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Things To Come

Christmas 1940 in Everytown: war is coming, then it never stops — decades of bombing, plague, and petty warlords — until a scientific world-state rebuilds the ruins and aims a gun at the moon. William Cameron Menzies’s 1936 British epic, produced by Alexander Korda from H.G. Wells’s own adaptation of The Shape of Things to Come, is the most ambitious science-fiction film of the 1930s: a century of future history in one picture. Menzies, the great production designer of Gone with the Wind, directs as a visionary of sets and crowds; Wells insists that science, not tyranny, is the way out. Raymond Massey is the Cabal line of believers; Ralph Richardson’s “Boss” is Mussolini in a ruined England. Arthur Bliss’s score and the gleaming 2036 city still look like prophecy. Solemn, colossal, and unmatched until the space age caught up.

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