Things to Come (1936) — H.G. Wells explains it all for you

A few days ago, while in San Francisco, I received some pleasant email regarding a piece I wrote years ago about the George Pal interpretation of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. As happenstance would have it, for a while I've been this close (imagine my thumb and fingertip measuring the depth of Uwe Boll's chance of an Oscar) to adding a post here on that same topic; I just never got around to it. Now back from SF and spurred on by the nice email, I figure it's time to get to it. I'm aiming to post it later this week. (And here it is.)

First, though, I want to ramp up to The Time Machine by addressing an earlier film I've referenced in three previous posts (those on The Man in the White Suit, Modern Times, and The War of the Worlds). It's 1936's Things to Come, produced from a screenplay written by Wells himself. Let's finally open the tap and take a big gulp from this one.


If you were an adult in the movie-going audience in the 1930s, it's a safe bet that you remembered, one way or another, the unprecedented horrors of the World War roughly 15 years earlier. The "war to end war," people called it, a phrase popularized by H.G. Wells in 1918, though he noted (in In the Fourth Year) that as a catch-phrase it had "got into circulation" by the end of 1914. And yet by the mid-thirties throughout England and continental Europe, the grinding Great Depression and Hitler's rhetoric were quite plainly setting the table for a Second World War.

To a disgruntled yet cautiously optimistic H.G. Wells, only scientific reason — not religion or capitalism — could be Mankind's savior in that most desperate hour, could give us the tools to finally rise above our baser animal selves and reach nobly toward a future built on peace, prosperity, progress, and the enlightened road of evolved socialism.

His best works (such as The Time Machine) long behind him and, at nearly 70, a waning Grand Old Man of literary highbrows, Wells collaborated with producer Alexander Korda to communicate his worldview on an epic scale. Together they adapted Wells' strange 1933 manifesto, The Shape of Things to Come, into a movie that was to serve as a cautionary tale, an anti-war plea, and a grandly self-confident platform where Wells' beliefs and fears could be realized and understood by worldwide audiences.

The result, the visually spectacular but arid and tendentious Things to Come, holds an important place in the history of science fiction cinema. As a visionary work that aims to honestly tackle the devastating consequences of international warfare, this is one of the few science fiction films that's about something, that's meant to offer you mental popcorn to munch on long after the "The End" card.

The movie "predicts" desktop video screens and big-screen TV, evil despots with an eye toward misusing the beneficent fruits of super-science, and a world knitted together by technologies such as long-distance communications and easy air travel. The May '36 issue of Modern Mechanix & Inventions, in a six-page spread on the film's "amazing achievements predicted for the world of tomorrow" (reproduced in full here), opined that in Things to Come...

...we have painted for us an astonishing picture in which there is not a single development which does not follow naturally out of laboratory discoveries of our own day. It is inspiring for us folk of 1936 to realize that the progress of science, as presented each month in the pages of Modern Mechanix & Inventions, is laying the foundation for a new civilization.

Things to Come spans an entire apocalyptic century and three generations of story time, ending in 2036 with a rocket to the moon. The war-ravaged world it depicts is saved by Science and scientists, both personified with messianic rectitude by Raymond Massey. In its vast scope and its visualizations of global war and a civilizing techno-utopia, it's epic on a Cecil B. DeMille Bible movie scale. A sweeping orchestral score by Sir Arthur Bliss adds to the grandeur.

For his director, Korda hired an American scenic designer, William Cameron Menzies. Although he had won the first Academy Award for production design, this was the first time Menzies had been tasked with directing a feature-length project on his own. His work as production designer and sometimes-director can be seen in visual spectacles such as the Raoul Walsh/Douglas Fairbanks Thief of Baghdad (1924), Korda's 1940 Thief of Baghdad, the original Invaders from Mars, and most memorably Gone with the Wind. Korda also hired a young Jack Cardiff, soon to become one of the most innovative and lauded cinematographers, as special effects camera operator. 

Things to Come is a product of its time and place and writer. That's important to understand if we're to appreciate it as something more than a creaky black-and-white polemic dressed up in flaring shelf collars. Even so, in its day it was a box-office flop. After Things to Come premiered, Wells' heart must have sunk as audiences avoided his philosophically impassioned and idealistic — yet dour and didactic — cri de coeur. Created to stimulate the intellect more than the emotions, the movie is preachy, slow-paced, and oh so upper-class English. Menzies, aided by art director Vincent Korda, filled the screen with awe-arousing visuals from the purest heady dreams of the Gernsback continuum, but his stiff and dry directing gave more personality and dimension to his sets than to his actors.

