Things to Come - Photo Gallery

Presented here are a number of stills from the author's collection, broadly divided into actual general production or publicity stills, along with reprints from various publications of examples specifically from "lost" scenes. Where appropriate, they are accompanied with explanatory text, in which extracts from the Film Story or Stover Script in green denotes footage surviving in the 92m 42s print, blue in the Gutlohn Print but not the 92m 42s Standard Print, purple is the apparently lost Stover Script material (i.e. not in 92m 42s or Gutlohn), while red is dialogue and description unique to the Film Story.

After the scenes of Everytown on Christmas Eve, there is a brief scene showing the young Dr Harding in his laboratory:

    During all these scenes, Christmas shoppers and people with packages pass to and fro. It is a peaceful and fairly happy Christmas shopping crowd. Nobody appears to be affected imaginatively by the war danger. The voice has called "Wolf" too often. Only the camera calls the attention of the audience to the brooding threat.
    At this point the essential story of the film begins.
    A glimpse is given of a scientific laboratory in which young Harding, a student of two and twenty, is working intently. It is a small, reasonably well-equipped municipal school laboratory looking out on the Central Square. It is a biological, not a chemical laboratory. Two microscopes are visible and plenty of laboratory glass, taps, etc., but not too many bottles and no retorts. (This laboratory has to appear in a ruinous state later, sans glass or breakables.) Through the open window comes the bellowing of the newsvendor. "War crisis!" Harding listens for a moment: "Damn this war nonsense." He closes the window to shut out the sound. He looks at his watch and sets himself to put things away.
    At first he is wearing a neat laboratory overall. This he takes off.

    A suburban residential road with little traffic and many pleasant detached homes is seen, and Harding walking along it. He approaches a house through a garden gate.

PART III

John Cabal's - Christmas Eve

A RATHER dark study is seen in which John Cabal is musing over a newspaper. The furniture of the room indicates his connection with flying. There is the blade of a propeller over the mantel shelf and a model on the mantel shelf. On the table are some engineering drawings partly covered by the newspaper.

In all known versions of the film, the end of the scenes in the Square dissolves directly to Cabal in his study, shortly before Harding's arrival. This seems to rule out the inclusion of the laboratory scene - the only time the location is seen in its undamaged form - from anything other than an end-of-filming rough-cut, but the existence of at least one appropriate photograph is evidence that it almost certainly was shot.

Passworthy - now sporting an O.H.M.S. (On His/Her Majesty's Service) armband - says goodbye to his son. Horrie Passworthy and the other children at the Cabals' Christmas party had a much greater role in the original narrative, standing as they did as metaphors for the various types of human personality that were intrinsic to Wells' approach to the script. Note the "subliminal" image of Adolf Hitler formed by the shrubbery against the wall in the background. Accounts vary as to whether this was a deliberate effect or not, but it seems unlikely that it was purely accidental!

As the army outriders speed through Everytown Square, closer inspection reveals their motorcycles to be a variety of makes and models, rather than having the uniformity that one would expect of military procurement, even in the 1930s!

Now changed into his Royal Air Force uniform, John Cabal wears the ribbons to the Victory Medal and the 1914-18 British War Medal, which Raymond Massey - as a Great War veteran - was himself entitled to wear.

The "Pestilence Years" segment was drastically rearranged, shifting backwards and forwards between scenes compared to the Film Story. This was probably done at a very early stage editing, since the background music is uninterrupted. The above still apears to be an "alternative" take for the first Wanderer the audience sees shot, showing him actually having fallen into the large shell-hole in the ruined Square, rather than simply to the ground, as seen in the extant footage:

Gordon's living-room. Mary and Gordon sitting. Atmosphere of hopelessness. Both stare towards the bed. Janet rises. Her face is now ghastly white and her eyes are glassy. She comes towards the two and towards the audience. Mary and Gordon stare at her, horror-stricken, as she passes them. Her face advances to a close-up. She leaves the room. After a second's hesitation, Gordon rises and hurries after his sister. Mary takes a few steps and then sits down.
    The Square. Janet wandering. Gordon reaches her and tries to take her arm, but she shakes him off. They go towards the crowd about the notice-board in front of the Town Hall. The crowd disperses, panic-stricken.

