The Time Machine (1960) — Taking you where you want to go

"I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's culminating time! ... He, I know — for the question had been discussed among us before the Time Machine was made — thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end." — H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1895


"It was intoxicating!" — Rod Taylor as the Time Traveler, The Time Machine, 1960


As I mentioned at the top of my last post, on the 1936 H.G. Wells movie Things to Come, I've been meaning to blogify the 1960 George Pal production of Wells' The Time Machine for a while. So here I sit, the day after Thanksgiving, having just slid the DVD out of the player, marveling at how enjoyable The Time Machine still is, how well it holds up in its fiftieth year.

I often find that movies I enjoyed in my youth are better off in my memory than when I revisit them again. In this case, I may like the movie even more now. Or at least I appreciate it more, recognizing its craft and acknowledging its charms with movie-watching experience well beyond the gosh-wow of my back-then kid self. That gosh-wow is still there for me, almost surprisingly, making The Time Machine, for all its Saturday-morning-cereal-box flavor and pop, still one of my favorite vintage science-fiction adventure films.

In the intervening years I've backfilled my understanding of where Pal's movie came from by reading and loving Wells' seminal novel (available online here, here, and here). So I'm compelled to start there when chatting about the movie, much the same way I pulled various threads together when I posted about The War of the Worlds from Wells' novel to Pal's 1956 movie and two hypothetical Hitchcock versions. In each case, the differences and similarities between the book and the movie, and what they say about the times they emerged from, are fascinating (well, to me at least).


The Time Machine: 1895

The Time Machine, the debut novel of a young, ideological Herbert George Wells, reflects its author's bleakly dystopian, anti-capitalist worldview in a Darwinian cautionary parable. Wells, after all, didn't set out to write merely an entertaining page-turner. A self-made social reformer who climbed up and out from brutal working-class poverty, Wells sought to deliver a trenchant "If this goes on" message.

In the book, the unnamed Time Traveler tells of his voyage to the year 802,701, a time in which humanity has degenerated into two species sculpted not by God but by nature's indifferent efficiency. The delicate and placid Eloi — descendants of the wealthy and privileged — live in edenic bounty and "feeble prettiness" on Earth's surface (in the space that had been the Time Traveler's home, in fact), unaware that they are merely bred and fed to become food for the Morlocks — descendants of the working class who have devolved into cannibalistic subterranean brutes feeding off the do-nothing, illiterate "Upper-world people."

The Time Traveler is an observer only, speculating and theorizing about what forces brought mankind to such straits. "It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged." There's a moment in chapter 4 where he climbs to the crest of a hill and finds a sort of golden throne, "a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognize, corroded in places ... the arm-rests cast and filed into the resemblance of griffins’ heads." There he sits and surveys "the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day." But his position as an authority figure in this strange world is merely figurative. He is not an adventurer-savior.

Near the novel's end is a beautifully rendered scene set eons later still. Here the final, gasping breath of evolution, human and otherwise, is embodied in a single tentacled creature on a beach beneath a bloated red sun at the twilight of the world. It's a Dying Earth scenario lit by loneliness and failure and Ozymandian futility.

To Wells' fellow fin-de-siécle Victorian intelligentsia, the contemporary social issues magnified for easy dissection in The Time Machine (and throughout Wells' career) pointed to a human race doomed by its own animal nature and trapped within the engine of capital-N Nature, which is — as he later described the minds of his Martian invaders — "vast and cool and unsympathetic."

As in the 1960 movie, the fraught, disheveled Time Traveler spins his tale to a cluster of (mostly) disbelieving dinner guests — the narrator, the Editor, the Medical Man, the Psychologist, the Very Young Man, and Filby. The final moments of the final chapter see the Time Traveler spiriting himself back to the future, leaving the narrator...

...waiting for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.

