This movie, produced in 1975, directed by Joseph Sargent, and starring Vic Morrow, Will Geer, Tom Bosley, Paul Shenar (as Welles), John Ritter, Michael Constantine, showed how American radio listeners reacted to what was merely one week of a series of Sunday night broadcasts, on CBS, by the Mercury Players led by Orson Welles.
Welles adapted H.G. Wells story, "The War of the Worlds", for a radio play, mostly presented as a series of news bulletins, then constant crisis coverage of a happening event.
The general public, if they tuned in just a couple of minutes late, missed the lead-in that made it clear that it was a radio play based on a classic book. The result was nationwide panic that Martians really were invading the world. Switchboards lit up (literally, since they still used cord-boards) as listeners called in. There was chaos in the streets as people fled the imagined Martian invasion forces.
If you've ever heard the radio play, probably a crackly, worn-with-time recording, it is a treat to not only hear it crisp and new, with studio quality, but to actually see how they made those special sound effects, particularly the Martian delivery capsule coming uncapped: a man held a large bottle deep in a commode, and unscrewed the lid!
The personal lives affected may be strictly the writer's imagination, but they are plausible stories of people affected by the lingering Depression, especially Vic Morrow as the husband/father going out of town to try to find work to support his family. He had to put off those plans to instead drive his family to safety, and his desperate act of mercy he was about to carry out, thinking a Martian machine was bearing down on them in the Holland Tunnel.
A patriotic father can't understand his son wanting to go to Canada and join the army there, and only after chasing the phantom Martians, getting told its a radio play, does son finally convey his real motivations to dad: he wants to go help fight Hitler, not wait for America, in a pacifist mood, to join the war later rather than sooner.
The movie ends with an epilog voiceover about the terror of October 30, 1938 being imaginary... but that the real nightmare was about to begin... cue sounds of a Hitler rally.
America didn't burn down CBS, but when a Peruvian radio station tried the same War of the Worlds broadcast, the angry people, discovering it wasn't reality, burned down that radio station.
I wish they'd put this movie on DVD
Yeah, a real horror story was less than a year away.
A good movie, although people who've researched the 'panic' have found it was more of an exagerration/lie.
One video I watched claimed 'the panic' was a myth fostered by newspapers trying to undercut the competition & popularity of radio. (Old media being afraid of new media, the more things change the more they stay the same.)
And here's the video I referenced Was There Really a Mass Panic as a Result of the War of the Worlds Broadcast?.
Runs almost 12 minutes, but the last few minutes are a bonus on the origins of Halloween.
This movie really doesn't belong in the Science Fiction/Fantasy forum.
It's neither. It's a dramatization of an actual event.