Moreover, Wells had no prior experience writing for film, and his screenplay exhibits few cinematic, or even dramatic, instincts. (Even after two prior versions: the first, titled Whither Mankind?, was utterly unusable; the second unfilmable but several steps closer to a workable script.* Everyone onscreen has a speech to make, and sometimes the speech-making is used the way Robert De Niro uses a baseball bat in The Untouchables. Philosophically the film's agenda is blinkered and naive (but audaciously so), and Wells' good intentions are undercut when the script takes its own moral probity as self-evident truth, which often translates as smugness or gormlessness.

Add the declamatory acting and the "futuristic" costumes that look like a WPA production of Oedipus Rex, and we have a movie that began aging badly on its opening day.

Things to Come opens with a near-future forecast of Christmas 1940 in the metropolis of Everytown (obviously London), a city threatened by world war. Pacifist intellectuals, such as John Cabal (Massey), try to turn the tide.

But Cabal's efforts go unheeded by the self-interested classes, and war arrives with tanks and aeroplanes and gas bombs. Everytown is destroyed by air raids (dramatically enacted four years before the real thing). The war continues for thirty years, thought by the end its original purpose is long forgotten.

As a result, civilization degenerates while "the Wandering Sickness" and devastation accelerate the spiral down until 1970, when the world has crumbled into a balkanized Mad Max Dark Ages. Everytown is ruled by a barbaric warlord, the Boss (Ralph Richardson), as the war continues on a Medieval scale throughout the Pestilence Years.

The Boss (the most anti-intellectual nationalistic neoconservative authoritarian blowhard to never receive a Fox News paycheck) desperately wishes for technological superiority over his enemies, especially via air travel, but everyone knows that no such technology exists anymore.

Nonetheless, some scientists, such as Doctor Harding (Maurice Braddell) and the mechanic Richard Gordon (Derrick De Marney), refuse to believe that civilization can't still be saved through technology. Sure enough, a strange craft appears among the clouds. The Airman emerges: John Cabal, 30 years older but still looking sharp as the deus ex machina in a black rubber flightsuit and enormous bubble helmet.

He represents Wings Over the World, an enlightened society of scientists and engineers, and is scouting the land to assess the savage tribal communities that have replaced civilization. Cabal promises the people a new, superior civilization "of law and sanity" that needs no Bosses or independent sovereign states, but only if the people put their faith in Science rather than in the Boss and his kind.

Naturally, the Boss wants to prevent Cabal from taking away his power. He imprisons the Airman while he battles a neighboring tribe. The Boss' female companion, Roxana (Margaretta Scott) — apparently the only truly interesting woman in a hundred years — is intrigued by the freedom and intellectual curiosity that Cabal represents. With her aid, Cabal helps Gordon escape with a flying machine to World Communications (a "government of common sense"), where Gordon informs the technocratic elite of what has happened to Cabal in Everytown.

Soon mammoth flying fortresses appear over Everytown, defeat the Boss' forces, and drop Peace Gas which knocks out the populace. Cabal declares that the Boss is "dead, and his world dead with him." The people of Everytown awaken to the birth of a new planned society of reason.

In an impressive sequence, we witness the next 70 years pass in a montage as Mankind's immense machines rebuild the world phoenix-like from the ashes of primal ruination.

Finally, we reach 2036. Behold the new, improved Everytown — an enormous art deco Brave New World, an enclosed subterranean Raygun Gothic supercity as gleaming white as a Sunday school ideal of Heaven. A little girl receives a history lesson by her grandfather, and she expresses delight that people will "keep on inventing things and making life lovelier and lovelier." (I'm not against the sentiment at all, although a more irksome use of a child as a mouthpiece for the author won't happen again until Charlie Chaplin's A King in New York in 1957.) Every aspect of human life (except apparently the fashion industry) has never been better, thanks to Science.

However, not all is well. A sculptor, Theotocopulos (Cedric Hardwicke), represents reactionary artists and others unhappy with all this dehumanized progress, as symbolized by a gargantuan Space Gun built to shoot the first manned vehicle around the moon. (This was an old Jules Verne device that Wells in '36 must have known was scientifically ludicrous, but it looked great.) Theotocopulos calls for a revival of the olden days when life was "short and hot and merry" (when that was, or what he considers "hot and merry," he doesn't say).

On a building-sized television screen, he rails against the "evil gods" of progress, which must be halted by destroying the Space Gun.

