The Time Machine (1960)

Calificación de los usuarios:

7.6/10   

Director:

George Pal

Escritores:

David Duncan (screenplay)
H.G. Wells (novel)

Fecha de Lanzamiento:

17 agosto 1960 (USA)

Género:

Aventura | Ciencia-Ficción

Frase comercial:

You Will Orbit into the Fantastic Future!

Plot:

A Victorian Englishman travels to the far future and finds that humanity has divided into two hostile species.

Plot Keywords:

Time Machine | Utopia Quest | Apathy | Library | Lava

Premios:

Won Oscar. Another 1 nomination

Comentarios de los usuarios:

Politically Laundered Sci-fi

Reparto

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
Doris Lloyd	...	Mrs. Watchett

También conocida como:

H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (UK) (complete title) (USA) (complete title)
El tiempo en sus manos (Spain) [es]

Duración:

103 min | Australia:89 min (video version)

País:

USA

Idioma:

Inglés

Color:

Color (Metrocolor)

Relación de Aspecto:

1.85 : 1

Sonido:

Mono (35 mm optical prints) | 4-Track Stereo (Westrex Recording System) (35 mm magnetic prints)

Clasificación:

Norway:16 (1960) | Iceland:12 | USA:G (re-rating) (1972) | Netherlands:AL | Australia:G (alternate rating) | Australia:PG (original rating) | Canada:PG | Finland:K-12 | Germany:12 | Norway:11 | Sweden:15 | UK:A (original rating) | UK:PG (video rating) | West Germany:12

Locaciones de Filmación:

Culver City, California, USA

Compañía:

George Pal Productions

Trivialidades:

The "lava" in the volcano scene in downtown was actually oatmeal with orange and red food coloring spilled onto a platform and slowly moved down the miniature set.

Errores:

Errores Reales: The 20th Century began on Jan. 1, 1901, not Jan. 1, 1900 as depicted in the movie. However, like in the year 2000, it was celebrated based on the change from 1899 to 1900 rather than based on numerical correctness.

Citas:

Filby: If that machine can do what you say it can do, destroy it, George! Destroy it before it destroys you!

Conexiones de Película:

Referenced in "The Big Bang Theory: The Nerdvana Annihilation (#1.14)" (2008)

Politically Laundered Sci-fi

In isolation, this film is an interesting and rather enjoyable tale. It is only when you appreciate the underlying theme in the original 1895 novel penned by H.G. Wells that you discovers how the story had been "laundered" to be "politically correct" for American public release. In a land where "socialism" has almost always been a dirty word and at a time when the McCarthy political witch hunts (that hit Hollywood rather badly) were still a fresh memory and when the "Cold War" was at its height, M.G.M. Studios was not going to take the risk of preaching a cautionary story about how the seeds sown by the capitalist system could exact a gruesome nemesis in a distant future. Instead, the studio took the story, stripped it of its ideology and presented it as the adventure of a gifted Victorian inventor.

Throughout his career, Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) placed his sympathies with the working class. In 1905, he joined the Fabian Society, a socialist think-tank whose ranks included George Bernard Shaw and that gave birth to the British Labour Party. It is not surprising that his ideology would embed itself in his writing -- and this was certainly true of his first novel, The Time Machine. The book tells of an enterprising inventor who crafts a device that can carry a human passenger forward or backward through time. The hero travels 800,000 years into the future and finds a world in which humans had evolved into two species: an illiterate and child-like race called the Eloi, devoid of technology but similar in appearance to modern humans who inhabited the surface of the planet; and the more repugnant Morlocks, technologically sophisticated and living in perpetual darkness in underground caverns. The hero gradually learns that it is the Morlocks who supply the Eloi with food, clothing and other basic necessities of life, but they exact a terrible price. At periodic intervals, the Morlocks "harvest" the Eloi for food.

(By his own drive, Wells, who lived an impoverished childhood and became literate only in his teen years, entered university where he studied biology under Thomas H. Huxley, the illustrious and outspoken champion of Charles Darwin. He was aware of the debates among evolutionary biologists of his day over the discovery of Neanderthal remains, about how two "distinct" species of humans -- Neanderthals and our Cro-Magnon ancestors -- existed in a prehistoric Europe and whether it was a peaceful co-existence or whether the two species competed, perhaps violently, for control of resources. Wells merely extrapolated the concept of two competing human species to a distant future.)

The hero in the novel also discovers how this world came into being. At some less remote future time, the industrialists collectively chose to establish their factories and means of production underground, leaving the surface of the earth green. Eventually, the politically powerful classes decided to banish all workers underground as well, leaving the world of sunshine and blue skies as a playground for the wealthy and the privileged -- a paradise that would eventually turn sour when the passage of time would adjust the genetic makeup of the two classes in their different environments and when a successful "slave revolt" would place the descendants of the workers in control.

Clearly, such a political fable could not be put on screen in the United States in 1960. If a cinematic version of the story was going to be made, another explanation had to be conjured up to account for the evolution of the two human species -- and it was found in the Cold War itself, a war that turns "hot" and forces huge populations underground for survival. Toady, however, almost forty years after the movie was released and more than a hundred hears since the novel first broke onto the world, that M.G.M. explanation seems horribly dated and it is the original Wells plot that holds up much better in today's international, political and industrial climate.