    Janet and Gordon walking towards the sentry. The sentry lifts his rifle. Gordon protects Janet with his body. To sentry: "No! Don't shoot; I will take her out of the town."
    Sentry hesitates. Janet wanders off the picture. Gordon hesitates between the sentry and her and then follows her. Sentry turns after them, still irresolute.

    Janet and Gordon wander through the ruins of Everytown. She goes on ahead feverishly, aimlessly. He follows her. We are thus given a tour through Everytown in the uttermost phase of Collapse. A dead city. Rats flee before them - starveling dogs.
    They pass across a deserted railway station.
    Public gardens in extreme neglect. Smashed notice-boards. Fountains destroyed - railings broken down.
    Suburban road with villas empty and ruinous. In the gardens are bramble thickets and nettle-beds. Janet and Gordon pass the former house of Passworthy, recognisable by the shattered fence.
    Gradually the two figures, following each other, recede, and what follows is seen across wide desolate spaces at an increasing distance.
    Janet drops and lies still. Gordon kneels down beside her.
    At first he cannot believe she is dead. He picks her up in his arms and carries her off. He is seen far away carrying her into a mortuary.
    Hooded figures come out to take her from him - all very far away.
    Mary waiting in Gordon's room. It is now twilight and we see her face very sad and still and pale. She looks towards the door when at last Gordon comes staggering in. He is the picture of misery. "Oh Mary, dear Mary," he cries.
    Mary holds out her arms to him. He clings to her like a child.
    Three dates on the screen.
    1968.
    1969.
    1970.

Thus, the early debut of Ralph Richardson's character did not appear in the Film Story, and it may be that while the above was re-written to allow an earlier introduction, it also circumvented the building of additional complex sets - especially the deserted railway station - that had little other use in the rest of the film. Clealry, shooting Janet in the Square not only avoided this added expense, but also served to clarify how the Boss gained his position of power in Everytown, although one would perhaps expect more subsequent animosity towards him from Gordon, under the circumstances!

When Roxana first appears, she is railing against the character of Wadsky for no readily apparent reason. This cut scene occurs between Gordan leaving the airfield in disgust, and the first shot of Mary in the marketplace:

    The Market. Camera swung round to the stall of gewgaws and old dresses. Roxana sailing down upon the trader. Roxana is a consciously beautiful young woman of eight and twenty. Her face is made up rather skilfully. In contrast to the dirty and dispirited people in the Square, she and her two attendant women seem brilliantly bright and prosperous. Her costume is best described as a collection of finery. It has been got together from the wardrobes and presses that are still to be found in the abandoned houses. It consists chiefly of an afternoon dress of circa 1935. Wadsky's stall is stocked with such findings.
    Roxana, advancing: "Where is Wadsky? I want to speak to Wadsky."
    Wadsky, who has been lurking behind his stall as she advances, pulls himself together and comes out to meet her.
    Roxana: "You had a piece of flowered stuff, a whole length, seven yards, and you did not tell me of it. You kept it back from me, and you gave it to that woman of yours. And she's got a new dress - a new dress."
    Wadsky disputes with his arms and shoulders while she speaks and when she pauses he Says: "Ooh Lady, I showed you that piece."
    Roxana: "Don't outface me, Wadsky. You have done that too often. You kept it from me!"
    Wadsky: "Lady! You said: 'I don't want stuff like that.'"
    Roxana: "Why! I had been asking for weeks for that very thing for the summer - light flowered cotton stuff."
    Wadsky: "Oh, but Lady!"
    Roxana: "How dared you? One would think I was of no importance in Everytown."
    Roxana turns to her first attendant. "Don't you remember? - I said I wanted light stuff with flowers."
    Attendant remembers dutifully.
    Roxana appeals to her further. "What is the good of a lover - what is the good of a powerful lover, if one is to be treated like this?"
    Roxana to Wadsky, who is bowing, very disgruntled. "I'll tell the Chief. I've warned you before. Everything first to me."

    Swing away from her to another part of the Market Square. A little excited knot is formed round a ragged man.
    Man: "I saw it with my own eyes."
    Crowd laughs.
    Woman: "First you drink and then you see things."
    Man: "First I heard the noise, then I looked up and there it was - far away up in the sky - over the hills."
    Gordon is seen coming through the Square towards them. He hears the last remarks of the man. "What did you see?"
    Man: "An aeroplane - flying - away there over the hills. Just about dawn it was."
    The crowd jeers at him. Gordon looks at the man, sums him up, shrugs his shoulders, and goes on his way.

