War Of The Worlds
“Ever since the Mercury Theatre on the Air's Welles-on-Wells broadcast on that Halloween night in 1938, ‘War Of The Worlds' has been a national bad dream and hangover of hysteria. As a screen property it was first offered to Cecil B. De Mille and then to Sergei Eisenstein during his American visit. As appealing as the vision of Nicolai Cherkassov tilting with Martians on the ice might be, we are probably fortunate that George Pal was the recipient of this story he had wanted for years.

“Instead of placing the period of the picture within the nineteenth century as written by H.G. Wells in his novel, Pal wisely set it in contemporary fifties Southern California. In so doing, Wells' sense of its ‘assault on human self-satisfaction' has been preserved for us. From the time the first fireball impacts near the small town of Linda Rosa where the pacifist representatives are crisped by the alien's venomous laser lash, the gloves...of respective numbers of fingers...are off. As Leslie Halliwell observes: ‘War Of The Worlds...was noticeable for introducing a streak of viciousness into science fiction: neither side showed much mercy, and the noise was deafening.'

“Al Nozaki's Raymond-Loewy-era designs for the cobra/manta-ray Martian assault machines are convincingly ingenious. Impervious to our atomic weapons, they move through a burning, crumbling Los Angeles with the working indifference of an ant-eater grazing a termite hill. It is this scenario, to an audience whose nation has emerged squeaky-clean through two global holocausts, that is difficult to laugh off. The alien's eventual demise through a vulnerability to our atmospheric bacteria is rather a Pyrrhic victory. Bombs couldn't touch 'em, but our ring-around-the-collar knocked 'em flat!"