Down Mexico way...

When I first started to actively collect items related to Things to Come, one of the first I failed to secure was one of a set of lobby cards used to promote the film in Mexico in 1947. Over the years, no other copy of the same card turned up, but in the last few months I've been lucky enough to acquire originals of five others, which can now be seen in the Publicity Material Gallery on my website. Each features a relatively high quality production still, framed alongside a stunning illustration by an unknown artist, although to describe it as an exaggeration of what actually appears in the film would be an understatement! I've also added a set of 1970s German lobby cards that I acquired very early on, but have only just got round to scanning, and a nice 1936 cigarette card featuring the film. [Disclaimer: This blog does not endorse smoking!]

I was quite surprised to realise that the last time I did an upload of TTC photographs was almost eleven months ago! I've now added another 25 images to the various sub-galleries. A number are actually the images used on the above-mentioned Mexican and German lobby cards, or otherwise from sources that are not actual original photographic prints, but are significant enough to merit inclusion. In any case, after a bit of study of the relevent UK copyright laws (i.e. until my eyes started bleeding), it's clear that all the photographs from the film are now actually in the public domain, anyway, so really anything goes....

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One step forwards, two steps back

My incurable obsession with the film Things to Come dictates that I regularly (i.e. pretty much every day!) check eBay for related items, so it was with some surprise that in doing so I recently found the DVD release seen here.

From the cover it was clear that this was a UK release of the American Legend Films "colorized" version that came out in 2006. Things to Come was for many years in the public domain in the United States, and whilst it and other non-American films were supposed to have their copyright reinstated in 1996 under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the situation has still not been legally settled for sure. Many distributors continue to release such films as "public domain," and this includes the Legend Films DVD, bolstered by their claim that their colorisation makes it a new work of which they own the copyright!

Regardless of the situation in the United States, though, the film remains in copyright in the United Kingdom, and will remain so - for reasons too complicated to detail - until at least the end of 2027. The current owners of the film are ITV Global (previously Granada Ventures), and the only licensed DVD UK releases are those put out by DD Home Entertainment in 2006, and the Network DVD special edition that came out in mid 2007.

My first reaction on seeing this new release was that it was a bootleg, with faked British Board of Film Classification certificates, but a quick search of their database showed that it had actually been classified by them in April this year. More surprising was that the publisher was listed as E1 Entertainment, the new guise of the large and established Contender Group. Acquiring a copy of the new release showed that the only copyright information on the disc or the packaging is to Legend Films, with ITV Global mentioned nowhere. Whoops!

The whole issue of colourising films is, of course, a contentious one. Some people regard it as a way of giving new life to films that were made in monocrhome; others - including myself - consider it vandalism of the highest order. Regardless of either position, Legend Films hasn't exactly helped itself, since as noted in my webpage on various releases of the film, the print they used for their effort is an exceptionally poor one. On the right is a comparison of the Network DVD in originaly monochrome, the Legend colourisation, and - as an interesting counterpoint - the faux coloured American lobby card of the same scene. As can be seen, the definition on the Legend print is very poor compared to the one used by Network. If that were not bad enough, it's not even complete, since beyond the four sequences reinstated in the Network DVD release, there are other seemingly timing cuts, for example in the opening Christmas Eve montage. Overall, the film on the new release runs to just 88m, rather than the 89m of the "standard" print, and the 92m 38s of the Network Special Edition.

As the title of this post says....

Things to Come Photo Gallery mega-upload

After a gap of over two years, I've finally got round to uploading all the various Things to Come photographs acquired since January 2007. There are 46 is all, although a few are upgrades of previous poorer quality and/all magazine-sourced pictures. I've also split the Photo Gallery into four sections, as the load time was getting a bit much as a single page.

Although I've tended to concentrate on stills from missing or truncated scenes, it's surprising the details that are apparent in even the familiar parts that can be missed in a fleeting glimpse in the extant footage. My favourite is the Thompson Sub-Machine Gun - the classic gangster's weapon - leaning against the wall in the background in this shot of the Boss's bedroom (just to the left of Rudolph's crooked knee):


It's a real shame Ralph Richardson didn't get to wield that in the character's death scene!

