The Night America Trembled The Night America Trembled "The Night America Trembled" is a top-rated television dramatization of the public reaction to the 1938 radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" that aired September 9, 1957, as an episode of the CBS series "Studio One". Hosted by Edward R. Murrow, the live documentary play was written by Nelson S. Bond and uses excerpts of the radio script copywrighted by Howard E. Koch. The film centers on the panic created when "The Mercury Theater on the Air" presented a radio adaptation of an 1897 H. G. Wells science fiction novel, "The War of the
The Spanish Earth the subject, the apolitical 1937 film, "The Last Train from Madrid". A later film, "Blockade" (1938), was also sympathetic to the Republicans. Orson Welles, who starred in Archibald MacLeish's verse play, "Panic" (1935), and had recently performed the role of narrator in his CBS Radio verse play, "The Fall of the City", recorded the narration for "The Spanish Earth" in May 1937. An additional English-language release is narrated by Ernest Hemingway. A French-language version is narrated by Jean Renoir. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt invited Hemingway and Ivens to show the film at the White House in advance