Director: William Cameron Menzies Writers: H. G. Wells Cinematography: Georges Perinal
Music: Arthur Bliss Cast: Raymond Massey, Edward Chapman, Sir Ralph Richardson, Margaretta Scott,
Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Maurice Braddell, Sophie Stewart, Derrick De Marney, Ann Todd, Pearl Argyle
Disc company: Legend Films Video: 1080p 1.33:1 Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 English
Subtitles: None Disc: BD50 (Region A) Release Date: 09/27/2011 Released as part of the oddly titled Ray Harryhausen Double Feature Blu-ray collection, featuring Things to Come, SHE, and a bonus DVD of The Most Dangerous Game, and available for purchase through Amazon.com
Penned by H. G. Wells from his novel The Shape of Things to Come and directed by feature newcomer William Cameron Menzies, who had already garnered acclaim for his accomplished production design, the lavish 1936 Alexander Korda production of Things to Come never quite amounts to the sum of its parts. A masterwork of design and ideas hamstrung by cold human drama and a penchant for speechifying, Things to Come is perhaps best described as an unforgettable failure – a sprawling epic of speculative fiction and philosophical propaganda that’s no less a classic for all of its faults.
Things to Come‘s ambitious narrative follows the 100 year history of the English metropolis of Everytown, from its destruction in war-time in Christmas of 1936 to it’s glittering future rebirth. The yarn is constructed around two generations of the family Cabal (both played by Raymond Massey, Arsenic and Old Lace), who are rarely so much characters as they are mouthpieces for Wells’ selfsame political-scientific philosophy. In 1936 John Cabal volunteers for the war effort, taking to the air as a fighter pilot. As the global conflict drags on for decade after decade, reducing Everytown to a pre-industrial autocracy, Cabal secretly organizes a new society of scientific fascists – a technologically unchallenged and black-suited army for peace. His Wings Over the World fills the skies of 1970, putting an end to all warmongers with the ‘gas of peace’, setting humanity on a track towards miraculous scientific progress and transforming Everytown into a glittering underground utopia.
In 2036 John Cabal’s great grandson Oswald Cabal, leader of the future governing council, must face a new threat to progress – an uprising among the citizens of Everytown who seek to halt mankind’s first trip around the moon. As hordes of rioters surround the enormous Space Gun that is to launch the rocket, Cabal orders it fired, preserving man’s quest for knowledge and sending the protesters into oblivion. The conclusion sees Cabal standing before an enormous telescopic lens, contemplating whether mankind is doomed to be Earthbound or fated to expand its conquest to the rest of the Universe. ”Which shall it be?” he asks, words that are repeated again in the rapturous chorus that closes the film.
Propelled by the shear magnitude of its production alone, Things to Come is dramatically inert for the most part. Sir Ralph Richardson (Dragonslayer, The Bed Sitting Room) takes a memorable turn as a mid-century despot of Everytown known only as the “Boss”, while Sir Cedric Hardwicke (George Pal’s War of the Worlds) does much the same as the doomed revolutionary Theotocopulos in the future Everytown of 2036. Unfortunately the “Boss” and Theotocopulos are little more than straw men, existing solely to be put down by righteous Cabal (either of them) and lost to the unstoppable march of progress. For his part Raymond Massey does well by a role that’s less forgiving than any of the rest, and effectively ties the multi-generational drama together even though he’s given little to do but strike a pose (often in one of two ridiculous costumes) and espouse interminable tracts of Wells’ philosophy.
Bombed-out Everytown, circa 1966
While Wells himself can be blamed for the deficiencies in Things to Come‘s drama, having penned the script himself (with updates by Korda associate Lajos Biro, The Thief of Bagdad), it was the power-struggle between producer Korda and Wells, who had been granted unprecedented access to and influence over the production, that would lead to the film’s steady decline. Wells proved difficult and inflexible with regards to the production, while Korda often reacted to what he disliked about the picture (like Wells’ interminable exposition) by simply removing it. By the time the film first reached American shores Korda and its distributors had already excised half an hour of its original 130 minutes, compromising its continuity and whatever narrative flow there had been in favor of the spectacle alone. Further release variations would be even shorter, with some running barely more than an hour.
