AFTER DESTINATION MOON, GEORGE PAL BEGAN THINKING DARKER thoughts. Just five years after the end of the Second World War, America was involved in a euphemistically designated “police action” in Korea. The Soviet Union signed a defense treaty with China. President Truman wanted a bigger and better bomb, later known as the H-bomb. Senator Joseph McCarthy was making alarming (and unfounded) accusations about two hundred-plus State Department employees he considered communists. China entered the Korean War, and General Douglas MacArthur would have retaliated by bombing China, triggering a nuclear free-for-all, except that President Truman relieved MacArthur of his command the following year. It seemed time to dust off When Worlds Collide, a novella by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie that Paramount purchased in 1932.
By 2 October 1950, Sidney Boehm had a script that was bleaker than anyone at Paramount anticipated. In it, a South African scientist discovered two new heavenly bodies, one of which will enter the solar system. Drawn into the orbit of the sun, it will cause massive floods and earthquakes. A League of Last Days is formed, hysteria is rampant with rumors of Martian invasions and flying saucers, and the pope chants the Kyrie in St. Peter’s Square. Evacuations begin amid widespread looting, and the lucky ones file into a space ship headed for the other—apparently habitable—planet.
Pal thought that the film would work better as an allegory of Noah and the ark. In fact, the ship that transports the chosen is called an “ark,” despite having an atomic jet in the stern to hurl it into space. The opening title establishes the biblical connection: “And God looked upon the Earth, and behold, it was corrupt. . . . And God said to Noah, ‘I will destroy them with the world,’” which is more or less the gist of Genesis 7:11–13. The new planets, originally named Bronson Alpha and Bronson Beta after their discoverer, have been rechristened Bellus and Zyra, names that sound more authentically sci-fi. Since Zyra is habitable, it is the last refuge of humankind. The space ship is ready, but who will board it? Only forty can be taken, and they will be the best and the brightest, who, one assumes, will increase and multiply, supplying Zyra with a master race. The film softens the Hitlerian association by implying that much of humankind has reverted to savagery. Even so, the film’s attitude towards those who must remain behind is—as Bosley Crowther remarked in his New York Times review (7 February 1952)—“disturbing.” There is not even an indication that the space ship will operate as a shuttle between Zyra and what is left of Earth. The scene is reminiscent of General MacArthur heading off to Mindanao on a PT-boat and leaving the “battling bastards of Bataan” to their fate. The fortunate forty may have a tough time ahead, but at least it will be scenic. Zyra is a Technicolor Eden in green and pink. “The First Day on the New Earth Has Begun,” the end title declares.
Far superior to When Worlds Collide was George Pal’s production of The War of the Worlds (1953), one of the most popular and commercially successful science fiction films of the 1950s. It was also a masterful updating of H. G. Wells’s 1898 classic, with Southern California as the target of Mars’s first worldwide blitzkrieg, campaigns that would eventually leave the planet devoid of human life, ready to be populated by Martians. What they would do with such a wasteland is another question. One point is frighteningly clear: Mars is capable of rendering Earth obsolete.
The War of the Worlds opens with a mock Paramount newsreel that shows clips of the two world wars, followed by the announcement of a war that will not so much end war as end human life. In a voiceover prologue, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, sounding like an accomplished storyteller from a class higher than those his listeners inhabit, delivers the essence of Wells’s opening chapter, “The Eve of the War,” beginning with the author’s sobering warning, “[T]his world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s, and yet as mortal as his own”—the qualifier portending things to come, when the Martians are felled by bacteria to which humans have grown immune. Before that happens, havoc reigns. Mars is a dying planet, searching for greener pastures. Pluto, Neptune, Saturn, and Uranus are too cold. Mercury has no air, and Jupiter’s atmospheric pressure cannot sustain life. The only possibility is Earth.
All the film owes to Wells is a bit of voiceover prologue and the explanation in the penultimate chapter that the Martians succumbed to ordinary bacteria. The screenwriter, Barré Lyndon (Alfred Edgar, pseud.), ignored Wells’s depiction of the Martians. At first, Wells described them using serpentine imagery as dark-eyed, snake-like creatures with tentacled, V-shaped mouths, dripping with saliva as they wriggle out of the space cylinders in which they landed. Later, Wells added further details. The Martians are sexless, budding like flowers and resembling octopuses with two sets each of eight tentacles. Fidelity to the source would have relegated the film to the lower echelon of horror.
