H. G. Wells: Things to Come (1936)
100 Best Science Fiction Films, Slant Magazine List
#61, H. G. Wells: Things to
Come (1936)
“If Mr. Wells is right,
we are in for an interesting century.”
-- Franks S. Nugent,
reviewing the film right after its release.
1. H.G. Wells wasn’t a
Fascist, just a grumpy old man.
Back in 2008 prominent Conservative Writer and Editor Jonah Goldberg scored a New York Times Bestseller with his extended rant, "Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton," which has also appeared under the titles, “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” and finally "Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods."
I have not, and will not, read this
book. There are a number of reasons for this, one of which has baring on this
essay.
The title was taken from
a 1932 speech given by English SF pioneer H. G. Wells. In an interview Goldberg
referred to Wells longing to "assist in a kind of phoenix rebirth" of Liberalism as an "enlightened Nazism." In another interview Goldberg
stated, "The truth is that ‘Liberal Fascism’ was originally a working
title I came up with independently for the proposal. But the idea was always
that we might change it for the actual book since it is such a bloody shirt.
But then I read up on Wells and his call for 'Liberal Fascism,' and I was like,
'What the hell, this is more apt than I realized.'”
There are a number of
problems here, first and foremost is that Goldberg never read a transcript of
Wells’ speech, only an analysis of it by another author. I’m pretty
familiar with Wells’ work and life, and even though there may have been a
thread to follow here (Wells was always ambivalent about Democracy, especially
the USA version), Goldberg’s cherry-picking of phrases without context or complete ideas is mightily offensive.
Wells was a fervent
anti-Fascist, so much so that Adolf Hitler singled him out for arrest and in his never-executed plans to invade England. Wells was also
anti-Communist; true, he was a prominent Socialist, and late in life a pretty
strident Ideolog, but he drew a strong distinction between the two Left-wing Ideologies. Most of what he said or did in his life contradicted the explicit
claim Goldberg's book’s title put forward. This spiteful ignorance should surprise no
one, as the book also notoriously argued that there was little difference
between Hillary Clinton and Benito Mussolini.
That being said, by 1932
Wells was an embittered man. He saw Europe destroy itself in WWI (1914 – 1918),
and soon after spiral into the economic collapse of the Great Depression (in
the USA the dates were 1929 – 1933, they vary elsewhere). As often happens, loss of faith makes a man desperate. Around 1928, he lost faith in the Common Man’s ability to make rational decisions. He
longed for the emergence of something akin to the ideas of (a near-opposite political
thinker) Alexander Hamilton when he pined for a “Natural Aristocracy,” more
enlightened than the hereditary ones of the past, a true Meritocracy that would
view leadership as a Professional Service rather than an Entitlement. More
simply put, Wells was sick of the mob mentality that had nearly destroyed
civilization once and by the time of this movie, was gearing up to do it again.
When Wells gave the
speech, Mussolini had already taken power in Italy by force ten years earlier
and was persecuting Socialists like Wells. Only the year before, not-yet-fully
Fascist Japan invaded and occupied northern China, which led directly to that
Japan’s withdrawing from the League of Nations. The same year as the speech, Japanese
Fascists assassinated there their Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, securing
that specific breed of Dictatorship there. The coming rise of clownish Adolf Hitler
was probably unimaginable to Wells, but Hitler’s Nazis were undeniably gaining
popularity in Germany and similar Fascist Parties were on the rise nearly
everywhere else, including Wells’ own England.
The next year, 1933,
Wells published “The Shape of Things to Come” which became the basis of this
film. That was the same year that Hitler was stunningly handed German leadership despite decisively losing the Election, and Hitler’s sudden importance
is reflected in Wells’ book.
By 1935, Wells had
completed his version of the screenplay and this film was entering production.
That same year saw European Fascism’s first important military adventure, Mussolini’s
invasion of Ethiopia.
The film was released in
1936, which was the same year England started its rearmament, but Germany was
far ahead of England and already intervening in the Spanish Civil War. By then,
any person with any awareness knew a larger War was inevitable but few could
imagine how bad it was going to get. In the film’s opening scenes there are Characters who were dismissive of the threat of another World War and the naivete of that
dialogue was indicative of how quickly the World situation was deteriorating -- Nothing that took as long to write, shoot, edit and release as this
film could possibly keep up with a public sentiment that was in such a state of
flux.
In the movie, WWII
begins on Christmas Eve 1940, but that was too optimistic. In reality, it had
already begun, as evidenced by China, Ethiopia, Spain, and a few other places.
True, the official start would not be until Germany’s Invasion of Poland on
September 1, 1939, but even that was more than a year ahead of Wells’
prediction.
Wells was nearly
seventy years old when the film was released and would live to see the horror
he predicted realized. He would survive the war, barely, it ended in 1945 and
he succumbed in 1946. In the film, WWII would drag on to decades, casting
humanity into a New Dark Age, so Wells at least lived long enough to maybe be
reassured that didn’t happen (or not, during the last year of his life he wrote ""Man has reached the limit of his possibilities"). The film’s story, a multi-generational saga,
would then move on to one of cinema’s first representations of a post-Apocalyptic
world, and then go farther still, to a bold Utopia in the unthinkably distant year
of 2036.
This was one of the most
ambitious movies ever made, and the very most expensive made in England
up-to-that-point. Though some of it hasn’t aged well, much of it still
mesmerizes, quite an achievement given that it was a FX-heavy production that
is now close to one-hundred-years-old.
Wells was a gifted
novelist, nominated for the Nobel Prize four times, and his political writings
influenced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Though now only
remembered for his SF, that was only a small percentage of his more than one-hundred books in multiple Genres. His non-SF is now forgotten, but at least
one non-SF novel, “Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul” (1905), was still notable enough to
become a stage Musical and then a film a generation after his death (these
adaptations were under the title “Half a Sixpence,” stage play 1963 and movie
1967).
As for his SF, his first
seven novels, starting with “The Time Machine” (1895), proved not only boldly
imaginative, creating and/or perfecting most of the Genre Tropes that we still
rely on today, but truly memorable because of their convincingly humanistic approach
to literally impossible situations.
But as time went on, and
Wells wrote more non-fiction than fiction, and the later fiction proved
inferior. As the quality of his fiction declined, Wells became dismissive of
his earliest, and best, novels, viewing them as childish, under-ambitious,
entertainments. A former fan of his, novelist G. K. Chesterton, diagnosed what
happened this way, "Mr. Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his
birthright for a pot of message."
