THE TIME MACHINE (1960): BEAUTY, COURAGE AND 800,000 YEARS INTO TOMORROW
George Pal’s adaptation of H. G. Wells sends Rod Taylor into a future of beautiful people, underground monsters and uncomfortable questions about what happens when humanity stops fighting for its own civilization.
By the BEAUX HOMMES Film & Culture Desk
There is something wonderfully direct about The Time Machine.
A man builds a machine.
He sits down.
He pushes a lever.
And civilization disappears around him.
No wormholes. No quantum lectures. No pages of rules explaining alternate timelines.
Just one extraordinarily beautiful machine—and one man determined to find out where humanity is going.
George Pal’s 1960 adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1895 novel stars Rod Taylor, Yvette Mimieux and Alan Young, with a screenplay by David Duncan. The film runs approximately 103 minutes and was produced and directed by Pal for MGM.
For BEAUX HOMMES Summer of Sci-Fi, we recommend it not merely because it is a classic.
We recommend it because beneath its colorful sets, monsters and romance lies a surprisingly serious question:
What happens to human beings when comfort becomes more important than curiosity, knowledge or courage?
That question has not aged at all.
FIRST: THAT TIME MACHINE
Before discussing Rod Taylor, Morlocks, Eloi or the end of civilization, we need to talk about the machine itself.
Because it is magnificent.
The film’s time machine became one of classic science fiction’s most recognizable props: an ornate Victorian-looking apparatus built around a chair, controls and a large rotating disc. Contemporary production histories credit MGM art director Bill Ferrari with the design and Wah Chang with its construction.
It remains compelling because it does not attempt to look like a modern computer.
It looks like something a brilliant Victorian inventor might genuinely have imagined.
Brass.
Metal.
Polished surfaces.
Mechanical controls.
A rotating disc suggesting a clock, sun or astronomical instrument.
This is an essential lesson for science-fiction designers:
The future does not have to look like our present-day idea of the future.
It should look like that character’s idea of the future.
George’s machine belongs to his world.
That makes it believable.
ROD TAYLOR: THE THINKING ACTION HERO
Rod Taylor plays the inventor usually called simply George, a deliberate connection to H. G. Wells himself. The film’s opening credit identifies the story as H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and Taylor provides narration describing George’s journeys through time.
Taylor is an excellent choice because he combines two qualities science fiction sometimes separates:
intelligence and physicality.
He looks like a man who could build the machine.
He also looks like a man capable of fighting his way out when the experiment goes badly.
That combination gives the film energy.
George is not a scientist who becomes irrelevant once danger arrives.
Nor is he a muscular hero whose intelligence exists only because the screenplay tells us he is brilliant.
Taylor gives him curiosity.
He wants to know things.
That is crucial.
At BEAUX HOMMES, we spend plenty of time celebrating powerful male bodies.
But a powerful body becomes far more interesting when a curious mind lives inside it.
George travels through time because he needs to understand.
Muscle gets him through the Morlocks. Curiosity gets him to the future.
We approve of both.
WATCHING HISTORY MOVE
One of the movie’s most delightful visual ideas is watching the world change around George as he accelerates through time.
Fashion changes.
Buildings change.
The environment changes.
A shop-window mannequin repeatedly changes clothing as decades fly past.
It is playful, economical visual storytelling.
Instead of announcing:
“Twenty years have passed,”
the movie shows you.
For aspiring filmmakers, illustrators and designers, this is a master class in visual compression.
If you need to communicate change, ask whether you can show one object changing rather than explaining an entire historical period.
A dress.
A car.
A building.
A hairstyle.
A man’s body.
A street sign.
Small visual changes can imply enormous transformations.
THEN THE 20TH CENTURY GETS UGLY
George initially imagines the future as a place of progress.
Instead, traveling forward exposes him to war.
The film inserts encounters with World War I, World War II and an imagined future nuclear war, using the Time Traveller’s journey to connect Wells’s Victorian optimism with the Cold War anxieties of the filmmakers’ own era.
That decision makes the movie more than a Victorian adventure.
George keeps expecting humanity to improve.
Humanity keeps inventing better ways to destroy itself.
For audiences watching in 1960, nuclear annihilation was not abstract fantasy.
The film understands that.
Science fiction often succeeds when it takes the fear of its present and projects it into tomorrow.
The clothes and effects may date.
The anxiety doesn’t.
THE WORLD OF THE ELOI
Eventually George travels roughly 800,000 years into the future, where he encounters the Eloi: young, attractive humans living a seemingly carefree existence.
At first, it looks rather wonderful.
Beautiful people.
Nature.
Fruit.