Fortunately, the leader of Everytown is John Cabal's great-grandson, Oswald (Massey again), whose daughter Catherine (Pearl Argyle) is one of the two lunar-bound space pioneers. Her astro-companion is Maurice (Kenneth Viliers), whose father, Raymond Passworthy (Edward Chapman), is Oswald's friend who shares the fears spoken by Theotocopulos.

Oswald learns that Theotocopulos will lead an attack against the Space Gun. Choosing to continue the launch, Catherine and Maurice join Oswald and Passworthy in a helicopter to the launch complex. Theotocopulos keeps on rousing the rabble, who flock to the Space Gun with metal clubs like villagers from a Frankenstein film. Just in the nick of time, the bullet-like moonship is loaded into the launcher and blasted into space. (The fate of the dissidents nearest the "shock wave" is, probably mercifully, not revealed.)

Having grown up with space travel and exploration as a now almost humdrum reality, it's easy for us today to forget that in 1936 the notion was so much fairy-tale fantasy, even among science and rocket enthusiasts. Only the readers of the sci-fi pulp zines gave the notion any credence, and you know what they're like. Even 20 years later, in 1956, Astronomer Royal Richard Woolley decreed in Time magazine that space travel "is utter bilge." (Sputnik was launched the following year, the Apollo Program five years later.)

So this climax may be the most "visionary" element in Things to Come, and Wells gives it appropriate symbolic gravitas. In the movie's most famous sequence, Oswald and Passworthy stand before a huge vision screen spackled with the infinite starry cosmos. Oswald calls it a beginning, but Passworthy wonders if humans are nothing more than animals. Oswald declares that the choice is ours to make, although it's obvious that to Wells the answer is implicit in the question:

"For Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and ways, and then 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 each little scrap of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. Is it this? Or...all the universe?.... Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?"

There's no denying that Things to Come is majestic and earnest. Its sequences that burst their seams with science-fictional images are fascinating to watch, especially with one eye on cinematic heritage à la Fritz Lang's Metropolis (which Wells called, with no sense of irony, "the silliest of films").

Wells, Pearl Argyle, Raymond Massey

It's also, in every meaningful definition of the term, a propaganda film. And not an effective one. Wells' techno-fetishist future is as narrow a fantasy as one of those Star Trek episodes where ten character actors represent the entire population and cultures of a planetary civilization. Humanistic artists and progressive technocrats alike are reduced to types that exist only to personify extreme pinpoints of view. Wells trumpets the axiomatic superiority of a conformist and strictly secular society that would choke a Libertarian. As subtle as a hardbound copy of Wells' History of the World thumping your forehead, Things to Come's message states that individual lives and actions are of no consequence when compared to the progress and destiny of the entire human race. (Disciples of Ayn Rand's equally simpleminded counter-polemics should not view Things to Come with throwable objects nearby.)

The passing years have only added to the film's retro-future kitsch and to the frayed edges of its timeworn period milieu, such as its casual sexism and all-white utopia.

Nevertheless, for boldness of ambition and nobility of purpose, Things to Come stands tall in the canon of science fiction on screen. It's eyebrow-raising in its prescient depiction of the Blitz bombings of London in 1940 and of the war that followed. The Boss remains all too familiar today, whether in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or here in the U.S. (Perhaps the universe's perverse sense of humor made it inevitable that when the real 1970 came around we had Nixon and Vietnam.)

The film's visual magnitude, episodic structure, and emotional coldness make it an ancestor of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, another slow-moving, characterization-free exploration of Big Ideas. Wells' high-minded epilogue for Massey remains a fine summation of the drives behind some of the best science fiction.  Its closing benediction of space travel as the ultimate metaphor for human transcendence continues to sing, even as we're yanked forward into a disquietingly unpredictable 21st century.

For more about the film — a lot more — I recommend the Things to Come website and blog of Nick Cooper. I've never met Nick, but I believe him when he says that his quest for all things Things to Come is an "incurable obsession." Indeed, it pegs the red zone of the Obsessometer, and I raise my glass of Bushmill's to him for it.

He covers areas I've elected to not go into here, such as the footage that has been indelicately snipped or re-edited over the decades. (The most common edition these days — embedded below — is just shy of 93 minutes, while the original theatrical release clocked in at 130 minutes, a cut of almost 30%.) Nick's coverage of the excised footage includes imagery and script reproductions. His collection of advertising and promo material is likewise impressive.

Cooper also provides an audio commentary track on the UK DVD edition released in 2007, which seems to be the best DVD edition of the film currently available. My old pal Glenn Erickson (a.k.a "DVD Savant") provides a thorough look at that DVD at his site.


