movie review: The Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" Scandal

John Ross

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles terrified audiences with a radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds that was so realistic that people mistook it for an actual news story. Believing that Martians really were invading, people panicked. Highways were clogged with fleeting motorists. Stores were looted. And some people disappeared for days after fleeing into the wilderness to hide from the Martians, inadvertently cutting themselves off from the very sources that could have revealed to them that the whole thing was a hoax.

All of the above is not only a true story, but also one that should fascinate anyone interested in this particular time period, the general history of mass media, or the career of Orson Welles himself. Documentarian John Ross is one such person who is fascinated by the story, but his fascination, and therefore his film about the subject, is remarkably unfocused. Ross serves as the documentary’s director, narrator, producer, and writer, so his is really the sole creative voice behind the film. As a result, there’s no one to check his own obsessions.

The film's biggest problem is that it goes off on so many tangents. Some of these tangents are appropriate. Others are not. For example, The War of the Worlds is science fiction, so Ross starts talking about the history of cinematic science fiction – but then he gets distracted and spends an inordinate amount of time talking about Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. After a while, it becomes clear that Ross likes Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and was just looking for an excuse to start talking about them.

And if that excuse seems thin, here’s an even thinner one: Ross mentions, more or less in passing, that people were “horrified” by the events depicted in The War of the Worlds – a segue that exists for no reason other than to serve as a transition into a brief discussion of the history of horror films. And this in turn segues into a discussion of the movie Nosferatu. But what the heck does Nosferatu have to do with The War of the Worlds? And what do Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, each of whom get an entire section of the film have to do with The War of the Worlds? Answer: Nothing. Ross doesn’t even try to make much of a connection.

Another, much more relevant tangent is Ross’s discussion of Orson Welles’s life and career. Ross discusses Welles’s childhood, his stage production of Macbeth, Citizen Kane and the resulting feud with William Randolph Hearst, and Welles’s gradual decline as a Hollywood presence. In fact, Ross delves so deeply into the life and career of Welles that Welles often becomes the primary subject. At least this tangent provides an appropriate, relevant context to the War of the Worlds broadcast, but if this is Ross's intention, why does Ross's bio of Welles pay so very little attention to Welles's radio career? Ross easily spends more time on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon than he devotes to Welles's non- War of the Worlds radio productions.

I think the answer to this question is that Ross clearly thinks of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in cinematic terms. This is a unique and potentially intriguing approach, but Ross never bothers to explain the reasoning behind this interpretation; I'm not even sure if Ross himself is aware of the fact that he's treating a radio broadcast more like a movie than like an entirely different type of art form.

There's even an auteurist quality to Ross's cinematic approach to radio criticism; the Auteur Theory states that, despite the necessarily collaborative nature of filmmaking, the director of a movie is the film's primary author. Along these lines, Ross devotes plenty of time to the life and career of director Orson Welles, but pays distressingly little attention to the writers. Very little attention to the writers. H.G. Wells, who wrote the novel that The War of the Worlds is based on, gets only a parenthetical, passing reference, while Howard Koch, who brilliantly adapted the novel into a faux news broadcast, isn't mention at all! Considering how much time Ross devotes to completely irrelevant topics, it seems a gross oversight to overlook the writers so completely.

Ross even fails as a narrator, alternately delivering the exposition with a flat monotone, and a false exuberance that is often staggeringly inappropriate. The most blatant example of Ross's failure to grasp the significance of his own narration: a cheerful voice declaring, "the Nazis had just invaded Czechoslovakia!"

This is not to say that the movie is all bad. The subject matter, even when presented in such a flawed manner, is a truly interesting story, and Ross deserves credit for so expertly editing together stock footage to make a series of unrelated clips appear to tell a visual story of people listening and reacting to the Welles broadcast.

But this movie simply fails to satisfy because of so many unanswered questions -- questions not about The War of the Worlds, but about this documentary itself. Why narrate the movie yourself, if you don't seem to understand the implication behind your own words? Why praise the writing without mentioning the actual writers? Why treat a radio broadcast like a movie? And most of all, why devote so much time to subjects so completely unrelated to the movie's central topic? I personally find a frustrating irony in the fact that Welles -- one of the greatest filmmakers, and one of the greatest narrators, of all time, is the subject of a film made by a man who clearly doesn't have the slightest knowledge of how to narrate or make films.