Things to Come (1936)

Things to Come (1936)

William Cameron Menzies (1936)

Based on H G Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (a 1933 work considered by Wells to be less a novel than ‘a discussion’ of the future in fictional form), Things to Come surveys the next hundred years and asks whether mankind will remain mired in political tyranny and fearful, backward thinking; or embrace scientific progress so as to improve living standards and increase human enlightenment.  Although the credits don’t name Wells (or anyone else) as the writer of the screenplay, there’s no doubt that he’s its author – no doubt either where he stands in the ‘discussion’ dramatised in Things to Come.  The closing speech is given to Oswald Cabal, the film’s chief proponent of the benefits of relentless technological advance and extraterrestrial exploration.  A timid, tired fellow called Raymond Passworthy asks Cabal, ‘…is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?’  Looking out on an awesome starry sky, Cabal replies:

‘Rest enough for the individual man – too much, and too soon – and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending.  He must go on – conquest beyond conquest.  This little planet and its winds and ways, and all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him – then the planets about him, and at last out across immensity to the stars.  And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time – still he will be beginning. …  If we’re no more than animals – we must snatch at our little scraps of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do – or have done.  [Pointing to the stars]  It is that – or this? All the universe – or nothingness…. Which shall it be?’

The setting throughout is a British city called ‘Everytown’ although, in the film’s opening episode, set in December 1940, the dome of St Paul’s is prominent on the skyline.  Christmas is coming; according to newspaper placards, war is just as imminent; the first enemy bombs fall on Everytown on Christmas Day.  This war isn’t done until nearly thirty years later, during which time civilisation has fallen into ruins and technological progress has ground to a halt, except in the development of biological warfare.  The unnamed enemy, facing defeat, has developed and propagated a ‘wandering sickness’, as lethal as the Black Death.  By 1970, however, a warlord known as the Boss has eradicated the sickness in southern England by shooting all those infected by it.

The middle section of Things to Come describes the thwarting of the Boss’s plans to conquer the ‘hill people’ in order to obtain coal and shale, render these into oil and get his biplanes back in the air.  The US cavalry arrives in the aerial form of ‘Wings Over the World’, a group comprising the last surviving ‘engineers and mechanics’ from across the globe:  from their futuristic aircraft, they drop sleeping gas bombs on Everytown.  The Boss, realising he’s beaten, ends his own life; a new era of peace and scientific development begins.

The film’s final section is set in 2036 and centres on what will be the first manned flight to the moon.  Opposition to it is represented by a sculptor who incites a popular uprising against this exemplar of inexorable technological advance.  By now, people live in underground cities and the common cold and indigestion are things of the past.  It’s not clear how far medical science has progressed in finding cures for serious diseases but the controversy around the moon shot doesn’t include voices arguing for a concentration on scientific research closer to home.   With a Luddite mob approaching to destroy the ‘space gun’ that’s to be used to propel the craft for the lunar expedition, Oswald Cabal, the head of the governing council, launches the flight immediately then speaks the film’s peroration.

An aged science fiction film like Things to Come offers the chance for a modern audience to assess the accuracy of (many of) its predictions, or the temptation anyway – one that I couldn’t resist.  This is what makes the opening sequence especially gripping.  Warning martial music (Arthur Bliss wrote the film’s score) is fused with the singing of Christmas carols and the effect is horrifying.  You can’t help but think of audiences who watched Things to Come on its release in 1936 and who really were confronted with war even sooner than Wells forecasts.  Shots of enemy planes approaching what appear to be the white cliffs of Dover and more than one sequence involving the use of gas masks are especially resonant.  The idea that the imminent international conflict didn’t end for decades is interesting in view of the Cold War and fears of nuclear apocalypse that followed 1945.  It’s an irony, however, not only that the narrative mid-point is 1970 (the year after Apollo 11) but that H G Wells, with his particular interest in space travel, should have seen missions to the moon as such a temporally remote possibility.  As for 2036, the unqualified endorsement of ‘progress’ during the intervening decades is itself rather startling in 2014.  Part of you expects the proud intention of Wings Over the World to exploit the planet’s natural resources for the betterment of human life to be modified by consequent environmental damage.  (The sinister implication of the name Cabal makes it all the more surprising that confidence in technology doesn’t turn out to be misplaced or hubristic.)

The film features a lot of ropy acting in smaller parts and, in the main roles, breathtaking miscasting.  Ralph Richardson is the Boss, a barbarous and charismatic tyrant who we’re told (by a woman) drives women mad with desire.   It would be amusing to think that the conspicuously unglamorous Ralph Richardson was cast with Adolf Hitler’s personal charmlessness in mind but, since Richardson exudes humorous eccentricity (and really struggles here to do inhumane), this seems an unlikely explanation.  Raymond Massey appears as three generations of the Cabal family:  in 1940, he’s a successful businessman worried about the onset of war; in 1970, he’s the Wings Over the World emissary who first lands in Everytown; in 2036, he’s Oswald.  Unsmiling and ponderous, Massey is an unappealing spokesman for the reign of reason: his calm fanaticism is more worrying than the wrong-headed or megalomaniac forces of retrogression that Cabal overcomes.  (Though he’s less irritating than some of today’s celebrity scientists – Professor Brian Cox, say, burbling and grinning about how amazing the universe is, like a brainbox twin of the Paul Whitehouse ‘brilliant!’ character in The Fast Show.)  Cedric Hardwicke is amusingly impassioned as the spoilsport aesthete Theotocopulos, although, with one hand clamped to his hip as he inveighs against the rush of progress, he’s decidedly an ac-tor rather than a sculptor.  The only human characterisation is from Edward Chapman as the two incarnations of Passworthy – complacently dismissive (but perhaps in desperation) of the prospect of war in 1940, fearful of his son’s involvement in the moon shot a century later.

The film was produced by Alexander Korda.  The main designer credit went to his brother, Vincent, but the director, William Cameron Menzies, is better known as a production designer and Things to Come is as remarkable for the way it looks as for the events it portends.  Pauline Kael described the film’s ‘posh, modernistic’ design as ‘amusingly dated … ([it] suggests the 20s …)’ but Christopher Frayling thinks it ‘a landmark in cinematic design’.   I don’t know anywhere near enough about sci-fi to be able to cite examples but the look of the future in this film certainly seems to predict accurately the sets for plenty of subsequent cinematic visions of other worlds and times.   It’s a pity that Things to Come – which even I found in several respects fascinating – also shares with successors in the genre a surfeit of tedious spectacular warfare (in the 1970 section anyway).   The cinematographer was Georges Périnal.  The special effects team was headed by Ned Mann.

21 October 2014

Author: Old Yorker