October 30, 1938: across the nation, Americans were sent into a frenzy of terror when they
mistook Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre broadcast of The War of the Worlds for the real thing. Why did so many people run terrified, believing a radio program of a Martian invasion was actually happening? One wag answered, “Because all the intelligent people were listening to Charlie McCarthy” (ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy) on another station. Historians and social psychologists see some far less funny causes at play: American’s very real fears of invasion after the devouring of Europe and Asia by fascist powers as well as anxiety over economic and social tensions. The radio play embodied and thus brought to the surface the very fears so many Americans were trying to suppress: our nation’s weakness instability in the face of invasion by alien German and Japanese. The 1975 television film TheNight That Panicked America effectively conveys this insight by interweaving storylines of the radio show’s production and broadcast with the reactions of Americans across the country.
Opening with a view of the earth from outer space, calmly tracking in to it, director Joseph Sargent evokes H.G. Wells’s opening to his novel War of the Worlds. The film further establishes the links between a world on the verge of world war and a world about to suffer Martian invasion with a narrator intoning the state of earth’s conflicts in language similar to Wells’s novel. The background of broadcasts of war news and Nazi rallies establishes radio’s power to show the impossibility of denying the fearsome inevitability of world war.
Next comes a switch to the pre-production frenzy of putting on a radio program, following producer/director Paul Stewart into the broadcasting station and up the elevator to the studio with a network standards and practices rep hammering at him to keep things uncontroversial, then into the studio where he’s pulling together script changes and pressing the sound effects woman to create something ominous. It’s an exciting vision of how live radio performances came together: actors, scripts, sound effects, orchestra, directing battling against time, censors, and technical limitations. If you think about it, though, all this rush and pressure to make things perfect right up to the last minute also mirrors the sense of tension and uncertainty in the country itself. A nice hint at the unspoken realization of the tinderbox of American fears is the S & P guy (Tom Bosley) insisting that they can’t have Roosevelt as part of the story; they have to go down all the way down to the Secretary of the Interior. It’s never uttered, but, of course, having “Roosevelt” in their play about a devastating invasion lends it too much authenticity. And isn’t it much less scary if you skip past vice presidents, speakers of the house, secretaries of state all the way down to Secretary of the Interior. (Welles gets past this by agreeing to substitute Secretary of the Interior for the President, but he sounds like Roosevelt). Art liberates attempts to suppresses reality.
The stories interwoven with the broadcast are sometimes humorous, yet they also bring home that this radio play brought to the surface fears and uncertainties, not just about war but about belief in American exceptionalism. John Ritter and Michael Constantine are son and father who are farmers at Grovers Mills, the site of the invasion according to the play. Joining up with others to defend their country from invaders, the son sees his father and other farmers shoot up — a water tower. This does not amuse the owner. However, this son, who has been arguing he wants to go to Canada to join up and fight against Hitler before the war came to America, is the one who figures out this is only a radio program and tries to stop the others from acting hysterically. The fellow who admits that half the world is in flames is clear-eyed enough to recognize a real danger, while those who try to live in denial find their fears breaking free of suppression to control them.
Other examples are especially interesting. Two servants had been listening to the radio before their wealthy employer’s party. So, they know that it’s only a play — which their general perspicuity would have told them anyway. However, the snobby employer and his equally snobby friends, frivolous, self-important, and even a little impressed with Hitler, buy into the program lock, stock, and Martian cylinder. Their self-satisfied ignorance practically hits you over the head as the employer keeps refusing to listen when the butler tries to tell him it’s only a play. Equally snobbish and obtuse, one of the guests decides the whole thing must be real because the professor reporting is touted as being from Yale — a fictional professor. Eventually, the crowd of airhead snobs rushes off into the night, stealing their hosts valuables, while the servants chill, finishing off the horsd’oervres and champagne.
Not all the stories are amusing, however. Will Geer is a Protestant minister who won’t let his daughter marry a Papist infidel, fearing a religious alien invasion. His bigoted form of faith isno comfort when he believes aliens will destroy him and he loses his sanity for a time. Perhaps the most poignant tale involves a middle-class family where the father (Vic Morrow) is leaving the wife (Eileen Brennan) and children to “go look for work,” but the suggestion is that he can’t handle supporting his family emotionally as well as financially any longer. The American dream of family stability and work’s inherent dignity and security has fallen apart. The fear of the family dying in the invasion pulls husband and wife together in an attempt to take their children to safety, until what they perceive as the approaching alien ship with its horrific heat rays draws them into the decision that mercy-killing the children is their only option.
Anyway, it’s an exciting film to watch that gives you something to think about. I loved seeing all the clever improvisation and creativity of putting on a live broadcast. Perhaps you have heard how the sound person created the menacing unscrewing of the Martian cylinders by having her assistant unscrew a pickle jar in a toilet in the men’s room to get just the right reverb? Paul Shenar was dead on in his reading of Orson Welles’s sign off for the play, as the Mercury Theatre’s trick and treat. I especially liked that the writers (including Nicholas Mayer and Howard Koch, a writer on the original script) left me considering how suppressing rather than facing what unsettles us in this world actually leaves us prone to that that which we try to suppress. If this can happen unintentionally by creative writers, actors, and technicians, what can deliberate manipulation through something like AI do, if we haven’t faced and come truly to understand the contentions of our world?
Sharon Healy-Yang 
