BY FRED BLOSSER
George Pal’s “The Time Machine†(1960) is an iconic
science-fiction movie. For more than a
half-century, from the big screen to perennial TV broadcasts to a wide range of
home-video formats, it has rarely been out of sight or beyond reach. On the other hand, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s
“Dune†is famous among SF and cinema aficionados precisely because it is
unobtainable. It was conceptualized but
never produced.
Both films, the real and the phantom, are highlighted
in new Blu-ray products released coincidentally this month on the same day,
July 8.
Pal’s movie, adapted from the classic 1895 H.G. Wells
novel, is nostalgically remembered by us “monster kids†of the Space Age
generation. My formative viewing was my
first, as a 10-year-old watching the film in a theater on its initial
release. The new Blu-ray edition from
Warner Home Video offered the chance to sit down and give the movie careful
attention again, not simply snatch glimpses of favorite scenes in occasional
cable broadcasts.
I was particularly curious to see if Pal’s vision held
up against criticisms that the film is too old-fashioned for today’s younger
audiences yet too much of a kiddie movie for adults, that it plays too fast and
loose with the revered novel, that the technical effects are hopelessly
antiquated in today’s CGI world. I’m
happy to say with benefit of grown-up critical acumen that the movie didn’t
disappoint. The visual elements and
production values were as polished and engaging as I remembered them, the
script by David Duncan was thoughtful, inventive, and fundamentally respectful
to Wells, and the actors hit all the right notes in their performances with
old-school professionalism and charm.
Among Wells purists, it’s widely asserted that Pal’s
“The Time Machine†betrays the novel because it deviates from Wells’ basic,
thought-provoking speculation about humanity’s evolutionary destiny and
simplifies his conception of the far-future world of 802,701 to which the Time
Machine travels. The protagonist of the
novel, referred to only as the Time Traveler, finds that our distant
descendants have separated into two new species. The indolent, physically childlike Eloi live
in leisure aboveground in a communal society, apparently without industry or
government. The brutish Morlocks lurk
underground, able to come out only in dusk or darkness.
The Time Traveler theorizes that the two species are
the evolutionary outcome of social divisions that began in his own time, when
the idle rich and the miserable urban poor began to draw further and further
apart. He comes to realize that the Eloi
are no more than “mere fatted cattle†whose clothes and food are provided by
the Morlocks. The underground people
sustain the Eloi for the ultimate purpose of eating them.
In the movie, the dynamic between the two species, the
eater and the eaten, remains the same. However, in the movie’s version of 802,701, the Time Traveler, George
(Rod Taylor), discovers that the Eloi and Morlocks divided as the result of war
and devastation over eons, not class differences. As repeated attacks and reprisals with
nuclear and chemical weapons poisoned the surface of the earth, societies fled
underground to survive. One branch of
humanity eventually returned to the surface after nature recovered, and the
other remained below. George learns this
history from recordings on “talking rings†that he finds in a ruined museum to
which the Eloi guide him.
Given that the social concerns of 1895 were unlikely to
pull American audiences of 1960 into their local movie houses, it’s difficult
to fault Pal and Duncan for updating the story to reflect the more compelling
contemporary fear of A-bomb and H-bomb annihilation. Pausing in the year 1966, George barely
escapes the strike of an “atomic satellite†that destroys London, a frightening
image then and still a disturbing one now. In hindsight, this apocalyptic vision gives the movie its own flavor as
social documentary that tells today’s youngsters more about the mindset of the
Cold War than any dry textbook. And it
also provides a framework for the overall story that, arguably, tightens its
dramatic structure for the screen.
Where Wells’ Time Traveler was motivated by scientific
curiosity, Taylor’s character wants to escape his own era. Scanning headlines of military mobilization
for the Boer War, he says, “I don’t much care for the time I was born
into. People aren’t dying fast enough
these days. They call upon science to
invent a new, more efficient weapon to depopulate the earth.†He sets off from 1899 to find a more
congenial future, but in visiting 1917, 1940, and 1966, he discovers that
societies will only continue to seek “more effective means of destroying each
other.†The Eloi and the Morlocks are
the logical outcome. In 802,701, he
watches as the Eloi dazedly march to their doom in the Morlock underworld
through the open door of a sinister Great Sphinx (splendid visualization of a
key image from the novel). They are hypnotically lured by the same wail of sirens
that herded Londoners into their bomb shelters in 1966.
Whether Duncan wandered too far from Wells’ model is
mostly a matter of personal taste (and in the novel, Wells’ narrative leaves
open the possibility that the Time Traveler’s class theory is the likely
explanation but not necessarily the right one). As an artistic question, credit Duncan and Pal for incorporating their
changes skillfully and thoughtfully. For
that matter, Wells himself may have approved had he lived long enough to
consult with the moviemakers: in later years, he increasingly brooded on the
threat of humanity destroying itself in global war, as dramatized in his own
script for the venerable 1936 movie “Things to Come,†directed by William Cameron
Menzies.
Fortunately, the movie’s prediction of atomic wipeout
in 1966 was never realized, but its anticipation of the Eloi society as
mop-haired, passive blond teens (another modification from Wells’ conception,
but not completely different, if you read the book closely) seems
inspired. By the end of the decade,
Pal’s Eloi had arrived in the form of the Boomers’ hippie, surfer, and stoner
cultures.
