically begins two years earlier, with the short documentaries Day of the Flight and Flying Padre, Stanley Kubrick’s directorial debut truly began in 1953 with the film Fear and Desire. Set in a time and place removed from our own, yet still familiar, the film centers around a quartet of soldiers (Frank Silvera as ‘Mac’, Kenneth Harp as ‘Lt. Coby’, Paul Mazursky as ‘Sidney’ and Steve Coit as ‘Fletcher’) who have been stranded 6 miles behind enemy lines after their plane is shot down. With the pressure of being spotted by a passing aircraft constantly looming over their heads, the soldiers locate a nearby river and decide to build a raft in order to float across into home territory, only to discover a nearby enemy base and airstrip occupied by troops and a mysterious general. Mac wants to go after the general, Coby just wants to get the hell out of Dodge, but when it comes to war you’re never going to end up getting what you really want.

The story goes that Stanley Kubrick hated this movie, which he described as ‘boring and pretentious’, to such an extent that he actually tried to have all copies of it destroyed Star Wars Holiday Special-style. While that might seem a little extreme at first, I can see where he’s coming from to a certain degree. This was a man known for his obsessive perfectionist streak when it came to his craft after all, and Fear and Desire was a film made for around 50 grand and looked like it. The entire cast was made up of seven people (two of whom played dual roles) walking in what looks like about a hundred square feet of state park for about an hour set to music which sounds like it’s from an episode of Gunsmoke, spending whole scenes talking in internal monologues like it’s David Lynch’s Dune. That and some melodramatic flourishes, in particular when they finally introduce the general, does give off something of an ‘amateurish’ atmosphere. A college film project before the advent of college film classes if you will.

Which isn’t to say that’s a film without merit, or one worth destroying. I think the acting, while nothing extraordinary, is solid, with Frank Silvera (a year removed from his film debut) and future screenwriter and director Paul Mazursky (in his film debut) doing most of the heavy lifting. The music, during the moments when it is reduced from the usual bombast to a deep throbbing bass, is incredibly effective during the tense parts of the film. Ahead of its time in that regard you could say, going hand in hand with the overall tone of the film, which feels more at home with the existential dread of the Vietnam era than the Sgt. Rock flag-waving days of the 50s. These are not faceless avatars of patriotism, they are regular people who have been thrust into the meat grinder, where death awaits behind every corner, and their behavior reflects that. Confusion, indifference, a suicidal drive to prove oneself, and even a complete retreat into fantasy in the case of Sidney, it’s a straight line from what we see in Fear and Desire and what we would later see in Full Metal Jacket
  
It’s also just fun to see a young Kubrick experimenting behind the camera. His love of cutting to close shots of people’s eyes and faces, the way he plays with shadows during the scene with the general, the cutaways during the scene where the soldiers raid a cabin, it all feels like things Kubrick saw in other movies and wanted to try out for himself. Particularly silent era films, as it seems that there’s an emphasis on the visual. 

Fear and Desire is indeed a Stanley Kubrick film but the feeling of Kubrick, the essence of what has become known as Kubrick, is not quite there. The pieces don’t quite fit. Because of that I can’t say that Fear and Desire is a must-watch film, but it’s not a huge time investment and it’s impressive enough for a debut outing that it’s worth a watch if you’re in the mood.

Now let’s take a quick stroll around the wheel of time, about 46 years, and see where Stanley Kubrick ended up, with-

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Waltz No. 2", by Dmitri Shostakovich

12 years after the release of the release of the infamous Full Metal Jacket, and several years of projects that were never realized or incomplete (what would eventually become A.I.), Kubrick came out with what turned out to be his final film, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut. Based on the novella “Traumnovelle” by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, the film stars Tom Cruise (coming off his award-winning performance in Jerry Maguire) as Bill Hartford, a well-to-do doctor living in New York with his daughter Helena and wife Alice (Nicole Kidman). Things seem to be going well, until a bitter Alice recounts a story about her almost cheating on him with a sexy sailor. Disillusioned with himself and plagued with thoughts of Alice in the arms of another man, Bill heads off into the bowels of New York, a city where you can’t even throw a rock without someone trying to hump it. While chatting with an old med school chum, Bill by chance learns about a mysterious club where some supposedly super sexy shit is going down, and decides that he needs to get all up in there. Turns out that secret sex clubs aren’t all that happy about uninvited guests.

