The Time Machine (1960) Review
8/10
On the fifth of January 1900 a man arrives late to his own dinner party, filthy and exhausted, and tells four sceptical friends that he’s been eight hundred thousand years into the future and come back to say what he found.
The 8 is for an adaptation that understood its source was a warning. Pal keeps the class argument, keeps the Morlocks as the consequence of it, and keeps the Traveller’s horror at what people were allowed to become.
The two points come off for Weena and the ending. The romance is a Hollywood addition that softens the Eloi into something to be rescued, and the last scene gives the audience a hopefulness Wells refused to supply.
I’m fonder of this film than the effects alone can explain. Rod Taylor’s anger puts me on his side from the dinner party onward, and a snail on a windowsill charms me more than all the money the 2002 version spent. What costs it for me is Weena and that tidy, hopeful ending.
The Effect That Won the Oscar
The journey forward is the reason people remember this film, and it was made with almost nothing. Gene Warren and Tim Baar took the Academy Award for Best Special Effects for it.
The technique was stop motion and patience. A candle burning down in single frames. A snail crossing a windowsill over hours. A dress in a shop window across the street changing style as the years pass, which is the detail everybody remembers, because it dates the passage of time with fashion instead of with a caption.
Wax was used for the lava sequence and models for the destruction of London. None of it would survive a modern comparison for realism, and none of it needs to, because the sequence is built on rhythm and a fixed viewpoint instead of on detail. The camera stays with George while everything else accelerates, and that’s the choice the 2002 version copied and improved on with forty years of technology. The idea was here first and it was executed with a snail.
The dress in the shop window is my favorite effect in any film of its era. I grin when the hemline moves, because Warren and Baar figured out that fashion is a clock everybody can read.
The machine itself deserves a mention. Bill Ferrari designed it at MGM as a sled with a padded seat, brass rails and an enormous spinning disc behind the driver. That’s now the visual shorthand for time travel in general. It looks like furniture. That’s exactly right for a Victorian building something in his own parlor.
An effect works when it’s measuring something the audience already understands. The dress in the shop window tells you decades are passing because clothes are a clock everyone can read.
Find the ordinary object that marks your interval. A candle for hours, a hemline for decades, a building for centuries. Specific small changes convey scale far better than a number on screen.
Limited resources force this kind of thinking. A budget large enough to render anything usually produces spectacle instead of a measuring device. That’s why the cheap version of this sequence is the one people describe from memory.
It Keeps the Argument
Wells wrote about a leisure class and a working class separated so long that they became separate species, with the underground workers eventually farming the surface dwellers they once served.
Pal and David Duncan keep that intact. The Eloi here are diminished. They don’t read, they don’t remember, they don’t help each other, and when one of them drowns the rest watch without moving. That scene is the film’s argument in thirty seconds.
That drowning chills me more than anything the Morlocks do. Nobody screams, nobody moves, and it’s the moment I understand exactly what Wells was afraid of. The talking rings are Duncan’s invention and they carry the history the novel delivers in exposition. George plays them, learns about the wars and the shelters and the split, and the audience gets the thesis from an artifact instead of a lecture. What Pal adds that Wells didn’t have is the wars. George stops in 1917, 1940 and 1966, watching the same street through three conflicts, and the 1960 audience is being told that the split has already started. That’s a good addition, because it serves the argument instead of replacing it.
Rod Taylor Was the Right Choice
Pal originally considered a middle-aged Englishman, with David Niven and James Mason both mentioned, and changed his mind and picked somebody younger and more physical. Rod Taylor was Australian, thirty, and this was his first lead in a feature.
The decision shapes the whole picture. A distinguished older Traveller would have made this a lecture with illustrations. Taylor plays George as an angry idealist who builds the machine because he despises his own century, and who comes back furious instead of wistful.
That anger is what holds the film together. He’s not sightseeing. He goes forward looking for evidence that people improved and finds three wars and then a species that’s stopped asking questions, and Taylor plays the disappointment as personal.
His narration to the dinner guests frames the entire film, and Taylor delivers it with the impatience of a man who knows nobody in the room believes him and has decided to say it anyway.
Alan Young does the quiet work opposite him, playing Filby and then Filby’s son, aging across the wars while George doesn’t. He’s the only person in the film who takes the machine seriously before it’s proved, and the friendship gives the picture the warmth its subject would otherwise deny it.
Casting against the expected age changes what a story can be about. An older authority figure observes. A young one is implicated, because he still expects the world to be better than it is. The rule generalizes to any framing character. Whoever carries your story to the reader determines whether the events read as a report or as a wound.
Notice the frame device doing double work. The dinner party gives the film its structure and also its final beat, because the guests dismiss him and one of them doesn’t, and that single exception is the only hope the story offers.
Where It Softens
Weena is the problem. Yvette Mimieux plays her with real sweetness, and the film gives George a romance the novel doesn’t have and doesn’t need. The cost is the Eloi. Wells made them pitiable and useless on purpose, because the horror is that comfort did that to them. Give one of them a personality, curiosity and courage and the argument weakens, since if Weena can learn then the condition isn’t what the book said it was.
Mimieux was seventeen when shooting started and turned eighteen during it, and was inexperienced enough that the production reshot some of her early scenes later in the schedule once she’d improved. That’s a piece of production history worth knowing and it doesn’t change the structural point. The ending goes further. George returns to his own time, tells the story, then leaves again taking three books with him, and Filby decides he’s gone back to build a better world. Wells left the Traveller gone and the books unnamed. Pal makes it a project.
Pal’s ending loses me. I’d have cut the romance entirely and let George leave with nothing, because Wells’s version stings, and this one asks me to feel hopeful about a future the rest of the film has shown me is rotten.
Why It Beats the Remake
Eight hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars against two and a half million, a profit of about a quarter of a million, and one Academy Award. Filmed at Culver City across about five weeks in mid 1959. The 2002 version had eighty million dollars, better effects in every measurable way, and a worse film, because it kept the Eloi and Morlocks as creatures while discarding what they were for. This one had a sled with a spinning disc behind the seat and kept the point. There’s a nice piece of continuity between them. Alan Young, who plays Filby here, appears in the 2002 film as a flower shop worker. That’s the remake acknowledging where it came from. The comparison is the most useful thing about watching these two together, and it’s the argument I keep making about adaptation. Effects date on a schedule. An idea about what people do to each other doesn’t date at all.
When you have to choose between fidelity to the imagery and fidelity to the argument, take the argument. Readers forgive a changed setting and never forgive a changed meaning. The practical version for adapting your own work across formats: write down in one sentence why the thing exists before you start cutting. Anything that survives the cut has to serve that sentence. And keep the constraint in mind. A small budget made Pal solve the journey with a snail and a hemline, and the solution is better than the expensive one because it had to be an idea before it could be an image.
The book on this: The Time Machine: The Cure sends the Time Traveller forward with a passenger, a stowaway, and a machine that slowly learns to speak, from 1895 out to a billion years.
Should you watch The Time Machine?
Yes, and watch it before the 2002 version. It’s an 8 because Pal kept the argument, cast an angry young man instead of a lecturer, and built the best four minutes anybody has made out of a time machine from a shop window across the street. It stops short of a 9 because Weena turns the Eloi into someone to rescue, and the ending goes soft on a story that ought to leave a bruise.