Director William Cameron Menzies, along with photographer Georges Perinal, designer Vincent Korda and effects director Ned Man, assured that Things to Come would at least have a cohesive visual style, from the opening moments in pre-war Everytown to the closing starscape, and no matter how cold and turgid its dramatics may be the technical achievements of the thing are difficult to overstate. The futuristic rebuilding of Everytown, in which massive excavators hollow out a cavernous expanse that swiftly develops into a vast antiseptic city of porcelain and glass (complete with moving sidewalks and glass-tube elevators) with the booming themes of Arthur Bliss taking precedence over any sort of sound effects, is perhaps the mother of all science fiction montages. Even the substantively embarrassing Space Gun, the film’s one absolute piece of scientific bunk (it even has a sight!), is of impressive construction and imposing scale.
But the spectacle is hardly limited to the future of 2036. The air raid sequence that begins the picture is one of most successful undertakings of its kind, with swift and lyrical cross-cutting between a panicked population and defensive military operations culminating in a terrifying tour-de-force of urban destruction and human misfortune. Mann’s complex miniature and composite effects are certainly more transparent a full seventy five years after the fact, but the brilliantly realized imagery (explosive anti-aircraft barrages, buildings reduced to rubble, survivors struggling among the wreckage, and the body of a child half-buried in debris) has lost none of its visceral potency. The montages that follow, detailing a horrific futility of a decades-long war between nations through the power of image alone, are pure Menzies, a mix of the literal and the symbolic that drives the story more effectively than any of Wells’ truncated drama. The plague-ravaged and despotic future of 1970, complete with a massive exterior set of bombed-out Everytown, invites one of science fictions great visuals – a fleet of improbably gigantic aircraft flown by the peace-dealing soldiers of Wings Over the World emerging from the clouds to put an end to the warmongers once and for all. That’s the image that so captivated a much-younger me, viewing Things to Come on television for the first time in one of its many confounding broadcast versions, and though the ideas behind it don’t settle so easily with me anymore the scene has lost none of its grandeur.
While its difficult for me to believe that the potential with Things to Come was not greater than what eventually came to pass, the final product still ranks as the unparalleled science fiction achievement of its generation. The ravages of time, battles with overzealous editors and a dubious public domain status may have conspired to eradicate much of this top-tier production’s original luster, but it’s still a hell of a thing, brimming with big ideas and some of the most classic of classic sci-fi conceptions. Regardless of whatever problems it may have Things to Come is still must-see genre material, and gets an easy recommendation from me.
The Space Gun.
I wish I had better things to report for this Legend Films Blu-ray edition of Things to Come, which packages colorized and black and white versions of this film and the Merian C. Cooper epic She on a single dual-layer Blu-ray disc, but with a retail price under $17 I can’t say that I was expecting much either. The case lists that the film has been “lavishly and painstakingly restored in high definition from the original 35mm elements” – an overstatement, to be sure. While She was indeed restored a few years ago by Legend Films in association with Kino International, Things to Come looks a lot like it always has in its domestic variants – bad.
Though this disc certainly has its technical faults, which will be enumerated later, the majority of Things to Come‘s problems can be blamed squarely on the nature of the source materials utilized. A concerted effort was made by Network and Granada several years ago to restore Things to Come to its original US release length of 96 minutes (all footage relating to longer release and pre-release versions is unfortunately lost), an effort that resulted in a lavish, if imperfect, 2-disc special edition DVD of the film in 2007. Even with the added benefit of 1080p resolution this latest Legend Films edition can’t touch that region 2 PAL-format disc, having been sourced from positive elements of the more common 92 minute cut of the film that are just too far removed from the source to even benefit from the HD upgrade.
