Things to Come (review)

In 1934, after years of writing about films and attempting to break into large-scale production, H. G. Wells finally found a willing producer in Alexander Korda. When the two eventually signed a contract agreeing to adapt Wells’s utopian futurist novel The Shape of Things to Come (1933), the legendary author was granted unprecedented control, with “virtually dictatorial rights over how the film was made.”¹ What resulted was the most expensive film Britain had yet produced (at least, according to Criterion’s new audio commentary track provided by David Kalat). Almost impossibly ambitious, Things to Come attempted the unlikely task of translating H. G. Wells’s liberal socialist philosophy and grand historical view into a cinematic megaproduction. If such an undertaking were not challenging enough, Things to Come also represented a bold attempt to revolutionize the cinematic form in keeping with the author’s theoretical speculations on the medium, which veered toward Gesamtkunstwerk: “Behind the first cheap triumphs of the film to-day rises the possibility of a spectacle-music-drama, greater, more beautiful and intellectually deeper and richer than any artistic form humanity has hitherto achieved.”²

In telling this epic tale, Things to Come compresses one hundred years of richly detailed future history into the course of ninety-eight minutes by way of what Keith Williams calls “a tripartite narrative structure, with ‘accelerated’ linking sequences, transporting audiences between key moments in future history like a cinematic time machine.”³ That our voyage is indeed an immersive wonder instead of a disconnected series of vignettes is due in large part to the efforts of Wells’s team of collaborators: director William Cameron Menzies, art director Vincent Korda, and composer Arthur Bliss. Especially striking in its ostentatious use of film language, Things to Come dynamically combines expressionist mise-en-scène with Eisensteinian spectacle. Stylized montage sequences dazzle and even veer toward Dadaist abstraction in a sequence depicting the construction of the film’s far-future technopolis—thanks to the uncredited contribution of Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy (then a European émigré living in England). Arthur Bliss’s propulsive score is also notable: unusually foregrounded, it greatly assists in conveying a sense of historical drama as well as helping to strengthen forward continuity and formal unity. The far-future production design provides a visual encyclopedia of modernist architecture and design heavily inspired by Le Corbusier and Norman Bel Geddes. (In his 1995 British Film Institute [BFI] monograph, Christopher Frayling has claimed that its showcase of the International Style had “significant visual impact” around the globe.⁴) However, the other segments—which include devastating scenes of modern warfare and a postapocalyptic regression to preindustrial tribalism—are no less impressively staged and show off the innovative styles of both Menzies and Korda.

In summarizing this total cinematic program, Laura Marcus observes that Wells’s vision “[brought together] the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art) [with] a concept of Gesamtgeschictswerk (total history),”⁵ and the image of history that emerges is a constant dialectic of progress versus regression. Throughout Things to Come, the progressive, authentically “scientific socialist” avant-garde (represented by Raymond Massey, first in the role of John Cabal and then as his grandson Oswald) must challenge a counter-force of social decay. Initially this antagonistic force is embodied in modern warfare, then in the culturally retrograde influence of traditionalist demagoguery embodied in the figure of the warlord (Ralph Richardson), and then in the artisan Theotocopulos (Cedric Hardwicke). In terms of familiar precursors, Things to Come mirrors nothing so much as the Jewish Bible, both in its epic scale and in its narrative logic: the masses always seem to succumb to a backsliding negative influence, and only the prophet-like technocrats stand in the way of social and moral chaos.

It would therefore seem self-evident that Things to Come, as the grand achievement of Wellsianism, is of essential interest for scholars of Wells, utopianism, and science fiction more generally. Wells’s bold, vanguardist proselytizing for progress did much to shape...