In Wells, the Deity is either absent or watching from on high. The only church mentioned in the novella is destroyed, as the curate panics. Later, the curate, hungry and raving, falls prey to a Martian, who lassoes him with a tentacle and presumably absorbs his blood into its veins. In the film, a courageous minister replaced the pusillanimous curate. The minister is convinced that Martians are more advanced than humans because they are nearer to their Creator. Holding up a Bible and reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm, the minister fearlessly approaches a Martian, only to be zapped with its high-power rays. The Deity has not yet chosen to make an entrance.
In the film, the Martians’ spacecraft have the saucer-like contours of UFOs with which 1950s moviegoers were familiar, even though the craft are occasionally referred to as “cylinders,” and at other times as “machines.” At first, the cylinders appear to be meteors. When they crash, they leave behind a radioactive crater, indicating that they are fueled by atomic energy. The meteoric spacecraft and their cargo are the creation of Pal, director Byron Haskin, and art directors Hal Pereira and— especially—Al Nozaki. The machines that subsequently emerge are cobra-headed, resembling goose-neck lamps and discharging rays of such potency that they produce instant annihilation.
Lyndon added a romantic subplot involving an atomic scientist who had worked at Oak Ridge—a reference that goes nowhere—and the minister’s niece, and religious symbols that were strikingly visualized. The Martian possesses an electromagnetic eye with three lenses, whose colors—red, green, and blue—match those of the spacecraft. The number three and its multiples are ubiquitous in Christianity—for example, the Trinity; the cardinal virtues of faith, hope, and charity; Christ’s third-day resurrection; the twelve apostles, seventy-two disciples, and nine-day novenas. The electromagnetic eye that operates like a surveillance camera evokes an all-seeing eye, a common representation of the Deity. A scientist observes that it would take six days for the Martians to destroy Earth, the inverse of the six days it took to create it. And at the end of the film, an alien’s arm falls out of the spacecraft. It is a shriveled, three-fingered appendage—triune Christianity transmogrified.
The Martians are the anti-Christ, the apocalyptic beast, a parody of Christianity and its symbols. But they are no match for Earth’s bacteria and the power of faith. In the final scene, those who have not fled Los Angeles or perished take refuge in various churches. In one, a minister prays for deliverance. In another, which is clearly Catholic, a priest recites the rosary in Spanish. In a third, a choir sings “Abide with Me.” The spacecrafts collapse as if in a state of exhaustion, suggesting that they, too, have been brought down by the germs in the Earth’s atmosphere. But the final shot, of a cathedral looming over the ruins, implies that bacteria alone did not destroy the Martians, that a higher power cooperated in their demise. If the rest of the world resembled the war zone that Los Angeles had become, it would be years before even minimal rebuilding would be possible. But the film did not explore that point. Believe in God and bacteria, and all will be well. And The War of the Worlds ignores another significant issue. When the Martians prove immune to ordinary weaponry, the government hauls out the A-bomb. This bomb leaves a spiral of white smoke that is less ominous than a mushroom cloud, and perhaps conveys a sense of the rightness of the act with its color—as if the bombing of Los Angeles were a lesser form of the devastation the Martins were wreaking on the city. But in 1953, the bomb was the answer to anything imperiling America. Lyndon’s script had its loopholes, but the production was so spectacular—and has remained so—that one is inclined to invoke the laws of verisimilitude and echo Aristotle’s response (Poetics 4, 5) to a representation that is uncannily lifelike: “That’s it.” Pal got it right. That is the way the world ends: with a bang, a whimper, and a renewal.
In the doomsday film, the extinction of the species is a sobering possibility, but rarely a reality. For the most part, the genre avoided the unthinkable. There was always a last-minute reprieve: emigration to a new planet (When Worlds Collide), or a fatal miscalculation by the invaders (the Martians’ susceptibility to ordinary bacteria in The War of the Worlds). In Earth Dies Screaming (1965), the planet may be in its death throes, but there are survivors, willing to venture on to the proverbial worlds elsewhere. Even the first postwar nuclear disaster film, Five (1951), followed the pattern, imagining a nuclear war (the cause of which is unspecified) that left the planet devoid of life except for five humans who, for various reasons, managed to survive.