    Mary is buying vegetables from the peasant with the horse-drawn car....

[After the discussion about the car, the scene continues:]

    Gordon and Mary finish their purchases and go towards the laboratory.
    Mary: "You are late to-day. Did you get anything done?"
    Gordon: "Nothing. The machines are rotten. There's no petrol. It's mockery for the Boss to set me at it. We'll never get one of them up. Flying has become a dream for Bosses and such-like drunken men. There was a drunken man over there, by the by, swearing he saw an aeroplane this morning."
    Mary: "Richard!"
    Gordon: "What is it?"
    Mary: "You won't think me mad?"
    Gordon: "Eh?"
    Mary: "I heard an aeroplane this morning."

The existence of the photograph of Roxana with Wadsky is good evidence that the scene was shot, not least because it is referred to in the extant footage. Similarly, Ann Todd's delivery - stressing the "I" - only makes sense in the context of the scene with the drunken man and Gordon's subsequent mention of it, so there is strong circumstantial evidence that it was shot, along with the additional dialogue between Mary and Gordon.

Following the banquet, Roxana visits the cell below the Town Hall, and has a disjoined conversation with Cabal. The Stover Script details four shots - running to approximately 1m 19s of dialogue - immediately prior to the sudden appearance of the Boss, but the Film Story has two additional sections of dialogue earlier in the scene:

    Roxana: "I don't think any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don't understand our imaginations. How wild our imaginations can be."
    Cabal decides he will not interrupt her.
    Roxana: "I wish I were a man."
    She stands up abruptly: "Oh if I were a man!.... Does any man realise what the life of a woman is? How trivial we have to be. We have to please. We are obliged to please. If we attempt to take a serious share in life, are we welcomed? And all the while---- Men are so self-satisfied, so blind, so limited. I see things happening here----! Injustice. Cruelty. There are things I would do for the poor - things I would do to make things better. I am not allowed. I have to pretend to he eaten up by my dresses, my jewels, my vanities. I make myself beautiful often with an aching heart. But I'm talking about myself. Tell me about yourself - about that greater world you live in. Are you a Boss? You have the manner of one who commands. You are sure of yourself. You make me afraid of you. Of the people you come from. Of what you are. Before you came I felt safe here. I felt - things were going on as they have been going on.... Always.... No hope of change.... Now - it's all different. What are you people trying to do to us? What do you mean to do to this Boss of mine?"

Followed by:

    Roxana: "I see. And our Combatant State here?"
    Cabal: "Has to vanish into the shadows. After the Tyrannosaurus and the sabre-toothed tiger."
    Roxana stands looking at him. He leans against the table and smiles at her.
    Roxana: "You are a new sort of man to me."
    Cabal: "No. A new sort of training. The old Adam fundamentally."
    She goes off at a tangent again. "I suppose at the bottom of her heart every woman despises a man she can manage. And all women despise men who run after women."
    Cabal: "You're not by any chance thinking of the Chief? Where is he to-night?"
    Roxana: "Drinking and boasting. And after that, he hopes to betray me without my finding out. Vain hopes, I'm afraid. We needn't think about him. If I said I still love him, it is as one loves a dirty troublesome child. I love him and he doesn't matter. What I am thinking about is you. And this new world Of yours - oh, it's your world - that I can feel advancing on us."
    Pause.
    Cabal: "Well?"
    Roxana: "Have men of your sort no use for women?"
    Cabal: "Madam, I'm a widower and a grandfather. I see these things with a philosophical detachment. And I don't quite know what you mean by use."
    Roxana: "A man is a man till he's dead. Don't you still want the help of a woman? Have you no use for that closeness of devotion you can never get from any man? Don't you see I have been working for you already? See what I have done for you! I have saved Harding from ill-treatment. I got you half released so as to work with Gordon. I may be able at last to release you altogether. Why do you despise me?"
    Cabal: "I don't despise you in the least. I think you are the most civilised being I have met yet in Everytown."
    Roxana: "More than your friends?"
    Cabal: "Oh, much more."
    Roxana is pleased. She presses on to her next step. "Why don't you confide in me? There's Gordon, there's his wife Mary and her father Harding, and you are all - together, in some way. Something carries you all along. Do you think I don't know you are planning things and doing things? Why cannot I help you? I know this place, these people. I am a sort of queen here. Am I nothing at all to you?"

