Old Yorker

  • Things to Come (1936)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Went the Day Well?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alberto Cavalcanti (1942)

    ‘Went the day well?
    We died and never knew.
    But, well or ill,
    Freedom, we died for you.
    Went the day well?’

    According to Wikipedia, this:

    ‘… epitaph is by the Greek scholar John Maxwell Edmonds. and originally appeared in The Times dated February 6th 1918, page 7, under a short section headed Four Epitaphs. It is the second of four epitaphs composed for graves and memorials to those fallen in battle – each covering different situations of death.’

    The verse provides the epigraph to this Ealing Studios film, for which John Dighton wrote the screenplay (with Angus MacPhail and Diana Morgan), adapted from a short story by Graham Greene called The Lieutenant Died Last.  I’d seen Went the Day Well? maybe twice before but was ashamed to realise I’d not previously appreciated it was made during rather than shortly after the end of World War II.  It’s an absorbing action drama but it’s as propaganda that the film is remarkable.

    The story of a German occupation of an English village called Bramley End and the locals’ resistance and resilience, Went the Day Well? has none of the soaring, sentimental rhetoric of Mrs Miniver, made in Hollywood in the same year (and released in America less than six months after Pearl Harbor).  It’s both starker and more nuanced than I remember the William Wyler movie as being:  people, including people that in the course of the picture we get to know and like, or at least respect, get shot or blown up.  Cavalcanti’s direction is both gripping and poetic:  while the momentum is relentless, he keeps reminding us of the beauty and vulnerability of the English countryside – the birdsong, the meadows and hedgerows, the imperilled sunshine (the film is brilliantly lit by Wilkie Cooper).  If this were simply a dramatic narrative, you’d be surprised how soon the Germans – who are posing as British soldiers (with, for the most part, improbably impeccable accents) – are unmasked.  Even as propaganda, it seems surprising at first that more time isn’t spent comparing and contrasting how the more or less vigilant people of Bramley End are or are not picking up on the telltale signs.  Then you realise that it makes complete sense to get swiftly into the business of describing the villagers’ resourceful, necessarily violent fightback.  Although made with artistry, Went the Day Well? is chiefly concerned with giving practical moral advice.

    This is a British film of the period where the limitations of the stylised acting can be overlooked because the urgency of the subject and story is so great.  And, although the ethos of the film might seem to be conventionally patriotic, it has some challenging and subversive strands.  It’s the local squire Oliver Wilsford who turns out to be the fifth columnist in the community.  Women, as well as men, have to commit acts of violence – and their responses are very different.  While the postmistress Mrs Collins kills a Nazi officer with a sense of compulsive but fearful duty, Ivy Dawking, one of the staff of servants in the big house where much of the action takes place, eagerly positions her rifle as if taking out Germans will be even more fun than shooting for prizes at a fair.

    A good few members of the NFT3 audience seemed to be laughing almost continuously.   Perhaps plenty of people did so in 1942 as well – but there was something disrespectful in these affectionate BFI chuckles:  they seemed to express a confusion of facile nostalgia for a more clear-cut moral landscape and a lost, heroic era of British history, with a condescending amusement at the style of the film and the playing.  I wasn’t immune from these feelings myself but Cavalcanti wiped the smile off my face quite quickly.  For example, the appearance of the Home Guard in Bramley End can’t help connoting Dad’s Army – yet the local defence men end up as corpses here.  So too, and heroically, does another natural figure of fun nowadays, the vicar.

    Good performances by Mervyn Johns (as a workman-cum-verger, who also introduces and concludes the story), Leslie Banks (the squire), Thora Hird (Ivy Dawking), Patricia Hayes (some kind of assistant to the postmistress), and, at least when she kills the German soldier, Muriel George (Mrs Collins); also with C V France (as the vicar), Marie Lohr (a posh woman who becomes a real heroine), Harry Fowler (a plucky teenager) and John Slater (one of the Germans).  The acting of Valerie Taylor, as the vicar’s daughter Nora, is very much of its time and clarse but, because of what Nora feels about Wilsford, Taylor is very affecting in her final act.  The music is by William Walton.

    13 July 2010

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