“The Shape of Things to
Come” probably should be put among his lesser fictions in that it barely
qualified as fiction at all, it was of that strange breed that I can only call
a “Speculative Essay.” By the time Wells wrote it, he already had a reputation
as a significant Popular Historian, so he set out to write a Future-History as
if it were an actual history book. In his two earlier best-sellers, “The
Outline of History” (1920) and “A Short History of the World” (1922), he
expounded on his faith in the (mostly) linear and vertical progress of man,
from Childish Ignorance to the Maturity of Reason, Tolerance, and the Scientific Spirit. The catastrophe of WWI, and his conviction that WWII was on its way, threatened that faith, making a Future-History all the more urgent,
calling for a World Government as our only hope, and expressing a notable
intolerance to those who disagreed with his program.
In its introduction,
Wells insisted he was working from notes written down by eminent diplomat, Dr
Philip Raven, who had been receiving dream messages from the Future-year of
2106. In addition to new speculations, the book included material Wells had first
explored in the fiction “The War in the Air” (1907) and the non-fiction “The
Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind” (1931).
As a pseudo-History book, it
had no Characters per se, so adapting it to a drama without losing the force of
its intellectual argument was going to be a challenge. Also, Wells saw the
need to revise his predictions already, because in the book he described both
Hitler’s and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s economic programs failing and the Great
Depression going on for another sixty-years; the failure of economic recovery
was intertwined with the eruption of WWII, so even though that’s it didn't happen the way Wells predicted, he wasn't wholly off-target either: Hitler’s rise
was the consequence of the Great Depression, his radical re-Militarization was
part-an-particle of his economic recovery plan, and his policy of Conquest was
driven in part by his need to steal other’s resources to sustain his economic
policies. Wells did correctly predict that a Border Dispute between Germany and
Poland would be what set the Whole World on Fire.
The film proved more anti-Fascist than the novel, because though the novel named Hitler as a
Villain, Wells continued to underestimate him, not imagining he’d be a
successful Conqueror nor envisioning the Holocaust against the Jews. Wells held
up Mussolini up as a more formidable foe of Civilization (well, at the time, most people did), but even Mussolini proved
small as more and more pages went by.
In the film version,
though no Nation States or Political-isms are named, but its Villain was
undeniably Fascism, and the film made that a greater threat than the book’s
other targets, namely organized Religion, Capitalism, and Communism. These
revisions demonstrate how amazingly fast the changes were in the Real World in so very
few years.
2. This book could’ve
never been a movie, yet here it is.
Wells was among the world's most respected authors by the time this film was made and saw more film adaptations of his works during his lifetime than virtually any other contemporary at least 23). These reached back to the earliest days of cinema ("Trip to the Moon" (1901)) and were often extremely loose adaptations and often uncredited ("Trip to the ..." cribbed from both Wells' work and that of Jules Verne). Several are considered landmark classics ("Trip to the ..." again, it is generally considered the first SF film ever made) but Wells had a reputation of disliking even the best of them (I do not know what his opinion of "Trip to the ..." but his complaints about the masterful "The Invisible Man" (1933) are famous, and I can imagine he was in a total rage when it's two inferior sequels came out (1942 & 1944)).
As indicated by his name
being in the film’s title, Wells had contractually guaranteed himself unheard
of control in the evolving film project. There are stories that he wanted every
else’s name removed from the credits, listing them only in a booklet that was
to be handed out at the screenings, and many Writers argued that Wells was bossy
and dictatorial to the filmmakers. Personally, I find it hard to believe that
was possible when his collaborators where such towering figures.
Producer Alexander Korda
not only secured extraordinary resources to create this film but had built major
film studios from scratch not once, but three times, so not a guy you could
push around. My leaning towards Wells being more cooperative seems supported
by his own acknowledging that “a new story had been invented” to make the book
into a movie and admitting that the final film not being he imagined. On top of that,
this wasn’t his last collaboration with Korda, so Wells couldn’t have been that
impossible to deal with.
Wells wrote his own
Screenplay, but that had to be significantly revised by Lajos Biro, who
received no credit. Cleary, even Biro struggled to translate arguments into Characterization, but his commitment to conveying Wells’ vision can’t be
questioned. In the end, the film over-relied on the Cast to humanize the
rhetoric (something that wasn’t necessary in adaptations of Wells’ earlier
novels) and the lead, Raymond Massey, publicly complained about how un-natural
the words that were put in his mouth were.
These failures of the
film are notorious, but its triumphs are equally famous. Korda imported
Director William Cameron Menzies from Hollywood because Menzies was seen as the
only man who could construct a film this big. Before becoming a Director,
Menzies was a landmark Production Designer and was, in fact, the inventor of
that job title. Those skills are on full display here and Menzies built around
himself an extraordinary team.
Ned Mann is primarily
given credit for the FX, but the overlapping disciplines of Production
Management, Art Department, and FX list fifteen Team Leaders, an amazing number
for a film from that era. As many of the best effects were the product of
camera tricks so Cinematographer Georges Périnal also belongs on that same list,
in addition to the normal responsibilities of his job title.
3. Act one (of three)
Menzies’ unique skills
were best on display in three montage sequences introducing each of the film’s
three acts. They reflected the influence of German and Russian cinema as well
as his own background in silent film, when that style of storytelling was most
hailed. They were made all the more alive with the new cinema gift of sound and
music.
The powerful score was
provided by Arthur Bliss, a prominent Composer doing his first film work. Bliss
started out as a Modernist, experimenting with discordant and atonal themes,
but became progressively more Romantic, and popular, as time went on. In this
film we can hear both and he displayed a keen instinct for
integrating his orchestra with the image and other elements of the soundtrack which was especially impressive in such an early talkie. What Bliss achieved
made him an early version of John Williams, the music became so popular it
migrated into the concert hall and this film score holds the distinction of being the first ever to be issued on an LP record.
The film opens with the
first of the montages, introducing us to the city named “Everytown” (the name
was perhaps a warning to the audience of how rhetoric-heavy the film would be).
There’s a marvelous cacophony of Christmas carols and more threatening music,
cutting back and forth between happy shoppers and newspaper headlines
threatening war.
We then move to a domestic scene with happy but concerned parents and grandparents looking lovingly on the children and fretting about the future. We are introduced to Actor Massey, who will be our Hero throughout for the film but in more than one role. Also present was Actor Edward Chapman, who will be Massey’s philosophical opponent for the rest of the film, but not a Villain so much as a Conservative knucklehead. Here, Massey’s John Cabal worries about the coming War and how it will interrupt the progress of Science that should be ensuring benefits for the children. Chapman’s Pippa Passworthy doesn’t really believe War is possible (a still believable stance in 1935, not so much in 1936), but even if it comes, War has always been a stimulant for progress, not its enemy.
