The War of the Worlds (1953) on Netflix
Vacationing nuclear physicist Clayton Forrester is among the crowd when a meteor lands in the hills above Linda Rosa, California. It is radioactive, and the first of many craft from Mars.
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Trailer
Plot summary
The residents of Linda Rosa, California, gather on a summer evening to see a large meteor that has landed in the hills, the object still hot. Vacationing nuclear physicist Clayton Forrester finds it radioactive and suspects it is hollow. He meets Sylvia Van Buren, whose uncle is Pastor Matthew Collins, and the three attend a square dance. Back at the crater, a hatch unscrews and an electronic eye rises on a flexible neck. Heat rays strike the men standing guard, and the power goes out. A second meteor falls, Marines move into the gully, and reports arrive of landings around the world.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The War of the Worlds (1953)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
The disintegration effect that reveals Marine Colonel Heffner's skeleton in The War of the Worlds, hit by a Martian "skeleton beam" fired from a war machine's wingtips, took 144 separate matte paintings to create.- Half the scenes in The War of the Worlds involved special effects, and an estimated $1.4 million of the film's $2 million budget went on them, including highly realistic scale-model miniatures of Los Angeles and its City Hall.
- The sound of the Martian heat ray in The War of the Worlds was created entirely with electric guitars; engineers recorded the high-pitched electronic screeching, played it backwards, and adjusted volume and tone until they found the effect.
- Britain's censors rated The War of the Worlds X in 1953, barring anyone under 16 from seeing it for its "horrific" content; local authorities protested the rating unsuccessfully, and Paramount's 1961 bid to reduce it to A was rejected.
- George Pal first wanted a War of the Worlds closer to H. G. Wells's novel, with a scientist searching for his wife, but Paramount production head Don Hartman demanded a romantic subplot in which the scientist meets and falls in love with a woman.
- Woody Woodpecker is hidden in a treetop at the start of The War of the Worlds, when the first Martian meteorite-ship crashes through the sky; George Pal, a close friend of Woody's creator Walter Lantz, put him in his films for good luck.
- Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado said that seeing The War of the Worlds as a child was one of the inspirations for the inclusion and the design of the aliens in his 1978 video game.
- Three Martian war machine props were made of copper and reportedly later melted down in a scrap copper recycling drive; a decade later the same blueprints were used to build the alien spacecraft in Robinson Crusoe on Mars, also directed by Byron Haskin.