* Thomas C. Renzi, in his H.G. Wells: Six Scientific Romances Adapted for Film, quotes Wells' own notes about his rather unsatisfying apprenticeship in writing for the screen.

Music: Melody Gardot (mmmmm)
Near at hand: A shelf full of Donald Harington novels, which I've had a hankerin' to revisit lately.

San Francisco

Last month I mentioned that Elizabeth and I were going to spend some quality time in San Francisco, specifically at the Hotel Vertigo, a "newly-opened homage to Hitchcock." The building provided the exteriors for Vertigo's "Hotel Empire," one of several locations that featured prominently in James Stewart's struggle to maintain equilibrium.

Well, our week there ended yesterday and I'm pleased to report that it was every minute a pleasurable trip. Our purpose for going had nothing to do with movies or movie fandom, but — as in New York and London — a film buff can spot movie locations in San Francisco as easily as doughnut shops and art students. Dirty Harry, Bullitt, Petulia, The Conversation, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.... Staying at the Hotel Vertigo was an irresistible whim, and while the Tenderloin district wouldn't ordinarily be my first (or second, or...) choice of SF neighborhoods, the area served us well, especially being as close at it is to transit hubs and therefore to everywhere else we wanted to go.

The hotel doesn't go overboard on the Hitchcock references (the decor stays outside the definition of kitsch), though it did provide this view just down the hall from our sixth-floor room:

Along with movie locations, San Francisco of course foams over the brim with literary references, another plus for the Mrs. and me. So imagine our happy jumping-up-and-downness when we discovered that the Vertigo was within two blocks of one of Dashiell Hammett's digs at the corner of Post & Hyde — the building, in fact, where he wrote The Maltese Falcon and gave Sam Spade an address.

 

Yours truly at the shrine.

During that same walk to breakfast we also stumbled across William Saroyan's old stomping grounds. The neighborhood being the historical performance nightspot for habitués Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, and other jazz greats didn't hurt either.

When we got to the Embarcadero, naturally I was reminded of 1955's It Came from Beneath the Sea, where a souped-up cephalopod pulls apart the Golden Gate Bridge and the Ferry Building, reaches up to thwack a helicopter from the sky, and writhes its tentacles through Market Street as the military opens up with flame-throwers. Unlike later Harryhausen creations, this pissed-off 'pus isn't given any personality beyond being a Giant Rampaging Thing, but it looks great until Kenneth Tobey's atomic torpedo kicks off the Bay Area calamari trade.

Speaking of Ray Harryhausen...

Although not a movie reference, this enormous sculpture in front of City Hall — titled Three Heads Six Arms — absolutely brought to mind certain Sinbad and Argonaut films showcasing Mr. H's "Dynamation" artistry. I half-expected the thing to come to life and make a grab for me.

We also were driven by "the Mrs. Doubtfire place," but it would take more than that to sour our week.

"No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living." — William Saroyan

"I was married once — in San Francisco. I haven't seen her for many years. The great earthquake and fire in 1906 destroyed the marriage certificate. There's no legal proof. Which proves that earthquakes aren't all bad." — W.C. Fields

 

Pic Pick: Screw CGI

If this image doesn't move you, you're beyond human reach.

Via Astronomy Picture of the Day, which provides info and context.

Laurel & Hardy meet Santana

This just makes me happy.

The clip is from Way Out West (1937). 

Via my old DVD Journal colleague and partner in Firefly comics, Mike Russell, whose splendid lengthy interview with Bloom County's Berkeley Breathed is really making the rounds.

Pic pick: Perspective

When I have a suckass day, I put it all into perspective by thinking about the men's room attendant at the International House of Asparagus.

Octoberfilms: Night of the Demon (1957) — The hell you say

When it comes to movies appropriate for Halloween marathoning, my favorites aren't those that aim to generate jolts to my limbic system with in-your-face "Boo!" or "Ick!" shocks. Instead I prefer the movies that subtly drill a tendril into my brain to pick the lock on those primitive fears waiting under my mind's bedframe since childhood.

However, these days the term "horror movie" elicits greater expectations of CGI eyeball kicks than of goosebumpy chills. While I love as much as anyone the high-tech eyeball kicks that serve the cause of creeping me the fuck out (The Ring and John Carpenter's The Thing come to mind), when I make a list of recent horror movies my strongest shock reaction is to warm up my coffee while wondering if I can find good parodies of them at Funny or Die or The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror."