So like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet or David Cronenberg’s Crash, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is one of those erotic psycho-drama kinda films or perhaps more accurately a part of the ‘white guy discovers pornhub’ genre. Attractive white guy, predominantly rich, who somehow isn’t getting enough sex already get pulled into a seedy underworld of all that weird sex you’re always hearing about. In fact Eyes Wide Shut consciously or unconsciously takes a lot of cues from Lynch and Blue Velvet, what with some off of the off-filter performances, a score that (by Jocelyn Pook) that runs the gamut from isolating to menacing, and there is this attempt at an unsettling, surreal atmosphere that hangs over things, almost as if it were a dream. Which you can tell by all the times they beat you over the head talking about dreams.

       Compared to Blue Velvet or Crash however, Eyes Wide Shut unfortunately comes across as rather sedated. I mean you’ve got Tom Cruise in the lead role, a man who in 1999 was probably considered one of the most attractive men in Hollywood, and he doesn’t do anything. Of course a slow burn in a Kubrick is nothing to be surprised, but in Eyes Wide Shut it seems to be take to a whole new level. To put it bluntly, Tom Cruise’s character is one that doesn’t do anything, doesn’t accomplish anything, and after 2 and a half hours nothing about his life really changes. Even the mysterious sex club, the one part of the movie that has passed over into the popular culture, feels rather toothless in retrospect. I mean this is a guy who had a character blow his brains out with a shotgun in his last film, and the most he can think of for this shadowy clandestine meeting of the rich and powerful is some people wearing masks and having sex? Not weird sex, there’s no bathing in blood or goat sacrifices, the positions don’t go more exotic than Cowgirl, just some sex and a bunch of nudity (almost entirely from women, god forbid we even get the hint of a penis anywhere in the public sex scenes). Like who the hell cares? And if they’re really the major power-holders of the world, and they’re all masked, why would they be worried that some dude happened to sneak in? What’s he really gonna do, realistically speaking? Call the cops, and tell them ?

       Yeah, I already mentioned the references to dreams, so you might be able to forgive things being more metaphorical than realistic or things not adding up necessarily, but the movie is just dull. In Blue Velvet, you go hand in hand with Kyle Maclachlan's character as he gradually loses his innocence, in Crash, even though it’s rather boring as well, you get to see James Spader drag himself and others into this strange world, they are active participants in their stories. Which you could say is a bit of subtext on Kubrick’s part, that Alice’s dissatisfaction with Bill leads him to become ‘impotent’ in terms of his affect on events, but a movie isn’t built on subtext alone. Even if it were the case, you don’t need to take 239 minutes to say Tom Cruise got his dick wet. Most movies do that in half the time, easy.

Of course this is a Kubrick film, so the meat & potatoes part of the film, the guts of it, are excellent. Every scene, from the ritzy hotels of the wealthy to the dingy apartments of the poor, looks as if it were meticulously crafted, a mixture of reality and cinema just uneven to become noticeable. The prominent use of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2 is also touch, as it’s a piece that I’ve always found to be both elegant and slightly foreboding, which fits in well with the ‘Great Gatsby’s sex life’ aesthetic that the film is going for. I also like that even 4 decades later there are some familiar elements from Fear and Desire here, shots emphasizing the face that cut to graphic scenes, the music stings, even a little internal voice clip like old Frank Silvera and the boys used to do. Stanley Kubrick seems to have a knack for crafting movies that could work just as well as a collection of paintings or photographs, and Eyes Wide Shut is no exception.

In the end however, whether it’s that oft-mentioned 2+ hour runtime or what, there’s just this...spark missing from Eyes Wide Shut for me. It feels like it should be a thriller, it feels like I should be on the edge of my seat in suspense, but it's not and I'm not. It’s not really a ‘bad’ movie though, the production is solid as I said and the cast is great, so I don’t feel as if I can just dismiss it as bad and say you shouldn’t watch it. So this is another one of those shitty, non-committal ‘play it by ear’ reviews then; If you’re interested, or you saw that one episode of Venture Bros. and you were curious then go for it, but if you’re looking for ‘the’ Stanley Kubrick film to watch, this ain’t gonna be it.

The first double feature in years, covering one of American cinema’s most famous filmmakers, and I end up covering two movies that I didn’t care for all that much. Somehow I’m not surprised. Even if he did make a couple of clunkers (in my opinion) though, there aren’t many people who had a strong an influence on the medium as Stanley Kubrick has had, even after his death. I mean when your style is so well known it’s become an adjective then you know you’re pretty big. I don’t know whether I’d like the man if I ever met him, reading about him ended up making me depressed, but above anything else the man was a craftsman, and I think he’d be pleased to hear that.

