The Book and the Movie | Things to Come | H.G. Wells / William Cameron Menzies, 1933-1936

The Shape of Things to Come, 1933 / Young H.G. Wells / Things to Come, 1936 dir. William Cameron Menzies

“Nothing is so pleasing to perplexed unhappy people as the denunciation of others.”

Raymond Passworthy: Oh, God, is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?

Oswald Cabal: There’s nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn’t abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come, 1933

Rowena: I don’t suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don’t understand our imaginations, how wild our imaginations can be.

John Cabal: If we don’t end war, war will end us.

The Boss: The State’s your mother, your father, the totality of your interests. No discipline can be too severe for the man that denies that by word or deed.

The Boss: You are not mechanics, you are warriors. You have been trained, not to think, but to do.

H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come, 1933

Raymond Passworthy: But… we’re such little creatures. Poor humanity’s so fragile, so weak. Little… little animals.

Oswald Cabal: Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First, this little planet and 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 depths of space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning…

Oswald Cabal: Little animals. And 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. It is this, or that. All the universe or nothing. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?

H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come, 1933

Things to Come (1936)
Director: William Cameron Menzies
Writer: H.G. Wells
Cinematography: Georges Périnal
Stars: Raymond Massey, Edward Chapman, Ralph Richardson

H.G. Wells, Pearl Argyle and Raymond Massey / Things to Come (1936)

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Before filming started, author H.G. Wells told everyone connected with the film how much he’d hated Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927) and how he wanted them to do the opposite of what Lang (whom he called “Lange”) and his crew had done.

Despite H.G. Wells’ dislike of Fritz Lang and his landmark film, Metropolis (1927) and Wells’ request that William Cameron Menzies avoid patterning his film after Lang’s, Menzies nonetheless drew a great deal of inspiration from it. Menzies admitted that the lengthy montage depicting the transition of the war-torn 20th Century Everytown to the progressive and rational futuristic city, in particular, owed a huge debt to the 1927 film.

Also:
Book//mark – The First Men in the Moon | H.G. Wells, 1901
Flick Review < The Invisible Thief | Segundo de Chomón, Ferdinand Zecca (1909) / H.G. Wells (1897)
The Book & the Movie: The Island of Dr. Moreau / H.G. Wells (1896) | Island of Lost Souls / Erle C. Kenton (1932)

The Book and the Movie: The Invisible Man / H. G. Wells (1897) | James Whale (1933)