Five was written, produced, and directed by playwright-screenwriter-novelist Arch Oboler, who began his career in radio with Lights Out, a mandate that a generation heeded by listening under the covers. Oboler’s most famous Lights Out script was The Chicken Heart, in which tissue from the heart of a chicken kept growing until it swallowed up the world. Bill Cosby, who heard The Chicken Heart in his youth, later recounted the plot so vividly in one of his monologues that it brought back memories of the shivers it sent up the spines of listeners back in the 1940s. Five would have worked better as a radio play. As such, it would have gripped the imagination better than it did by appealing to the eye on film.
Five began promisingly enough with credits accompanied by the now emblematic mushroom cloud and the boom of detonation, followed by a title, “A story about the day after tomorrow,” and an excerpt from the Book of Revelation about the last days. Next followed a montage of major cities—London, Moscow, Paris—reduced to smoking ruins and accompanied by the sound of wailing sirens. Yet for all its darkness shot through with occasional slivers of light, Five is neither particularly unnerving nor reflective. The survivors—a pregnant woman; a Dartmouth MA with mechanical skills made for such a crisis; a bank manager and one of his employees; and an explorer who has climbed Mt. Everest and espouses a Darwinian philosophy of survival of the fittest—may not enjoy life’s creature comforts, but with empty stores and homes, they live in nuclear style. The Dartmouth grad has taken over a hilltop house (Oboler’s own in Santa Barbara, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), which he makes habitable, finding a generator to power it and seed to plant corn. The explorer is the villain, believing that there are other survivors elsewhere (the nearest metropolis is Los Angeles) and setting off to find them. To make Five compatible with Genesis, Oboler must reduce the quintet to a duo. First, the bank manager dies. Then the explorer, after killing the bank employee, develops radiation poisoning, leaving the Dartmouth grad and the woman as the next Adam and Eve. The end title, from the Book of Revelation (21:1), promises a new order: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” It will certainly be a meatless earth. Since there are no animals, the couple and their descendants will be vegetarians.
Columbia’s Invasion U.S.A. (1952), released the following year, envisioned a nuclear war instigated by a power known as “he” (a pronominal synonym for the Soviet Union) that left the Pacific Northwest and California in the hands of the enemy. Then Boulder Dam was bombed, much of New York was in ruins, and the nation’s capital was under siege. However, the phantasmagoria depicted in the film never actually happened. In the opening sequence, a mesmerist twirls a snifter of brandy in front of five people in a Manhattan bar, presenting them with a vision of what could—not would—happen to the United States if the government made cuts in military spending and reduced the armed forces by half, as an Illinois congressman has proposed. Just when it seems that New York will fall to the communists—who spout Marxist clichés about a people’s republic on American soil—the heroine (Peggy Castle), to avoid being raped by a Russian soldier, jumps out of a window. As she falls through space, her image is reduced to a speck floating in the mesmerist’s brandy snifter, thus bringing the action back to the bar, the five back to reality, and the film back to its didactic end title from George Washington: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” The prospect of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union prompted the congressman—who in the vision is shot when the Soviets overrun the Senate—to change his mind about reducing the defense budget. Coincidentally, the defense budget rose from $224.3 million in 1951 to $402.1 million in 1952. Invasion U.S.A. is wildly implausible (Soviet paratroopers in American uniforms rain down on Washington and barge into the Senate, looking and sounding like ex-Nazis who had discarded Mein Kampf in favor of Das Kapital). In the end, one is obliged to respect Five for not pulling the same stunt—presenting mass devastation as a bad dream that vanishes at dawn, or as a hypnotic state that ends with a click of the fingers or the twirl of a snifter.
On the Beach (1959), on the other hand, posed the unthinkable by dramatizing the end of civilization, with Australia as the termination point and no hope of a deus ex machina. The film, released in December 1959 and set in 1964, premiered in a year that was not particularly tension-ridden, as compared to 1962 and 1963. In 1959, the United States welcomed Fidel Castro as Cuba’s liberator after the overthrow of the Fulgencio Batista regime—although the welcome mat was rolled up after Castro allied himself with the Soviet Union. Rawhide, Bonanza, and The Twilight Zone made their television debuts. Barbie dolls went on sale. Pope John XXIII announced the convening of a council later known as Vatican II. The Ford Edsel proved to be a bust. Gypsy and The Sound of Music dominated the Broadway scene. And on 17 December, just in time for Christmas, On the Beach opened simultaneously in the United States, Australia (naturally), Sweden, and West Germany. Although the United States had been living with the possibility of nuclear war since the late 1940s, the threat seemed remote in 1959. When President Eisenhower played host to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, optimists even thought that rapprochement with the Soviet Union was possible.