Once you know the gun is there, it can be glimpsed at the start of the scene, when Richardson flops onto the bed, but it's missing later on, when a similar camera angle is used. This is probably explained by one of the cuts made to this scene. After the Boss says, "I don’t bully. I just handled the man," there is a brief cutaway to Cabal in the "detention room" under the Town Hall, before cutting back to Roxana saying, "He’s the first real aviator that has come this way in years." The sole surviving London Films editor's cutting/continuity script documents what's missing:

502. LONG SHOT 11ft. 0frs.
The two.

BOSS: I don’t bully. I just handled the man.
ROXANA: No. You bully. And you bully too soon.
     Boss gets up and goes over to get himself a drink.
BOSS: Ah, I don’t seem able to please you today.

503. CLOSE UP 12ft. 13frs.
Boss, Roxana joins him, as they walk back to M.S.

ROXANA: Well, if you must go from one tactless thing to another. Weakening your authority, sacrificing dignity.
BOSS: Here, what’s the matter with you?
ROXANA: Oh, I saw....

504. CLOSE SHOT 33ft. 8frs.
The two.

ROXANA: There’s your head mechanic - the essential man for the job, and you can’t keep your eyes off his wife.

505. MEDIUM SHOT 33ft. 8frs.
The two, they walk to CLOSE SHOT.

ROXANA: Don’t I know you? But never mind that, I’m accustomed to over looking that sort of thing. What I’m asking you now, whether you bully or not - was it wise to take this man in this way?
BOSS: How else could I have treated him? How else?
     They sit on the bed in C.S.
ROXANA: Well look at it. He’s the first real aviator that has come this way in years. Think of what that means, my dear. You want aeroplanes don’t you? You want your aeroplanes put in order?

506. LONG SHOT 4ft. 7frs.
The two sitting on the bed. Roxana rises.

ROXANA: A really clever man could have had some of those machines up long ago...

The cuts between the surviving fragment of Shot 505 and Shot 506 is noticeably abrupt, the reason being that Roxana had even more dialogue in between, that didn't make it into the scripted version of the film:

ROXANA: Well - I've always doubted if that young man Gordon was up to the job. He's good-looking in a weak sort of way - but is he really skillful and scientific? He - fumbles. He just goes about with this girl of his - whom you think so good-looking.

This dialogue really clarifies the dynamic between the two characters, and sets the scene for Roxana effectively offering to transfer her allegiance to Cabal later on.

And the machine gun? I would hazard a guess that when the Boss goes for his drink in Shot 502, he moves the weapon in the process. Later in the film, however, it is very conspicuously present in the foreground when Burton informs the Boss of Gordon's successful escape:

Picture this

Although it's fairly well known that what exists now of the film Things to Come is not the entirety of what was originally planned, or even filmed, it is not so widely appreciated that some of the extant footage appears in a different order to that originally intended by scriptwriter H.G. Wells. This is particularly true of the third act of the film, set in the year 2036. In the published Film Story - essentially the shooting script from mid-1935 - following the little girl's video history lesson, part of this segment plays out thus:

(1) Oswald Cabal meets with Space Gun engineers; introduced to Maurice Passworthy
(2) "A quarter of an hour later," Cabal arranges to meet Raymond Passworthy
(3) Cabal meets Passworthy in the City Ways; they travel outside to the "Athletic Club in the hills"
(4) At the Athletic Club, Cabal and Passworthy meet Catherine Cabal and Maurice
(5) Cabal meets with his ex-wife, Rowena
(6) Theotocopulos's televised speech
(7) World audience reacts to (6)
(8) Three days after (4), Passworthy meets with Catherine and Maurice
(9) Cabal discusses the growing rebellion with "Controller of Traffic and Order" Morden Mitani
(10) Cabal meets with Passworthy, Maurice and Catherine

The surviving footage and the slightly expanded surviving editor's script, hocwever, has the following arrangement:

