The story of a century: a decades-long second World War leaves plague and anarchy, then a rational state rebuilds civili | dG1fOWlya2xlQjhWWms
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00:00 This week on BFI Player Plus, my recommendation is one from the vaults, the 1936 British classic
00:05 'Things to Come', helmed by legendary production designer turned director William Cameron Menzies,
00:11 starring the mesmerising Raymond Massey, and written by HG Wells, whose brilliant imagination
00:17 is the film's driving force.
00:19 "Shoot! Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!"
00:32 [Train whistle]
00:57 Drawing on his 1933 story 'The Shape of Things to Come', Wells' screenplay presents
01:03 a vision of the near future which blends wide-of-the-mark sci-fi invention with some peculiarly prescient
01:08 political insight.
01:10 Prefiguring the horrors of World War II, the story imagines a conflict which lasts for
01:14 decades, ravaging the landscape with biological weapons and paving the way for the rise of
01:20 Ralph Richardson's despotic boss Rudolph, a figure modelled on Mussolini.
01:25 What follows is a battle between the past and the future, between the old world and
01:29 the new, in which Wells offers a counterpoint to the themes and anxieties of Fritz Lang's
01:34 metropolis.
01:35 A milestone of science fiction cinema, 'Things to Come' was produced by Alexander Korda,
01:40 who looked to the likes of Bauhaus legend Laszlo Moly-Nagy for visual input and inspiration,
01:45 and enlisted his brother Vincent Korda as art director on what would become a design
01:49 classic.
01:51 As Professor Sir Christopher Frayling famously observed, 'Things to Come' is to modernism
01:56 as 'Blade Runner' is to post-modernism.
01:59 By coincidence, the film also played a key role in the cinematic education of Ken Russell.
02:04 As a young boy, Russell would project films in his father's garage to raise money for
02:08 the Spitfire Fund, and one of his favourites was 'Metropolis'.
02:12 The film was silent, but Russell had a record featuring the Arthur Bliss march from 'Things
02:17 to Come', and discovered that it provided an excellent accompaniment to Lang's images.
02:22 As Russell said later, it led to a lifelong fascination with the power of music and film.
02:33 Described as 'the first true masterpiece of science fiction cinema', 'Things to
02:37 Come' was much admired by 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke, and continues to prove an influential
02:43 screen classic to this day.
02:48 [music]
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02:52 [BLANK_AUDIO]