John says, “If we do not end war, war will end us.” Almost immediately, all hell breaks loose.
Everytown was a truly
gargantuan set (the Set Designer was Producer Korda’s brother, Vincent), and
yes, other studios had similarly massive sets for their grandest Productions,
but the great expense was generally mitigated by planning ahead to reuse them
in later films (a notable example of this would be “Sunrise” (1927)). Here
though, it was created to be destroyed right before our eyes, with Anti-Aircraft cannons blasting, people running in terror, getting crushed by
falling buildings, accumulating rubble making the roads impassable, and even a
dead child among the ruins, which was pretty raw stuff for 1936.
The Wells’ book that was
most famous for its accuracy of forecast was the fore-mentioned, “The War in
the Air,” which predated the Military use of Aircraft in WWI yet was still
remarkable in how it anticipated how much worse it would be in WWII. We see
that vividly unfold here, the first motion picture that ever attempt such a thing,
and these scenes now look like a realistic WWII movie, not SF. Wells correctly
forecast that the emerging philosophy of “Total War,” combined with Airpower,
would make Civilian population centers targets like never before. When “War in
the Air” was reissued in 1941, Wells stated, "I told you so. You damned
fools."
Other details he got
wrong, like an extensive use of Poison Gas. Though Poison Gas had already been
outlawed by the Geneva Protocols (1925) and had proved more a Terror Weapon
than an effective Strategic one, Wells assumed that when Civilians were
deliberately targeted those rules would go out the window. That didn’t
happen in the Real-World WWII, but Wells wasn’t completely wrong here either; Hitler was guilty of some Battlefield use of Poison Gas, and he extensively used
it to murder Civilian Prisoners in Concentration Camps. But Poison Gas would never become
wide-spread again -- well, except for Saddam Hussain, and Bashar al-Assad, and ...
4. Act two (of three)
The war then drags on
for decades and is summarized in another excellent montage. We see the dates
roll by the land reduced to ruin, Airplanes and Armored Tanks incrementally
disappearing from the Battlefield, and uniforms are replaced by patch-work
rags. In a nice touch, a fluttering scrap of a newspaper, dated 1966, fills the
screen; the typesetting has deteriorated with the loss of industrial technology.
One of the things the paper informs us is that Bioweapons have entered into
the fray, another thing outlawed by the Geneva Protocols, and though not used
during the Real-World WWII, Germany, Japan, Canada, the USA, and maybe others,
experimented with them.
The next act takes use
through the years 1966 to 1970. We return to the massive set of Everytown, now
a blasted ruin. All Scientific research, Invention, and Industrial Activity
have ceased. Agriculture is reduced to Stone Age methods. Petty Warlords rule
over Feudal City-States. Hunger and disease rule as much as the Warlords, and
one specific plague, the “Wandering Sickness” especially terrorizes, its
dangerously infectious victims anticipating the Zombies from George Romero’s
“Night of the Living Dead” (1968).
We’re introduced to an
impressive Villain, Rudolf, who insists that everyone call him “Boss.” He’s
played by Sir Ralph Richardson and is clearly modeled on Mussolini.
"Nothing remains to be done but a conclusive bombing of the hills. Then,
for a time, we shall have a rich and rewarding peace, the peace of the strong
man armed who keepeth his house."
But not everyone in the
world moved backwards. During the Hellish decades of War, the world’s
Intellectual Elite, the Scientists, Doers and Makers, retreated to a secret
location in Basra, Iraq. This location probably was chosen by Wells because it is not
far from where human civilization was born and the Code of Hammurabi was
written (1754 BCE). Another aspect of the Real-Place which Wells may well have been aware of, was that was an ancient and essential Port in its own
right (founded in 636 CE), but because of its shallow waters, it had
little 20th c. Military value, so believably over-looked during the Air-War. There
the Elites waited out the evitable fall of Civilization. Now, they were greatly
technologically advanced while all others wallow in self-inflicted ruin
brought about by the Evils of Fascism, and the Elites are ready to travel forth to spread the
Gospel of Peace, Reason, and future Prosperity.
After the horror of the Air-War in the beginning of the film, the purpose of that technology is
surprisingly reversed. For Wells, terror of this new technology was more than
matched by his enthusiasm for it, and this film will prove the most powerful
evocation of the now-forgotten SF theme “Pax Aeronautica,” the idea that peace
could be imposed and maintained by an Air-Power-based Elite. Wells was
borrowing from Rudyard Kipling's “Aerial Board of Control” stories (first one
published in 1905), wherein an international Air-Traffic Control organization,
created to deliver mail, becomes so powerful that it curbs the power of Nation
States, protects us from stupid Wars, and evolves into a de-facto World Government.
In a similar vein, “L.P.M.: The End of the Great War” by John Stewart Barney
(1915), showed a shocking technological optimism given that it was published
during WWI. Barney’s story introduced a phrase that has baring here, an
"Aristocracy of Intelligence," who will make up the new World Rulers.
On May Day, 1970 (an
obviously symbolic date) an Airplane lands just outside the ruins of Everytown.
Out if it steps John Cabal, both older and wiser. In his sleek, black, uniform
and improbably massive helmet, he’s an impressive sight indeed. As much as
Massey complained about the script later, he provided enriching purposefulness
and stoic dignity to the role and had the skill to make film’s speechifying
oratory sound almost natural coming out of his mouth. He promises the Boss and
the impoverished citizens of Everytown that all their wishes will come true if
they submit to the Benevolent Despotism of his organization, “Wings Over the
World.”
The Boss throws him in
jail.
As good as Massey and
Chapman are in this film, Richardson’s performance, as well as Margaretta Scott
as the Boss’ mistress, are the most full-blooded. Part of this, of course, is
that Villains are always more fun, but there was also a lesson here that Wells
and/or Biro should've taken to heart: Dictators speak in pomposities, real men do
not. Artificial gravitas is wholly realistic coming out of the mouth of
self-important thug like the Boss, but when John sounds the same way, we
question his moral integrity. That problem will come into focus during Massey’s
single best scene, a debate between the Boss and John over the realities of
Fascism vs the ideals of Socialism, and Massey allows his too-noble
speechmaker to display a little smug wit. John is our Hero, but he would’ve
been a terrific Villain.
