The Time Machine (George Pal; MGM) deserves a place on the very short list of good science fiction films partly because its hokum is entrancing, its special effects expertly rigged and its monsters sufficiently monstrous. But the picture's major virtue is that its human characters are compounded not of green cheese or ground-up Dracula scripts, as is customary in such ventures, but of flesh, blood and imagination.
The yarn, skillfully embroidered by Producer-Director George Pal and Scriptwriter David Duncan, brings up to date H. G. Wells's 1895 romance. Disheartened by the alarms of...