Sunshine.
No office commute.
No visibly oppressive government.
No one arguing about interest rates.
George might reasonably assume humanity finally figured things out.
Then he begins talking to them.
And that is where the nightmare starts.
The Eloi have almost no curiosity.
They do not meaningfully study history.
They do not seem interested in how their world works.
They accept what exists around them.
Their civilization has essentially inherited a world it no longer understands.
This horrifies George.
It should.
BEAUTY WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE
This is where The Time Machine becomes especially interesting for BEAUX HOMMES.
The Eloi are beautiful.
But beauty has become disconnected from intellectual development.
Their bodies survive.
Their culture barely does.
That is a fascinating warning.
A civilization can become attractive and still become empty.
A person can too.
We love beauty.
We celebrate bodies.
We celebrate fashion.
We celebrate sensuality.
But BEAUX HOMMES has always been most interested in combining those things with knowledge, curiosity, art, history and thought.
That is exactly what George discovers is missing.
The Eloi have inherited beauty.
They have forgotten almost everything else.
Beauty without curiosity eventually becomes decoration.
That may be the film’s most important lesson.
YVETTE MIMIEUX AS WEENA
Among the Eloi is Weena, played by Yvette Mimieux.
Mimieux was very young when she made the film, and The Time Machine became one of the roles most closely associated with her early career. TCM notes that George Pal cast her as Weena opposite Rod Taylor, describing the character as a young woman living in the distant future whom George comes to love.
Weena brings the film something essential:
Emotion.
George can argue with civilization intellectually.
Weena gives him a reason to care personally about the people living inside it.
Their relationship has the simplicity of a fairy tale.
He comes from another age.
She comes from another species of human civilization.
They should have almost nothing in common.
Yet affection crosses an unimaginable amount of time.
That is one of science fiction’s great romantic ideas:
Love does not need two people to come from the same world.
Sometimes it only needs two people willing to recognize one another.
AND THEN COME THE MORLOCKS
The Eloi are not alone.
Beneath their apparently peaceful world live the Morlocks, underground descendants of humanity who operate machinery and prey upon the Eloi.
Visually, they are among the movie’s most memorable creations.
They are pale.
Strange.
Predatory.
Almost industrial.
And they exist in direct contrast with the beautiful Eloi above ground.
This is where Wells’s old class metaphor becomes physical.
One population lives above.
Another lives below.
One enjoys the world.
The other maintains the machinery.
By the time George understands the full relationship between them, paradise has become something horrifying.
DESIGN LESSON: SPLIT THE WORLD IN TWO
Artists should study how simple the film’s major visual division is.
Above ground: sunlight, vegetation, flowing clothing, beautiful bodies.
Below ground: machinery, darkness, smoke, harsh surfaces, monsters.
The audience understands the distinction immediately.
This is visual storytelling through opposites.
Soft / hard.
Light / dark.
Beautiful / grotesque.
Passive / aggressive.
Natural / industrial.
That kind of contrast is extremely useful in fashion photography and illustration.
If your hero wears white, consider a dark environment.
If the model is beautiful, consider something grotesque beside him.
If the clothing is futuristic, place it inside old architecture.
Contrast produces narrative before anybody speaks.
THE MORLOCKS AREN’T JUST MONSTERS
This is important.
If the Morlocks were merely creatures waiting underground, the movie would still work as an adventure.
But the concept is stronger than that.
The Morlocks represent what remains of a civilization in which different portions of humanity became separated by function and environment.
The future did not produce an invading alien species.
Humanity did this to itself.
That makes the story much darker.
We are both the Eloi and the Morlocks.
Beautiful consumer and invisible worker.
Comfort and labor.
Surface and machinery.
One cannot exist without the other.
Science fiction becomes powerful when the monster turns out to be a distorted reflection.
THE BODY WAKES UP
There is something satisfying about watching George become increasingly frustrated with the Eloi’s passivity.
Eventually he begins demanding action.
Fight.
Ask questions.
Defend yourselves.
Care about what happens.
The interesting thing is that George’s masculinity becomes moral rather than merely physical.
His strength matters because he uses it to resist.
He refuses to accept:
“This is simply how things are.”
That may be the definition of a hero.
Not somebody who never experiences fear.
Somebody who sees an unacceptable situation and decides it doesn’t have to remain acceptable.
THE SPECIAL EFFECTS WON AN OSCAR
And they deserved recognition.
The Time Machine won the Academy Award for Special Effects, with the Oscar going to Gene Warren and Tim Baar.
Today, viewers accustomed to enormous digital environments may notice miniatures, optical work and period techniques.
Good.
Look at them.
Study them.