The Boss continues his
evil ways and Wings Over the World swoops in and overthrows him by force. Just
like how the Airplanes that destroyed the World now came to save it, the Gas Weapons that slaughtered so many are now used to bring peace, only this time it
isn’t Poison, but a sleeping gas with an (almost) zero fatality rate. The
armies of Wings Over the World move into Everytown without firing a shot,
providing compassionate aide to the populace as they woke up.
Would this even work?
Well, maybe, at least up
to a point. Nothing like this non-lethal Weapon exists even now, and even
before this film, WWI demonstrated that Gas was of only limited value on the Battlefield. But assuming it could be invented, it might prove to be a kinder,
gentler, form of Tear Gas for urban Crowd Control, which is basically how the
film used it.
In this scene, either
one of the four Costume Designers (John Armstrong, René Hubert, Cathleen Mann,
and Sam Williams (the last being uncredited)) or Wells himself (who insisted on
being involved in the costume design like he did everything else), made a
tactical error that can only be seen in retrospect. After John argued in favor
of his Benevolent Despotism, the army of Wings Over the World arrive dressed in
all-black uniforms and patent leather jackboots. As Hitler was in power only
three years at that point, the film failed to anticipate how the Nazis’
exceptional fashion sense would affect future generations associations of Good
vs Evil.
5. What is “Liberal Fascism”?
Now I have to return to
Goldberg. As a Conservative, he, inevitably and frequently, discusses the
infamous Conservative Cult-leader Ayn Rand. Goldberg is no fan of her reed of Libertarianism and admits he never made it through any of her books, but he
does offer her some cautious praise from time-to-time.
I think he would’ve
found one of Rand’s novels, “Atlas Shrugged” (1957), instructive, as that book's entire
plot seems lifted from the book or film versions of “Things to Come.” In "Atlas Shrugged," Right-Wing
Messiah John Gault convinces the world’s Capitalist Elite, the Robber Barons,
Doers and Makers, to retreat to a secret location and wait out the evitable
fall of Civilization. Once they become Technologically advanced enough, while
all others wallow in self-inflicted ruin brought about by the evils of
Collectivism, they plan to travel forth and spread their Gospel of the Virtue
of Selfishness and future Prosperity.
Rand’s book is 600 pages
longer than Wells’, even more ponderous and speechifying, yet ends just at the moment of the fall of Civilization, never attempting to describe the hard work of
rebuilding it. Never-the-less, it has been far more popular than Wells’ Future
History ever since its publication.
This plot over-lap is
damning to Goldberg’s "Liberal Fascism" rant, because it speaks not of a corrupt Ideology, but
the corruption of the Ideolog within any Ideology. Sin is Universal and rarely wears any -ism pins. Our biggest ideas and ideals were created to elevate us
above our inevitable sins. True, some ideologies, like Fascism and Communism, inevitably lower
us deeper, but most other ideologies hold at least a little bit more promise
for elevation because they embrace co-operation with other Ideologies, even
while they clash. Put it this way, do you honestly believe that someone
self-identifying as a Republican is less likely to cheat on his/her spouse than
a Democrat? If so, you think like Goldberg.
So, what was Wells’
“Liberal Fascism” all about?
Well, Philip Coupland,
who wrote the paper, "H.G. Wells' 'Liberal Fascism'," which Goldberg
used as the source, or at least justification, for the title of the
above-complained about book, criticized Goldberg’s use of the term:
“Wells did not label his
'entire ... philosophy' liberal fascism, not in fact and not by implication.
Liberal fascism was the name which he…gave to his theory of praxis, that is his
method of achieving his utopian goal, not the goal itself. ... Wells hoped for
activists who would use what he considered to be 'fascist' means (technocratic
authoritarianism and force) to achieve a liberal social end. In contrast, a
'liberal fascist' would pursue fascist ends but in a 'liberal' or at least more
'liberal' way.”
Since Authoritarianism
and Use-of-Force were built into the Wells’ idea, it still sounds a pretty
reactionary, but before we judge Wells too harshly, think a little more
broadly. In 1932 Wells recognized the hated Fascists were winning, and that
they were winning because their methods were more effective. Now consider the
rise and triumph of our beloved Democracy:
Democracy in the USA was
born of violent Revolution (1775 – 1783) and saved from a horde of
Slavery-obsessed Traitors by engaging in an even-more violent Civil War (1861 –
1865).
The first significant
wave of Democracy in Europe was mostly not a result of violent Revolution, but
might as well of been, as it was an experiment embraced as the continent
dragged itself out of the ruins of WWI.
That experiment was
failing as Wells gave his speech, wrote the book, and made the movie. As the
European Democracies mostly failed while and Fascism and Communism were both
on the rise because of their Use-of-Force.
Democracy’s second, and more secure, wave came as Europe dragged itself out of the ruins of WWII, the greatest Use-of-Force of all. There were places where modern Democracies had to be inflicted on populations that generally didn’t choose it, requiring a Benevolent Despot who, like John Cabal, arrived in an Airplane. That Benevolent Despot just happened to the USA under the Marshall Plan in Europe and Occupation of Japan. The man most responsible for the realization of this second wave was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during WWII, later President of the USA, and life-long Conservative, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Later, Eisenhower would speak admiringly of Socialist Wells’ ideals.
Important here, in the
context of Goldberg, is that in the USA, the modern Conservative movement was led by
Goldberg’s mentor William F. Buckley, Jr. and Buckley was Rebelling against
Eisenhower’s embrace of a few Progressive ideals at least as much as it was a
Rebellion against those more completely Liberal or Left.
Franks S. Nugent, who
reviewed this film when it first came out, got Wells better than Goldberg did,
“As a historian Mr. Wells is convinced that struggle is universal and
inescapable. His film, being a premature history of the next century, therefore
is a record of conflict; conflict between man and man, between idea and idea.”
6. Act three (of three)
and the seductions of Despotism.
Next comes the final, and
most impressive, montage, as the world rebuilds its Industrial Base, then
employs that to rebuild its cities, and a marvelous new Future is born.
The lines are,
initially, a little Art-Deco-ish, making the machines look at little “Flash
Gordon-ish” (comic book first published 1934 and first movie serial released
the same year as this film). We see conveyor belts, spinning bobbins, bubbling
vats and flashes of man-made lightning, all gloriously monumental. The laser
drills of the digging machines big today’s jumbo jets hollowing out the mountains so a new habitat could be created underground and the land
above becomes green and pleasant again. Wrote Geoffrey O’Brien, it was, “an
industrial short elevated to a lyric poem.”
