Views from Crestmont Drive

This is an ambitious film from 1936, based on a treatment by H.G. Wells depicting future history from 1950 to 2036. Again, Wikipedia has a fairly detailed plot at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_to_Come.

I’ve read that for decades after, Things to Come was considered the most serious, big-ideas science fiction film of all time. (Until 2001, maybe.) It has some striking ideas and images, but it hasn’t aged well.

This film breaks into roughly three parts.

• In 1940, war breaks out. We witness events from a generic city called “Everytown,” beginning as the main character, the forceful John Cabal (played by Raymond Massey), and his friends discuss the inevitability of war and its impact on technological progress. Then sirens sound and the war begins; we see the center of town as people run, cars crash, aircraft attack, tanks roll through the central square. Bombastic music. Buildings collapse, burn. Then shots of ships at sea, futuristic tanks, planes over the coast. Title cards display the years as war goes on… 1945, 1960. Finally it’s over in 1966, but then a pestilence spreads; no one who catches it survives.
• Everytown is now ruins, occupied by poor villages. The town is now run by a warlord, who wears furs and has a chatty wife. Despite common thought that technology is over, one day a plane flies over and lands nearby. Its pilot is John Cabal, wearing an oddly huge helmet, and he explains that the engineers and mechanics of the Mediterranean area have united into an organization called “wings over the world,” and are rebuilding civilization. The warlord arrests Cabal and tosses him in a dungeon. Sample lines from the warlord: “Who wants books that muddle our thoughts anymore?” and “Why was all this science ever allowed? What was it ever let begin, science? The enemy of everything that is natural in life.” But huge flying-wing airplanes appear in the sky and overwhelm the warlord’s ancient planes, then drop sleeping gas over the villagers. Cabal remarks, about the warlord, “Dead and his world dead with him…” “Now for the rules of the airmen, and a new life for mankind.”
• Then there’s a transitional montage of the rebuilding of society, via huge technology. Mountains are blown up; enormous machines grind away; men pass through factories on gliding platforms. More music.
• Then we see the result, in 2036: the area where Everytown lay is now grassland and low hills, while the city has been rebuilt inside a huge nearby cave! It’s an enormous spacious well-lit cavern, rather like the interior of a huge shopping mall or Las Vegas hotel, where all the residents wear white robes with enormous shoulder pads. The story immediately becomes one about progress, as an artist (played by Cedric Hardwicke) wants to rebel, to stop progress before it’s too late! The head of the ruling council, Oswald Cabal (again played by Raymond Massey), plans to launch the first mission to the moon via an enormous “space gun.” After some debate about who to send, the space gun is prepared, and launches despite converging mobs. Looking into the starry sky, Cabal speechifies about progress and knowledge, concluding with “All the universe or nothing? Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be? ..”

The film is an admirable attempt to imagine a disastrous, and then expansive future; it recalls a quote from Wells: “Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe.” Comments:

• The acting style is broad and the music, by Arthur Bliss, bombastic and grating. The music was popular at the time and released separately on recordings, but you don’t hear it much anymore, all these decades later.
• The film equates progress with enormous technology, which was appropriate for a time when Empire State Buildings and Hoover Dams were being built, but isn’t so true anymore.
• I don’t find the idea of building utopia, so to speak, in an underground cavern, plausible, and wonder it was thought so. (Somewhat similarly, in the 1950s and ‘60s and ‘70s there were science fiction stories and movies about building cities under the sea, another idea that’s rather faded away.)
• On the other hand, the production design is striking, especially of the underground Everytown. This is another case where a feature on the DVD, about Vincent Korda and others, is as interesting as the film itself.
• There are some cute scenes in the final section with a little girl and her grandfather, reclining on glass furniture and watching a big screen showing Manhattan as it used to be, as grandpa explains about the age of windows, when they were diseased and had colds, not like today.
• One of the DVD features points out that the “space gun” is implausible—its passengers would quickly turn to raspberry jam—but Wells, who had considerable influence and involvement with the making of the film, wanted the resemblance of the vehicle to go to the moon with the cannons fired earlier when war broke out.
• The debate in the final sequence is rather insipid; what is the artist complaining about, exactly? Religious opposite would have been more plausible (as was a theme in written SF of the ‘40s and ‘50s), but there’s no mention of religion here. At the same time, the contrast from the middle section of the film, of barbarity, to the final section, of gleaming building and expansion into space, is sharp, and moving.

I grant that standards and styles have changed over time, which accounts for much of my reaction. And I’m aware that similar stylistic complaints would be made about 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially about its slow pacing compared to virtually all modern cinema. So I’ll grant Things to Come its status and try to understand it in its context.

As I’ve said, the basis for these posts, and for my taking the time to watch these rather primitive films from the dawn of the movie era, is to revisit the predecessors of the earliest science fiction films; I have no particular interest in horror films per se. Except for Metropolis (in 1927) and Things to Come (in 1936), there were no true science fiction films, in the modern sense, until 1950. (And my interest in those is how they presumed misunderstandings of how the world, the universe, actually works.) Rather, the 1930s and 1940s were dominated by horror films, beginning with the iconic films about Dracula and Frankenstein.

So yes it’s mostly because the subjects of these films have become iconic. No matter how obscure the original novels were, the films made in the first and second decades of the film industry, about Frankenstein and Dracula and the Wolf Man, have rooted themselves into popular culture. That’s why we see new versions of them every decade or so.

So here we are with The Wolf Man, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_Man_(1941_film), the 1941 film starring Lon Chaney Jr., along with Claude Rains and Ralph Bellamy.

I’d never seen it before. What I knew about was mostly from comments by Harlan Ellison – the famous, firebrand short story and TV writer and anthologist, profoundly influential in the 1960s and 1970s, and who died in 2018 – who spoke of Lon Chaney Jr., and Bela Lugosi, in their famous roles, as if they were some kind of gods. Ellison grew up in the 1940s, and these movies and performances were imprinted on him, in a way I suppose like Star Trek and 2001 imprinted on me, in both cases in our teenage years. He would speak of those actors, those movies, in his appearances, in his essays.

So then, Lon Chaney, Jr.? He’s big, he’s tall, and the word that came to mind to describe him as I watched the beginning of this movie was galoot. Right at home in one of those old American TV series set in the south, e.g. Mayberry R.F.D. Big and dumb and with a dopey grin. The plot of the movie is there on Wikipedia, but let me observe, again, how the mansions these people live in, in these early 1930s and ‘40s films, are improbably large and luxurious. Talbot Castle is in Wales, supposedly, and we see the same kind of charming village as we saw in some of the Frankenstein films. So Larry Talbot returns to his father’s estate in Wales, is attracted to a local shopworker, Gwen. Nearby is a camp of gypsies. What is the premise here? That werewolves, men who transform into wolves “at certain times of the year,” turn others into werewolves by biting them [much like vampires].

And so Larry Talbot (Chaney) is bitten by one of the gypsies (played by Bela Lugosi, because of course), and becomes a werewolf himself.

And the fascination, even redemption, of this film, compared to the other early horror films, is that Talbot is horrified by this transformation and how it affects those around him. Chaney, the galoot, becomes a sympathetic, tragic character; he understands what’s happening to him and tries to overcome it. He seems to die at the end – in an ironic scene that mirrors an earlier scene – and yet Chaney came back to play the Wolf Man in a number of sequels.

The DVD I watched has a long feature about the life of Lon Chaney, Jr.; a bit character, in the shadow of his father’s reputation, until he stuck the audition for this movie, and played the character in all the sequels, and did well in many other films through the 1950s. Sometimes the stories of these actors are just as interesting as the movies they played in.