(1) Cabal meets with Space Gun engineers; introduced to Maurice Passworthy
(6) Theotocopulos's televised speech
(4) Cabal and Passworthy meet Catherine Cabal and Maurice
(X) Theotocopulos and followers discuss public reaction to speech
(10) Cabal meets with Passworthy, Maurice and Catherine

Most significantly, what are two different meetings between Cabal, Passworthy, and their respective children - i.e. 4. & 10 - separated by a gap of three days and a number of other events, are effectively merged together to give the impression of a single meeting, punctuated by a brief cutaway to Theotocopulos and his followers. The latter does not appear at all in the Film Story, and it feels very much like an addition to explain the changed timeline. In the original version there are at least a couple of days for the discontent to grow after the broadcast, but in the surviving footage it seems that all it takes is a few choice soundbites from the rebel artist to provoke an instant reaction, hence the need for one of his entourage to declare that his words, "have struck fire!"

It is notable that whilst in most cases the dialogue in existing footage is almost word-perfect when compared to the Film Story, the only major deviations are in the scenes involving Theotocopulos. The role was originally played by Ernest Thesiger, but Wells was so dissatisfied with his performance that he personally approached Cedric Hardwicke as a replacement. Thesiger was so unaware of this that he actually turned up at the film's premiere in February 1936 with a group of friends, so clearly the change happened once all of his scenes had been shot the first time around.

When the restored Network DVD was being planned, the question was how to integrate script extracts from the missing footage in the "Virtual Extended Version" of the film, and it was decided to include as much as possible, but to retain the chronological arrangement of the extant footage, thus:

(1) Cabal meets with Space Gun engineers; introduced to Maurice Passworthy
(6) Theotocopulos's televised speech
(4) [At the Athletic Club,] Cabal and Passworthy meet Catherine Cabal and Maurice
(5) Cabal meets with his ex-wife, Rowena
(X) Theotocopulos and followers discuss public reaction to speech
(8) Three days after (4), Passworthy meets with Catherine and Maurice
(9) Cabal discusses the growning rebellion with "Controller of Traffic and Order" Morden Mitani
(10) Cabal meets with Passworthy, Maurice and Catherine

The decision to drop Cabal and Passworthy's actual first meeting and subsequent journey through the City Ways was a difficult one, but at the time what was known of the film as a whole suggested that this was one sequence that had probably not been shot, let alone included even in the rough-cut. Whereas most lost scenes are represented by production photographs proving that they were at least rehearsed, if not actually filmed, there seemed to be absolutely nothing of what was quite a convoluted journey through and then outside of the Everytown of 2036. In his 1995 book on the making of the film, Christopher Frayling suggested that the technical requirements of the Athletic Club - with its huge flexible windows and complex sporting water-chute - may have been too great. Although there was much dialogue between Cabal and Passworthy, there didn't seem to be an easy way to incorporate it into the "Virtual Extended Version" of the film on the DVD, so it was omitted.

Last week I finally got round to scanning and preparing for upload all of the almost forty additional production photographs I had acquired since the DVD was put together. These come from various sources and in a variety of formats, requiring some precision in lining up on the scanner, but still some trimming of the image electronically. It was while I was doing the latter on the still shown here - one of the iconic images from the film, frequently used to illustrate it in books, magazines, and on video or DVD covers - that something fleetingly caught my eye. I blinked, thinking "surely not," as I peered at the figures just visible along the bottom edge of the photograph. I zoomed in on one in particular, the image now more pixelated, but more compelling. I grabbed the still itself and a strong magnifying glass, and the results were even more conclusive. Finally, I put the photograph back on the scanner, homed in on the portion in question, and cranked the resolution up from the usual 100 to 900 DPI:


So there he was, Oswald Cabal amongst the crowd in the City Ways, and to his right (i.e. on the left of the photograph), the almost unmistakable top of Raymond Passworthy's head! In retrospect, while I'd only recently acquired this particular still (in a job lot of seven from Australia), I wondered how I'd not spotted this detail before. A quick check of the other examples I have of it used elsewhere, however, showed that in all cases the bottom edge of the image had been trimmed off, so that Cabal's head was barely visible, let alone that of Passworthy.

