The Time Machine (1960) Directed by George Pal. Screenplay by David Duncan based on the 1895 novella The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Starring Rod Taylor, Alan Young, and Yvette Mimieux.
It’s a snowy night in London, just a few days after the dawn of the 20th century. A group of men gather at the home of their mutual friend, an inventor by the name of George, who has invited them over for dinner but is currently absent. The men drink their friend’s booze and grumble about his lack of punctuality. It’s only after they’ve been ushered into the dining room and seated at the table that their host finally makes an appearance.
George (Rod Taylor) stumbles into the room, dirty and bedraggled, and asks for a drink before explaining where he’s been. That explanation goes something like this: Remember how you were all over here a few days ago? Remember how you all made fun of me? Well, guess what, suckers! I invented a time machine.
I’m paraphrasing, but only a little. This is the framing device that introduces The Time Machine (1960), which is based on the H.G. Wells novella of the same name. The protagonist of the book is only ever called the Time Traveler; in the movie he is winkingly named H. George Wells. George Pal, the film’s director, was a dedicated H.G. Wells fan. He had already adapted The War of the Worlds (1953) and would later acquire the rights to (but never produce) Wells’ 1899 novel The Sleeper Awakes. He also produced Destination Moon (1950), which was among the first films to aim for a practical, realistic portrayal of space travel. (Yes, it’s on the Film Club list.)
And this isn’t really relevant to The Time Machine, but it’s fun to know anyway: Pal had begun his career as an animator. Specifically, he got his start using replacement animation, the type of stop-motion animation where, instead of changing the model frame by frame, a series of hand-carved wooden puppets are filmed frame by frame to give the appearance of motion. He started out with dancing cigarettes in an advertisement and went on to make an entire series of animated ads and films; all of these films are collectively called the Puppetoons series. You can take a look at some examples: a Philips radio ad from 1938, a clip from a version of Dr. Seuss’s “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberrry Street,” and in The Puppetoon Movie (1987), which Pal’s friend Arnold Leibovit produced to showcase Pal’s work.
Let’s leave the puppets and go back to London in 1905. Around that dinner table, and in the film’s voiceover, George recounts where he has been. He reminds his friends that just a few days ago, on New Year’s Eve, he invited them over to witness a demonstration of a miniature version of his time machine. The miniature version of the time machine looks exactly like the large version, right down to having a plush red armchair for the driver to sit in. (Does this mean the armchair is a necessary component of the time travel mechanism? This is the first of many questions that go unanswered in this film.)
At that previous get-together, the small machine vanished right in front of them, but George’s buddies were skeptical that it actually traveled through time. I don’t blame them for that; I too would require rather more proof. What I do blame them for is encouraging George to put his considerable imagination and intellect toward something more commercially profitable, like helping with the Boer War. I’m just saying, if a friend tells you he has invented a time machine, maybe don’t go immediately to, “How about colonial war profiteering instead?”
As the friends leave, Filby (Alan Young) advises a thoroughly demoralized George not to do anything rash.
So George goes back inside and immediately does something rash, because that’s what intentional time travel is all about!
I’m using “intentional” to distinguish the kind of story typified by The Time Machine from other kinds of time travel stories. Time travel is broad, flexible, multifaceted concept that has (probably) been around for as long as humans have been telling stories. There are myths from cultures around the world about people who find themselves in situations where they are taken out of their own time and returned years or centuries later. Sometimes they travel to another land where time passes differently; more often they simply fall asleep. Such journeys usually happen thanks to the meddling of gods or demons or supernatural creatures, or purely by chance, as opposed to being something the time travelers choose for themselves.
Intentional time travel in fiction comes along a bit later—it’s been around for a few centuries, but trying to pinpoint any precise origin is a lesson in historical futility—and more specifically the shift from utilizing magic to constructing purpose-built machines had to wait for the Industrial Revolution to come along. H.G. Wells wasn’t the first to write about a machine invented to travel through time, but he was among the earliest, and he was definitely the one who popularized the idea of purposeful, exploratory time travel as a specific science fictional trope.
George is upset that his friends don’t support his dreams and aspirations, so he hops into his full-size time machine to test it out. He starts small, and his delight grows as he sees the world pass more and more quickly around him. He watches the candle burn down, the seasons change, the fashions on a storefront mannequin evolve.
This sequence is the best part of a film that is, on the whole, a rather mixed bag. The time machine itself is a lovely, ornate prop; it was designed by Bill Ferrari and built by Wah Chang. You have 100% without a doubt seen Chang’s work before. Working on Star Trek: The Original Series, he was the man responsible for the tribbles, the Gorn costume, the Vulcan harp, as well as the communicator that Motorola engineer Martin Cooper cited as inspiration for the world’s first handheld mobile phone.
Gene Warren and Tim Baar won the Academy Award for their special effects, but I also want to call attention to the cleverness of Paul Vogel’s cinematography. The simulated time-lapse flow of George’s trip through time is accomplished by means of a mechanical lighting effect: circular shutters with segments of different colors to simulate the changing sky. Unfortunately, there are also examples where the rushed production and low budget really do show: spots where you can see how the matte paintings don’t line up with the foreground; some odd discrepancies in the depth field of certain scenes; the regrettable choice to use chunky oatmeal as lava. (In all fairness, they had 29 days to film and less than $1 million to work with.)
George makes a stop in 1917, where he’s both excited about being able to visit the future and meet Filby’s grown son (also played by Alan Young). But he’s also dismayed to learn that the future means war and the death of his friend Filby. His next stop, right in the middle of the Blitz in 1940, does little to convince him that humanity is on the right track.
