The Time Machine (1960 film)
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| The Time Machine | |
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| Directed by | George Pal |
| Produced by | George Pal |
| Written by | H. G. Wells (novel) David Duncan |
| Starring | Rod Taylor Alan Young Yvette Mimieux Sebastian Cabot Whit Bissell |
| Music by | Russell Garcia |
| Release date(s) | 17 August 1960 |
| Running time | 103 min |
| Language | English |
| Budget | approx $850,000 |
| IMDb profile | |
The Time Machine is a 1960 movie filmed by George Pál (who also made a famous 1953 "modernized" version of Wells' The War of the Worlds)
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[edit] Background
Pál, whose unique spirit is all over this film, was a very special director, already famous for his pioneering work with animation. He was nominated for an Oscar almost yearly during the 1940s. Unable to sell Hollywood on the screenplay, he found the British MGM studio (where he'd gone to film Tom Thumb) much friendlier.
The film is based on The Time Machine, a novel by H. G. Wells first published in 1895. In the screenplay, the division of humanity into the mild Eloi and beastly Morlocks results from mutations induced by a nuclear war during the twentieth century.
The screenplay was written by David Duncan (Duncan was a writer for TV series Daniel Boone (1964) and The Outer Limits (1963), among others.)
The soundtrack music is by Russell Garcia, composer.
MGM art director Bill Ferrari invented The Machine, combining a sled-like design with a big, radarlike wheel. The original Machine prop would later reappear in animator Mike Jittlov's short Time Tripper, and thus in his feature film version of The Wizard of Speed and Time which incorporated it.
The film received a 1961 Oscar for its then-novel use of time lapse photographic effects to show the world around the Time Traveller changing at breakneck speed. An especially humorous touch is lent by the fashion changes of a Mannequin in the shop window across the street from the time lab.
Players included Rod Taylor as George, Alan Young as David Filby and James Filby, Yvette Mimieux as Weena, and Sebastian Cabot as Dr. Philip Hillyer.
Young, whose sympathetic portrayal of loyal friend Filby lends much to the poignancy of the film, is perhaps best known for his CBS TV role (1961-1966) opposite a horse named Mister Ed. Cabot played Mr. French, who cares for the three orphaned children of his bachelor employer's brother in the CBS comedy series Family Affair. (The two men are also well-known to fans of Disney animation for their voice work; Young as Scrooge McDuck, Cabot as Bagheera in The Jungle Book and the Narrator in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.) Mimieux soon became one of MGM's most popular ingenues of the early sixties.
Pal had always wanted to do a sequel to the 1960 film. The film was remade in a 2002 version. Starring Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons, and Samantha Mumba, it was directed by Wells' great-grandson Simon Wells. It also features a cameo by Alan Young from the first film. Even though the credits list the 2002 version as being based on the 1960 screenplay by David Duncan, marked differences are noted from both the original film and the novel: it begins in New York rather than London, the 'Weena' character is referred to as 'Mara' (who also has a young brother), and the Eloi are shown as being self-sufficient. Despite being well produced, the 2002 film was met with mixed response.
[edit] Plot
As the film opens, it is New Year's Eve in London. A small group of Victorian men dressed formally are talking in a room. In the center of the room there is a table with a wooden box on it. They are talking about dimensions. One of the men says that he can understand three dimensions: e.g. the length, width, and height of the box, but cannot understand a fourth dimension. The fourth dimension is theoretical, and people do not perceive it as existing. The protagonist (George) says that that is because we are not free to move backwards and forwards at will in the fourth dimension, but are confined to a point on it: the present.
Then George opens the box and inside it is a small-scale replica of the time machine. He explains how it has a lever which when pushed forward will cause travel of the machine into the future, and if pulled backward will cause travel of the machine into the past. Spatially though, the machine stays in the same position on the table. Then one of George's friends, at his request, pushes forward the small lever, causing the machine to blur, then disappear. The others are incredulous, but dismiss what they've seen as a parlor trick. With other appointments to attend, his friends leave. But George finds that Filby has stayed. He confronts his friend about his incredible machine. He tells George that it's not for us " to tempt the Laws of Providence ". He invites George over to his home for a visit, but George says he can't. But he does invite Filby and the others to dinner again the next Friday in the new year.