Finally we have some evidence that Cabal and Passworthy's journey through the city was actually filmed, but it will probably take the discovery of more photographs (the actual footage is too much to hope for!) to clarify the situation, although that may take some time. Based on the codes that appear on each still, there are at least 520 or so of them, of which I already own 91, and am aware of a further 41 - around a quarter of the total.

The long and short of it...

Given the amount of time and money I have devoted to researching Things to Come over the years, people have often asked me exactly why I find the film so fascinating. There are, of course, many reasons, but perhaps the most tangible is the very fact that what exists now represent only a part of what was originally intended - approximately three-quarters of it, in fact.

For decades, the only version of the film available from the rights holder in the United Kingdom was one that ran to 92m 42s, or exactly 89m on video or shown on television, due to the inherent speed-up when transfering 24 frames-per-second (fps) film to the European 25fps PAL video system. This was the version - which I retrospectively dubbed the "Standard Print" - first released on VHS and Betamax by Spectrum-Polygram in 1981, and - after a long absence from broadcasting - shown on BBC2 in early-1986. The latter was my first viewing of the film, but even then I knew that something was amiss, mainly because it fell well-short of the 113m quoted by most film guides, while Peter Nicholls's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979) even mentioned a 130m "rough-cut"! On top of that, I was aware of photographs of scenes that seemed to be absent, most obviously Boss Rudolf's "Victory Banquet" in the Town Hall after his forces take over the Floss Valley Mines.

Not long after the BBC2 broadcast I acquired a copy of Wells's published "Film Story," essentially the shooting script at the start/middle of production in early/mid-1935. I planned to do an article on the differences between it and the surviving footage for the media fanzine I co-edited at the time, but unfortunately I left both the book and all my notes on a bus (D'oh!). Over the years I retained an interest in the film, but this was mostly restricted to checking the shelves in secondhand bookshops for a replacement copy of the Film Story, or new bookshops in the hope that someone would publish a new edition.

What did turn up was Peter Frayling's exhaustive 1995 study of the film's production for the British Film Institute (BFI), which included tantalising details of Leon Stover's The Prophetic Soul - A Reading of H.G.Wells's Things to COme (1987), an academic book that reprinted not only Wells's first version of what became the film's narrative, but also what was described as the "release script." Frayling highlighted that this contained a number of additional segments of film that did not appear in the Standard Print, ranging from whole scenes down to fragments from others that at least partially existed. He also noted:

"The print shown at the trade show was, according to Rachael Low, 9,781 feet or 108.67 minutes; the Monthly Film Bulletin noted its running time as 108 minutes. The release print was 98 minutes, so between trade and premiere there had been cuts of ten minutes. Mysteriously, most of today's film guides (including Halliwell) list the original time as 113 minutes; some go as high as 130 minutes. But there is no evidence that a version longer than 108 minutes was ever publicly screened. Video versions tend to run about 95 minutes - which, allowing for different speeds, translates as the original 98 minutes in the cinema."

Frayling makes two misassumptions here. Firstly, Rachael Low's Film Making in 1930's Britain (1985) actually states the footage as "9,781, later 8,830" in her list of productions from that era. The first is implied as being the trade show only by default, and equates to 108m 41, while the second would run to 98m 07s, but is not explicitly identified as the version shown at the premiere. Secondly - and perhaps more importantly - as stated above, PAL videos of the film don't run remotely close to 95 minutes, but rather 89m exactly, so clearly not the 98m 07s print (a possible explanation for this is that the 1986 Central Video release of the film does indeed have it ending at the 95 minute mark, but only because it is preceded by a generic "Korda Classics" trailer). The waters were muddied even further by the other standard reference work, Dennis Gifford's The British Film Catalogue 1895-1985 (1986), which has the first release as 100m, noting a 1943 reissue by Exclusive Films as being "2,931 feet cut".

