Director Byron Haskin and producer George Pál’s 1953 adaptation of HG Wells’s alien invasion story may have uprooted the action from the leafy suburbs of Surrey and transported it to southern California (wherelese?) but they wisely opted to stick with Wells’s original method of tripod undoing. After frying everyone into little clouds of ash with their heat-rays, the seemingly unstoppable Martians were not defeated by our military might, or even by the A-bomb, but instead it’s lowly viruses and bacteria which sees them come unstuck. A fine ending and a sage lesson for our arrogant species.