Political theory and practice

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 24 minutes rated 7.2 by 28542 raters.
Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Classic
In the hills of California far from Grovers Mill a large, flaming meteor lands with a mighty wallop. It starts a forest fire and the locals turn out to quell the fire, and marvel at the object. It’s big; it’s hot. Nearby reading the script is Top Scientist (perhaps on his way from ‘Atomic City’ [1952] and counting down to ‘The Twenty-Seventh Day’ [1957 ], both reviewed elsewhere on the blog).
Top puts on his professorial glasses. The yokels gasp in awe. Top figures out the meteor came from Mars. Probably he read the luggage tags on it.
Then the meteor hatches the first Martian weapons tripod. The three stooges approach it in peace with a white flag as they do in the westerns and are cindered from their trouble. A sky pilot muttering the Lord’s Prayer is likewise toast. More meteors arrive. More tripod war machines appear and lay waste to everything, houses, roads, baseball card collections, churches, tanks, firetrucks, cannons, vending machines…. Nothing is spared, not even World Series tickets!
These tripods did not come in peace. They are landing all over the world, Dubuque, Indianola, and elsewhere.
In desperation the ever reliable Lee Tremayne nukes them. Kaboom. Yet the tripods, now shined by the radiation, keep coming with their red heat rays.
There follows a flight, and a reunion, and the Martians die. Seems they were anti-vaxxers and had no shots before travelling to Earth.
There are some marvellous scenes, as when the first Martian is glimpsed through the window of a wrecked house, and then the tendril that reaches out later. There is an effort at science as Top and his colleagues at the Pacific Smarty Pants Institute examine the evidence.
There is satire of the media. When the Martians start to appear, the journalist wants to know what colour their socks are. As always getting right to the point is the press. The trivial and childish initial responses of the media are realistic.
None of the formidable weapons the Yankees can bring to bear even dent the Martians tripods. Not even Little Boy. They are powerless against this invader.
The panic is likewise realistic. The mob destroys the very science that might save them. Has a contemporary ring to it, doesn’t it.
Thanks to the science at Pacific Smarty Pants we know the Martians are unvaccinated puny little stick figures in latex. Hence when exposed to the pollution, FM radio, smog, haze, advertising, pollutants of California, they croak. The end.
What every one remembers who saw the original on the wide screen is the tripods, the periscopes, and the creatures, all and always in threes. Three eyes, three tendrils, three tripods, tripods. Made the fraternity brothers wonder what else they had three of.

The special effects were indeed special. They remain gripping even in the iTunes version I watched. The wire work was great, though over the years transfer from the original film stock to other media has revealed the wires at work in some versions. This has given a new generation of nitpickers no end of sanctimonious fun.
Producer George Pal included but did not himself understand the irony and satire in the original, e.g., the priest, the bacteria, the media frenzy, the rigidity of officialdom when faced with something new, and the irrationality of the anti-science response. He repeated the jokes without understanding the humour. He then overlaid these with a superficial, stiflingly, and sappy veneer of Christianity. When the local priest walks into the heat ray it is sheer stupidly in the original story, in the film is a noble sacrifice, pointless though it is. And so on.
Pal’s Sy FY curriculum vita is rich and varied, starting with ‘Destination Moon’ (1950). He is described as a happy soul who was also naive in the extreme. In his hands this satire became a warning of a Communist invasion that can only be stopped by praying and singing hymns. It also keeps the tigers away.
By the way the love interest for Top was included at the insistence of the studio executives, and so Pal complied. That late and forced inclusion may explain why she has so little to do.
That wizened H. G. Wells combined with the wunderkind Orson Welles made an enduring franchise out of ‘The War of the Worlds.’ Typing the title ‘War of the Worlds’ into the search box on IMDb will produce a confusing list of hits. Captain Nerd, that is, Thomas Miller, in ‘Mars in the Movies’ (2016) has counted more than a dozen direct replications of ‘War of the Worlds,’ and notes other more tangential derivations.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 20 minutes, rated 6.2 by 229 cinemitizens.
Genre: Old Dark House

Verdict: Gail Russell is the show.

Big Joel McCrea, before he devoted himself exclusively to westerns, is a reclusive business man with two young children. His wife, their mother, died a few years ago. He fired their previous governess for reasons not specified and hired the ingenue Gail Russell. A kindly doctor is much in attendance, Herbert Marshall of the Wooden Leg.