In 2000 the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) made its database of film classifications available online, revealing that Things to Come was submitted at a staggering 117m 13s, and passed with no cuts the day before the London premiere on 21 February 1936, while the Exclusive Films version was submitted at just 72m 13s and passed only after further unspecified cuts. The 2,931 feet noted by Gifford equates to a whopping 32m 34s, but was it cut from his vague 100m original, Low's 108m 41s, or Exclusive's 72m 13s (and therefore the BBFC's unspecified cuts)? The latter seemed unlikely, given that knocking it off the submitted 72m 13s would result in a film of just 39m 39s, but then adding it only took the length up to 104m 48s. Clearly everything suggested versions a lot longer than the 92m 42s Standard Print, but being more precise seemed impossible because nothing really added up.

It wasn't until 2001 that I made a real breakthrough with the aquisition of a copy of Stover's book. It turned out that the "release script" was a continuity/editing guide, with all shots not only numbered, but also "timed" in feet and frames of film. With 16 frames per foot of 35mm film, and 24fps projection, it was possible to work out the running time of the version of the film it documents with a high degree of accuracy. Comparing the script to the 92m 42s version revealed that there were a total of fourteen additional segments of film, which add would around twelve minutes, suggesting a total running time of almost 105m. It clearly wasn't the "release script," as this theoretical total fell mid-way between the two lengths quoted by Low, so I more generically renamed it the "London Films Script" (LF script).

The following year (2002), my flatmate Claire (now Mrs Cooper!) introduced me to the temptations of eBay. I'd seen references online to "public domain" prints of the film floating around in the United States with at least some of the extra footage from the LF Script, so I thought I'd see if it applied to any of the apparently many North American VHS releases, and - incredibly - the very first one came up trumps, although it was a pretty grotty copy. Although it contained four of fourteen missing segments, one was damaged in the middle, whilst elsewhere the film had been edited for both language and timing - every instance of the word "God" and the single utterance of "damn" had been crudely removed, and some of the longer montage sequences had also been trimmed down.

Using a combination of the actual duration of the extra footage and the London Films script for the damaged segment, I determined that but for the latter, they would add 3m 42s to the Standard Print, i.e. 96m 24s in all. This seemed to make sense, as most American sources - including the original review in Variety - had the release there as "96m". Although I quickly upgraded the initial VHS of this version with the additional footage, every copy in circulation came from the same damaged source, a 16mm domestic print distributed by the Chicago-based Walter O Gutlohn company. I subsequently did some further checking of the remaining ten lost segments documented in the LF Script, and came up with what I thought was a reasonably precise duration for that version as 104m 41s.

Following the acquisition of a better copy of what - for the obvious reasons - I came to describe as the "Gutlohn Print," in September 2003 I sent a copy of it to Christopher Frayling, and mentioned the BBFC's recorded length, information which would not have been easily available information at the time of his BFI book. His response was to the effect that it was good to see "new" footage, but that he was doubtful that a version as long as 117m could ever have existed.

In May 2005 I attended a screening of the film at the National Film Theatre (NFT), preceded by an introduction by Frayling. A previous NFT screening had used the Standard Print, but this time around it was the Gutlohn version, but a copy that was not only much better quality than I had ever seen it before, but also the additional segment that was damaged on all the US video releases was complete. This dispelled a nagging doubt I had had that this damage was around an edit point, whereas in fact all of the missing scripted footage was there.

I eventually revisited the issue of the length of the UK premiere and initial release, and realised that advertised screening times might at least give a maximum "time-slot" for the film at any given venue. One item acquired via eBay was a small promotional booklet for a cinema in Chatham, Kent, which advertised a rolling programme for the week starting 27/09/36 of:

13:38 - Bar 20 Rides Again
14:46 - Things to Come
16:40 - Bar 20 Rides Again
17:48 - Things to Come
19:42 - Bar 20 Rides Again
20:50 - Things to Come

This demonstrated that Bar 20 Rides Again was consitently shown in a 68 minute slot, while for Things to Come it was 114. According to the BBFC, Bar 20 Rides Again had a duration of 62m 53s, suggesting a 5m 07s gap between the end of it and the start of Things to Come. Assuming the latter was 108m 41s would make the gap between the end of it and the start of the other film a strikingly similar 5m 19s. Since analysis of two different films screened at the same cinema the week before showed a similar pattern (albeit with the gaps being uniformally just over 10m each), this was good circumstantial evidence that the 108m 41m print was in circulation for at least seven months after the UK premiere, while a later similar booklet for another cinema suggests that it had been replaced with the 98m 07s print before the end of 1936.