The two key FX artists
in this sequence were Wells’ own son, Frank, and Hungarian-born László
Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy was a painter, photographer, and cinema innovator who
created a lot of FX and animations for this film, but except for this scene,
his work was mostly unused. Moholy-Nagy most productive years were while he
lived in Germany and associated with the Bauhaus and Constructivist schools of
Modernism, and the film would embrace that in the broadest sense but leaned
towards a different school (I’ll get to that later). When Hitler came to power,
Moholy-Nagy was cast out of Germany and his work officially labeled
“Degenerate Art.”
A striking aspect of
this film is how its look kept changing. To a degree this is obvious, things
will look different as you move from a prosperous contemporary to a post-Apocalyptic
ruin, then on to Future-Tech, but the changes went
deeper than that. When Everytown is reborn underground, the visual style is
transformed once again, and the Art Deco lines get largely replaced by
something even cleaner and sleeker.
Art Deco was the
then-most recognized vision of the future, reflected in SF films like
“Metropolis” (1927) and realized in the Real-Word in skyscrapers like the Chrysler and Empire State buildings (both 1930). But Wells
hated the movie “Metropolis,” which envisioned Class-Conflict worsening, not
getting better, with time. He pressured all the Design departments to make
“Things to Come” look different from it in every possible way.
The underground Utopia
of the re-born Everytown embraced the aesthetics of Modernism, favoring the
German Expressionist version of it over the competing Bauhaus and
Constructivist schools. Though there were real-world examples of Modernism to draw from, wasn’t yet as familiar to the public as Art Deco, so it had a clear
advantage in trying to look like Tomorrow. The film pushed its visual ideas
pretty far, presenting believable architecture that was beyond the reach of the
construction technologies of its day.
American Architect John
C. Portman Jr. was just twelve years old when this film came out. Though I
can’t confirm it, I’m certain that watching this film as a child was a
formative experience for him. Later in life, he was a leading figure in the
Neo-Futurism movement (yet another version of Modernism) and he became most noted for his massive,
fully enclosed, atriums. His famous New York Marriott Marquis (1985) bares a
remarkable likeness to the Everytown of this film’s final act.
The Cinematography
changed as well. Earlier scenes were high contrast and rich in dark shadows,
not only the sinister ruin of Everytown, as you’d except, but even the happy
world of Christmas Eve 1940, before the bombs fell. In the re-built Everytown,
all shadows have been purged, there is a near obsessive embrace of the white in
the walls, furniture, and clothing that created an extreme contrast to
everything that came before it.
Since we’ve finally made
it to Utopia, we must ask, just how much Despotism did Wells really want? Well,
the movie seems a little uncertain on that count.
The good news is that
though the World Government emerged through Use-of-Force, by 2036, they don’t
seem oppressive. The State is not heavily Militarized, there’s an immersive Mass-Media environment that is not State-controlled, and free expression is
encouraged. It might have even evolved into a Democracy, but that’s never
actually said.
Ah, but there’s a
problem. All the good-sounding stuff in previous paragraph are demonstrated by things going wrong. Because the Police are not Militarized, they're unprepared
for a massive riot, and that riot was triggered by a reactionary
anti-Government Pundit who had unfettered access to the Public Airwaves. So
individual Liberty is protected in this Utopia, but maybe that wasn’t the best
strategy for this Utopia.
It should be said that
the Utopia in the book was far heavier-handed than that in the movie. Wings
Over the World is more bluntly called the “Dictatorship of the Air,” who were a
self-appointed Elite, which contradicted Wells’ claim that it was also a Classless Society. All organized Religion and Capitalist activity are
explicitly outlawed, and the “Modern State,” which emerged around 1960 in the book,
ruthlessly enforced a Monopoly on Education that embraced rigorous a Social Conditioning that placed highly restrictive sexual and emotional controls on
Citizens. “We have learnt how to catch and domesticate the ego at an early
stage and train it for purposes greater than itself.” Wells does have this
eventually over-thrown and replaced by a kinder, gentler, State-less society, but that doesn’t
change his admiration of it.
Our new Villain is Theotocopulos, played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke and the Character's name is borrowed from Doménikos Theotokópoulos, the given name of famous Painter a hot head, El Greco). Theotocopulos first appears in the only black coat to be found in 2036, his visage is modeled after Auguste Rodin’s “Monument to Balzac” (1897) which is appropriate because he’s a Sculptor waging war against Progress. He is especially resentful of Everytown’s struggling Space Program. There’s already been tragically failed moon-landings, and the Government is gearing-up to try once again. Theotocopulos calls for an end to the "barbarous mechanical progress…The object in life is happy living. Progress is not living; it should be only the preparation for living."
Theotocopulos speaks to
the masses via a TV screen as large as the side of a skyscraper, I think this
was the first time that particular image was executed in a movie. Much later,
Ridley Scott would be praised for a very similar image in his SF film, “Blade
Runner” (1982); but by the time that film’s sequel came out, “Blade Runner 2049”
(2017), those screens were pretty common in the Real-World, so the image had to
be re-thought if the second film was going to remain Future-y.
Theotocopulos’ arguments
were more sophisticated, but less pragmatic and more self-contradictory, than
those of the earlier Villain, the Boss. True, Theotocopulos opposed the Space
Program because it uses human volunteers as experimental subjects (just like
our NASA does) but he also weirdly pined for good old days of shorter life expectancy. He’s a Luddite, but the real-world Luddites, a Radical,
borderline Terrorist, movement that became prominent in 1811 but was crushed by
the iron fist of the English Government in a string of Show Trials and Executions in 1813, were concerned about job security and food, so they
probably wouldn’t have listened to this guy. Never-the-less, the bored and
comfortable citizens of Everytown do. By the thousands, maybe tens of
thousands, they attacked the Space Program in an orgy of vandalism.
Also, Wells made the Boss a
Warlord, so he made sense, but why is Theotocopulos an Artist?
Well, before WWI, Wells
was a member of the Fabian Society, a radical Socialist Reform group that believed in
incrementalistic Political Reform over violent Revolution. Today, both their
accomplishments and scandals are largely forgotten and when they are spoken
of, it is mostly in terms of the large number of Writers and Artists attracted
to the group, notably George Bernard Shaw.
When the Fabians
succeeded in recruiting Wells in 1903 he was an already an Internationally renowned visionary
who got invited to dinner with many World Leaders, so they must’ve been considered
a real coup. Actually, they should’ve known he’d make trouble, as he’d been
arguing with several of its founders for decades before joining. By
1906 he was publicly condemning them as dilettantes and do-nothings in the
tract, “The Faults of the Fabian.”