The War of the Worlds (1953), directed by Byron Haskin

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Thunder Child", by Jeff Wayne

Or, The Martians Crave Our Delicious Hamburger Sandwiches

     I’ve already talked in spades about the influential figures in my life when it comes to comic books, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore etc., but let’s spend a paragraph or two talking about some non-graphic novelists who I enjoyed in my youth. Way back in the day, when the Syfy Channel was still Sci-Fi and internet pornography was an as-yet inexact science I was an avid reader of books (physical copies of ebooks printed onto sheets of paper, for you younger readers out there), and when it wasn’t Harry Potter or Animorphs, it was classical literature. Dumas, Cervantes, Verne, Doyle, from the Elizabethan to the Victorian I took my fill of the best that the written word had to offer. I couldn’t say for sure what it was that inspired such a consuming interest, whether it was the act of a (so-called) intelligent child searching for reading material beyond the level of his peers or a fascination with the ill-fated League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film and the far, far better comic original, but if it was old it was interesting to me. Which helps to explain my choice in movies as well.

     Of all the old-timey wordsmiths in history however, the one that stuck with me the most was undoubtedly H.G. Wells. Jules Verne was pretty good, especially if you were a fan of people traveling to various places in exotic vehicles, but it was Wells, oft-regarded as one of the earliest ‘science fiction’ writers, that really dug its claws into the imaginative portion of my mind. There’s just something about that turn-of-the-century fiction that I’ve always loved, when science was still a work-in-progress and there was a sense of wonder and discovery in the air, or at least that’s how it reads after the fact when folks aren’t dying of tuberculosis. “The Time Machine”, “The Island of Doctor Moreau”, ‘The Invisible Man”, stories that have managed to survive the test of time to be endlessly repackaged by studio executives looking to profit from a dead man’s work. No wonder poor people turn into lemurs in the future.

     Out of all the stories by Mr. Wells, there is one that affected me as much as it affected pop culture at large: The War of the Worlds. The premier alien invasion story, a concept that has been repeated endlessly throughout the 20th and 21st century, which itself has been revisited numerous times over the years. There was the infamous radio broadcast by Orson Welles in the 30s, which caused far less mass hysteria than we like to pretend it did, likely because no one in New Jersey would’ve been able to tell the difference. There was a subpar film by the great Steven Spielberg in 2005, starring a Tom Cruise not yet ostracized from society and a Dakota Fanning not quite old enough to be forgotten, which you might (not) remember being parodied in one of those shitty Scary Movie sequels. There was a TV series that ran 2 seasons in 1988, which was a continuation of our subject today. There was a D-list movie released the same year as the Spielberg film, which spawned an equally D-list sequel three years later. There was even a War of the Worlds musical produced for the stage that played throughout London, which despite being about murderous alien death machine probably had a smaller body count than that Spider-Man show on Broadway (#topicalreference). We won’t be talking about those things today though, obviously since I’ve already listed in an off-handed and casual manner. Instead, we’ll take a look at what is probably the second most famous take on The War of the Worlds, the 1953 film adaptation directed by Byron Haskin and released through Paramount. Whether these aliens are a thinly-veiled metaphor of the Communist menace or not is up to you to decide.

     The plot of The War of the Worlds is literally over a century old at this point, so you’ll have to forgive me if I spoil some things plotwise. Basically, it turns out that there is life on other planets (specifically Mars), and the lifeforms on that planet are jealous of the temperate climate and the fine-ass hoes that we have here on Earth. So in typical human fashion they decide to invade our planet, first appearing in a small town but quickly spreading throughout the rest of the world. Aforementioned militaries of the world attempt to curtail the extra-terrestrial attacks to no avail, and just when it seems that humanity is destined to be a footnote in the pages of history, the Martians are killed by what is essentially a deus ex machina. Apparently Martians were smart enough to master space travel and enormous war machines but just forget to get their booster shots before making the trip. I mean Great Britain didn’t even figure out typhoid wasn’t caused by farts until a decade or so prior, but the highly advanced alien race couldn’t put two and two together? But of course internet critics didn’t exist back then, so these sorts of things get a pass.

