THE WAR OF THE WORLDS: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Paramount, 1953) Paramount Home Video

A pop culture phenomenon decades before it ever hit the Technicolor movie screen, thanks to Orson Welles’ legendary 1938 Mercury Players broadcast - causing millions casually tuning in to their radio dials to fervently believe the earth had been invaded by visitors from another planet – director, Byron Haskin’s The War of the Worlds (1953, and, also based on science fiction writer, H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel) is an escapism yarn, photographed to perfection by George Barnes. The movie changes Wells’ location and time from vintage Victorian England to ‘then’ modern-day California, but keeps tight to the sensationalizing paranoia ‘Wells’ and ‘Welles’ were able to generate in their own mediums. War of the Worlds is the perfect popcorn pic for a Saturday matinee, with its key-lit melodrama, trend-setting SFX, instantly recognizable sound effects, neatly marketed as a glossy bauble. The picture ran off with an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. But its real influence has been felt ever since in the proliferation of sci-fi epics that, in one form or another, all pay homage to its story-telling stealth and visual design. Inventively visualized, eighty-two years later The War of the Worlds remains the standard bearer. Shooting in 3-strip Technicolor legitimized, not only the picture, but the entire sci-fi genre, then considered the red-headed stepchild of the industry and usually relegated to badly conceived/cheaply executed B-grade kiddie matinee full and nonsense. The other virtue here is a superb script by Barré Lyndon, that moves like gangbusters on its dynamic and propelling chiller/thriller scenario. Add to the mix, a religious slant – deftly to place God at the forefront of humanity’s salvation – a life-affirming tome for the ultra-conservative Eisenhower generation - and, well, how could it miss?

Perhaps well-aware of the reputation Orson Welles’ broadcast had garnered – and retained in the intervening decades – and also, astutely in tune with the mounting anxieties afflicting the atomic age, War of the Worlds would become nothing less than tremendous in its ‘then’ ground-breaking visual effects to provide – among their many delights – a truly good fright. Interesting to consider the quaintness here, in those same SFX, in an age as commonplace as flushing a toilet, and, with each subsequent close-encounter ratcheting up its gut-churning bloodshed and horror at the expense of meticulously constructed suspense. The cyclops-inspired Martian machines that invade earth on this occasion may lack today’s CGI-generated sophistication, but they have, arguably, lost none of their vigor to inspire creepy phantasms from another world, plundering and pulping mankind with a methodical thrust and thirst for total human annihilation. Seemingly, to draw a parallel between the radio broadcast and his movie, Haskin’s begins with a B&W prologue, smash cut into a burst of Technicolor for the main titles, evolved through several matte paintings by Chesley Bonestell, chronicling our limited understanding of the solar system – minus Venus. Accompanied by a voice-over narration from Sir Cedric Hardwicke, we get the Cole’s Notes, 50-cent tour of the planets, with Hardwicke explaining how earth’s verdant landscape and ecosystem have proven an enticement to marauding space invaders.

Conceived by producer, George Pal – the grandfather of fifties’ sci-fi, War of the Worlds was initially planned as a 3D release, the concept abandoned when 3D’s popularity began to wane. Given the picture’s overriding popularity over the decades, it is hardly surprising its success and legacy have managed to eclipse its source material. H.G. Wells, an agnostic, had great contempt for the clergy, portrayed as cowardly and ineffectual. For the movie, steeped in Eisenhower-era ultra-conservatism, with its staunch affinity for God, mom’s home-made apple pie, and America – the beautiful, Lyndon and Haskin present Pastor Dr. Matthew Collins (Lewis Martin) as a forthright and empathic man of the cloth who sacrifices himself for the greater good, as both his parishioners and his God expect. Indeed, Barry’s screenplay emphasizes a stalwart faith with the movie’s penultimate confrontation between aliens and man inside a church, and humanity’s deliverance from evil having no parallel in Wells’ authorship. Indeed, Wells would have likely abhorred this alteration as it belies his fundamentally godless viewpoint.  