Should you invest in the new Blu-ray edition? That may depend on whether or not you’re a
completest who wants “The Time Machine†in every available
video format. By and large, the color
and clarity of the image appears to be incrementally better than the earlier
DVD, released by Warner in 2000 -- I’ll leave that judgment to consumers with a
sharper eye and higher-end equipment than mine -- but the package doesn’t
expand on the earlier DVD extras of the movie’s theatrical trailer and a
featurette.
The latter, “The Time Machine: The Journey Back,â€
originally produced for TV in 1993, features then-new interviews with Taylor,
co-star Alan Young, and the movie’s creative FX technicians, and a skit with
Taylor, Young, and supporting actor Whit Bissell. The skit apparently incorporated material
that Pal developed for a never-produced sequel. The veteran technicians’ remarks about the
movie’s stop-motion, time-lapse, matte, and other pre-CGI effects are
fascinating, and it’s heartening to see talented movie people enthusiastically
describe their creative work and speak fondly of their colleagues, but if you have
the DVD, you have the featurette.
Click here to order the Warner Home Video Blu-ray from
Amazon.
One of George Pal’s other unrealized projects was a movie version of the wonderful 1935 novel “Odd John†by Olaf Stapledon, Wells’ successor as a genius of ambitious, mind-expanding speculative fiction. That’s my personal pick for the great SF movie masterpiece that never was. Most other enthusiasts would choose “Dune,†Alejandro Jodorowsky’s legendary attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s novel to the screen in 1974 as a 20-hour-long religious allegory drenched in psychedelic imagery.
Frank Pavich’s 2014 documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune,†released as a combo Blu-ray/DVD package by Sony Pictures Classics, relates the rise and fall of Jodorowsky’s abortive project through interviews with the now-86-year-old director and other participants, visuals from pre-production art, and animated storyboards.
Jodorowsky’s enthusiasm for his doomed enterprise is infectious (I hope I’m as energetic and articulate when I reach my eighties), and the anecdotes about his pursuit of Salvador Dali and Orson Welles for key roles are amusing. He says he secured Welles by promising to hire the chef from Welles’ favorite restaurant as the actor’s personal chef for the duration of the shoot. Months of hectic preparation went into lining up a cast, in most cases on the strength of a handshake, while Moebius, Dan O’Bannon, and H.R. Giger worked on pre-production designs and layouts. The project crashed when the Hollywood studios turned down the chance to underwrite what Jodorowsky pitched as “the most important picture in the history of humanity.â€
Would the film have been the cultural game-changer that Jodorowsky envisioned, or even the revolutionary SF movie that enthusiasts mourn? The evidence in the documentary is too scant to inform an answer either way, so it’s anybody’s guess. Most of the individuals interviewed by Pavich are true believers who supported Jodorowsky then and revere him now. It would have been interesting to hear a different viewpoint from the studio people who passed on his proposal. “Accountants,†Jodorowsky says disdainfully. No one from that side is identified by name, no one is interviewed, and no studio memos are unearthed, so the cards are all on one side of the table, probably an unavoidable problem given a documentarian’s limited resources and the passage of four decades.
By the same token, it’s difficult to credit the enthusiasts’ insinuation that images from Moebius’ storyboards, circulating in Hollywood long after Jodorowsky moved on, eventually made their way into “Star Wars†(1977), “Raiders of the Lost Ark†(1981), and “Contact†(1994). As one piece of circumstantial evidence, the documentary juxtaposes a sword-fight from a Moebius storyboard with a light-saber duel in a clip from the George Lucas film. Given what we know from decades of interviews and personal accounts, it seems like a real stretch to ignore the younger filmmaker’s repeated acknowledgement of Akira Kurosawa’s chambara imagery as his inspiration. The reference to “Contact†rests on an opening shot in which the camera shows a spiral galaxy from a distance, and then pans in: a pretty generic SF visual.
Inevitably, the documentary brings up the version of “Dune†that eventually emerged from the studios after Judorowsky lost the rights, David Lynch’s 1984 production. Judorowsky says gleefully that the Lynch movie was “awful,†a conclusion shared by most mainstream critics when the picture was released, but Lynch has his supporters (including me), and the documentary takes the comment at face value without elaborating and without giving the other camp equal time.
One suspects that Jodorowsky’s project was mostly a victim of bad timing. Had the idea for “Dune†come his way four years earlier (like Lynch, he had never read Herbert’s novel before a business partner suggested it), he might have leveraged the media attention heaped on his avant-garde film “El Topo†(1970) and exploited Hollywood’s not-yet-exhausted zeal to court the Woodstock-era youth market. By 1974, studios and audiences were less inclined to throw money at eccentric, drug-tinged movie concepts. Moviemakers who realized offbeat projects had an advantage that Judorowsky didn’t – they already had some toehold in the studio system, however precarious – or they worked below the radar on minuscule budgets independently of the studios. At least, with better serendipity, Jodorowsky’s “Dune†would have been the outstanding 20-hour-long Midnight Movie of 1971 or 1972.
Click here to order the Sony Pictures Classics Blu-ray + DVD pack from Amazon.