The Time Machine (1960)

George Pal's 1960 adaptation of the Wells novella arrives from a distant era, and not merely the one featuring Morlocks. A Victorian inventor named George builds a machine, watches London burn under nuclear bombardment, and lands in the year 802,701, where he finds a passive surface people and a carnivorous subterranean one. The cast is uniformly white. The women exist to be rescued. Weena, played by Yvette Mimieux, spends her screen time being carried off by a current or grabbed by a Morlock, and the critics of the day dismissed her, accurately, as a doll. Nobody in the production appears to have given the matter a second thought, which is its own kind of historical document.

The film has no interest in the questions that preoccupy contemporary audiences. There are no LGBTQ characters or themes. There is no racial commentary, though the Eloi and Morlocks are separated by species and class, not by skin. The ecological angle is absent entirely; the apocalypse here is a satellite-borne nuclear weapon, a product of Cold War dread, and the ruined London has nothing to say about carbon. The Eloi are docile and well-fed, the Morlocks breed them as livestock, and the allegory about labor and leisure sits in the background without anyone bothering to draw the lesson.

What survives of social critique is a whisper. Wells' original division of humanity into idle surface-dwellers and underground workers is present in outline, but Pal treats it as spectacle, and the camera prefers the burning caverns to the economics. The talking rings deliver one stern passage about a 326-year war between East and West, a warning that lands and then evaporates. The rest is adventure, handsomely mounted, Oscar-winning in its effects, and content to be an entertainment. On the evidence, the film is a product of its moment, and its moment had other concerns.

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