Add to that, these Radical Socialists
were also Conservatively-minded in many ways and fretted endlessly over Wells
reputation for sexual promiscuity. In 1908, when the Fabians refused to
advocate for Wells’ proposal to create a public welfare fund for mothers, he
resigned. In 1910 he viciously mocked them in the novel, “The New Machiavelli,”
which some critics mark as an artistic turning point for Wells, the beginning
of his retreat from dramatic storytelling and seeing the novel as only a
platform for Ideological argument.
So why did Artist Wells, through Theotocopulos, attack the Arts? Maybe because some Artists were mean to him.
Actors Massey and
Chapman return as the descendants of their earlier characters, Oswald Cabal and
Raymond Passworthy. Oswald is still looking to the future and Raymond is
still annoying. This time, Raymond is not being dismissive of War, but
fretting over the fact that both their children are to be the new Astronauts.
Because of social
unrest, the launch has to be done ahead of schedule, making the already
dangerous mission even more so. The two men’s reaction to the risk to their
children show Wells and/or Biro going completely off-the-rails. Raymond is
so sympathetic that for the first time he sounds reasonable, while Oswald seems
unloving, inhumane, and increasingly dislikable. Wrote Geoffrey O’Brian, “From
first to last, the film expresses strongly held convictions in a tone that is
almost indifferent to the audience’s reaction. It hardly seeks to persuade: it
displays and declares.”
But the launch is a
success, and Oswald does give a truly great speech in the final scene. Richard
Scheib wrote that it “is one of the most visionary speeches in all of
science-fiction cinema.”:
Raymond: “Oh, God, is
there never to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?”
Oswald: “Rest enough for
the individual man. Too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for Mankind,
no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this
little planet and its winds and ways. And then 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.”
Raymond: “But we're
such little creatures. Poor humanity's so fragile, so weak. Little... little
animals.”
Oswald: “Little animals.
And if we're no more than animals, then we must snatch each little scrap of
happiness, and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other
animals do or have done. It is this, or that - all the Universe or nothingness!
Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?”
7. About the Science in
Science Fiction.
The launch of the
Astronauts was via a Space Gun, which was an odd choice in 1936, and worth a
moment’s consideration.
SF existed before it
became a genre, and the genre existed before it was named in 1929 by Editor Hugo
Gernsback. The emerging Genre was already distinct and popular in the 1820s
because of the works of Mary Shelly and Edgar Alan Poe but much
later Wells who got credited as the Genre’s father, a title he shares with
Jules Verne, who started publishing works in this vein a full thirty-years
before Wells did.
Davis Suvin made a
convincing argument that the Genre was born on May Day 1871, so about a decade
after Verne and two decades before Wells, with the simultaneous publication of
Lord Lytton’s “The Coming Race” (which proved a favorite of Hitler’s), George
Chesney’s “The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer” (which
predicted WWI and even got some specifics right), and Samuel Butler handing in
his manuscript for “Erewhon” (it saw print the next year, and was a Utopia that
influenced Wells). Basically, Suvin argues that SF was really born the day
one could see that even the publishers understood that there was a market for
it.
Dreams of Space Travel
predate 1871, and became more important as Genre solidified, but there was a
problem. Authors who embraced this not-yet-named Genre were obligated to at
least pretend Scientific reasonableness. Galileo Galilei had given
us an infinite, but also very specific, Universe to explore in the 1600s, Sir
Isaac Newton screwed it all up before the end of that century with Laws of
Gravity that made it impossible for either lighter-than-air, or
heavier-than-air, aircrafts to fly to the Moon.
In the 1800s, Writers
struggled to find a way out of the gravity-well. Verne proposed a
reasonable-sounding solution, the Space Gun, in “From the Earth to the Moon: A
Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes” (1865), but alas, a human forced to
endure that kind of acceleration all at once would die as his/her internal
organs would liquify. Verne tried to address the problem by easing the rate of acceleration slightly by making his gun barrel 900 feet long and carefully rifled, but that still
wasn’t good enough.
Later, Wells found a
“solution” in the novel “First Men in the Moon” (1901). He “invented” an
imaginary element called “cavorite” which repelled the force of gravity. Verne
would mock Wells for his indulgence of pure Fantasy as if it were real Science.
The real solution was
Rocket Power, and that solid Science was broadly known among the educated
classes as early as 1915 when Robert Goddard patented the idea of a multi-stage
rocket. After that, even the fanciful newspaper comic-strip, “Flash Gordon,” was using rockets. Yet
here we are in 1936 and “Things to Come” is still using Verne’s Space Gun. Why?
Well, the Script’s
scientific explanation is gobblely-gook, trying to make the gun sound like
multi-stage Rocket. Wells and/or Biro was clearly pursuing symbolism. Air Power and Gas Weapons had already been converted from destructive to productive
tools, now even the Gun has.
8. Utopia sucks.
One must wonder,
comparing the book to movie, how much Wells mellowed his radicalism in three
years, or how much Korda exerted himself. Wells original screenplay would’ve a
bit more than two-hours running time. More than 20-minutes disappeared before
the first test release, and it is uncertain if the additional minutes
were even filmed or at all reflected Biro’s pre-production Script restructuring.
The film of those first
screenings was again deemed too long, and the 108-minutes was cut to 98. When
released in the USA, it was additionally cut to 96, and then again to 92.
Apparently the 96-minute version is the longest that still survives.
When the film first came
out, it was near-universally hailed. C. A. Lejeune proclaimed that there has,
“never been anything like ‘Things to Come’…No film, not even ‘Metropolis,’ has
even slightly resembled it.”
Critical response has
remained positive in the Generations since, but with increasing to address the dramatic failings and Philosophical inconsistences.
The triumph of the Production is never challenged, but among those still loving
it wholly, and those casting a colder eye, there are two clear camps:
Those who still love it focus
on the middle, post-Apocalyptic section, which is the longest of the three
acts, with the better Characterization and more complex storytelling.
Those more dismissive
focus on the Utopia, with massive sets (both full-sized and miniature) that
dwarf the Actors.
Wells’ first novel, “The Time Machine” was a Dystopia that had the degenerate race of Morlocks living in a Hellish underground city. Here, Wells moves Utopia underground.