The question remained as to what exactly the LF Script was. The copy in Stover's book was undated and contained no additional details as to its purpose. Luckily, a photocopy of the original document came up for sale in July 2004, but that too lacked any real clues, showing that Stover's reprint was almost verbatim, although with Americanized spellings, and one of two transcription errors in some of shot timings. Bearing in mind that the script contained everything that was in both the US and Standard Prints, and that - with the exception of two brief cutaways - there was nothing in either that was not in the script, it seemed most likely that it constituted an early "draft" of what was destined for America, edited down from the 108m 41s UK version. Whether US distributors United Artists actually got both script and print to this length, but trimmed it further, or whether there were more cuts made by London Films beforehand, it is impossible to say. What did seem clear was that the version American audiences eventually got to see in April 1936 was subsequently trimmed again to produce the 92m 42s Standard Print. My own money was on this having happened in 1947, when the film was reissued by Film Classics Inc. in the States, or the following year when re-released by British Lion in the UK.

Eventually my interest in the film came to the attention of Network DVD, who were planning the first UK retail DVD of the film, and I was asked to advise on the release and to write the accompanying "viewing notes" booklet, documenting the background to the film, its production, and other related issues, including its current much-truncated form. Although they had been supplied a copy of the Standard Print from the current rights holders, I pointed them in the direction of the longer US Print held by the BFI, although it took some time to secure a copy. When it came to detailing the various running times in the booklet, I used the ones that - at the time - previous research suggested were correct, i.e.:

LF Script - 104m 41s
US Print - 96m 24s
Standard Print - 92m 42s

However, when the copy of the BFI's print was eventually obtained, I was surprised to discover that it clocked in at 96m 30s, six seconds longer than expected. By implication, this meant that I had also underestimated the length of the LF Script by at least the same amount, but by that stage it was too late to amend the text of the booklet. Six seconds, of course, does not seem like very much - enough time to read this sentance out loud, in fact. Yes, it could have been a reinstated line of dialogue, but a by now exhaustive (over?) familiarity with the film suggested otherwise.

The DVD release came and went, but I while I never expected it to be the "final word" on the film for me, even I didn't think that any major new information would come to light as quickly as it did. This was in the form of trade promotional material for both the 1943 Exclusive Films and 1948 British Lion re-releases, which stated the exact footage-length of each version. In this case of Exclusive Films this was 6,850 feet or 76m 07s, which was 3m 54s longer that the version the BBFC reckoned was submitted to them before they cut it further, but in retrospect it seems logical that the reverse was actually the case, i.e. that it was submitted as 76m 07s and passed after cuts at 73m 13s. One simple calculation, at least, now made sense:

Low - Gifford cuts = Exclusive publicity
9,781ft - 2,931ft = 6,850ft
108m 41s - 32m 34s = 76m 07s

With that little mystery out of the way, what of the British Lion print? I had always thought that this was the 92m 42s Standard Print, but the publicity material stated 8,398 feet - 93m 19s, a difference of 37s.

I returned to the LF Script and compared it to a working copy of the BFI print, which had been transferred at 25 fps, but time-coded at 24 fps. Paying particular attention to the shots either side of the ten still-missing scripted segments, it became clear that in most cases there was material lost either side of these edits - sometimes single frames, but in places more, and they all added up. It showed that my original estimate of the LF Script length was under by around 21 seconds, so a more accurate duration for it - based on the simple "adding" back in of the still-missing ten segments - was 105m 02s, making it "only" some 3m 39s shorter than the initial UK circulation of 108m 41s.