The film demonstrates what filmmakers could achieve through ingenuity, models, photography, physical construction and carefully controlled visual illusion.
Do not dismiss an effect simply because you can understand how it was created.
Understanding the trick should increase your appreciation for the magician.
WHAT ASPIRING ARTISTS SHOULD STUDY
Creative people should watch The Time Machine twice.
The first time, enjoy it.
The second time, study it.
Look specifically at:
The machine itself.
How does one object explain the personality of its inventor?
Color.
How do warm and cold palettes separate worlds?
Silhouette.
Can you recognize a Morlock before seeing every detail?
Costume.
How does clothing suggest civilization?
Architecture.
How does the physical environment tell us what happened to society?
Miniatures.
How can scale create convincing spectacle?
Transformation through time.
How does one repeated object demonstrate decades passing?
Contrast.
Beauty becomes more visible beside ugliness.
Romance.
How little exposition is actually necessary for an audience to understand emotional connection?
And above all:
Design the culture, not merely the costume.
A futuristic dress becomes far more interesting when we understand the society that created it.
THE TIME MACHINE ITSELF IS A DESIGN MASTERPIECE
Young concept artists should particularly study the central prop.
It demonstrates something that is frequently lost in contemporary science fiction:
Technology can have personality.
Modern futuristic design often defaults to identical smooth surfaces.
White.
Black.
Glass.
Screens.
Blue lights.
Pal’s machine feels handmade.
Personal.
Almost eccentric.
We can imagine George working on it alone.
That individuality makes it memorable.
If you are designing a futuristic object, ask:
Who built it?
How wealthy were they?
What materials could they access?
Do they value beauty?
Are they an engineer?
An artist?
A soldier?
A scientist?
Would they polish the brass?
Would they leave fingerprints?
Objects should reveal character.
FOR THE DREAMERS
This movie is fundamentally about a man who refuses to accept the boundaries of his own time.
Everybody else experiences time as something happening to them.
George decides to travel through it.
That is a wonderful metaphor for creative ambition.
Every inventor looks slightly ridiculous before the invention works.
Every new fashion looks strange before somebody wears it confidently.
Every artistic movement looks wrong before people learn how to see it.
Every entrepreneur starts with something that exists mostly in their imagination.
Every writer begins with an empty page.
Creative people live partly in the future.
They make things for a world that has not completely arrived yet.
George simply builds a machine that lets him visit.
DO NOT EXPECT THE FUTURE TO SAVE YOU
Perhaps the movie’s wisest idea is George’s disappointment.
He wants to believe the future will solve humanity’s problems.
It doesn’t.
Technology advances.
Wars continue.
Civilizations disappear.
Human beings evolve.
Problems change form.
That is worth remembering now.
Artificial intelligence will not automatically make us wise.
Space exploration will not automatically make us peaceful.
Medical advances will not automatically make us compassionate.
Technology changes our possibilities.
It does not relieve us of responsibility.
The future becomes better only if people make better choices inside it.
WHY WE RECOMMEND IT
Because Rod Taylor makes intelligence look adventurous.
Because Yvette Mimieux gives the distant future a human face.
Because the Morlocks remain wonderfully creepy.
Because the time machine is still one of the great pieces of science-fiction design.
Because George Pal understood spectacle.
Because the Oscar-winning effects remain inventive.
Because the story combines romance, horror, action, sociology and philosophy without forgetting that movies should also be fun.
And because more than sixty years after the film was released, it still asks an excellent question:
If you could see where humanity was going, would you have the courage to come back and try to change it?
BEAUX HOMMES VERDICT
★★★★½ out of five
George Pal’s The Time Machine is colorful, romantic, occasionally frightening and enormously imaginative.
Some elements belong unmistakably to the period in which it was made.
That is part of its charm.
We do not watch classic science fiction because its predictions were always accurate.
We watch because yesterday’s visions of tomorrow reveal what people hoped for—and what they feared.
And this particular future contains something BEAUX HOMMES readers should appreciate:
A handsome, intelligent, physically capable man.
A beautiful woman.
A spectacular machine.
A mysterious civilization.
A world that has forgotten its history.
And one very important message:
Never become so comfortable that you stop asking questions.
The Eloi did.
Look how that turned out.
So watch The Time Machine.
Study its designs.
Admire Rod Taylor.
Fear the Morlocks.
Fall a little bit in love with Weena.
And afterward, ask yourself the question that every artist, inventor and dreamer eventually has to answer:
What future are you helping to build?
BEAUX HOMMES — SUMMER OF SCI-FI
Beauty. Bodies. Art. Culture. Imagination.
www.beauxhommes.com