Wells doesn't tell us the Time Traveler's ultimate fate in the vasty deeps of Time. However, perhaps he does provide a hint: In Chapter 2 the narrator mentions the mysterious Silent Man, "a quiet, shy man with a beard," at the dinner table. As Glenn "DVD Savant" Erickson (a movie-watching kindred spirit of long correspondence) says at his site:

"The Silent Man is obviously the Time Traveler himself, returned at an advanced age. Older but perhaps wiser, he's there just to contemplate his younger self. His motive has to be guessed at, and it is easy to read into his blankness anything one wants."

This sly nuance by Wells, if that's what it is (and I do believe it is) pleases me mightily — this suggestion not just of some self-directed circularity in the Time Traveler's life, but also of Time's potential mutability, and therefore the possibility, however slim, that the bleak, pointless future the Time Traveler witnessed can be avoided, undone. At least that's my read on it. I am a "this time machine is half full" kind of guy.

The Time Machine: 1960

The Time Machine, the movie produced and directed by George Pal fifty years ago, reflects a very different time and a very different audience. While Wells' story is social class commentary wrapped within a stark narrative fable, Pal's movie is a brightly colored sweetmeat with all the indicting political ideology of a buttered scone. It's a Boy's Own adventure complete with handsome square-jawed inventor undertaking a journey through the Fourth Dimension to a new world complete with monsters, fisticuffs, rescues, escapes, and a keen awareness of our protagonist's superiority to the poor benighted heathens in his midst. He is every inch the adventurer-savior. Along the way, the memorable orchestral score by Russell Garcia hits all the right stirring emotional notes.

Wells' story ends with a sigh at Mankind's ultimately insignificant place in an indifferent cosmos. Pal's ends with an optimistic romantic hero returning to the future to lead the Eloi out of their Dark Ages and into a new Enlightenment of learning and questioning and, one presumes, other proper English virtues.



One can imagine Wells — righteously angry at Mankind's foibles and predilection for self-destruction — riding his Time Machine to our present and viewing the fruits of Mr. Pal's labor in the Wells vineyard. What would be Wells' reaction? In a word, he would plotz.

But does that make Pal's movie a poor adaptation?

Not at all. Certainly not if you're 15 years old, as I was when I first watched The Time Machine on a weekend afternoon between one TV program and another. I loved it. So I admit to a certain prejudice while saying that, after watching it again decades later, I still love it.

Is it hokum? Sure, much of it. The titular machine itself, as envisioned by Pal in one of the classic pieces of pre-CGI model-making, is perhaps symbolic of the movie as a whole: It's a charmingly magical fantasy contraption; its apparati are all aglitter with polished brass finishes and faceted crystal; the rider's compartment is cozy with red velvet cushions and tasteful Victorian filigree scrollwork. It's clean and functional, here and there a little gaudy, and isn't stained by any over-abundant motor oil of logic. It does, however, take you where you want to go.

The movie stars Rod Taylor as the Time Traveler, now named George. Taylor soon after went on to provide the voice of Pongo in One Hundred and One Dalmatians and then reached his first career peak as the leading man in The Birds. His appearance as Churchill in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds was, for me, one of that film's numerous pleasant surprises.

Likewise, Taylor's solid performance as George is one of the many likeable elements in The Time Machine. He's a true Pal protagonist — a driven, earnest man of learning who still has what it takes to beat the baddies and get the girl, a model for males throughout the Western world. Even when fighting a mob of Morlocks in their cavernous lair strewn with the remains of cannibalistic feasts, Taylor's hair is never mussed — and that looks exactly right.

Alan Young co-stars as David Filby, George's best and most loyal friend. His is the voice of restraint that tells George there are things Man was not meant to know, that he should be content to live in his own present world, that one should not tempt fate in the name of upstart wanderlust. He provides the conservative counterpoint to George's idealistic questing:

"I have no desire to tempt the laws of Providence, and I don't think you should. It's not for Man to trifle with.... There is something to say about the common-sense attitude to life. If that machine can do what you say it can do, destroy it, George! Destroy it before it destroys you!"

Filby chides George with such kindly, brotherly concern that when we learn what becomes of Filby in the near future the movie offers one of its few moments of touching poignancy. Young, in fact, plays two characters, the second being Filby's son Jamie, whom George meets in the future. But more on that shortly.

