Wartime Memory and Post-War Purpose in The War of the Worlds

By Christopher Stewardson

George Pal’s mark on American science fiction cinema is indelible. His films are slices of vivid imagination and possible futures, from When Worlds Collide (1951) to The Time Machine (1960). It’s unsurprising that his films were singled out (along with those of director Ishiro Honda) as the most convincing in the canon of apocalyptic cinema by Susan Sontag in her 1965 essay, The Imagination of Disaster. Perhaps the most destructive of Pal’s work – both emotionally and literally – is his 1953 adaptation of The War of the Worlds. 

Pal’s production sees H.G. Wells’ story transposed to California in the 1950s. The Martians arrive hidden in meteorites, attracting the attention of scientist Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry), who strikes up a romance with local library science teacher Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson). After the Martians emerge, Sylvia’s uncle, a minister, is one of their first victims. He approaches the Martian war machines with bible in hand, only to be vaporised by their fantastic heat ray. As he dies, Sylvia screams into the camera, her face bathed in a grotesque red glow.

The film is so unique in its realisation of Wells’ story that it exists as its own text as much as an adaptation, owing to its fantastic combination of art director Albert Nozaki’s striking Martian war machines, its eye-popping optical effects, its singular sound design, and its lavish Technicolor photography. But beyond just spectacle, the film’s greatest weapon lies in its potency as a war film. Yes, the film is of its time as an atomic-age science fiction piece, complete with the addition of a nuclear weapon deployed (unsuccessfully) against the Martians, but its construction deliberately invokes the Second World War. 

To contextualise what I mean, let’s consider the earlier works of Pal. The Hungarian artist had started out in cartoon commercials but soon grew bored and shifted to stop-motion animation. He was working in Berlin at the time, but the ascension of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis convinced him and his wife to leave for Paris, before moving again to Holland. There he established a studio, employing around seventy people and producing advertisements for a variety of companies. Eventually, he moved into shorts and thus emerged George Pal’s Puppetoons. Two months before Nazi Germany invaded Holland, Pal and his wife moved again to Hollywood. 

In America, George Pal’s Puppetoons would continue via Paramount Pictures, and in 1942 he directed Tulips Shall Grow. In the seven-minute short, a pair of young lovers in an idyllic depiction of Holland are suddenly beset by an invading force of robots called the Screwballs. These goose-stepping automatons march over the land squashing tulips and bombing windmills. In the chaos, the lovers are separated. One of them takes shelter in the ruins of a church and prays for deliverance. The heavens open and a rainstorm rusts the Screwballs away. With the invaders defeated, the lovers skip off into the horizon as the words “Tulips Shall Always Grow” fills the screen. 

That this ending plays out almost verbatim in The War of the Worlds is significant. By the film’s end, Clayton and Sylvia have been separated in a besieged Los Angeles. They eventually find one another in a cathedral, embracing as the Martians approach outside. The scene is punctuated by the awesome image of a stained-glass window shattering before the invaders’ heat ray. Then, just as the pair wait for death, the Martian machines fall and crash, their occupants succumbing to Earth bacteria. The end of the Screwballs (as evocative of the Nazis) is repeated in the demise of the Martians.

Other elements overtly parallel WWII as well, namely a mid-film montage depicting the world enveloped by the Martian menace. Stock footage from wartime newsreels is combined with images of the Martian machines to suggest a worldwide fight for survival, one made explicitly like the Second World War. Particularly chilling is the inclusion of wartime footage showing great crowds of people fleeing. And while it is useful to examine War of the Worlds as an American Cold War piece, with its fears of invasion and a presumption of necessity in using nuclear weapons, Pal’s involvement as producer and the film’s images evoke WWII more pressingly. Even the film’s pre-title sequence recalls the first and second world wars, placing the Martian confrontation as the next in a growing list of worldwide conflicts. 

