The Time Machine

The Time Machine, the movie produced and directed by George Pal, reflects a very different time and a very different audience. While Wells' story is social class commentary wrapped within a stark narrative fable, Pal's movie is a brightly colored sweetmeat with all the indicting political ideology of a buttered scone. It's a Boy's Own adventure complete with handsome square-jawed inventor undertaking a journey through the Fourth Dimension to a new world complete with monsters, fisticuffs, rescues, escapes, and a keen awareness of our protagonist's superiority to the poor benighted heathens in his midst. Wells' story ends with a sigh at Mankind's ultimately insignificant place in an indifferent cosmos. Pal's ends with an optimistic romantic hero returning to the future to lead the Eloi out of their Dark Ages and into a new Enlightenment of learning and questioning and, one presumes, other proper English virtues.

One can imagine Wells — righteously angry at Mankind's foibles and predilection for self-destruction — riding his Time Machine to our present and viewing the fruits of Mr. Pal's labor in the Wells vineyard. What would be his reaction? In a word, Wells would plotz.

But does that make Pal's movie bad?

Not at all. Certainly not if you're 15 years old, as I was when I first watched The Time Machine on a Saturday afternoon between one TV program and another. I loved it. So I admit to a certain prejudice while saying that, after watching its new DVD incarnation the year I turn 40, I still love it. Is it hokum? Sure, much of it. The titular machine itself, as envisioned by Pal in one of the classic pieces of pre-CGI model-making, is perhaps symbolic of the movie as a whole: It's a charmingly magical fantasy contraption; its apparati are all aglitter with polished brass finishes and faceted glasswork; the rider's compartment is cozy with red velvet cushions and tasteful filigree scrollwork. It's clean and functional, here and there a little gaudy, and isn't stained by any over-abundant motor oil of logic or verisimilitude. It does, however, take you where you want to go.

The movie stars Rod Taylor as the Time Traveler, now named George. Taylor soon after went on to provide the voice of Pongo in One Hundred and One Dalmatians and then reached his first career peak as the leading man in The Birds. Taylor's solid performance is one of the many likeable elements in The Time Machine. He's a true Pal protagonist — a driven, earnest man of learning who still has what it takes to beat the baddies and get the girl, a model for males throughout the Western world. Even when fighting a mob of Morlocks in their cavernous lair strewn with the remains of cannibalistic feasts, Taylor's hair is never mussed — and that looks exactly right.

Pre-Mr. Ed Alan Young co-stars as David Filby, George's best and most loyal friend (and Wells' original narrator). His is the voice of restraint that tells George there are things Man was not meant to know, that he should be content to live in his own present world, that one should not tempt Fate or Providence in the name of upstart wanderlust. He provides the conservative counterpoint to George's reckless questing, and does so with such deep-felt concern that when we learn what becomes of Filby in the near future the movie offers one of its few moments of genuine poignancy. Young, in fact, plays two characters, the second being Filby's son Jamie, whom George meets in the future. But more on that shortly.

The inevitable add-on love interest is delivered by Yvette Mimieux as the young Eloi woman Weena. Vapid and childlike, Weena single-handedly sets back 800,000+ years of women's progress. She is the evolutionary end of all "dumb blonde" jokes, and apparently retains an excellent hairdresser. This being 1960 Hollywood, Mimieux is just dandy as the willing fantasy woman of earnest inventors and 15-year-old boys everywhere. She's not just pretty. Better yet, she's innocent and compliant — and, we can infer, unfettered by all those socially imposed sexual hangups that are so anti-evolutionary. (C'mon, you don't have to be 15 to imagine what's waiting for George, our Competent Man avatar, when in the end he chooses to leave our time and return to Weena's side. "To help build a new world" my ass.)

To the credit of Pal and screenwriter David Duncan, many of the bolts and rivets of Wells' plot remain intact — in particular, the opening scenes of George demonstrating his bric-a-brac model Machine for his friends (a fine supporting cast headlined by Young, Sebastian Cabot, and Whitt Bissell). Removed are a number of Wells' later, bleaker scenes (including the aforementioned End Of The World) and, of course, that messy Darwinian indictment of modern class power structure.