Another of the most prominent novelists of the day was E.M. Forster, who was associated with, but I don’t think an actual member, of the Fabians. A few years before Wells penned “The Shape of Things to Come,” Forster published his only SF, which many consider one of the finest novellas ever written in any Genre, “The Machine Stops” (1928). It was a Dystopian fantasy about mankind retreating underground into a Future-Tech city that completely dehumanizes them and ultimately kills them all, a remarkable, and negative, anticipation of Wells' Utopia. Forster was explicit that it was an intended as an attack of Wells’ many Utopias. In Forster's work, the Earth's surface was a Waste Land while in Wells' Utopia it's a garden, but we never see any of Wells Protagonists go upstairs to enjoy it.
Another great novelist, Aldous Huxley (Wells had been a student of his father, T.H. Huxley), published his landmark Dystopian novel, “Brave New World” (1932) mere months before the book “The Shape of Things to Come” came out, and it is remarkable how much overlap there is between Huxley’s vision of Hell and Wells' vision of Heaven.
What the underground people got to enjoy was abundant artificial sunlight, air-conditioning, soaring bridges, gigantic television screens, and they appear to be disease- and poverty-free. But they didn’t have very good fashion sense, it was all short pants and peak-shouldered tunics. The Wings Over the World uniforms may have been crypto-Fascist, but they were far more fetching, 2036 was in desperate need of some "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" (TV series first aired 2003).
In every scene in the
Utopia, the governing elite look down from some elevated catwalk, balcony or
office, a contrast to the post-Apocalyptic section where, unless they were in
an airplane, the Heroes addressed all people at eye-level. John Cabal was even
comfortably seated, below eye-level, while debating the Boss.
One of the few original Critics who hated the film was Otis Ferguson, who complained that Utopia
looked like, “a pure-food restaurant.” But Ferguson was a notorious grump who
also hated “The Wizard of Oz” (1939). When WWII finally broke out officially,
Ferguson joined the War effort, not as a Military man, but as a Merchant
Marine. He died in 1943 when his ship was bombed in the Gulf of Salerno.
But only a little later, more Criticism emerged. The not-yet-famous Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, was even harsher, “The
heaven of Wells and Alexander Korda, like that of so many other eschatologists
and set designers, is not much different than their hell, though even less
charming … In 1936, the power of almost all tyrants arises from their control
of technology.”
Novelist George Orwell
who, like Wells, was a prominent Socialist and strong voice against both
Fascism and Communism, was already a Writer of some note before WWII. During
that War he wrote, “Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is
physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State
encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the airplanes, are all
there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.”
9. White is evil.
And time has not been
kind to the Utopia’s obsession with whiteness. Though white would be seen as
clean, modern, and Progressive for decades to come, examples of that would be
“The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) and “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), it
would eventually become a symbol of anti-life sterility and oppression, as seen
in “The Andromeda Strain” and “THX 1138” (both 1971). The latter is especially
telling, because its Dystopian future shares so many elements with Wells’
Utopia, and I suspect that Writer/Director George Lucas used this film, as well
as Foster’s “When the Machine ...” and Huxley’s “Brave New World,” as his
guides.
And there is another
problem with the white, basically that there were no Black people.
England nobly outlawed Slavery before the USA. Also, as an Island Nation dependent of ocean trade, by the time this film was made the center of a Global Empire on which the Sun Never Set, it was ethnically diverse, but steadfastly in denial of that fact, and therefore was even more dishonest about race than even the USA. Yes, the USA lied about Slavery and for three decades the two most profitable films ever made were D.W. Griffith’s KKK propaganda
movie “Birth of a Nation” (1915) and then “Gone with the Wind” (1939, Menzies was part of that film too) which was ripe with Slavery and KKK apologetics, but at
least we admitted it happened and though we generally demeaned Black people in our media, we did exist they existed. In older English films,
I see no evidence of their centuries of Slavery ever being there and no Black characters at all till the 1960s.
This failing has started to change. The popular TV series, “The Midsomer Murders” (first aired 1997) is set in a fictional district largely based on the town of Wallingford in Oxfordshire. The TV had no non-white characters even though the Real-World demographics of Wallingford suggested that forty-precent of the old biddies fussing in their gardens should’ve been. In 2011, the series' producer, Brian True-May, got into trouble when he was challenged on that and gave a rude response. The first South Asian people arrived Midsomer the next year (that was the fifteenth season of the show). True, one of them is immediately a murder suspect, and another suspiciously dead, but what else to you expect from a Crime show? One year later they had their first non-White Character as part of the regular Cast.
10. The road to
Perdition, for this film, and Science Fiction in general.
Part of this film’s
importance is that it marked the end of an era. Silent films and early talkies
had their fair share of big-budget, major release, SF, but this film would
prove to be the last, at least in the English-speaking world, for more than a
decade. This is often attributed to this filming failing in the box office, but
I suspect there was more to temporary death of SF cinema than that.
First off, “Things to
Come,” though a financial failure, it had a pretty big audience. It was voted
the ninth best British film of 1936 and the sixteenth most popular film at the
British box office in. This would’ve meant was a hit had it
been more modestly budgeted, but unfortunately, it was the most expensive film
its country ever produced. D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” (1916) which likely
influenced “Things to Come,” faced a similar fate -- the argument could be made
that it would’ve never mattered how popular it was, the available audience
could’ve never matched the expenditure.
Also, the industry of
cinema was different back then, movies stayed in theaters far longer, and the
line between first- and second-run features wasn’t as clear as it today (Todd
Browning’s “Dracula,” 1931, continued to re-appear in first-run theaters until
at least 1958). But several things interfered with “Things to Come” from building a sustained income-stream.
First and foremost, the nature of cinema quickly barreled-past it. Basically, “Things to Come” was erased by the
insanely large number of masterpieces that were released right on its heels. There
just wasn’t any other year in cinema that compared to 1939, the most outstanding
in terms of both quality of product and high attendance. Those great films
crowded out each other, so forget the one that was already three years old and
struggling. Also, color film, something that appeared on-and-off since even the
silent era, had finally triumphed, and “Things to Come” gave us the Future in
black-and-white. The world's most successful film from 1939-1945, "Gone with the ...” was incredibly vibrant in its color.
