Subtitles:

English (SDH), English, French, German, Spanish, none

Extras:

Set in the Victorian era, George Pal's production of The Time Machine (1960) is a faithful adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel in most respects except one - it omits the author's cynical observations about the British class system. Yet it's the main premise that has captivated audiences for years: A scientist (Rod Taylor) creates a time-traveling machine that carries him forward into the year 802,701 where he finds a strange new world populated by the Elois, a passive, peace-loving race, and their predators, the Morlocks, a cannibalistic tribe that lives underground and is light sensitive.

H. G. Wells always thought The Time Machine would make a compelling film but he never lived to see it become a motion picture; he died in 1946. However, his son, Frank, saw The War of the Worlds, a film version of his father's novel which was directed by George Pal in 1953. That convinced him that Pal was the man to bring The Time Machine to the screen. Unfortunately, Paramount Studios, which had produced The War of the Worlds, had no interest in the project. Undaunted, Pal and science fiction writer David Duncan shopped their screenplay around to various Hollywood studios without success until Pal journeyed to England to film tom thumb in 1958. It was there that he forged a friendship with Matthew Raymond, the head of the British MGM studio, who helped Pal put together a budget for The Time Machine.

Opening at the end of the 19th century, The Time Machine begins in a small English home, where four men await the arrival of their host for dinner. They are each fashionably dressed, and as they wait they smoke cigars, sip wine, and offer few words to one another. Around them, a large collection of clocks ticks away the time; their host, a man named George Wells, has a deep and abiding fascination with time, an interest the other men seem to find mildly annoying. After they are invited to sit for dinner without George, he bursts into the room, his clothes torn and dirty, his skin muddied and red. He sits, swallows a glass of wine, and begins telling the men where he has been: a post-apocalyptic future in which the earth has grown new species of plants, there is nary a trace of technology, and the only humans – descendants of those who survived a nuclear holocaust in the 20th century – have divided themselves into two distinct groups. The first are the Eloi, all of whom are young, clad in pastoral clothing, and intolerably careless; they have little knowledge or intellectual curiosity, dine on food they themselves have not picked, and regard George’s incessant questioning as bothersome, even after he saved one of their own from drowning. When George asks a young Eloi man to show him their books, he is disheartened to find a few lonesome shelves stocked with texts that crumble in his fingers.

Gary Tooze

June 21st, 2014