Other scenes that exist only in the movie have George making brief stops during his initial journey forward. These scenes set up what can be considered Pal's equivalent of Wells' narrative diatribe. However, in 1960 Cold War insecurities had trumped Victorian class consciousness for an audience's attention. Pausing to look around in 1917, George meets young James Filby (Alan Young again), a soldier newly returned from "the front." When Filby tells George the fate of Filby Sr., he buttresses the Time Traveler's disgust at modern man's instinct for warfare. When George departs this world at war he immediately arrives in another, stopping in 1940 during a blitz bombing of his London neighborhood. Then in 1966 he arrives just in time to hear the air raid sirens and to encounter young Filby again, now an old man in a silver radiation suit leading others to the neighborhood fallout shelter because of an "atomic satellite zeroing in." Atomic blasts and the violent response of Planet Earth herself almost prevent George from reaching his Time Machine and propelling himself far, far into a future that he is sure will have evolved into an enlightened utopia free from our primitive barbarism.

It's the Cold War adornments — air raid sirens and underground shelters — that set up the world George finds in the year 802,701. Pal's extrapolation isn't as thought-provoking and weighty as Wells', and it's Wells' that arguably has aged better. Give Pal's vision its due, though. As he did four years later with another exceptional fantasy, The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, by weaving a thread, however thin, of contemporary commentary into his movie, Pal's Time Machine steps up a rung from what studio executives probably considered little more than children's fare. And for us today watching the DVD, it provides a look back to a time when the possibilities of bomb shelters and air raid sirens and atomic annihilation were real enough to make Pal's Eloi and Morlocks, if not possible, then at least unnervingly plausible.

The rest of the movie proceeds briskly in expected pulp magazine fashion. The vacuously innocent — and universally blond — Eloi enjoy their sunlit existence of mindless frolicking and consuming, while the few surviving books crumble to dust untouched and unread. Down below, the nocturnal Morlocks tend the chugging machinery and surface periodically to harvest the "fatted cattle" Eloi for their own grisly larders. To this our hero arrives, explores, endures, pontificates, and punches Morlocks in the snoot, all with his best girl by his side. Naturally enough, he becomes both a savior and role model for the Eloi, who learn from him that one can rise up against one's oppressors (ironically, with fists and aggression) and that active self-determination is the first step toward freedom (and, just to be waggish, toward starvation and privation resulting from the wreckage of what had been a comfortable economic system, if like the Eloi you're ignorant of all that cannibalistic feasting and stuff).

Don't worry about the built-in conveniences. Expect to chuckle out loud at least once. So the Eloi speak perfect English even if they can't spell "socialist manifesto." So the chubby, green-skinned Morlocks' winky-blink lightbulb eyes look silly. So Rod Taylor saves humanity by blowing up an underground complex roughly the size of a city block. George Pal knew what he wanted and accomplished it with aplomb and his own period style and verve, just as H.G. took care of his own creative goals and audiences. Pal replaced Wells' grim prognostication with a sense of wonder that's still shiny today.

Pal's Time Machine is simplistic but avoids being merely simple-minded. It's a puff pasty. Tea with jam and bread. If you have one, watch it with a girlfriend with strong feelings about the depiction of women on screen (my wife's imitation of Weena is a scream). It makes an interesting matching bookend for Pal's earlier and darker War of the Worlds, his even looser adaptation of a Wells novel. Playing compare-contrast between them justifies a double-feature DVD evening. Then, to give you a peek into the kind of motion picture Wells felt more at home with, cap the evening with Things to Come (1936), for which Wells wrote the screenplay. That one is more impressive in terms of scenic design and conceptual scale, plus keeps Wells' tendency toward ideological pontification intact. Hmmmm .... Things to Come may have more thoughtful meat on its bones, but I can guarantee that you'll have a better time with Pal's adaptations. So I recommend sandwiching the real Wells between the other two.  (Mark Bourne, DVD Journal)