Interestingly, the film’s atomic-age placement also plays into these echoes of WWII. As the opening narration also tells us, we’re now in an age when wars are fought “with the terrible weapons of super science, menacing all mankind and every creature on Earth”. The failure of a nuclear weapon against the Martians is shocking because this weapon – of grotesque design and barbaric legacy – is apparently useless in this new war. A genocidal weapon deployed during the last conflict is nullified by the shape of the next. With memories of war still in mind and images, the film is frightful and uneasy in its estimation of the future: there’s the possibility of something worse than that which has already been unleashed. 

However, the film uses the Martians’ weakness as written by Wells and stresses an overtly Christian perspective. As the Martian machines suddenly stop and fall, the narrator notes God’s “wisdom” in creating the germs which kill them. It’s very American, and these Christian overtones pervade the film. After the Bomb fails, one scientist puts forward a theory that the Martians can conquer the Earth in six days, which Sylvia identifies as “the same number of days it took to create it.” This binds the film to a very American projection of Christianity. And while the film’s other religious evocations can be astonishing, like the image of the cathedral’s stained-glass window shattering, the Christian overtones – as indicative of the society in which the film was produced – forcefully give the film a neat, assured resolution which sits at odds with the frightening ideas of war and apocalypse with which it deals.

This tidy ending is perhaps the scariest thing about The War of the Worlds when placed in context. During and after WWII, US propagandists exported and indulged the image of America as a democratic liberator, arm in arm with its European allies via the United Nations and (more dangerously) NATO. America accused the Soviet Union of draconian rule while intentionally rehabilitating Nazi scientists and Japanese war criminals. America’s violent systems of intense racism continued unabated – systems from which the Nazis had taken inspiration. Furthermore, the Marshall Islands became contaminated and brutalised by repeated post-war US nuclear tests, displacing their communities in the pursuit of US military hegemony.

Across the Atlantic, Europe’s monstrous empires persisted after the war. The same systems of disgusting racism and violent conquest that had structured and motivated the Nazis were still being shared and practiced by their European neighbours. These nations lauded themselves as defenders of democracy, as though their empires were not of the same cloth as Nazi Germany; as though France had not committed the 1944 Thiaroye massacre in Senegal against soldiers who had been made to fight for them; as though Britain did not try to repress the Kenya Land and Freedom Army in the 1950s via torture, massacres, and concentration camps; as though, mere three years after supposedly defeating Nazi Germany, these Euro-American powers had not taken it upon themselves to carve up Palestine to install an equally-genocidal zionist settler colony. And these few examples are an extremely narrow slice of the full picture. The point is that the character of the Nazis was never uniquely theirs; it did not begin with Adolf Hitler, and it did not end in 1945.

The ending of The War of the Worlds is therefore horrific because it forces a dishonest conclusion to the terrifying wartime nightmares it conjures and reflects. The film raises memories of Nazi invaders, drawing them as the external, alien Martians in the process, and then gives a firm ending which implies a resounding defeat – one delivered by divine intervention and therefore requiring little introspection. But the Nazis did not come from beyond or outside; they did not spring from nowhere; and their ideology was not defeated.

The ending betrays the film’s visceral images and the bloody chaos they reflect in favour of a conclusion that isolates and implicitly de-historices the war, thereby reaffirming the post-war status quo. This is not a unique approach, of course. Many American science fiction films of the 1950s conjure wartime and atomic spectres, via giant monsters and/or otherworldly invaders, only to vanquish them with relative ease through the US military, the Air Force, or the Bomb itself. Conventional means nullify the “enemies” that reflect, evoke, and indict the inherent contradictions of the US and the Western world order. Sitting amongst these contemporaries, despite its own singular expressions, The War of the Worlds is of its time. It powerfully evokes wartime memories before an ending that positions them for a post-war purpose, reflecting pervasive narratives that isolate and de-historicise the Nazis, obscuring the ideological kinship shared by the Adolf Hitlers, Winston Churchills, and Harry Trumans of the 20th century. 

George Pal’s The War of the Worlds is a spectacle of technical brilliance, wartime memory, and terrifying post-war positioning.