I’m not sure why I’m objecting so strongly though, given that just over a month ago, on this very blog, I stated that “The degree to which science fiction accurately predicts the future is not really the point …” Perhaps giant cannons are to scientific romance as warp drives are to modern science fiction? And since I’m happy enough to accept warp drives as necessary plot devices to allow the author to tell the story they want to tell, I should probably just accept Verne’s cannon on that basis. But I still wish he’d gone with something he wasn’t quite sure wouldn’t work, rather than something he knew would not.

Incidentally, Things To Come was on telly earlier this afternoon, on BBC2 - I had a quick peep and it was the restored version on the new DVD.

I’m not inclined to give Verne a pass though — the science was available to tell him that after firing, the occupants of the Columbiad would have been smeared into a thin paste covering the floor …

Aye! It was excusable for Verne writing in the 1860s, and even Wells used it in ‘The War of the Worlds’ in 1897 (the Martians appear to have fired their cylinders at Earth from a giant gun on their planet).

In ‘Things To Come’, however, he appears to have done it as a sort of metaphorical effect. The Space Gun paraphrases the anti-aircraft guns in Everytown Square. The anti-aircraft guns point up at a threatening sky, the Space Gun points up at a sky full of opportunity. It’s all a bit ’swords into ploughshares’.

Thanks for the quotes, I would have looked up Frayling before the talk except the BL would give it to me! I have Aerial Wonders of our Time — actually a partwork — and in fact I used those pictures in my talk. I think they are publicity stills though, as they don’t seem to be actually in the film (unless they’ve been cut from the subsequent edits).

I agree with the BIS. What is it with pioneering SF and using cannons for space travel? Verne did it too.

Chris:

The advantage (and disadvantage) of Sedgwick’s method is that it doesn’t rely on attendance figures (which it doesn’t seemed were widely compiled anyway). It basically assumes that if people still wanted to watch a film, then cinemas would show it; conversely, if they stopped coming to see it, then cinemas would drop it (and pass it down the chain). But it is possible to imagine scenarios where that isn’t always the case. For example Leicester Square Cinema, where TTC premiered, was owned by (from memory) United Artists which seems to have had an arrangement with Korda’s London Films to promote their films. So the fact that it was on for 9 weeks there may have been a loss-leader to help persuade other cinemas to keep showing it. Or something. But again with a large enough cinema sample that sort of problem would be minimised.

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Although 1936 was the year of London Transport’s Constructivist air-brushed poster ‘By Bus to the Pictures Tonight’, not too many people seem to have gone by bus to see Things to Come. It was a critical success, but only did moderately well at the box-office. Alexander Korda tried to put a brave face on things: when asked if the film would ever break even, he would reply, ‘Of course. It was an expensive effort but we’re only a few thousands out at the moment.’ An American film distributor was more blunt about it. ‘Nobody is going to believe,’ he said, ‘that the world is going to be saved by a bunch of people with British accents.’

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The design press was divided, the Architectural Review devoting a double-page spread and praise to the film, the Architect’s Journal being less effusive, and Design Today being fairly unimpressed, especially with the portrayal of the future artist, Theotocopoulos.

Film critics, too, were divided, and Frayling says:

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Outside the design world, newspapers were fairly evenly divided as to the merits of Everytown 2036. Graham Greene, in the Spectator (28 February 1936), thought the first third of the film was ‘magnificent’ but judged the ‘vision of the world peopled by beautiful idealistic scientists’ to be sentimental and strangely old-fashioned. The Times (21 February) thought ‘the new world, with all its machinery and vistas of glass and steel, is so large and glittering, and so obviously a working model, that one cannot imagine how it could have been done.’ Alistair Cooke, in the Listener (18 March) - the best-known review of the film, today reckoned that ‘it must be heartbreaking for Mr Wells to be told that the costumes he predicted they’d be wearing in 2030 are to be the very thing in beach-wear this summer. … Things to Come shares with most Utopias the primary error of making today the premiss.’ But he did concede that ‘Vincent Korda is the hero of the piece… When it comes to considering what sort of rooms we shall be living in in forty years (mine’s in oak, just six feet by three) your guess is as good as mine. But it could hardly be as good as Vincent Korda’s. By a few imaginative strokes on his drawing board he has made the piece a lovely thing to look at.’

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Note that Green was more impressed by the near-future section at the start than by the far-future of the last part of the film.

Frayling also has interesting things to say on the public reaction to the war section:

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Disturbing stills from the blitz sequence were subsequently published in a book called Aerial Wonders of Our Time, which warned the government and anyone else who might be listening of the imminent danger of ‘death from the skies’. When Things to Come was reissued as a second feature, in suburban cinemas, in 1940, Mass Observation reporters noted that the shots of squadron after squadron of enemy planes flying unharmed over the white cliffs of Dover were greeted with laughter, but that the sequence of panic in the streets following the air-raid were watched in complete silence. The anti-war discussions in John Cabal’s house also ‘aroused interest’. One witness reckoned that in retrospect the film had proved to be ‘a provoking prophecy’.

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Finally, the BIS (British Interplanetary Society) was horrified by the Space Gun!