The clock ticks 12 a.m.: it is the new year of 1900. George tells happy new year to his housekeeper, Mrs Watchett. George opens the door to a room in his house which faces a garden, and in the room there is a full-scale version of the time machine. The machine is like an open sleigh with one seat, a large disk behind the seat which is capable of revolving, and controls in front of the seat. The controls have the lever which can be pushed forwards or backwards, three small elliptical displays: one green, one yellow, and red. The yellow and green are smaller and above the red display: they are for month and the day. The red display is for the year. He sits on it, pushes the level forward slightly. He notices that the candle is melting faster and that the clock on the wall is going faster than his watch (which is unaffected). Then he pushes the lever more and the hands of the clock revolve visibly around the clock. He sees the sun and the clouds running across the sky, again and again, through the skylight windows of that room which is like a greenhouse (because so much of the walls and the ceiling are made out of glass, so that he can see the outdoors). He sees the shifting shadows and patches of sunlight moving across the non-glass walls of the room.
At a certain forward (futureward) speed he sees what happens to the window display of a store for women's dresses across the street. The display has a lady mannequin which is seen by George to quickly be dressed and undressed by the store-keeper. He slows down and stops the machine on occasion to see how the mannequin has been dressed, wondering how her dress will change in the future. So he starts the machine again, pushing the lever forwards, and sees people scurrying quickly through the street and the mannequin being dressed and undressed.
Then there are flashes in the sky. Eventually the room becomes boarded up and he can no longer see outside. He stops the machine and steps out of it. It is September 13th 1917. His room, and other rooms in the house, are full of cobwebs. Some cobwebs block the doorway, so he cuts through them with his hand. He steps out of the house, which has been fenced up around with wooden boards. He pushes some boards out of the way, rights an astronomical device. He walks over to the store and meets a man in uniform who he thinks is his old friend David Filby. But George finds out that the man is not David but rather his son James. The father has died in the Great War, "a year ago", but James remembers that his father mentioned a friend of his called George, because the abandoned house across the street had never been liquidated by David but instead kept in memory of his friend, who David believed would one day return. James invites George in for tea, but George refuses, instead going back into the house, to the machine, stopping to unboard the glass windows of the room he is in.
More travelling forward in time. When George stops the machine again, on June 19th 1940, there are barrage balloons in the sky and sounds of bombings: "It must be the new war". George resumes movement, then a bomb falls on top of his house and burns it to the ground, but leaves him and the machine intact, since they are not stationary in the present of the surrounding environment but travelling though it.
He stops again on August 18th 1966. He steps out of the machine onto the grass, and sees several people hurrying walking towards him, then past him, into some doorway. Across the street Filby's store has turned into a more modern building taking up a large portion of the block. There is an elevated train. James Filby is now older, with grey hair, and wearing something similar to a space suit, which protects against radiation. James comments that he vaguely remembers having met George somewhere, sometime earlier. Then alarm sirens are heard, and George cannot keep James from walking towards the doorway: "we must go into the shelter." Then something appears in the sky, and James says: "An atomic satellite, zeroing in." James goes into the shelter, and George is left alone. Then there is an explosion, the sky turns red. The explosion releases lava from the Earth's underground, so hot lava is moving down the street and George gets back into the machine and starts going forward in time. Soon the lava covers the machine up, then it dries up. George is nervous, holding his head in his hands and praying that if he goes far enough into the future that the lava cover above him will disappear.
Past the year 500,000 the roof of dried-up lava starts crackling and falling, then clears off. He sees new plants and trees growing on the ground. Then a building rises up. He stops the machine on October 12th, in the year 802,701 and steps onto the grass. In front of the time machine is a low building with a large, grotesque sphinx on top of it. The face is narrow and triangular: in a way it resembles the statues on Easter Island, but with sharper edges and hollow features.
Then George visits the natural surroundings. There are a lot of trees, some with fruit. He calls it a paradise, but then he wishes he had someone to share that paradise with. He finds a domed building with a staircase leading up to it. Parts of the domed roof of the building have broken, and small pockets of grass grow on the stone steps leading towards the entrance of the building. He goes inside the building and sees several low round tables. Around the tables are no chairs but pillows, on the ground, for sitting. The tables are set with white plates, tumblers, and a big bowl full of fruit in the middle of each table.
Then he sees some people in the distance. They are young (adult) people, dressed in simple, plain clothing of solid pastel colors. They are sitting near a river. In the river a young woman is drowning. None of the others seem to notice her. Then George gets into the river and rescues her.