I then looked again at the Standard Print and found that compared to the US Print, overall it had "lost" not 3m 42s, but 3m 48s. Most of this was the four edited segments themselves, but collectively they were slightly shorter than I'd originally thought, whilst there were other losses elsewhere. Originally presented on eleven 10-minute projection reels, the ten change points on the Standard Print all showed a similar loss of frames documented in the LF Script. Such change points are often subject to damage, losing frames, or else when combined on larger projection reels. The "lead out" at the end of each reel usually prolongs a shot longer than necessary, just in case the exact change to the next reel is missed, and these are often shortened when combining reels. It seemed likely that much of this occurred in the twelve years between the first release of the US Print - which in the form of the BFI's print lacked these omissions - and British Lion's reissue, so it was probable that it was already incorporated into the latter's length of 93m 19s. Since the Standard was effectively a subset of the US Print, could the British Lion print be an intermediate version between them, 37s longer than the Standard?

Of the four additional sequences that differentiate the US and Standard prints, two are over a minute long, one is 31s, and the remaining one runs to.... exactly 37s. This is the sequence in which Passworthy rants at Harding about the Christmas Eve attack meriting a war of vengeance on their enemy. Ironically some commentaries have suggested that this segment was removed early on, because audiences wouldn't take to a portrayal of such an obvious British warmonger, and yet everything now suggests that it survived until after the Second World War, and was actually the last single "loss" to occur.

I still wasn't satisfied with my analysis of the LF Script, as checking the specific missing segments has highlighted the occasional anomaly "either side" of some of them, while spot-checking what seemed to be suspiciously abrupt edit-points elsewhere in the extant footage suggested more. What I really neeed to do was to go through the Script shot-by-shot, all 1000+ of them. In the event, the results surprised even me, but that's for another post....

Cover stories

One long-planned feature for my pages on the film Things to Come has been a database of commercial cine film and video releases, both official and not so official, and I've finally got round to making a start on it here. Considering the major (to put it mildly) issues about the lost footage from the film, there's a certain unintentional humour in the wildly different running times quoted on the various releases, despite what version is actually on the tape/disc. The most extreme, ironically, was the first pre-recorded tape of the film I ever bought, that put out by Central Video in 1987. It claimed a length of "approx 108 minutes," but sadly turned out to be the "standard" 92m 42s version, running to 89m exactly due to PAL speed-up. Oh well...

The picture seen here, incidentally, was the first incarnation of the Network DVD cover, as seen on Play in the weeks before the release date, which I quite like. Although probably unintentional, there's a nice echo of the way early posters for the film turned the Space Gun capsule into a rocket, by portraying the huge propellor-drive Basra Bombers as jet aircraft!

The errors of academia - Part 1

Although H.G. Wells and most of his work have, of course, been subject to a great deal of scholarly interest over the decades, the same cannot be said of either Things to Come, or the other three films that formed part of his deal with Alexander Korda. Even when the works on which they were based are a primary subject, the films barely gets as much as a passing mention. Similarly, whilst numerous biographers have chronicled Wells's life, most devote little or nothing to either the films or - where applicable - their published scripts. Unfortunately, the time covered in Wells's own Experiment in Autobiography (1934) apparently pre-dates even the earliest stages of his dealings with Korda, although its "forbidden" third volume - published very much posthumously as H.G. Wells in Love in 1984 - does provide a few tantalising, though oblique, references.

It was with some hope, then, that I recently purchased the third and fourth volumes of the mammoth Correspondence of H.G. Wells, edited by David C Smith, both being necessary as they cover 1919-1934 and 1935-1946 respectively, spanning the 1934-1937 period during which work on the films took place. Anyone hoping for shattering and candid revelations, however, will be disappointed. While Wells was a prolific writer of letters, most were tightly focused on a particular matter, and rarely strayed into "chatty" details of whatever else he was up to at the time. Sadly, while this collection does include a number of letters between Wells and Arthur Bliss about the latter's music for Things to Come, these are generally the only ones directly dealing with the production of any of the films, although it is possible to tease out a number of interesting details elsewhere.