The Stover Script omits most of the above, but continues:

[#604] Mary: "He's a great man. My father knew him years ago. My husband worships him."
    Roxana: "He's so cold - so preoccupied. And so - interesting. Do men like that ever make love?"
    Mary: "A different sort of love, perhaps."
    Roxana: "Love on ice. [#605-606] If this new world - all airships and science and order - comes about, what will happen to us women?"
    Mary: "We shall work like the men."
    Roxana: "You mean that? Are you - flesh and blood?"
    Mary: "As much as my husband and father."
[#607-608] Roxana with infinite contempt: "Men! Sometimes - when I think of lean grim Cabal - I believe this world of yours must come. And then I think - it can't come. It can't. It's a dream. It will seem to come but it won't come. It's just a new lot of men at the top. There will be wars still. Struggles still."
    Mary: "No, it will be civilisation. It will be peace. This nightmare of a world we live in - that is the dream, that is what will pass away."
    Roxana: "No. No. This is reality."
[#609] Mary, staring in front of her: "Do you really think that war and struggle - mere chance gleams of happiness - general misery - all this squalid divided world about us, do you think it must go on for ever?"

Unfortunately, also missing is Gordon's actual escape. The photograph seen above apparently shows Gordon preparing one of the Boss's aircraft, but the Film Story has no corresponding scene, moving from the discussion between Cabal and the Boss in the cell directly to Roxana visiting Mary, which is largely as it appears in the Stover Script, except where it continues thus:

    The aeroplane, flying. In the aeroplane is Gordon at the controls. He is satisfied. Behind him sits a rosetted guard. Gordon turning the machine round. Then a long shot of Everytown far below. The machine flies on. The guard stirs. He protests inaudibly because of the roar of the engine. Gordon disregards him. Guard taps Gordon's shoulder, signs for him to return and presently, finding no response but a cheerful smile, points his pistol. Mutual scrutiny. Guard weakly menacing. Gordon points over the side of the cockpit. He smiles suddenly, having taken the measure of his man, and puts his fingers to his nose. The aeroplane jerks sharply upwards, and the guard, no longer pointing his pistol, but gripping tight, is manifestly scared.
    Aeroplane looping the loop then the falling leaf trick.
    Guard's ordeal through all this motion. He drops the pistol and grips the side.
    Pistol falling, hitting the ground and exploding.
    The aeroplane seen flying away over the hills.

This dissolves directly to Gordon telling of his escape in the conference room at Basra (seen later after Cabal has been freed and Everytown subdued), rather than the surviving aerodrome setting that shares some of the same dialogue:

    "And so I got away," says Gordon's voice.
    As the voice is heard, the last scene dissolves into the next.

    A conference room at Basra, rather like an ultra-modern board room. It is bleakly and rationally furnished. Telephones have been restored to the world. Through a large open window one sees the great and growing aerodrome of Basra with a number of aeroplanes coming and going. Far off there is a group of smoking factory chimneys. It is a sudden contrast to the general ruinousness that has prevailed throughout the film since the war sequences. A dozen young and middle-aged men sit at the table indifferent to these familiar activities outside, and Gordon stands talking - too excited to sit.
    Gordon: "And so I got away. That is where you will find Cabal. The Boss of Everytown is a violent tough - he may do anything. There is no time to lose."
    A Middle-aged Man: "Certainly, there is no time to lose. Half squadron A is ready now. You ready to go with them, Mr.----?"
    Gordon : "Gordon, sir."
    The middle-aged man begins to dial a telephone.
    A Young Man: "This gives us a chance of trying this new anaesthetic, the Gas of Peace.... I wish I could go...."
    Wipe off to next scene.

Despite the relocation of some of this dialogue to the aerodrome - where Gordon is visibly accompanied by a rather bewildered soldier from the Boss' rag-tag army - a much-used still shows Gordon in the conference room, again with the would-be guard behind him:

There is a possibility, of course, that two versions of the arrival of Gordon and the guard were shot,one in the Conference Room and one on the Aerodrome, and it was the latter that was used.