Later she walks up to him and asks him "Why did you?" (save her life). He asks her for her name and she answers "Weena". He asks for the name of her people and she answers "Eloi". But she does not know how to write, so George writes these names down on the ground in printed capital letters using his finger to clear away dust. When he dots the last letter, Weena playfully dots the first.
The young people walk up the steps of the domed building. Inside the building they sit around the tables and eat the fruit. George sits at one table and tries to engage others in conversation. He mentions how some of the big fruit they are eating would be considered unusually large by the civilization he came from. The young people seated around him are not very conversant. He asks them if they have a government, or any laws. A young man responds "We have no laws." George asks them if they have books. The young man responds "Books? We have books", pronouncing the word as though it were He leads George into another room which has a few filled bookshelves. When George picks up a book, it is so old that the pages flake into shards. Sweeping his hand through a row of books, they all crumble to dust. Back in the large dining room, George gets angry and chides the young people for being so ignorant, indifferent, oblivious.
In his fit, he walks out of the domed building and goes towards the time machine, but the time machine has disappeared. The tracks of its sleighs have been left on the ground, indicating that the machine had been dragged into the building with the big head-statue on top of it, behind a pair of big, smooth, plain metallic doors. George tries to open the metal doors, unsuccessfully: he bangs at the doors with a rock, but the rock breaks up into pieces.
The only historical information George is able to obtain is from a small museum Weena takes him to. (The equipment in the museum is recognizeable as props that appeared in other science-fiction movies.) She shows him a table a ground-glass top on which are a few metal rings about two inches (5 cm) in diameter. When they are spun on the glass, a light shines at the point of contact—and the voice of Paul Frees narrates a few lines. This means of sound recordings dates from when the survivors of the nuclear war remained in fallout shelters and were concerned about running out of oxygen.
Later, Weena tells George that the Morlocks are inside that building; that they would have dragged the machine into it. At night, Morlocks move furtively behind the bushes. George lights matches to try to see them, but the Morlocks prefer to stay hidden.
Weena shows George a place behind the building where there are openings in the ground, similar to wells. Looking into them George can see that they are like air-shafts leading into a subterranean place. There are columns of metallic handle-bars built into the walls of these air-shafts, which a person can use to climb up or down. Also, through these holes a mysterious periodic hammering noise is heard to issue from the subterranean place.
George starts climbing down one of these shafts, but then a siren alarm is heard and he starts climbing back up. The alarms issue from several cones which have sprouted around the big head-statue above the building. Each cone has a column of about three holes through which the sound is emitted. Weena has started walking at a slow steady pace towards the front of the building, and she joins other Eloi who are walking at the same slow, steady, somnambular pace towards the front of the building. George runs after her, looks for her. At one point he grabs one girl but when he gets her to turn around it turns out she is not Weena, so he lets her go. He complains that they move dumbly like cattle. He does not reach Weena in time: she and several other Eloi have gone into the building through the metal doors which were open while the siren alarms were sounding but which closed soon after Weena got in. Many Eloi were left outside, in front of the door. George makes the connection: the sound that summoned people in 1966 is used by the Morlocks to summon the Eloi.
Then George goes around to the back of the building, to where the holes on the ground are. He climbs down the air-shaft of one hole, reaching the subterranean place, which is like a big artificial cave. In one chamber he sees a number of human skeletons strewn carelessly about, the result of cannibalism: the Morlocks are eating the Eloi. In other chambers there are big machines which look like big electric transformers: with metallic coils spun around pairs of vertical tubes which support (and are joined to) a horizontal tube at their top. What these machines do is not specified by the movie.
The Morlocks use whips to corral the Eloi into a certain chamber. The Morlocks are now seen to be hideous hominid, ape-like creatures. They have big chests, bluish skin, big dark drooping eye-chambers, but instead of having eye-balls they have light-emitting (or reflecting?) points of light in the middle of their dark eye-chambers. Thus, they can see in the dark, but they are afraid of light. George lights some matches, attempting to frighten the Morlocks which use whips and who are corralling the Eloi. Eventually he discovers that if he punches a Morlock with his fist, the Morlock will recoil: Morlocks do not move too fast. Fighting ensues. At one point a Morlock has George dominated with his whip, then one of the male Eloi summons up enough courage to punch that Morlock with his fist, which saves George for the moment. Weena pitches in: George tells her to grab the torch which he had previously lit up. With the torch they scare off a lot of the Morlocks who are accosting them. Then they use it to light up flammable material in the cave, such as some hanging "curtains" at the entrance of one of the chambers where the Morlocks were trying to herd the Eloi. This starts a fire and it definitely scares off the Morlocks. Then the Eloi manage to get out of the cave, back to the surface, through the air-shafts. Back on the open ground, the Eloi, under George's guidance, hurl tree branches into the holes, which feed the fire inside. The Eloi move away from the area behind the building where all the holes are. The holes explode, and they see this entire area (with the holes) cave in, fall down flat, crushing the subterranean place.