Thematically, Haskins and Lyndon are far more reverent to Wells in their retention of the motivations of these Martian invaders – their necessity to find a new home, having since made their own planet uninhabitable. The crash-landing depicted in the novel is faithfully reproduced, although now, the cylindrical-inspired spacecraft of Wells’ time has morphed into meteorite-shaped vessels of doom. The movie is less apocalyptic in what follows – no references to the Martians ‘feeding’ off human blood or forcing captives to act as bounty hunters to ensnare the fleeing factions of humanity into their clutches. As in the novel, the Martians are wiped out by earth’s microorganisms, the movie foreshortening this incubation period from the novel’s 3-weeks, to a mere 3-days, further expedited by the movie’s 82 min. run time; a very fast-acting and lethal virus to wipe out the enemy. But perhaps the biggest alteration is in the physical design of this Martian hoard. The book’s bear-sized, disk-shaped beings with beak-like, V-shaped maws, oozing saliva, have been streamlined as short, long-armed, 3-finger menaces, with broad-shouldered upper torsos, and a single, gleaming eye, incorporating a rotating red, blue and green colored lens. For budgetary reasons, the Martians are never photographed from the waist down, presumably, as the preliminary sketches for their lower half were never actually created in Edith Head’s costuming.

It should also be noted, Lyndon’s adaptation bears no earthly resemblance to the novel, set in the 19th century and following the exploits of a medical student who journeys to the English countryside where the Martian attacks have occurred. Gone is the Victoriana bric-a-brac, replaced by a modern male protagonist, Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) a California physicist who falls madly for his former college student, Sylvia van Buren (Ann Robinson) shortly after the Martian invasion has already begun. Borrowing from the best parts of the novel, Forrester similarly experiences an ordeal in an abandoned and decimated ruins and has his own ‘close encounter’ with an actual Martian. Like the novel’s protagonist, Forrester is eventually reunited with his romantic ideal in the end. The Cold War slant exercised herein is typical for sci-fi movies from this period, the atomic bomb’s double-edge sword – perceived as both a threat to mankind, yet a queer sort of salvation against the enemy; the proverbial ‘lesser of two evils’ at hand and at play. A concerted effort was made by visual effects designer, Al Nozaki to eschew the traditional ‘saucer’ flying spacecraft, the design instead to favor tripod-esque and tentacle-like war machines with a cobra-head and cyclops-inspired single electronic eye – copied verbatim a decade later for Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), also directed by Byron Haskin. Decades later, the iconic high-pitch of the spacecraft’s death ray would be endlessly recycled as the standardized ‘ray-gun’ sound in other movies and on television.

War of the Worlds is set in southern California. We are introduced to Dr. Clayton Forrester, a renown atomic scientist on a much-needed respite, fishing with colleagues, Dr. Pryor (Bob Cornthwaite) and Dr. Bilderbeck (Sandro Giglio) when a large unidentified object crashes near the town of Linda Rosa. At the impact site, Forrester becomes acquainted with USC library science/instructor, Sylvia Van Buren and her uncle, Pastor Matthew Collins. The object to have plummeted to earth from outer space is deemed as inactive. However, later in the evening, its round hatch unscrews and opens. A Martian weapon disintegrates the three men standing guard at the site. The United States Marine Corps arrives to isolate the object, even as devastating reports herald an unearthly invasion by similarly designed objects has already begun to decimate cities all over the world. Pastor Collins’ faith is tested when he naïvely attempts to peaceably contact the Martians, and, instead, is disintegrated by their death ray. Now, the Martian war machine emerges, plying its heat-ray and skeleton beam to wipe out all human curiosity seekers. Unable to escape in a military spotter plane, Forrester and Sylvia take refuge in an abandoned farm house. But their burgeoning romance is blunted when another alien ship plunders overhead. Dismembering one of the Martian’s electronic eyes, Forrester collects an alien blood sample.

The sample is analyzed at Pacific Tech, even as the Martians devastate major world capitals. Forced into a life-altering predicament, the U.S. government contemplates dropping an atomic bomb on the enemy. Alas, the Martians’ force field deflects even these attacks. Evacuating Los Angeles, Forrester, Sylvia, and the Pacific Tech team are parted in the chaos; their scientific research and equipment, either stolen or destroyed. Forrester searches for Sylvia. Recalling her strong faith, he reasons she has taken refuge inside a church, and, after exploring several, he discovers her among the praying survivors. The Martian invaders descends on the site. However, at the last possible moment, the death rays lose power and their ships suddenly collide into one another; one of the Martians, stumbling forth and dying. A penultimate voice-over explains, that although the Martians were resilient to human weaponry, they have no protection against earth’s natural bacteria. Seemingly, this has decimated their immune system. If man could not prevent the annihilation of earth, then it was the ‘littlest things’, place there by God, to have saved everyone from complete destruction.