You know those classic Warner Brothers cartoons where Foghorn Leghorn lifts up the big snarly dog by the tail and whales on its ass with a two-by-four? That's what I'd like to do to everyone behind such recent whipped dogs as Jennifer's Body, The Human Centipede, and this year's remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

So I seek out those movies that genuinely know how to push my buttons — which means that they know where to find my buttons, when to push them (and, equally important, when not to), and how to push them in such a way that I'm not too aware that the movie has its long, bony finger on my button in the first place. They demonstrate that atmospherics, mood, and suggestion can be more effective than power-sprayer special effects, and that the scariest monsters are those you can't see, at least not clearly (e.g., Alien), because a monster imagined is always worse than a monster standing naked in the studio lights. (Controversially and arguably, our subject film at hand proves the point by, reportedly due to a producer's meddling, briefly violating it.)

For me, Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) is a nonpareil of that second category. Accompanying it on my list of Top 10 Favorite Scary Movies are such films as  The Innocents, Alien, Psycho, The Changeling, Quatermass and the Pit, The Wicker Man (1973 only), and a modest but effective thriller of necromancy and devilry that's a high point in British genre cinema, Night of the Demon.

This spooky gothic number from 1957 played in the U.S. in a recut release, 13 minutes shorter, titled Curse of the Demon.

Under either title, any self-respecting horror cineaste with a taste for period genre stylings and precision craftsmanship can go here for an intelligent script directed with mastery and style by Jacques Tourneur, protégé of the great Val Lewton in the '40s.

Stephen King, in his nonfiction book on horror fiction, Danse Macabre, places Demon on his list of films that contributed something of value to the genre, and gives it a special asterisk as one of his personal favorites. Not a bad recommendation, and it's only right to add that Night/Curse of the Demon is a movie that lots of its fans remember with affection and respect from their childhoods — because that's when it scared the crap out of them.



Here's a deceptively simple story exceptionally well told, its pulse beating beneath its skin with Tourneur keeping its lub-dub steady from start to finish.

American psychologist John Holden (Dana Andrews) arrives in rural England (not far from Stonehenge, which figures in the proceedings) to headline a parapsychology conference. A die-hard skeptic and debunker ("not a superstitious sucker"), his very public aim is to disprove the alleged black magic of "witch cult" leader Dr. Julian Karswell, played with smooth affability by Niall MacGinnis.

However, Holden's local colleague, Professor Harrington (Maurice Denham), has realized that their investigations into Karswell's group have uncovered demonological truths too terrible to dismiss, and Harrington begs Karswell to "stop what has begun." But the scientist recants too late. The urbane and polite sorcerer reminds Harrington that "You said, 'Do your worst,' and that's precisely what I did." Not even Karswell can halt what is underway, and deep in the night-black woods Harrington perishes violently by a giant hellish creature, his death occurring at a date and time predicted to the minute by Karswell.

Karswell had passed to Harrington an ancient strip of parchment inscribed with occult runes. The runes can invoke a demon that kills any person possessing the parchment. And not just any bush-league demon either — we're talking a monstrous fire demon "whose legend has persisted through civilization after civilization.... Babylonian Baal, Egyptian Sethtyphon, Persian Asmodeus, Hebraich Moloch."

The curse can be broken only by stealthily passing the parchment to someone else, and after Holden arrives and pokes too closely into Karswell's business, he turns out to be the latest unbeliever to whom Karswell slips the demonic death warrant.

Much of Demon's tension arises from our watching Holden pull the runes from his pocket and place them back again, the paper fluttering as if alive, while he refuses to recognize the terror stalking him. Holden is our anchor, our point of view that must be convinced of the dark forces on the loose in the dark, and his ghostly encounters in dark hallways, alone in the woods, in a lonely farmhouse, and other scenes where the overriding question is "Who's there?" do the job thoroughly.

Peggy Cummins also stars as Harrington's attractive niece, kindergarten teacher Joanna. She occupies the middle ground between Holden's obstinate skepticism and Karswell's witchcraft beliefs. Joanna is as level-headed as any educated modern woman, but unlike Holden she's willing to acknowledge the evidence that's before her eyes.

Demon takes full advantage of this collision of realities: stiff-necked modern matter-of-factness vs. ancient supernatural magicks. It's a theme seen again and again in British genre films of the '50s and '60s, and a duality well suited for a British setting, where the isles' stiff-upper-lip pragmatism occupies the same space as Stonehenge and haunted castles. Karswell understands these dueling dogmas far better than Holden could ever hope to.

