THINGS TO COME

   Film (1936). London Films. Dir William Cameron Menzies, starring Raymond Massey, Cedric Hardwicke, Margaretta Scott, Ralph Richardson, Edward Chapman, Ann Todd, Maurice Braddell. Screenplay Lajos Biro, H.G. WELLS, based on Wells's The Shape of Things to Come (1933). 130 mins, cut to 113 mins. B/w.

   This Alexander Korda production was the most expensive and ambitious sf film of the 1930s - and, despite the growth of magazine sf over the next 15 years, the last sf film of any importance until the 1950s. Although Wells himself was closely associated with TTC, it is notthe most satisfactory of the 1930s films based on his work, and was a box-office failure. The film is divided into 3 parts: the 1st, set in 1940, sees the start of a world WAR that continues for decades; the 2nd,set in 1970, deals with a community reduced by the war to tribalism until the arrival of a mysterious "airman", who announces that a new era of "law and sanity" has begun and quells the local warlords with "Peace Gas"; and the 3rd takes place in AD2036, when the ruling technocrats have built a gleaming white UTOPIA and an attempt is being made to fire a manned projectile into space, using an electric gun, despite (vain) opposition from effete "artists" who are still maintaining that "there are some things Man is not meant to know".Characterization and dialogue are weakly imagined and the rhetoric is preachy and pompous, despite the famously overblown but moving concluding speech delivered by Raymond Massey, as he declares of Man: ". . . and when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning." Wells's belief that the future of humanity lay with a technocratic elite and his scorn for the ARTS seemed oddly old-fashioned even in 1936 - not to say undemocratic. But the visual drama (supported by Arthur Bliss's majestic musical score), despite static compositions, is exhilarating: the special effects were by the imported Hollywood expert Ned Mann and director Menzies was a great production designer (most famously for Gone With theWind [1939]). TTC is one of the most important films in the history of sf CINEMA for the boldness of its ambitions and for the ardour with which it projects the myth of SPACE FLIGHT as the beginning of humankind's transcendence. Wells published a version of the script as Things to Come * (1935).

   PN/JB