Despite changing times and tastes, The War of the Worlds remains tremendously entertaining, albeit, more so today as a time capsule than cutting edge thriller. Half a century, and then some, has passed since the burgeoning sci-fi genre made its mark on popular cinema. And yet, the infectious blend of religion, death rays, and alien conquerors has not withered from our public consciousness, perhaps because our inner fascination with life beyond our meager understanding of this solar system persists.  While the picture has, undeniably dated, in its moral sensibility, SFX, clothing and hair styles, its best moments continue to ply us with pleasurable frights. As an unspoiled summation of fifties’ dogma, steeped in pseudo-religious methodology/man-made science, and quaintly perceived logic aplenty, no match for God and that blind leap of faith – War of the Worlds is an absorbing tale. Wed to George Pal’s visual artistry it achieves a shadowy and self-reflective Armageddon.

Even in an age of darkly purposed graphic novels, War of the Worlds holds up remarkably well, thanks to Pal’s ingeniously concocted amalgam of datum and delirium - an artistically envisioned saga of humanity’s survival in the face of insurmountable odds. Its brilliant use of Technicolor notwithstanding, War of the Worlds legitimized sci-fi at the box office, and, in a way too few of its competitors have in the intervening decades. Haskin’s direction is first rate, as is Lyndon’s screenplay. And, if the acting suffers – marginally – from that stilted severity to afflict a lot of sci-fi back then, and, for which all ‘science-types’ of this generation were presented as severe intellectuals ‘with the proverbial ‘pole’ stuck a little too firmly up their backsides, the Martian invaders suffer from no such compunction to remain remote and tyrannical figures, inflicting mass devastation at will. If anything, the Martians emerge as pseudo-reptilian terrifyingly intergalactic seeds of doom – their mental perspicacity and physical agility, meant to put a period to our own smug sense of superiority as masters of this world and those beyond it, yet to be touched by the hand of man. The exceptional mind craft on tap in War of the Worlds earmarks it as cornerstone of the genre, not only of its time, but for all time. And while others have dared an overthrow of its technical prowess, virtually every masterpiece to have been forged in its wake has, in some way, paid homage to the virtuosity in its storytelling, making War of the Worlds one for the ages.

Paramount Home Video has finally come around to a native 4K of their 4K mastered standard Blu, first tested on the market by Aussie/indie label, ViaVision. Once again, the mountain moves at a glacial pace when it comes to preserving its limited vintage catalog it still under its banner. Virtually all of Paramount’s pre-50’s assets were stripped and sold to EMI (later, Universal). So, Paramount, still dragging its corporate knuckles on the linoleum where the rest of its movie heritage is concerned, is a real head-scratcher. Is this new 4K worth a repurchase? Well, yes – and no. 

The ‘yes’ of things has to do primarily with the marginal improvements here in both color saturation and fidelity, as well as subtle tweaks to contrast and fine detail over the previously issued 1080p standard Blu. Important to note, both the Blu and this 4K have been mastered from the same ‘restored’ elements. Paramount has not performed a ‘new’ scan beyond the one it did two years ago – in 4K – but neglected to actually port over in 4K to home video. So, what we are getting now is merely what we should have had all along. If you are seeking the absolutely best incarnation of this movie to showcase on your home theater system, you will want to snatch this disc up right away. But if you are anticipating quantum leaps in video mastering to positively astound, you may be more than a tad disappointed. Comparing the standard Blu and this 4K, on large-format TV’s – even in projection – you really do have to search the skies to appreciate the overall advantages in image quality.

As before, the audio here is DTS 5.1 as well as a restored 2.0 mono. We get a pair of audio commentaries, available on the DVD from 2005 – the first, with Ann Robinson and Gene Barry, the other, with contempo film-maker, Joe Dante, historians Bob Burns, Bill Warren, Barry Forshaw and Kim Newman. Also, from the DVD, the original Mercury Players’ radio broadcast from 1938, and the 30-min. ‘making of’, plus a 10 min. puff piece on H.G. Wells and the original theatrical trailer. So, virtually nothing new in extras. Bottom line: The War of the Worlds is a classic. 

While Paramount is marketing this one as a 70th Anniversary, there is nothing new or exciting to mark the occasion. The packaging – a recreation of the original poster art – is much appreciated, but was also presented in the standard Blu release from 2 years ago. Given the impeccable mastering of that original Blu-ray release, I would have much preferred if Paramount had hunkered down to do 4K releases of any number of its vintage movies still sporting substandard 1080p transfers (or in some cases, no hi-def video release) in desperate need of an upgrade: Sabrina (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), Funny Face (1957), Half a Sixpence (1967), Witness (1985) and Dead Again (1991) immediately come to mind. Dumb marketing on Paramount’s part.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

4.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

5

EXTRAS

2