The cold light of reason, Holden is told, casts very deep shadows. It's Joanna who at the very end, after witnessing the horrific climax of Karswell's demonic conjurings, declares that perhaps it's better not to know some things.

After Holden calls Karswell "crazy," the rotund necromancer replies genially, "On the contrary, it's you who seem to be slightly unhinged," and we have to give Karswell the point on that round. It's worth considering the evidence that in this story's reality it's Karswell and his little cult who have the more accurate bead on how the modern cosmos operates, not Holden and his scientific materialism. Within the opening minutes, we in the audience witness hard evidence that the supernatural horrors are certifiably real. For the remaining running time that awareness steers our feelings regarding the doggedly skeptical Holden — he may be the narrative hero, but the guy is so pig-headed, so self-righteous, so willfully closed-minded that we know something's going to come along to corkscrew his thinking before the closing credits.

Although well-regarded today, Demon's reputation took time to amp up.

Considered little more than filler during its initial distribution, in the U.S. Curse of the Demon was double-billed as the "B" entry with Hammer's Revenge of Frankenstein. We can imagine a typical American moviegoer's reaction to such a pair of dissimilar creature features — Hammer's garish full-color EC Comics sensibilities paired up with Demon's more sedate, suspenseful, black-and-white turns of the screw. (John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows has a rather marvelous two-part history of that pairing's American distribution experience.) In the U.K., Night of the Demon was paired up with Ray Harryhausen's 20 Million Miles to Earth, making another set of mismatched socks.

Over the decades it has accrued an admirable level of respect among genre devotees. That was helped by Forrest Ackerman's monthly subscription favorite, Famous Monsters of Filmland, which carried tantalizing images and descriptions of the movie throughout the '60s and '70s. Then the June/July '87 copy of Filmfax made it a cover feature. It's been only spottily shown on TV, but more and more it has appeared on the bill at international film festivals and university campuses. Today it's recognized as a first-rate specimen of its form, a textbook model of how to make an unsettling paranormal movie.

And no doubt some of the film's appreciators discovered it thanks to a line from Rocky Horror Picture Show's famous opening song: "Dana Andrews said prunes / Gave him the runes / And passing them used lots of skills."


Jacques Tourneur was a master craftsman who was himself the son of director Maurice Tourneur. By 1942 he was Val Lewton's first director when Lewton headed the new horror unit at RKO. Their partnership led to some of the most lauded films of the genre: Cat People ('42), I Walked with a Zombie ('43), and The Leopard Man ('43), all displaying Tourneur's command of visually rich composition and precision-targeted atmosphere, with Cat People in particular being an artistic and commercial success. Tourneur went on to helm other fine work as diverse as westerns, comedies, and the film noir classic Out of the Past. He directed one of the earliest episodes of TV's The Twilight Zone.

With the arguable exception of a few key shots reportedly inserted against his wishes — more on that shortly — Tourneur concocted a tightly wound suspense film that would awe a Swiss watchmaker. Like Lewton before him, he employed every tool in his kit to control the goings-on and catch us off our guard.

Demon displays an exquisite sensitivity to the use of light and shadow, and Tourneur accents meticulously architectural dark compositions and sunny outdoor scenes alike with little epiphanies, sudden surprises, Hitchcockian camera work, and cool spritzes of humor. Every scene, shot, and sound counts, and the result is a deliciously "Lovecraftian" mood film that could make ol' H.P. himself shake off his New England funk.

The screenplay is credited to writer Charles Bennett, who scripted several of Hitchcock's better British films in the '30s (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Sabotage, etc.), and producer Hal E. Chester. They drew inspiration from M.R. James' Edwardian ghost story, "Casting the Runes," opening up the story into a screenplay that's clever, subtle, and refreshingly chooses not to insult its audience.

Other names here are cinematographer Ted Scaife (The Dirty Dozen, also contributed to The Third Man and The African Queen), production designer Ken Adam (Dr. Strangelove, numerous James Bond films, Addams Family Values), and composer Clifton Parker.

It's a rare pleasure to find a good villain, and Demon sports a terrific one in Niall MacGinnis' scene-stealing performance as Karswell, a character templated on that infamous showboating Satanist, Aleister Crowley. Fantasy fans will recognize MacGinnis as Zeus in Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts. Because Demon avoids flinty good guy/bad guy dichotomies, here's an antagonist far removed from the cackling stereotypes of Satanic high priests in starched Ming of Mongo collars.