So he travels ahead a bit more to 1966, where he finds that the unknown-to-him but known-to-the-audience Cold War fears of nuclear Armageddon are coming true, as an “atomic satellite” detonates and triggers—please imagine me tearfully trembling and clinging to my PhD in geophysics as I type this—a volcanic eruption that engulfs London.
It’s curious that at no point does George consider going back. He escapes by going forward again: forward as he and his time machine are encased in lava, forward as he waits for the stone to erode away. In the year 802,701, he finally stops again. This time he finds a pleasantly lush landscape with nice weather, abundant fruit trees, and a cheerful population of people who appear to live a life of complete leisure.
George thinks it’s very swell that humanity has reached the point of being able to laze about on idyllic rivers instead of laboring and warring—until he sees a young woman drowning in the river, and he realizes with horror that nobody is trying to help or even seems to care. He only grows more appalled as the young woman, Weena (17-year-old Yvette Mimieux, in her first role), tells him more about her people, the Eloi, and their ignorant, uncurious way of life. George, a proper Englishman in his dedication to the Great Man theory of history, fully believes that the Eloi just need somebody to show them how to be better, and they will be. All the while we are trying not to think too much about the movie’s choice to develop a romance between George and the childlike Weena.
George does grow a bit more sympathetic toward the Eloi when he learns that they are always in danger from the Morlock, who are furry, subterranean, and have stolen his time machine. He learns that the Eloi and Morlock both evolved from humans in the past, thanks to a centuries-long war that drove part of the population underground. And, yes, we all have a great many questions about this scenario, but we shan’t be asking them here, because they have no answers within the film.
Everything that happens after that point is a bit silly: Weena and several other Eloi are taken by the Morlock, George goes to save them, there’s a fight that involves a lot of whips and fur suits catching on fire. George rescues the Eloi and does great damage to the Morlock caverns, and there is some drama over whether he’ll be able to leave before he finally gets his time machine back and has to return to the past to escape the Morlocks.
This ending is one place where the otherwise quite faithful movie diverges from the book. In the book, the Time Traveler keeps traveling into the future, in some passages that are eerily beautiful in how Wells describes Earth’s strange and frightening far future, when the Sun is dying and life on Earth has changed beyond recognition. In the movie, he heads right back to the year 1900 and the dinner party, where he recounts his tale to his highly skeptical friends; he then leaves again, presumably (back) to the same future. The book’s Time Traveler also disappears into his travels, with a promise to the narrator that he’ll be back with proof in half an hour, and is never seen again. The narrator speculates that he could have gone anywhere in the past or future; there is no suggestion that he’s returning to the Eloi’s world for any purpose.
All in all, the first part of the movie feels charmingly old-fashioned, with its Victorian protagonist marveling at the wonders and horrors of the 20th century as he travels through the future. But the second half feels not old-fashioned but outdated, and I’ve been thinking about some reasons why that is.
What I keep coming back to is that there is literary and political context to H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel that I think does not translate well into a Cold War-era film—even though, at the same time, I think that thematic misalignment is interesting.
There was another very popular time travel story published toward the end of the 19th century, this one of the “fell asleep and time passed” variety, and that was Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward. Bellamy’s book is an example of utopian fiction: a book that exists to imagine a more perfect world from a philosophical, political, or sociological point of view. (The professor of my college “Utopian Fiction” philosophy class would be so proud that I’m finally using what she taught us.) These days we’re used to interpreting portrayals of a perfect world as dystopian, but Looking Backward was fully in earnest in its description of a socialist future. So too was William Morris’ News From Nowhere (1890), because socialist utopian thought experiments in the form of fiction were quite popular around that time.
Wells’ The Time Machine is a bit of an oddball, in that it was born of the same socialist literary tradition as Looking Backward and News From Nowhere, but it’s also an early example of the now-common sci fi premise of an apparently utopian world that is in fact deeply fucked up. He wasn’t the first to write about an apparent utopia disguising an actual dystopia, but he was influential in a larger shift that was taking place across literature—the shift away from those thought experiments about better worlds and toward thought experiments about worlds that have gone very wrong in attempting to be perfect.
By the time George Pal made The Time Machine in 1960, the world was already familiar with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (the English translation was published in 1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and well as with films such as Metropolis (1927) and Things To Come (1936, written by H.G. Wells himself).
That is—with the caveat that this is a generalization and there are always counterexamples—by 1960, fiction about failed or dystopian societies tended to be based on the very real political problems writers were seeing in the world around them. And that is captured in the first part of The Time Machine, when we see the prediction of Cold War paranoia in the volcano-inducing destruction of War World III. But the film never achieves any depth when it comes to exploring the society of the Eloi and Morlocks, which is noticeable only because George says several times that he wants to learn more about the societies of the future.
I don’t always like to spend so much time comparing a film adaptation to its source material, but I think The Time Machine is an interesting case because it’s so easy to see the ways in which science fiction—in both books and film—changed after, around, and in response to H.G. Wells’ novel. The result of adapting the tale in the midst of that ongoing cultural evolution is imperfect, with a promising beginning but sort of falling apart toward the end. It exists as a sort of patchwork example of the different ways we imagine what the future might look like, if we ever get a chance to visit.
What do you think about The Time Machine and its place in the history of time travel fiction? I didn’t mention the 2002 remake. I actually saw it when it came out, but I realized as I was reading through the Wikipedia article that I remember absolutely nothing about it, not even that Jeremy Irons was in it as the Morlock leader. So I can’t offer much comparison—anybody who remembers more, or wants to mention other adaptions and interpretations, is invited to chime in!
Next week: Another take on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine with Singeetam Srinivasa Rao’s Aditya 369. This time we’re starting in Hyderabad, India in the ’90s and heading to both the past and the future. Watch it on Amazon.
