Things to Come

William Cameron Menzies' Things to Come (1936) based on a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells is startlingly bad -- worse, it's silly, and silliness, of course, is the kiss of death for science fiction.  The film stars Raymond Massey as an idealist with Socialist leanings who, later, plays the part of his own grandson, a technocrat who is part of the New World Order.  Relatively restrained in the first half of the film, Massey chews the scenery at the film's climax -- his eyes enlarge and seem to protrude from his skull and his voice assumes the ranting tone of Hitler or Mussolini.  It's completely unconvincing, an attempt to achieve an effect by brute force, something that almost never succeeds.  This is a pity because the film's first twenty minutes are very impressive and frightening.  It's Christmas in Everytown (a place bordered by a big distinctively shaped peak that looks like Table Mountain in Cape Town -- in fact, the mountain has the same function of the peak in Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire acting as an imperturbable and constant feature despite the changes in scenery at its base.)  In the darkness, there is "war fever" -- everywhere we see placards announcing the imminence of war -- and the Christmas carols that people sing have a sinister, bellicose sound, slightly off-key it seems.  The shadows of the city are fragmented into a montage of glaring faces and off-kilter, spiky expressionist images.  Soon enough a great armada of biplanes crosses the English Channel, flying over the White Cliffs of Dover to bomb Everywhere Town (of course, it looks like London complete with a statue of Nelson, Trafalgar Circus and St. Paul's Cathedral).  Poison gas is used and a beatific boy whom we saw looking with delight at a model castle and train is shown smashed in the ruins of the city.  The war lasts thirty years, a montage of tanks that become increasingly sophisticated and shadowy marching soldiers.  When it is over, civilization has been spoiled and the wrecked city is now in the hands of a ranting war lord.  Raymond Massey appears in a streamlined prop-driven bi-plane and, disastrously for the movie, hops out of the plane wearing what seems to be a black bathtub around his shoulders and head.  (The film's costumes are absolutely ridiculous -- worse, in some low-angle shots, the genitals of the male actors are pretty clearly depicted in their weird trousers.)  Massey's character gets tossed in the dungeon after he makes a speech about a group of aviators who have preserved civilization through an organization called Wings over the World.  After some pointless vignettes, including the original of time-honored post-apocalyptic scene in which horses pull a car like a chariot into a marketplace, the Wings over the World aviators attack the town, hurtling down "peace bombs" that make everyone fall asleep.  The film, then, fast-forwards to the year 2036, one hundred years from the film's first Christmas scenes.  For some unknown reason, the men of the future have hollowed out a mountain to build a white and gleaming city that looks quite a bit like a fabulous Embassy Suites hotel --it's all white atrium and gardens and glass-faced elevators rising and falling in glass tubes.  The technocrats who run this society have decided to send Raymond Massey's daughter and a young man into orbit around the moon, firing them into space though a gigantic white cannon supported by a huge gantry -- the absurdly phallic space-howitzer is a muzzle-loader.  Anti-progress rioters attack the enormous cannon -- they swarm over its esplanades and causeways like infuriated ants.  But the cannon is fired and the comely couple ejaculated into space in their capsule and Massey, then, gets to rant some more about man exploring the universe before the picture ends at a sprightly 88 minutes.  It's really awful on all levels.  The sets are enormous and impressive but the special effects, obviously projected on screens embedded in the scenery are completely ineffective.  The acting is worse than terrible.  A good way to assess the skill of a film maker is to look at the actors who are not speaking but just standing around -- here the supernumeraries look inert or bored, as if they are waiting for something to happen.  It's interesting to see the film's depiction of the horror that the world felt 18 years after the end of the Great War on the subject of poison gas.  Gas of this kind is the film's bête noire and the best sequence in the film involves an enemy aviator, shot down by Massey's character in a dogfight.  The enemy aviator's canisters of poison gas burst just as a little girl runs up to the scene of the crash.  The enemy flyer gives the little girl his gas mask, musing that it is odd that he is now saving her when a minute or two earlier he was trying to drop poison gas bombs on her village.  Massey chivalrously leaves his service revolver with the dying enemy who, of course, shoots himself rather than succumb ignominiously to the poison gas wafted around him.