Against Dana Andrews' self-consciously flat and steadfastly boorish unbeliever, MacGinnis' Karswell is simultaneously several contradictory things — a dangerously powerful occult religious leader, a charming trickster who hosts children's Halloween parties at his remote country mansion (where he lives with his doting mother and performs magic shows as Bobo the clown), a sympathetic bloke just securing a living in his chosen field, and a genuinely frightening master of platinum-card witchcraft.

"Oh yes, I don't think it would be too amusing for the youngsters if I conjured up a demon from hell for them."

MacGinnis' engaging work leaves open the question of whether Karswell is a true Satan-sanctioned diabolist who learned demon-summoning through long study, or else was once just a dweeby Anton LeVay fanboy who got lucky by stumbling across that magic parchment, then puffed himself up to wealth and power like a goateed Jerry Falwell.

Either way, when Karswell explains to his mother that their mansion and high-living lifestyle derive from what his followers give them out of fear, he confesses that he cannot stop what has begun because of his fear for his own life. "This house, the land, the way we live. Nothing for nothing. My followers who pay for this do it out of fear. And I do what I do out of fear also. It's part of the price.... Because if it's not someone else's life, it'll be mine. Do you understand, mother? It'll be mine "

Not even Holden, whose skepticism comes as rigid as a Stonehenge megalith, can ultimately deny the potentially lethal presence of supernatural forces associated with Karswell. Once Holden is told that he is marked for death by a gigantic demon next Tuesday at 10 p.m. sharp, those forces appear to be approaching closer and closer and....

A number of memorable moments stay with you after the closing credits:

• The thing in the woods. First pursuing Harrington, then Holden, that billowing smoky Hellmouth cloud out of which the demon materializes inspires Harrington's cry, "It's in the trees! It's coming!" — a line sampled by Kate Bush in her song "Hounds of Love." 

• The wind storm. One of the best scenes occurs at the children's party, when Karswell gives Holden a pointed demonstration by whipping up a wind storm as casually as lighting a cigarette. The eerie magicks contrast with Karswell's Bobo clown makeup and glib offhandedness. "I didn't know you had cyclones in England," the befuddled scientist says, to which "Bobo" responds, "We don't. You could probably use a drink." Tourneur was justifiably proud of this scene, its effects accomplished with four strapped-down airplane engines. 

• The Lewtonisms. By the time he signed on for Demon, Tourneur was a veteran director who had learned much by working for Lewton, whose contribution to the filmmakers toolchest included sudden emotional hits achieved through sleight-of-hand visual and aural legerdemain. Demon is punctuated by "Lewtonesque" touches that, through misdirection and expert timing, jolt you with simple sounds and objects. Some jumps here are delivered solely by blows from the soundtrack.
  
  (In a possible hat-tip to Lewton's Cat People, Tourneur sends Holden into a confrontation with a house cat that transforms into an attacking leopard; the effect is one of two brief moments of embarrassment in the film, as the savage beast is too clearly stuffed. The second such moment occurs soon afterward with a shot of the moon and, nearby, three equally bright stars that blink off and back on in unison as if a stagehand leaned against a toggle switch.)

• The clinical hypnosis scene, in which a local True Believer — catatonic after a prior encounter with the demon of the parchment — finds relief by leaping through a high window, pointing to harrowing consequences in store for one of the attending hypnotists, the coolly rational Holden. 

• The seance. After being etherically attracted by a screeching singalong of "Cherry Ripe", the deceased Prof. Harrington speaks from The Great Beyond to warn Holden that he is indeed quite satanically fucked.

• The climactic train sequence. From the final confrontation between Karswell and Holden to a doomed and futile chase along the tracks, leading to the towering millennia-old demon taking wrathful vengeance like one of Lovecraft's Otherworldly Terrors. In a manner not unlike what Jaws did for coastal beach swimming, Demon may have given riders on the 8:45 to Southampton reason to take a pause.

•  The appearance of the titular demon, which brings us to this movie's controversial sticky wicket....

Sit down at any film fan convention bar over White Russians and Manhattans, and you can't engage in a learned discussion on Night of the Demon for more than 60 seconds before the heated topic of "It" comes up. "It" is the appearance of the title demon itself. Does it help the overall movie, or does it kneecap Tourneur's well-tuned mood and tone? No matter who starts the topic, a fight's going to break out and some poor M. Night Shyamalan fan is going to end up hiding under the table.