1939 was also the year Hollywood became less cowardly, allowing their most prestigious films to include controversial Political content (this was true of “Gone With the …” though its Politics are now much maligned). “Things to Come” couldn’t have been in Hollywood in 1936. Though film never named any combatants Nation State or any Political -ism, it was still explicitly anti-Fascist, and that explicitly risked access to the German market, then the world’s second most lucrative. In Hollywood at the time, the big studios were all kowtowing to Hitler. The first anti-Fascist film made in the USA was “Hitler’s Reign of Terror” (1934), but it abruptly disappeared after protests by the German government (it was not rediscovered until 2013). After that, the studios started bending to German censorship even in pre-production, and starting in 1936, they were even letting German officials, under the direction of Reich Minister of Propaganda Joesph Goebbels, censor our films before their release in even our own country, never mind Germany. MGM went as far as putting money into the German war effort to recover revenues being held maliciously in a form of escrow by the Nazi Government; as MGM was owned by Jews, this cowardliness was all the more disgusting. Basically, no anti-Nazi films were permitted to be made in the USA until that special year of 1939. “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” was the one to break the ban, so historically important even though it was a financial bomb.
Even so, this film that
was too brave to be made in the USA somehow pulled off a small miracle in that
it got distribution in censorship-obsessed Nazi Germany (I have no idea how).
But there proved to be a dark side to that achievement, because Hitler was
apparently so impressed with the scene where Everytown was bombed to smithereens,
he instructed Hermann Goering, the head of the German Air Force and founder of
Gestapo, to screen it to his subordinates.
So, after 1936, SF was
probably held back because it was so often Political, but then, starting in 1939,
when Political subjects boldly returned to this country’s studios, the crisis
was so immediate that films with Political themes to seemed to need be Historical, or exactly Contemporary, and Fantasy looked really silly.
It would take till 1950 for there to be another decently budgeted, prestige release, SF film in the
English-speaking world, “Destination Moon,” which sparked a new SF
craze, which has repeatedly mutated, but hasn’t really abated, in the decades
since.
In the dry years,
Universal Studios was where most of the very little SF action was happening. But
their SF had always been tied to their Monster Movies (example: “Frankenstein”
(1931)), so Gothic is style and backward- not forward-looking. Worse, the
Universal Monsters became increasingly embarrassing after 1941. Universal did
make the finest SF serials, and those were often forward-looking and popular, (“Flash Gordon” was the studio’s second-biggest money maker in 1936 and spawned two
sequels), but still, serials were kiddie-fare. The studio bosses seemed unable
to conceive that there might be more adult audience for dreams of the Future.
More things stalked this
film: Despite its Production company, London Films, remaining a major player in
World cinema for at least a decade to come, someone goofed at some point and allowed this
film’s copywrite to expire, so after a certain point, no matter how popular
“Things to Come” was, none of its makers could make a penny off of it. And it
was popular, I grew up in the 1970s and I must have watched ten times on TV.
11. Why hasn’t there
been another film like it?
Between 1902, which gave
us the first SF ever made, “A Trip to the Moon” (which borrowed from both Wells
and Verne) and the landmark year of 1968 which gave us, “2001: A Space
Odyssey,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Night of the Living Dead,” and a bunch of other
really important SF films, there are three movies in the Genre that stand above
all the rest for their breathe-taking ambition: Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,”
which Wells hated, “... Things to Come,” and finally, and most obviously, Stanley
Kubrick’s “2001…” There’s an irony here, because Kubrick apparently hated
“... Things to Come” almost as much as Wells hated “Metropolis.” There were other
SF landmarks of course, and they came more frequently after 1968, but even now,
those three remain hard-to-top.
All the events in the
story of “Metropolis” unfolded in a few weeks or months, and with “2001…” time is warped, but almost all of it unfolded across a two-year space. The events in
“... Things to Come” covered a full century. Was there ever another film that tried
to re-capture bold, pseudo-historical scope?
The answer is, mostly,
“No,” though its title would reappear in later films trying to ride its coat
tails:
In 1976 there was a
Dystopian SF Porno film titled “Things to Come,” which was so ultra-cheap much
of its footage were scenes clipped from some other ultra-cheap Porno films. There
is only one known print still in existence, and I know of no one who has actually
ever seen or reviewed it.
1979 brought us, “H. G. Wells: The Shape of Things to Come,” which marketed
itself as a remake of this film, but showed no evidence that anyone involved
ever saw this film or read anything Wells ever wrote. It was a
more-embarrassing-than-average knock-off of “Star Wars” (1977) and featured an
impressive cast Actors who formerly had careers and looked very unhappy about
what they’d been reduced to.
The fact is multi-generational
sagas are rarish in cinema in general because that’s a lot of narrative to squeeze into a
short running-time. They are rarest of all in SF cinema. I can think of
only one SF film that even attempted the pseudo-Historical scope of “Thing to
Come,” the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer’s “The Cloud Atlas” (2012). A monumental
work, seemingly more influenced by Griffith’s “Intolerance,” than Wells, it
weaves six-storylines together, two of them in the future, so it’s a mix of
Historical Drama and Future History covering the years 1849 through 2321. Except two of the narratives (one set in
1973 and the other in 2321) it’s not about people who change History, but the
personal dramas of those caught up in the History of their day. An important
narrative device is that characters from the past leave behind some sort of a record of their lives which
inspires/impacts the choices of those who come later. “The Cloud Atlas” is not as
ideologically minded as either “Metropolis” or “... Things to Come,” but stakes its
ground unconditionally in favor of Individual Expression. It argues that even
without the massive Despotism of an out-of-control Nation State or World
Government, there will always be tyrannies of some sort, and faith in Freedom
is the only thing that can keep us human. “... Things to Come” rejected that
notion, even though Wells did once believe in it, he just seemed to give up on it sometime around 1928.
One more film should be
addressed here, it was Wells’ second, and final, collaboration with Korda, “The
Man Who Could Work Miracles” (1937). The plot-mechanics were
Supernaturally driven, so not really SF, but in its thinking, it was pure SF. A
warmer, gentler film than “... Things to Come,” it featured better dialogue and Characterization, and an especially fine lead performance by Roland Young. Ralph
Richardson returns, much funnier this time. It has only a fraction of “... Things
to Come’s” ambition, and required only a fraction of this film’s cost, yet
still managed some delightful FX, and couldn't be more stylistically removed
from the earlier film.
It’s Director, Lothar
Mendes, a German Jew who left that country before Hitler’s rise, and shared
Wells contempt for both Fascism and Communism, but seemed to view everything
else far differently. Mendes had bounced back-and-forth between the USA and England
since 1926, then settled permanently in the USA before 1940 and spent most of
the rest of his career making anti-Nazi and WWII films.
“The Man Who ...” is as much a Political Allegory as “... Things to Come,” but less smugly
Elitist. It admits what this film doesn’t, that the answers to questions that
are beyond the reach of the Common Man are often beyond that of Experts as
well. The best way to describe it is that’s it’s like “Bruce Almighty” (2003),
only not stupid.
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