The inevitable MGM add-on love interest is delivered by Yvette Mimieux as the young Eloi woman Weena. Granted, perhaps you shouldn't watch the movie with a female friend possessing strong feelings about the depiction of women on screen (Elizabeth's imitation of Weena is a scream). Vapid and childlike, Weena single-handedly sets back 800,000+ years of women's progress. She is the evolutionary end of all "dumb blonde" jokes, and apparently retains an excellent hairdresser.

This being 1960 Hollywood, Mimieux is just dandy as the fantasy girlfriend of earnest inventors and 15-year-old boys everywhere. She's not just pretty. Better yet, she's innocent and compliant — and, we can infer, unfettered by all those socially imposed sexual hangups that are so anti-evolutionary. (C'mon, you don't have to be 15 to imagine what's waiting for George, our Competent Man avatar, when in the end he chooses to leave our time and return to Weena's side. "To help build a new world" my ass.)

To the credit of Pal and screenwriter David Duncan, many of the bolts and rivets of Wells' plot remain intact — in particular, the opening scene (set in a Christmas-card London, New Years Eve 1899) of George demonstrating his bric-a-brac model Machine for his disbelieving friends (a fine supporting cast headlined by Young, Sebastian Cabot, and Whitt Bissell).

 

Removed are a number of Wells' later, bleaker scenes (including the aforementioned End Of The World) and, of course, most of that messy Darwinian indictment of modern class power structure.

What's added provides little bulk to the rest of Wells' plot, so the story here is pretty thin. Still, the scenes of George witnessing the passing years and decades of the 20th century are perhaps the most interesting part of the movie.

When people talk about the special effects in Pal's Time Machine, this is very likely the sequence they're talking about. Remember that we're talking about a movie made a generation before CGI and computer-controlled camera work, the "In my day we walked ten miles through snow up to our beltloops to get to school" days of cinematic fantasy-making. In a sequence that today strikes you as either brilliant or cheesy (or both) depending on your sensibilities, George observes the accelerated rush of Time and Fashion by the amusing time-lapse changes occurring on a department store mannequin. The Time Machine's stop-motion and time-lapse trickery won 1961's Academy Award for Best Special Effects, and while they may look a tad dated today, they still display an economy and purpose that exceed even some of today's bloated and less mindful CGI extravaganzas.

Other scenes that exist only in the movie have George making brief stops during his initial journey forward. These scenes set up what can be considered Pal's equivalent of Wells' narrative diatribe. However, in 1960 Cold War insecurities had trumped Victorian class consciousness for an audience's attention. Pausing to look around in 1917, George meets young James Filby (Alan Young again), a soldier newly returned from "the front." When Filby tells George the fate of Filby Sr., he buttresses the Time Traveler's disgust at modern man's instinct for warfare. When George departs this world at war he immediately arrives in another, stopping in 1940 during a blitz bombing of his London neighborhood.

Then in 1966 (six years in the movie's future) he arrives just in time to hear the air raid sirens and to encounter young Filby Jr. again, now an old man in a silver radiation suit leading others to the neighborhood fallout shelter because of an "atomic satellite zeroing in." Mushroom clouds ("the labor of centuries, gone in an instant") and the violent response of Planet Earth herself almost prevent George from reaching his Time Machine and propelling himself far, far into a future that he is sure will have evolved into an enlightened utopia free from our primitive barbarism.

"One vast garden," he says of his initial explorations when he finally arrives. "At last I found a paradise!" It isn't long before he discovers just how wrong he is on that point.

It's the 20th-century Cold War adornments — air raid sirens, underground shelters, and the phrase "all clear" — that set up the world George finds in the year 802,701.

Pal's extrapolation isn't as thought-provoking and weighty as Wells', and it's Wells' that arguably has aged better. Give Pal's vision its due, though. As he did four years later with another fantasy fave of mine, The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, by weaving a thread, however thin, of contemporary commentary into his movie, Pal's Time Machine steps up a rung from what studio executives probably considered little more than children's fare. And for us today watching the movie, it provides a look back to a time when the possibilities of bomb shelters and air raid sirens and atomic annihilation were real enough to make Pal's Eloi and Morlocks, if not possible, then at least unnervingly plausible.