Different sources tell differing stories about how much Tourneur knew and approved (or didn't) regarding the demon's two boldly realized materializations, one near the beginning, the other at the climax. Did the director really never intend for the demon to be seen at all, his personal aesthetic calling for complete ambiguity? Or did he plan for its presence but visible only in hazy, ill-defined forms? Some Demon scholars have made a case for Tourneur knowing about the demon as we see it all along. After all, it was in the original script and its presence had been discussed pre-production. The full-figure winged version of the beast is so well integrated into the body of the film that it's hard to imagine Tourneur not having some foreknowledge of its presence.

Almost every account attributes the final demon images — achieved via some fairly obvious puppetry and an ornate animal-like head used for screen-filling close-ups — to 11th-hour insertions authorized by producer Hal Chester, who decided that a full-blown "monster" would make the film more commercial. (Notice that it's the central image in the theatrical poster art.) That decision is said to have outraged Tourneur, scenarist Bennett, and actor Andrews.

 

In the Summer '73 issue of Cinefantastique magazine, Tourneur himself gave his sharply worded remembrance:

"I wanted, at the very end, when the train goes by, to include only four frames of the monster coming up with the guy and throwing him down. Boom, boom — did I see it or didn't I?.... But after I had finished and returned to the United States, the English producer made this horrible thing, cheapened it. It was like a very different film."

Here's Tourneur speaking to the French film magazine Midi-minuit fantastique, as printed in Chris Fujiwara's Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall:

"The scenes in which you really see the demon were shot without me. All except one. I shot the sequence in the woods where Dana Andrews is chased by this sort of cloud. This technique should have been used for the other sequences. The audience should never have been completely certain of having seen the demon. They should have just unveiled it little by little, without ever really showing it. They ruined the film by showing it from the very beginning with a guy we don’t know opening his garage, who doesn’t interest us in the least."

Likewise, Bennett is on record (in Pat McGilligan's Backstory 1: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age) decrying that Chester...

"...messed up the screenplay quite a bit. It was so good, the screenplay, that it couldn't be completely destroyed, only half destroyed. It's still considered a good movie. I think the job Jacques Tourneur did with what Hal Chester gave him was awfully good. Hal Chester, as far as I'm concerned, if he walked up my driveway right now, I'd shoot him dead." 

Also:

"I had to sit by while Chester made the biggest balls up of a good script that I have ever seen.... somehow the movie, perhaps because the fundamentals of my screenplay couldn't be entirely wiped out, succeeded. To add insult to injury I frequently get letters, even now, from cult-type organizations, asking me to write something about Night of the Demon because it is still loved in peculiar areas."

Honestly, I love his supercilious old-fartism when mentioning "cult-type organizations" in "peculiar areas." We call them movie lovers, Mr. Bennett, and they're damn near everywhere these days.

However, even with these damning testimonials, there's room to say, "Hold on a minute here."

Britain's Today's Cinema at the time singled out the "thrills from well-staged giant fiery demon in the woods and on the railway." Danny Peary, in his first of three Cult Movies books, wrote "I believe most critics dislike the demon for no other reason than they know it was studio-imposed.... I am in favor of this vile creature as big as a house and ugly as sin.... It's the scariest monster in film history as far as I'm concerned (no matter that others think it ludicrous)." In his book Classics of the Horror Film, critic and film historian William K. Everson hailed the apparition as "such a lulu that it lives up to the fearsome descriptions of it."

I'm one of enthusiasts who sees the beast an essential pleasure of the film. Its first appearance early in the story sets up anticipation for an even bigger pay-off later on, and that pay-off delivers the goods. 

Similarly, opinions on the creature's design range all over the map. To some the demon, especially in its distant winged formed, looks as shudderingly authentic as any hell-beast in a medieval woodcut from Häxan (aka Witchcraft Through the Ages). Naysayers, however, assert that the winged version is too obviously a puppet or a man in a costume. Some see in the close-up model head a well-wrought Stygian terror, others a mood-shattering resemblance to, say, the aforementioned snarly dog from the Warner Brothers cartoons.

To me, what we have here is mostly a matter of insensitive editing — the rather vague full-body shots look great, but the close-up model head is overused. It shouts when the rest of the film whispers.

So is the demon a flaw in an otherwise polished gem, or a worthwhile facet in the gem's structure? In either case, it's not on screen long enough to destroy the Night of the Demon's many virtues, and there's something to be said for a monster that sends eight-year-olds scurrying behind the couch, making them fans for life.

Music: "Shoot To Kill," by Quincy Jones, from the movie Mirage. Via Crime Jazz: Murder in the Second Degree.
Near at hand: Elizabeth, prepping a requested agent proposal for her novel, The Seventy.