Time is on My Side

George Pal's The Time Machine (1960) is a movie I've somehow never seen. I've seen the Morlocks in screenshots and parodies and I've seen the Machine itself any number of places (Big Bang Theory, for ex), but not the whole movie, until now.

It stars Rod Taylor as the unnamed inventor. His friends (Sebastian Cabot, Whit Bissell, Tom Helmore and Alan Young) gather at his place, but he isn't anywhere around. His housekeeper, who I swear is named Mrs. Whatsit, hasn't seen him much - he's been in his laboratory. They are starting to eat without him, when he bursts in, ragged and dirty. Then he tells him the tale.

It started earlier in the week - New Year's eve, 1899. He gathers these same friends to tell them that he has invented a time machine, and demonstrates with a model. The model machine disappears with its cargo of a cigar. But has it really travelled through time? His friends are sceptical, and all head out, but Taylor stays behind. He writed a note inviting them to dinner, then climbs into his full-sized machine and heads off to the future.

First, the time machine itself is a lovely prop - a gearpunk time sled. Then we get some of Pal's beloved stop-motion time travel, as Taylor looks out his lab window at the mannequin in the window across the way getting dressed and redressed. He finally makes a big leap and finds that there is now a war on (WWI), and his friend Alan Young has died. His next jump takes him into WWII territory, and another into the late sixties, where Young's son, now an air-raid warden, tries to get him into a shelter - London is being nuked. The gag is, to Taylor, it is all one long war.

The nuking of London is another great chance for some miniature work, with some bright red oatmeal lava covering toy cars under a tiny railroad bridge. At this point, Taylor finds himself trapped under lava and has to travel into the future until it erodes. There he meets the peaceful but apathetic Eloi, including ingenue Yvette Mimieux (her film debut), and discovers that the cannibalistic human underground dwelling Morlocks that feed on them have stolen his sled. Will he make it back in time for dinner? (SPOILER - of course, we saw it in the beginning of the movie.)

I enjoyed the heck out of this, especially the cheesy special effects. My only criticism is, needs more Sebastian Cabot. But you could say that about any movie that isn’t mostly Sebastian Cabot.

As far as Yvette, I wasn’t all that taken with her - but I do have a copy (MP3) of the album she recorded with Indian classical musician Ali Akbar Khan, where she recites several poems from Beaudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (in English). So you’ve got to love her.