If On the Beach had come out during the crucial weekend of 26 October 1962, audiences would have reacted differently. This was the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the presence of surface-to-air missiles in Cuba, supplied by the Soviet Union and aimed at the United States, kept the nation on tenterhooks as the world wondered if Cuba would be the Sarajevo or Pearl Harbor that triggered another world war. Armageddon was averted by a diplomatic pas de deux, the upshot of which was the dismantling of the missiles and their return to the Soviet Union. Even when the crisis ended on Sunday, 28 October, there was still the fear that such incidents were not over and would, in fact, increase. If On the Beach had come out after the Kennedy assassination, the film would have had an even greater impact—first a president, then the world. The knowledge that the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had sought residence in the Soviet Union would have given the conspiracy theorists more strands to spin in their ever-growing web of intrigue. And if, by chance, someone who was politically astute had seen On the Beach in 1964—the apocalyptic year according to the film—he or she would have realized that extinction was unlikely, but war in Southeast Asia was not. Those who believed that Vietnam was the next Korea were vindicated when President Lyndon Johnson used an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin—when North Vietnamese gunboats fired on an American destroyer—as justification for requesting authorization from Congress to prosecute the war in Vietnam without a formal declaration. The details of the incident were muddied, but that did not matter. Nineteen sixty-four was a year for waiting—not knowing exactly what, except for the one event that would reveal what is to come. Americans had become so used to postwar arrhythmia that a scare here or there suggested the result would be another confrontation/trade off/show of force/police action/undeclared war—but certainly not a pax Americana.
Whenever one sees On the Beach, the effect is devastating—more so after 9/11, when a terrorist attack could be the spark that ignites the powder keg. It was a film for all seasons. The fact that it has brought in over $5 million in rentals suggests that doomsday pays off. America had been living under the mushroom cloud since 1945, when the genie had sprinted out of the bottle, ready to bedevil humanity and haunt its dreams. But those who simply dismissed On the Beach as an end-of-the-world flick failed to recognize the art with which producer-director Stanley Kramer invested it. With the unofficial Australian national anthem, “Waltzing Matilda,” serving as a leitmotif that becomes more dirge-like as the film progresses, Kramer presents the last bastion of civilization as a place where some engage in business as usual—hosting dinner parties, lounging in leathery men’s clubs, racing sports cars, hitting the bottle, and engaging in one last romance before the final tolling of the bell. Kramer’s last outpost is a cross section of types one would expect to find anywhere at zero hour: a submarine captain (Gregory Peck) resigned to the inevitable, but still speaking of his dead wife and family as if they were living; the functional alcoholic (Ava Gardner) who loves him, knowing that their relationship will be short-lived; a scientist (Fred Astaire) who gives his sports car a tune up before competing in the Australian Grand Prix, believing that if he wins, which he does, death will be an anticlimax; and a lieutenant (Anthony Perkins) with a wife and child, who knows that when the inevitable occurs, they must die as a family—and not from radiation poisoning. When suicide pills are available, he has no choice other than to provide them with the gentlest death available. To placate the Legion of Decency, which frowned on suicide, the wife utters a final prayer, “My God forgive us.”
Always the moralist, Kramer could not help but end the film with a shot of a drooping banner, “There Is Still Time, Brother,” strung up when the Salvation Army held a revival-type rally. Now the banner is part of a wasteland of deserted streets and empty buildings. In 1959, there was still time, as there was in the years that followed. Armageddon has been predicted so often that when it comes, it will seem like just another battle. If it culminates in total destruction, we will never know it.
Unlike Nevil Shute’s novel, in which the war of wars began with Albania bombing Italy, no one in the movie seems to know how the war started. When asked who started it, one of the captain’s crew says facetiously, “Albert Einstein.” This statement is true only indirectly; more likely, the end of the world comes from a miscalculation, a miscommunication, a pressing of the wrong button, or some such human error. But on one point, the crew is in total agreement and totally correct: Weapons designed for protection became weapons of destruction. Humankind has destroyed itself, a frightening thought that one would rather not contemplate—except in a movie theater from which one could exit onto streets thronged with people with more mundane concerns than the planet’s last days.