The rest of the movie proceeds briskly in expected pulp magazine fashion. The vacuously innocent — and universally blond — Eloi enjoy their sunlit existence of mindless frolicking and consuming, without knowledge of reading, writing, or even fire.

George rails:

"What have you done? Thousands of years of building and rebuilding, creating and recreating so you can let it crumble to dust. A million years of sensitive men dying for their dreams. For what? So you can swim and dance and play!"

Meanwhile the few surviving books crumble to dust untouched and unread. Necessary exposition comes from the Talking Rings (voiced by the ubiquitous Paul Frees), mechanisms so ancient and underpowered that they can only hint at the history of the preceding 800,000 years. George frowns at the story they tell, while Weena looks on smiling at the incomprehensible toys.

Down below, the degenerate, nocturnal Morlocks tend the chugging machinery and surface periodically to harvest the "fatted cattle" Eloi for their own grisly larders.

To all this our hero arrives, explores, endures, pontificates, and punches Morlocks in the snoot, all with his best girl by his side.

Naturally enough, he becomes both a savior and role model action hero for the Eloi, who learn from him that one can rise up and thump one's oppressors with fists and aggression, and that active self-determination is the first step toward freedom (and, let's be waggish, toward starvation and privation resulting from the wreckage of what had been a comfortable economic system, if like the Eloi you're ignorant of all that cannibalistic feasting and stuff). Watching him set this essentially alien civilization aright, I can't help but consider how on-the-money Taylor would be have been if cast as Star Trek's Capt. Kirk six years later.

Don't worry about the built-in story conveniences. Expect to chuckle out loud at least once. So the Eloi speak perfect English even if they can't spell "social Darwinism." So the chubby, green-skinned Morlocks' winky-blink lightbulb eyes look silly. So Taylor saves humanity by blowing up an underground complex roughly the size of a city block. George Pal knew what he wanted and accomplished it with aplomb and his own period style and verve, just as H.G. took care of his own creative goals and audiences. Pal replaced Wells' grim prognostication with a sense of wonder that's still effective today.

Pal's Time Machine is simplistic but avoids being merely simple-minded. It's a puff pasty. Tea with jam and bread. The movie makes an interesting bookend for Pal's earlier and darker War of the Worlds, his even looser adaptation of a Wells novel. Playing compare-contrast between them justifies a double-feature evening.

George Pal

Then, to give you a peek into the kind of motion picture Wells felt more at home with, cap the evening with Things to Come (1936), for which Wells wrote the screenplay. That one is more impressive in terms of "vision" and conceptual scale, plus keeps Wells' tendency toward ideological pontification intact. On the other hand, while Things to Come may have more thoughtful meat on its bones, I can guarantee that you'll have a better time with Pal's adaptations. So I recommend sandwiching the real Wells between the other two, finishing on a high note with The Time Machine.


The current DVD of The Time Machine (and Amazon's "on demand" streaming) adds a fine 50-minute behind-the-scenes documentary, The Time Machine: The Journey Back, hosted by Rod Taylor and featuring Alan Young and Whit Bissell. Produced in 1993, it focuses on the production and special effects, with special attention given to what ultimately became of the Time Machine prop itself (talk about salvation from the brink of oblivion!).

Then the documentary takes an unusual, warm turn near the end with a charming vignette, a real "Journey Back" in the form of a mini-sequel to the movie made thirty years before. Rod Taylor's George — much older yet still virile — returns in the Time Machine to his laboratory. The resulting scene between George and Filby (a suitably gray-haired Young) offers a touching coda that honors both characters and the movie they helped bring to life.

I like to think that even ol' H.G. himself would approve.

Music: a Fats Waller compilation
Near at hand: Shakespeare figure standing in conversation with a tin robot figure.

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.