They live next door to …. an Old Dark House. Mac comes and goes at all hours. For a recluse he is out and about all the time, leaving Gail to cope with the rebellious children. ‘Make them obey,’ is his only advice to her as he slams the door. She does; they don’t.

Turns out a woman was murdered nearby years ago, and others since. At least one of the murders coincides with one of Mac’s nocturnal outings. Gail reads ‘Jane Eyre’ for some tips, as did the screen writers.

The dismissed former governess, retains an hypnotic hold on the boy who in turn dominates his little sister. This trio plots to undermine Gail, who makes it easy by falling into every trap set for her. Inevitably, Gail goes to the Old Dark House to find answers. Her survival instinct is less than a Girl Guide at a bus stop.

The fraternity brothers got some of the characters mixed up, and never did figure out what the Old Dark House has to do with Maxine. Or why reclusive Mac is always out. Or why any of it matters. But they did learn to beware of kindly doctors much in attendance.

Raymond Chandler got a writing credit along with three others on this, but I did not hear any Chandler dialogue. The story is from Ethel Lina White’s novel. She also wrote the novel used for ‘The Lady Vanishes’ and ‘The Spiral Staircase.’ Brava!

Gail Russell is eye candy but she fell on hard times, tripping over bottles, aged prematurely, got terminal stage fright, and disappeared from view. She was in a Randolph Scott film ‘Seven Men from Now’ (1956) reviewed elsewhere on this blog some years after this in one of several efforts at a comeback.

Lewis Allen directed to perfection, getting the most out of the script and the players. It is a miniature version ‘The Turn of the Screw.’

IMDb meta-data runtime is 55 minutes, rated 6.9 by 92 cinemitizens.
Genre: Docudrama.

An episode of the long-running CBS television program ‘Studio One.’ It combines narration by Murrow with re-enactments.

Verdict: When Ed Murrow speaks, I listen.

In this case it is a dramatisation of a CBS radio broadcast in 1938 of a story published 1898 in Great Britain. The result was headline news across the United States and the world. Huh?

On Halloween night, October 30, 1938, Orson Welles’s Mercury Players of the Air performed an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds.’ It took the form a news report, including a reporter in the field at Grovers Mill in New Jersey. We see all of this being simulated in the CBS radio studio.
Those who heard the broadcast and reacted included a teenage babysitter, card playing college boys, patrons at a neighbourhood bar, and a police officer at a switchboard. Some people went nuts. Others ran amok. Others loaded shotguns. Many hid under the bed. Some fled. Fleeing was hard since no one knew where Grovers Mill was. All of this in response to a radio broadcast.

The next morning the ‘New York Times’ thundered the news of the national panic caused by the broadcast!

Why the panic?

The program was advertised long in advance in newspapers and magazines. The newspaper radio listings, including those in the ‘New York Times,’ clearly identified the program as an entertainment. The on-air introduction made that clear, too.

However, ‘The Mercury Players of the Air’ was a sustaining program owned by the CBS network. It had no commercial sponsors so there were no commercial breaks. It ran straight through for one hour. Once it started off it went, and as later research found, many people were dial surfing and missed the introduction and had not read the listings but tuned in part way through.

Many a PhD has since dined out on the aftermath. Was there really a panic? Whoa, here comes the Four Horses of Definition. What explains the reaction? Sociological, psychological, dietary, demographic, ethnic, swamp gas explanations have all been seriously offered and seriously considered in PhD dissertations. Faux News denies it ever happened or Hillary did it. One or the other.

Murrow put the programming in the context of the news of 1938 from Europe and Asia. In the East Japan was devouring Formosa, Korea, Manchuria, China, and Shangri-la. From Europe the air fleets of Nazi Germany featured in every movie newsreel. It had re-occupied the Rhineland. Seized the Saar basin. Anschlussed a very willing Austria. Carved the Sudeten out of Czechoslovakia only a few days before with goose-stepping automatons.

Pundits were describing ever more terrible weapons of modern war beneath the seas and from the skies. These combined with memories of chemical weapons in the Great War. What a brew!

For some auditors, who missed the newspaper advertisement, the program listings, and the introduction, the descent on Grovers Mill might well have been the spawn of Naziism. To listen to the broadcast now there are only a few gasped, terse descriptions of the Martians and someone in distress might not fathom those. Or just conclude that these were the creatures of the Asiatic Japanese or Satanic Naziis.

That was one of the findings of Hadley Cantril’s ‘Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic’ (1940): Many who heard part of the broadcast were prepared for catastrophe by all the bad news that just kept coming.