Volume 4 includes some sporadic communication with the delightfully named Leon M Lion. Smith identifies him as a producer of plays, although he also produced Alfred Hitchcock's film Number 17 (1932) - in which he also acted - and wrote and acted extensively for the theatre, films, and television up to the end of the 1930s. In the first letter quoted of 14 November 1936, Wells says:

"Yes, I'd like a talk but not just now for a week or so. I'm choked with engagements & can get no fragment of time to do my own thinking." (Letter 2207, page 110)

In a footnote, Smith states that this was in reply to a letter from Lion asking to meet Wells to discuss, "Films and the future and be forthwith stimulated." Lion wrote again 2 February 1937, asking if it was possible to meet, which they did on 27 February, and according to Smith:

"Lion told Wells he liked the idea of The New Faust and how it would lend itself to the camera, Lion suggested Laurence Olivier for the lead part. Lion had just seen him in Hamlet, and he invited Wells to see Sir Toby Belch in which Olivier was also appearing. They saw the play and on 6 March Lion wrote again to Wells, proposing casting The New Faust under the direction of Alexander Korda. The film, which was call The Miracle Maker for a time, was produced by Korda in 1936 with Roland Young, Ralph Richardson and Joan Gardner. Lion was apparently attempting a stage production. The film, and the screenplay, were ultimated titled The Man Who Could Work Miracles, (London: Cresset Press, 1936)."

Smith seems to be correct up to a point, in that this does suggest that Lion was looking to produce The New Faust, but it was almost certainly as a film rather than a play. Wells's original deal with Alexander Korda was for four film scripts: Things to Come, adaptations of his short story The Man Who Could Work Miracles - which did indeed have a working title of The Miracle Maker at one point - and his novel The Food of the Gods, and The New Faust, a reworking of his short story The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham. As with the first two - which were filmed - Wells published the script of The New Faust, but at the time only in Nash's Pall Mall magazine in December 1936, whereas the other two had appeared as books in the United Kingdom and United States first, before appearing in the same magazine (Things to Come was also published in an American magazine). On 10 March 1937 Wells wrote to Lion:

"Now we must wait until I can talk to Korda & then I will let you know if anything further can be done." (Letter 2258, page 141)

It is known that following the production problems and poor box office performance of both Things to Come and The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Korda was loathe to proceed with either of the other two films himself. This may represent an attempt by Wells to take some of the risk out of Korda's hands, while still allowing him to profit as director, although it may equally have been primarily Lion's own interest in filming the script. One can only assume that in the end Korda was not willing to either make The New Faust or relinquish the rights to let anyone else do so, and it is known that he eventually paid Wells off later in 1937 in relation to both it and The Food of the Gods.

It is notable that The New Faust seems to have been generally overlooked by most Wells scholars, and it rarely appears in bibliographies of his work. The script was belatedly published in book form by Athlone Press and Continuum International in 1984 as The Man With a Nose and Other Uncollected Short Stories (edited by J.R. Hammond). A curious postscript is that the television writer Jeffrey Caine lists "The Late Mr Elvesham/The New Faust" amongst three scripts written by himself for an "H.G. Wells Short Stories" series for Hallmark Entertainment. This was presumably an ultimately unmade follow-up to Hallmark's 2001 series The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells, which freely adapted six of his short stories as if they were events to which Wells himself was either a party or a witness.

Because....

This was something I always vowed I would never do, but lately it has occurred to me that it's a fairly painless way of flagging up prospective "updates" to my various websites, even if I can't immediately get round to doing them. So whether you've come here from Things to Come, The Underground at War, The London Underground in Films & TV, or wherever, the links there (or at least the ones that will be there!) should be selecting the relevant posts here. If you're really curious, though, you can always click on the appropriate link and be subjected to the full blog! Of course, given my usual tardiness, I can't guarantee that this won't also fall by the wayside as well, but it's worth a try....