THE TIME MACHINE (1960)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*


Though George Pal's TIME MACHINE appeared in theaters at the beginning of the 1960s, I would argue that it is, in essence, the last great SF-films of the 1950s. I'm not talking about the base fact that some of the movie's scenes were filmed in 1959. Rather, it's more to do with my perception that the 1950s, no matter how many bad SF-films may have appeared, still evinces American cinema's first true investment in the SF-genre's concept of "thought experiments." In contrast, the early 1960s show marked a waning enthusiasm for such experiments, though arguably the genre made a comeback in 1966 with FAHRENHEIT 451 and recovered somewhat with recognized masterworks like PLANET OF THE APES and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, both in 1968.

To date, no other filmmaker has managed to craft an adaptation of the Wells novel that has rivaled that of producer-director Pal and writer David Duncan-- which is quite an accomplishment, given that Pal and Duncan change so much of the source material.

As I pointed out in this essay, Wells is so devoted to his theme of cosmic degeneracy that he devotes scarcely any time to having his Traveler play about with his time-hopping machine, but instead has the character vault into a future thousands of years distant from his own. Duncan, however, is extremely concerned with having his traveler, name of George (from Wells' middle name), interact with 20th-century developments. Of course, Duncan had an advantage of hindsight that Wells did not have, but there's also a concerted attempt in the script to make Wells' future reflect the priorities of 1960s culture. Thus George (supposedly an Englishman, though Rod Taylor plays him as a practical-minded Yankee) makes his first temporal forays into World War I, World World II, and a 1960s atom-bomb war, the last of these playing to contemporary fears that such a conflict was practically right around the corner.

Improbably, despite the many thousands of years that ensue between the 1960s and what I'll call "Morlock-Earth," the patterns of the 1960s become indelible templates for the future. Duncan is basically true to the sociological patterns suggested by the Eloi and the Morlocks, but he adds in the contemporary reference of bomb shelters, which are loosely responsible for the divergence between the two species of humankind. The Morlocks are still the "engineer-types" who chose to remain underground even after the bombs stopped falling, but now the Eloi, the descendants of people who ventured back to the surface, have unaccountably lost all ability to think rationally. The movie-Eloi even have, unlike Wells' version, access to fallen cities that come complete with recording-devices that reveal to George (in English!) the circumstances of civilization's fall.

Perhaps because these Eloi are no longer covalent with "the idle rich" of earlier civilizations, Duncan stumps for the idea that the fragile flowers of the future are not beyond redemption. As in the novel, the Eloi seem blandly indifferent to one another's fates, even when one female, Weena, almost drowns in a river, only to be rescued by the Traveler. However, in the film George's heroic action provides a model for redemption. In the novel, Weena is described as child-like, and there's no sense of a budding romance between her and her savior. As played by Yvette Mimeux, though, Weena is ineluctably a mature female, and her association with George marks her slow journey to maturation (characterized by her desire to compete with the women of George's time-frame).

As in the novel, George's time-device is stolen by the Morlocks, forcing the hero to descend into the metaphorical underworld and fight these cannibalistic "devils." Unlike Wells' Traveler, who doesn't appear to fight very well but manages to stave off his foes with the help of an iron bar, Taylor's George is seen as a good brawler, and his actions cause at least some of the male Eloi (but not the female ones!) to fight their long-time oppressors. George returns to his own time, but the coda suggests that he will return to the Morlock-Earth and use the knowledge of his time to reform the fallen world.

Even before Pal's adaptation, though, it might be argued that Wells' scenario was broadly adapted in the 1956 film WORLD WITHOUT END, which simply re-arranged matters so that the people in the underworld became the helpless wimps and the people on the outside mutated into horrendous barbarians.