These prepared people had endured the unimaginable for a decade: the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, armies of the unemployed, starvation, diseases out of control, along with the Asian and European political news. The times, they were apocalyptic.

The story is that Cantril in Princeton heard the broadcast and then read the ‘New York Times’ the next morning, and mobilised the research project within hours to identify and interview auditors. Quite impossible today with months of Ethics Committee vetting, budgets laid down years in advance, KPIs that suit research managers, corporate plans, the annual cycle of research grants, and more.

But now back to the film, there is a raft of new faces in the re-enactments, including Ed Asner, John Astin, Warren Beatty, James Coburn, Vincent Gardenia, and Warren Oates. Babysitter Susan Hallaran eats the wallpaper as they say in show biz, though this was her last credit on the IMDb.
Alexander Scourby is the radio announcer with the mellifluous voice, and he carries the show on radio. The son of Greek immigrants who learned English from Shakespeare.

But the star of the show is neither named nor given any lines: Orson Welles.
The wunderkind at work that very night.
He wanted nothing to do with this reprise. Whether the broadcast caused a panic, there was a sizeable reaction to it. CBS was cross-pressured because on the one hand it wanted the acclaim of such great influence (to lure advertisers in the future) but it wanted no part of the complaints. It did what every large organisation still does and delegated responsibility downward. The fact that Welles, for once, had done everything through channels and had approvals all the way to the top, was conveniently forgotten by the professional amnesiacs of management in CBS. Such amnesia is surely the subject of one McKinsey management seminar.
It was left to Welles alone to eat a lot of crow by way of apology. This was not something that came easily to this mercurial Zeus, and he had no wish ever to re-visit it. That is, he never wanted anything to do with CBS again, as Murrow obliquely noted.

The gossip on the inter-web is that H. G. Wells and Orson Welles met a year later in San Antonio Texas where each was on a speaking tour. Hope they stayed in a better hotel there than I did once upon a time.

Murrow’s documentary makes no mention of the 1953 film. Yet it would have come to mind for many in the audience. There are several other documentaries about the broadcast, one or two with similar titles.

IMDb meta-data runtime is 56 minutes, rated 6.2 by 103 cinemitizens.
Genre: Old Dark House

Verdict: Sly fun.
Perry White and Mrs live in an Old Dark House at the end of a very long causeway. Otranto mansion comes equipped with a black stereotype, the ever ready Will Best, and a vast garage.
Then one dark and stormy night a party of relatives knock on the door! Perry is a perfect host, and why not when one of the guests is the first Superman disguised behind a pencil moustache. The guests all have letters of invitation:

But neither Perry nor Mrs Perry sent any such invitations. That puts arrowroot into the plot.
Guess what! No sooner are they assembled than the lights go out, the telephone goes dead, the cars are immobilised, the weather turns violent, and then it gets worse. They are alone! They are cut-off! They are in an Old Dark House movie! [Gasp!]
Among the guests is the redoubtable Veda Ann Borg who plays a double role. That sounded good to the fraternity brothers since Veda is one live wire. Regrettably, one of the twin sisters she plays is snuffed at get-go, while the other reacts by locking herself in a room. Not even Veda can do much in those circumstances.
Also invited (by someone unknown, and it stays that way) is the ever thuggish Grant Withers who was the short-priced favourite as villain from the start. Mr Smooth insinuates himself in the party. Now and again faces appear at the window.
Smooth knows something the others don’t. Some dastardly cur has stolen the radium from the watches of the doctors at a nearby hospital and that thief is amongst the denizens of the Old Dark House, though how and why are never explained. How could it be stolen? Why come to the island with it? Who did invite all these people? To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, and how many times does that happen in a movie review, ‘whereof one does not know, one must not speak.’ In plain English that is ‘Dunno.’
Winsome Girl does not live up the the billing but how could she: ‘OUT OF THE FOGS OF FEAR! STORMS OF TERROR!…came this amazing person…to thrill you!’ However, she was cool-headed, resourceful, and capable of surprising even Mr Smooth. No screaming. No fainting. No tripping. None of the usual tropes for women to make snowflake men feel superior. She and Smooth combine in a neat deception at the end to reveal the conspicuous villain. The screen play breezes along. The direction is crisp.
Believe it or not the spindly Kirk Alyn played Superman in the first film in 1948. He must have gotten the job after posing as the 98-pound weakling in Charles Atlas advertisements and the casting director called the wrong guy.
As this picture travelled across the United States the yellow telegrams from D-Day started to arrive. Three thousand were sent in one day.