In front of the building, the metal doors are now open, and the Eloi tell George that they see his machine in there. George goes in, but the metal doors close in behind him. A Morlock appears, and George travels to the future on his machine, to see the Morlock die and turn to dust, leaving his ape-like cranium and his bones behind. Then George travels to the past, back to 1900, to January 5th. He tells his story to his friends, the same group of men as at the beginning of the story, but only Filby believes him. George takes a flower out of his pocket and shows it to them: it is a flower which Weena gave him after he rescued her. He gives the flower to Filby who knows about botany, to see if Filby can identify it, but he can not. George's friends leave, realizing that the time is late. As Filby leaves, George says quietly, " Good Bye David - Thanks for being such a good friend, David. Always. " When the other men are leaving, outside, Filby tells them that, if anything, it is a rarity to find such a flower blooming in winter. As he wishes the others good night, he goes back again.
By the time he reaches the laboratory where the time machine was, it is too late: George has left again. This time there are marks on the ground of where the time machine was dragged back from where it had been dragged by the Morlocks (the machine was dragged back inside from the snowy garden outside). Filby tells the lady housekeeper what the tracks on the ground mean. Then he comments that someone like George would not go back to another time without first having come up with a plan. Looking at the library he sees that there are three books missing. Filby asks the lady housekeeper what three books she would choose to take with her if she were to restart a civilization. She asks Filby if they'll ever see George again; Filby replies, "One cannot choose but wonder, Y'see, he has all the time in the world."
[edit] Sequel/documentary
In 1993, a combination sequel/documentary short, Time Machine: The Journey Back, directed by Clyde Lucas, was produced. In the first part, Michael J. Fox went behind the scenes of the movie & time travelling in general. In the second half, written by original screenwriter David Duncan, the film's original actors Rod Taylor, Alan Young & Whit Bissell reprised their roles. With Bissell's opening narration, the Time Traveller returns to his laboratory in 1916, finding Filby there, and encourages his friend to join him in the far future - but Filby has doubts. (It is featured on the DVD of the 1960 film).
[edit] Awards and nominations
- Academy Award for Best Effects, Special Effects winner (1961) - Gene Warren and Tim Baar
- Hugo Award nomination (1961)
[edit] Quotes
DR HILLYER: I'll be damned ! - but where did it go ? . . . GEORGE: No where in the usual sense - it's still here !
DAVID FILBY: George . . I speak to you as a friend - more, as a brother . . . If that machine can do what you say it can, destroy it. Destroy it before it destroys you !
GEORGE (in 1917): . . You look rather silly without your mustache, old man . . FILBY's SON: . . There was quite a resemblance. I'm James Filby . . . GEORGE: Was ?
GEORGE (in 1940): Then I realized the truth of the matter - this was a new war
GEORGE (to Weena): . . Man's past - is mainly a grim struggle for survival. But there have been moments, when a few voices have spoken up . . .
GEORGE (when he realises the Eloi's lack of historic preservation): "What have you done? Thousands of years of building and rebuilding, creating and recreating so you could let it crumble to dust. A million years of senstive men dying for their dreams, for what? So you can swim, and dance, and play... You, all of you, I'm going back to my own time; I won't even bother to tell of the useless struggle and their hopeless future, but at least I can die among men"
FILBY (to Mrs. Watchett): "He must have taken something with him..." MRS. WATCHETT: "Nothing... except three books" FILBY: "Which three books?" MRS. WATCHETT: "I don't know... is it important?" FILBY: Oh, I suppose not. Only, which three books would you have taken?
[edit] Trivia
The brass plate on the control panel of the time machine reads in script ' Manufactured by H. George Wells ' (a tribute to author H. G. Wells})
The final script of the film reveals that the audio recordings in the museum dated from the year 4829, therefore suggesting that the long 326-year war was not the same war as the nuclear war in 1966. However, this information was omitted from the final film.
