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Things to Come is a 1936 British science fiction film, produced by Alexander Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies. The screenplay was written by H. G. Wells and is a loose adaptation of his own 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come and his 1931 non-fiction work, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind. The film stars Raymond Massey. Christopher Frayling of the British Film Institute calls Things to Come "a landmark in cinematic design."
SynopsisSpoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The film begins in the fictional English town of 'Everytown' in 1940, as a global world war breaks out. The war lasts for decades, long enough for the remaining survivors to have forgotten the reasons for it in the first place. Strategic bombing is so successful that civilisation on both sides is totally devastated. Humanity falls into a new Dark Age where the technology level is reduced to that of medieval times, symbolised by an automobile being drawn like a cart by a horse. There is even a medieval-type plague sweeping through the land, known as "the wandering sickness." In 1970, Everytown is run by a local warlord called Rudolf, a.k.a 'The Boss' or 'The Chief' (played by Ralph Richardson), who is at constant war with the "Hill People" and obsessed with fixing up the old remaining biplanes and capturing coal mines in order to convert the coal to fuel for the aircraft. The Chief consolidated his power over Everytown after having eradicated "the wandering sickness" by shooting all those infected with the disease. One day, a futuristic aeroplane lands outside the town. The Chief and the townspeople are incredulous when the pilot John Cabal (played by Raymond Massey) proclaims that the last surviving band of scientists have formed a society known as 'Wings Over the World'. They are building a civilisation, based in Basra, Iraq, that has renounced war and has outlawed independent nation-states. The Chief resists by making the pilot his prisoner, but the Chief's mechanic (whom he was using to fix up old biplanes from the war) escapes to Basra in a plane he was testing, and alerts Cabal's scientist friends regarding his capture.
A montage sequence follows showing decades of technological progress and human achievement, beginning with Cabal explaining the plans of the Global Conquest by the Airmen of Wings Over the World ("First this zone, then that!") . Image:Things to Come spaceship.jpg The space gun By 2036, mankind lives in gigantic underground cities. Everytown is one of them (the only one shown, with no information given on any others - or if there even are others), and the first flight to the Moon is about to be launched from a space gun nearby. However, Luddites among the population fear this new technology, led by a sculptor who claims mankind needs a "rest" from further technological development, and that shooting people into the cold of space is not "natural". They start a riot, trying to destroy the space gun before it can be fired. The head scientist Cabal (the great grandson of the pilot in the previous section of the film, and also played by Massey) explains that the crowds are misguided and that technology has in fact saved humanity. He launches the space ship with his daughter and the daughter's boyfriend as the crew, and the blast from the launch knocks the crowd back. The film ends with Massey's character delivering a speech to the idea of Progress and humanity's quest for knowledge, claiming that "if Man is merely an Animal then he must fight for every scrap of happiness he can, but if he is something more, then he must strive for more - the Universe or nothing - which shall it be?" Taglines:
Behind the scenesWells is assumed to have had a degree of control over the project that was unprecedented for a screenwriter, and personally supervised nearly every aspect of the film. Posters and the main title bill the film as "H. G. Wells' THINGS TO COME", with "an Alexander Korda production" appearing in smaller type. In fact, Wells ultimately had no control over the finished product, with the result that many scenes, although shot, were either truncated or not included in the finished film. The rough-cut reputedly ran to 130 minutes; the version submitted to the British Board of Film Censors was 117m 13s; it was released as 108m 40s (later cut to 98m 06s) in the UK, and 96m 24s in the United States. The standard version available today is just 92m 42s, although some prints are in circulation in the United States - where the film is in the Public Domain - that retain the additional scenes that constitute the original American release. Wells originally wanted the music to be recorded in advance, and have the film constructed around the music, but this was considered too radical and so the score, by Arthur Bliss, was fitted to the film afterwards in a more conventional way. A concert suite drawn from the film has remained popular; as of 2003, there are about half-a-dozen recordings of it in print. After filming had already begun, the Hungarian abstract artist László Moholy-Nagy was commissioned to produce some of the effects sequences for re-building of Everytown. Moholy-Nagy's approach was partly to treat it as an abstract light show but only some 90 seconds of material was used (e.g. a protective-suited figure behind corrugated glass), although in the autumn of 1975 a researcher found a further four discarded sequences. [1]
Historical parallelsThe film, written throughout 1934, is notable for predicting World War II, being only 16 months off by having it start on 23 December 1940, rather than 1 September 1939. Its graphic depiction of strategic bombing in the scenes in which Everytown is flattened by air attack and society collapses into barbarism, echo pre-war concerns about the threat of the bomber and the apocalyptic pronouncements of air power prophets. Wells was an air power prophet of sorts, having described aerial warfare in Anticipations (1901) and The War in the Air (1908). See also
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