     For now…

     The 53’ Paramount adaptation, as you might expect from a film adaptation, keeps the basic framework of the original idea but makes a substantial amount of changes. The setting is changed, taking place in Smalltown California, USA in the early 1950s rather than Tinyton Glen, Great Britain in the late 1900s. The iconic ‘tripods’ in the original story are replaced with sleek silver flying machines (which have become iconic in their own right), and the black smoke and red weed of the tripods are replaced with generic laser beams and force fields. Most substantial of all perhaps is the addition of a protagonist and leading lady, for that romantic subplot that all films are required to have and such, rather than the ‘lone survivor’ angle that the story went for. Ann Robinson plays Sylvia van Buren, who is supposedly very intelligent but does nothing but look attractive and scream, as is the nature of female characters in sci-fi, and Gene Barry plays Dr. Clayton Forrester (absolutely mind-blowing to a MST3K fan like me), the the consistently unflappable scientist at Pacific Tech who just so happens to be near ground zero at the start of the whole deal. Retro TV fans will know Gene Barry for his role as the pimp of the Old West, Bat Masterson, from the show of the same name. Give Clayton a derby and a cane and there wouldn’t be any difference, which is either a knock against Mr. Barry’s dramatic range or a testament to his Colt .45 levels of badassery.

     I’m finding it a bit difficult to rip into The War of the Worlds, because at the end of the day it is a sci-fi movie made in the 50s, and so was limited as all genre films generally were during that time. But I can certainly list a few issues. As much as I love Gene Barry, Clayton Forrester isn’t so much a protagonist as he is a guy the camera focuses on a lot of the time, and even then he occasionally gets lost in the shuffle. Sylvia is a women in the 50s, and so isn’t allowed to do anything or develop a real personality, thus making the romance between her and Forrester feel as hollow as most 1950’s marriages. The Martians just look stupid as hell, limitations of costuming in that era be damned, and I feel like the film would have benefited from showing as little of their physical form as possible. Nothing that comes about due to their appearance is really vital to the plot in my opinion, beyond acting as a cheap scare after an already suspenseful scene, and it could just as easily have been excised or altered with no dip in quality. There’s nothing scarier than what spawns our own imagination, after all. Also, not quite sure what the God deal is going on with this movie, as if Bruce Almighty ‘saved’ mankind because bacteria killed the Martians. Pretty sure if a Human-loving deity of a Christian persuasion really existed or cared, he probably wouldn’t have let a priest get flash-fried in the first half of the movie. Or let a enormous amount of Earth’s population die, have their homes and property destroyed and descend into mass hysteria. Or at least let those deadly bacteria that he created kill off the Martians before they almost destroyed the planet. As I said at the beginning though, this is a sci-fi flick from the 50’s, and science fiction in film was a much slower beast in terms of experimentation and philosophical exploration as it was in literature. Rubber suits and screaming girls were what sold the tickets back then, and that’s what we got.

     Plot problems, characterization problems and thematic problems aside, there is one area where The War of the Worlds excels: special effects. Much like fellow sci-fi classic The Blob, which also involves an alien creature falling to Earth in Smalltown USA by the way, WotW is practically bursting with bright lights and color, and you persistent readers know how much I love generous helpings of color in movies. Every scene that features the alien ships fucking up the landscape, blasting everything to hell with their multi-colored death beams, engenders a visceral, childlike joy in destruction that you only ever get when a Godzilla movie is doing things right. While I generally tend to prefer the tripod designs for the Martian war machines, I have to admit that that flying machines used here; sleek, near featureless silver aircrafts with their tri-colored electronic eyes slowly drifting over the ruins of civilization, have their own appeal, and I think they’ve got the potential to become one of my favorite spacecraft designs.They quickly and firmly establish the inhumanity of the alien threat right from the outset, cold, inscrutable, much more so than the actual Martians do. It looks like either the T-1000 eating the head of ED-209 or a Yes album cover, in a good way.

     If you’re interested in getting into old school sci-fi, The War of the Worlds should be right up on the top of your list, along with The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Blob, and The Thing From Another World. They can be cheesy and the stories can be a bit spotty (which isn’t really restricted to sci-fi films of that era, is it Mr. Emmerich?) but it accomplishes exactly what good science fiction is meant to do: It inspires the imagination, gives light to new ideas and new ways of looking at things, that you might create something as strange and exciting in the future. Maybe it doesn’t succeed as well as H.G. Wells did in 1897, but as far as film adaptations go it’s manages to stand on its own two feet, which is more than you can say for I Am Legend. Worth a watch.

RESULT: RECOMMENDED