On October 30th, 1938,
much of America tuned into a radio broadcast of the popular NBC show Chase and Sanborn Hour. 15 minutes into the broadcast typically
marked the end of the first Charlie McCarthy sketch and the beginning of the
first musical number, at which point many people would idly scan their radio
band. Then they’d hear it – first
reports of a strange meteor crash in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey.
Something came out of the
meteor. A tripod. And within a half-hour nearly the entire
population of Grover’s Mill had been disintegrated by a Martian heat ray.
Over a million listeners never tuned
back to Chase and Sanborn. Some ran, some rioted. Farmers grabbed their shotguns.
Such was the lunacy inspired by an
elaborate prank by a then 23-year-old Orson Welles and his troupe of Mercury
Theatre actors. According to PBS’ The Battle Over Citizen Kane, Welles
timed his radio play adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds so that the first reports of invasion would
coincide with Americans playing radio roulette between acts. Of course, how much of that is true and how
much can be attributed to serendipity, only Welles knows.
Montreal’s Fantasia Festival offered
an in-depth look at Welles’ Mercury Theatre production and its aftermath last
night during War of The Worlds: Welles
and Wells, hosted by Cineclub’s Phil Spurrell. Opening with a ten minute sampling of the
original radio broadcast, the presentation also touched on Montreal’s own
connection to Worlds during the Expo
67, followed by a screening of the rare 1975 TV movie The Night That Panicked America.
Though further investigation has
chalked up much of the reported public reaction to the broadcast as
drummed-up Yellow Journalism, it’s easy to see how some, when confronted with panic from a
relatively new medium, could have over-reacted (National network broadcasting
had only begun a decade earlier). For
the first two acts, the play unfolds much as a developing story on a 24-hour
news network would today, with tiny tidbits of new information meted out in
between commercials and musical interludes.
Spurrell accurately described it as
a testament to the genius of a 23-year-old master of entertainment, but it’s
also quite refreshing to examine a relic from a less cynical world – a prank
believed largely due to the public’s willfulness to lose itself in a
medium. In an age where the equivalent
ambition is an intern’s desire to get a newscaster to say “Captain Sum Ting
Wong” and “Ho Lee Fuk” on live television, it is an exhibit of what unbridled talent
and ingenuity sounds like; a reminder of an idealized era when wielding power
and even exploiting ignorance could be harmless fun, but still articulate.
After the broadcast sampling,
Spurrell screened footage from Montreal’s Expo ’67 of re-edited scenes from the
1953 adaptation of the novel. The
footage was reconfigured to be displayed on multiple screens and
rear-projected, so as to demonstrate how several events could play out
instantaneously. The 1967 Expo, Spurrell
said, was “sort of the birthplace of the IMAX.”
It, in fact, was where director Richard Franklin got the idea for
split-screen sequences in the 1968 film The
Boston Strangler, starting a late-60s fad for the technique frequently
utilized by directors like Brian De Palma.
The footage had not been seen publicly
in forty years.
If the Welles broadcast is best
looked at as a relic, ABC’s The Night
That Panicked America is a fascinating curiosity of its time. Never released in theatres or on VHS, the film
is a dramatization of the broadcast and the public reaction. It’s a time-capsule of oddities wrapped in a
fairly generic TV movie. The late Vic
Morrow leads a cast that includes a young John Ritter, Tom Bosley, Cliff De Young, Casey Kasem
and Eileen Brennan (who passed away just
last week). It also falls weirdly into
place of director Joseph Sargent, whose oeuvre includes one of the best
seventies thrillers (The Taking of Pelham
123) and a film that is featured on nearly every “worst of all-time” list (Jaws: The Revenge).
The in-studio depiction of the
broadcast is as captivating as it is accurate, reminiscent of the 1982 early
television comedy My Favuorite Year
and Joe Dante’s cold war-panic farce Manitee.
Though the depictions of panic in small
town America – from Ritter’s eager-to-fight-the-Nazis farmboy earnestness to the
bourgeois wealthy having the wool pulled over their eyes by their mistreated
butler – plays out with the kind of trite hackery for which television is often criticized.
Still, as a novelty, it’s a joy to
watch.
Cineclub
plans to re-screen the film and the rare footage sometime closer to the 75th
anniversary of the original radio broadcast sometime in October. Check http://www.cineclubfilmsociety.com/
for updates.
