1960

DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER: GEORGE PAL SCREENPLAY: DAVID DUNCAN, BASED ON THE NOVEL BY H. G. WELLS STARRING: ROD TAYLOR (H. GEORGE WELLS), ALAN YOUNG (DAVID FILBY/JAMES FILBY), YVETTE MIMIEUX (WEENA), SEBASTIAN CABOT (DR. PHILIP HILLYER), TOM HELMORE (ANTHONY BRIDEWELL), WHIT BISSELL (WALTER KEMP)

The Time Machine

MGM • COLOR, 103 MINUTES

An inventor in 1899 London constructs a machine that sends him 800,000 years into the future, where he encounters a strange utopian society.

Leave it to producer/director George Pal to take a visionary, socially conscious, and often dismal story from the mind of H. G. Wells and transform it into a colorful screen fantasy. After conquering Mars with The War of the Worlds (1953) and winning a Best Special Effects Oscar for Tom Thumb (1958), the former animator reached the pinnacle of his career with his adaptation of Wells’s definitive time-travel chronicle, The Time Machine. On a threadbare budget (between $600,000 and $800,000), Pal and his crew fashioned an escapist sci-fi adventure for the ages starring an ornate Victorian time machine that sends its inventor on a wondrous journey across the centuries.

Instead of modernizing the 1895 tale, Pal honored Wells’s era by selecting 1899 as a point of departure. “If you start the film at the turn of the century and show this machine working up to the present, then you believe it,” Pal explained. The director gave Wells another nod by making his hero, H. George Wells, a stand-in for the author himself. Though Pal initially considered James Mason or Michael Rennie for George, Rod Taylor—who had traveled into the future via a time warp in World Without End (1956)—was given his first starring role as the time traveler and inventor of the machine. “I expected something out of Frankenstein—electrodes and wires,” Taylor said of his first view of the machine, a baroque wood-and-brass contraption patterned after George Pal’s childhood sled. “When I saw this wonderful-looking thing that was straight out of the Victorian era, I was ready to really believe that… I could indeed travel through time.”

A Morlock captures Yvette Mimieux.

George fends off the Morlocks.

Director and producer George Pal

As George rides his invention through the fourth dimension, stop-motion details—such as the changing fashions on a department-store mannequin and celestial bodies racing across the sky—indicate the passage of time. These were meticulously photographed frame by frame by Wah Chang and Gene Warren; Tim Baar and Warren received an Oscar for the team’s simple yet ingenious pre-CGI effects. With today’s technology, Chang speculated, “some things would have been made easier, but other things we did probably as fast, maybe faster than you could do with a computer.” Using old-fashioned craftsmanship, Chang and Warren projected a vivid ride through time, saturated in (according to the film’s trailer) “futuristic Metrocolor.”

Once George arrives at his final destination—the year 802,701—his adventure takes on elements of romance and horror. The Eloi’s idyllic but doomed society, where no one reaches thirty (an idea that would be recycled in the 1967 novel and the 1976 film Logan’s Run) is disrupted when George appears and falls in love with Weena, a young Eloi woman played by Yvette Mimieux. “We needed a girl of the future,” George Pal said of his casting choice, “so beautiful she’s almost eerie, and that’s Yvette.” Though she had no training as an actress, Mimieux learned as she went; The Time Machine launched her career as one of MGM’s top starlets of the early 1960s. The horror, meanwhile, is supplied by the Morlocks—subterranean cannibals that stand among the most repulsive monsters in science fiction.

Though many of the novella’s cautionary tales are diluted or eliminated in the film, the threat of nuclear war is given added weight. Pal tailors the story for a circa-1960 audience, immersing them in the quaint nostalgia of late-Victorian England, jettisoning them into a distant future (one that oddly resembles the then-impending flower-power era), and making a few wartime pit stops along the way—including an all-too-realistic vision of a possible 1966, complete with Brutalist architecture and fallout shelters on every corner. Because it encompasses so many eras of the past, present, and future, The Time Machine—like its lovingly designed contraption—feels simultaneously antiquated and futuristic, and altogether timeless.

Rod Taylor is H. George Wells, inventor of the time machine.

Rod Taylor and the time machine

When it was released, the movie popularized the concept of time travel by bringing Wells’s vision to the moviegoing masses. Through the magic of George Pal’s film, Wells sparked a pop-culture phenomenon: a machine that transports its operator to different time periods. Without The Time Machine, Doctor Who’s TARDIS, Marty McFly’s flux capacitor–equipped DeLorean, the Quantum Leap accelerator, even Bill and Ted’s special phone booth might never have existed.

FAR-OUT FACTS

Pal consciously chose a clean, non-destructive energy source to power the time machine: crystals. In 2012, MIT professor Frank Wilczek began researching the use of time-space crystals as a source of such energy.

In 1895—the same year The Time Machine was published—H. G. Wells and manufacturer Robert Paul applied to patent a time machine device they designed for amusement. The design featured a chamber in which motion pictures would be projected on a screen, providing the illusion of traveling through different eras. It was never manufactured.

MIND-BLOWING MOMENT

When George descends into the cavernous underworld, he lights a match and sees the hideous Morlocks for the first time. Described by Wells as having “pale, chinless faces” and “pinkish-gray eyes,” the Morlocks were outfitted with blue-green flesh, gaping mouths, and glowing eyes by pioneering makeup artist William Tuttle.

KEEP WATCHING

WORLD WITHOUT END (1956)

TIME AFTER TIME (1979)