As the screenshots below will attest, Things to Come appears soft throughout and lacks anything in the way of fine detail in its hi-def debut. Menzies and Perinal’s expressive, highly stylized close-ups are void of skin texture, clothing appears flat and uninteresting, and any sense of higher definition is effectively diffused in the gritty mush of an image duped a few times too often. Contrast likewise suffers, with what were once balanced highlights and intense shadows now reduced to uninteresting shades of dull, milky grey. Damage is abundant in varying degrees, with much of it undoubtedly baked right into the print itself. Expect plenty of dust, dirt and speckles, as well as some persistent emulsion scratches and lines. But perhaps the most egregious fault with the transfer can be lay squarely at the feet of Legend Films themselves, who have granted Things to Come an AVC encode at an intolerably low average video bitrate of just 9.57 Mbps (the colorized version improves by half, at 15.8 Mbps) – less than a quarter of what the format is capable of. The considerable grain in the image is supported in lackluster fashion, with plenty of artifacting to be found on close inspection, though the inherent softness of the image does a good job of concealing any more fatally distracting digital nastiness.
In all fairness this is far from the worst Things to Come has looked on home video, and I have a perfectly unwatchable Madacy Home Video VHS edition to prove it. Still, better sources for this film do exist, and their availability on the market renders this HD offering essentially useless however low the price may be.
For the sake of full disclosure, HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command-line tool. After comparing to the original .png files the results appeared quite transparent to these eyes, even when zooming in 2-3x. The sample DVD snapshots in comparison sets one and two were captured in .png format in VLC, upscaled to 1080 resolution from the native PAL resolution and composited into a 1920×1080 frame for ease of comparison in GiMP, then exported as .jpg at a quality setting of 95%.
In the first two sets of captures the upscaled Network DVD is represented first, followed by the Legend Films black and white and colorized versions respectively. The rest should be self-explanatory.
More Blu-ray Screenshots:
Audio is additionally disappointing, with only a lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic track in the original English to be had. Things to Come has never sounded good on home video, to the point that some editions are outright unintelligible, and while the dialogue in this case improves over that of many (I didn’t have trouble discerning any lines this go around) it’s difficult for me to believe that even this flat-sounding recording couldn’t have improved a bit with a lossless encode. Funnily enough, the audio on this Legend Films edition actually bests that of the Network R2 DVD, whose zealously over-processed audio “restoration” resulted in shrill high end and some nasty phasing problems (much of the dialogue on that edition sounds as though it were recorded from within a soup can). Still, this is no better than you’ll find on the Legend Films DVD.
Supplements are as lackluster as the rest, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, and pertain to Ray Harryhausen’s (who had no part in the production, being just 16 at the time of its release) memories of the film and, mostly, to his association with Legend Films and their dubious colorization process. You get Interview with Ray Harryhausen (3 minutes) and Colorization Process with Ray Harryhausen (8 minutes), both in up-converted 1080i. After all the fantastic things Harryhausen has done in his life this it’s a sad development that he’s become the chief talking head for this sort of thing. (She also features a pair of Harryhausen interviews in 1080i HD, as well as an audio commentary with Harryhausen and Mark Vaz. A Harryhausen bio and filmography and a 9 minute collection of vintage toy commercials in 1080i rounds out the disc. A bonus DVD of The Most Dangerous Game is also included.)
Harryhausen’s name looms as large as that of Things to Come on Legend Film’s packaging for this release, a regrettable strategy given that the man had nothing directly to do with the films contained in it, and the ballyhoo about the colorization’s latest revival certainly left a bad taste in my mouth. Regardless of what you make of any of that, the presentation of Things to Come leaves a hell of a lot to be desired, leaving this half of the Legend Films double feature woefully lacking anything in the least bit recommendable. Skip it.
Film: Very Good + Video: Fair Audio: Fair Supplements: Poor
Harrumphs: Everything.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case.
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