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H.G. Wells puts Darwin in contingency with Marx, George Pal adds Buster Crabbe and registers the poetry of time-lapse. The young Victorian inventor (Rod Taylor) is a "prompt, precise and punctual" fellow, who rallies against being "a prisoner of time" to the annoyance of colleagues at the fin de siècle dinner. His botanist friend (Alan Young), a more moderate seeker, warns him about the laws of providence, but the clockwork sleigh—equipped with scarlet velvet seat, titanium lever and rotating propeller—is already in the lab, ready for a spin. Temporal tinkering produces first a racing snail, then Cocteau's observation about mutating epochs reflected on the frozen smile of a display window mannequin. The man who was disgusted by the Boer War witnesses London during the Front in 1917 and the Blitz in 1940, nuclear disaster (sirens, aluminum suits, lava poured over maquettes) is predicted for 1966, followed by "darkness for centuries." When the magma cracks in the year 802, 701, he finds humanity divided between a blond surf colony (the Eloi) and blue-skinned gorilla machinists (the Morlocks). Curran has it: "It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active." The traveler contemplates the accumulation of knowledge turned to dust and scolds the placid hedonists ("The human race reduced to living vegetables"), though he eventually warms to the notion that any future that includes Yvette Mimieux in a pink tunic can't be all bad. A continuum of raids, the upstairs-downstairs arrangement of prey and predator, the fourth dimension and the counterculture prophecy. "By George, you could always tell a good yarn." The line of influence extends to Schaffner's Planet of the Apes and Boorman's Zardoz, plus Mackendrick's Don't Make Waves. With Sebastian Cabot, Tom Helmore, Whit Bissell, and Doris Lloyd.
--- Fernando F. Croce |