After Everytown has been subdued with the Gas of Peace, Cabal wanders aims his observations on womankind at the sleeping Roxana and Mary:

DISSOLVE:

One of the most glaringly-obvious of lost scenes is that in which Oswald Cabal meets with his estranged wife, Rowena, played by Margaretta Scott in addition to her earlier role as Roxana. As with the Pestilence Years section, the bulk of the 2036 sequence was similarly rearranged so that the televised speech by Theotocopulos appears before Oswald Cabal meets with Raymond Passworthy, before they are joined by Catherine Cabal and Maurice Passworthy. The latter leads into their sudden decision to leave for the Moon early when the riot begins, but in actual fact the footage of supposedly one discussion is actual from two much longer scenes, set several days apart. As scripted, the first of these meetings (at an "Athletic Club") was followed by Oswald's meeting with Rowena, Theotocopulos's speech, Cabal meeting with Controller of Traffic Morden Mitani, and then the second of the Cabal/Passworthy meetings (over dinner in Cabal's private chambers), shortly before the riot breaks out.

The longer scene with Mitani explains why Ivan Brandt is credited on screen with the role, despite the fact that in the extant footage he actually appears less than some other actors who aren't billed at all. The fact that he does appear in the credits points to the removal of this scene been a very late decision, and the same applies to Margaretta Scott's second role. Surprisingly, there are a great many many photographs from the Oswald/Rowena meeting scene, and indeed the image of Scott as this character (rather than Rowena) was used extensively in the original and indeed subsequent publicity for the film. This continues to this day, as witnessed by the numerous video releases with artwork featuring her lost role.

The lost bridging material follows on from the footage retained in the Gutlohn Print:

    Passworthy: "That man Theotocopulos is right. This thing mustn't be. It is human sacrifice. Maurice, my son!"
    Cabal takes his arm.
    Cabal: "There is still a month and more ahead of us. Let us talk it over calmly, Passworthy. There is a month yet. This is a shock to you. It was a shock for me. But perhaps it is less dreadful - and something greater - than you think. Consider it for a day or so. Let us all dine together - let us meet in three days' time, and tell each other plainly all that we have in our minds."

    Cabal is shown in close-up with Passworthy: "I won't come back to the city with you. There is someone else to whom I must talk. I have to talk."
    Passworthy: "No one is as closely interested as we are."
    Cabal: "I don't know. She has a kind of claim. Many people would say it was as strong a claim as ours."
    Passworthy: "And who is that?"
    Cabal: "Catherine's mother. The woman who used to be my wife. . . . Didn't you know I had a wife? Or do you think Catherine came suddenly out of my head? Like Pallas Athene? I had a wife and she was very much a woman and we parted years ago."

    Evening passes to twilight. After-sunset glow in the sky. A terrace with clipped yew trees (new type of yew) looking out over a wide landscape with the sea in the distance. Standing out against the sea is a huge heavy mortar-like structure. This is the Space Gun. It is our first sight of this. It crouches monstrously, dwarfing every other detail in the landscape. A certain mistiness enhances, if anything, its portentous dimensions.
    An aeroplane sweeps down and its shadow passed across the terrace.
    A momentary glimpse is given of Cabal descending from the plane he has flown to this place. Then the camera returns to the terrace to await him.
    Cabal enters and walks slowly to the terraced balustrade. He stands musing, looking at the Space Gun. His hands are behind his back. So he remains for some moments.
    He turns at a footfall and Rowena enters. Rowena is the descendant or Roxana, the favourite of the Boss of Everytown in 1970, just as Oswald Cabal is the descendant of John Cabal. She is physically like her prototype - the part is played by the same actress - but she has none of the arms-akimbo dash of her ancestress. She is better bred. She is dressed much more beautifully and with nothing of Roxana's sluttish magnificence, and her gestures are well under control.

    Rowena: "And so at last I am permitted to see you again."
    Cabal: "You heard the news quickly, Rowena."
    Rowena: "It is all over the world now."
    Cabal: "Already?"
    Rowena: "On the air everywhere. The whole world talks of nothing else. Why have you done this thing to me? Our daughter!"

    Cabal: "I did not do this to you. She determined to go. What do you want with me?"
    Rowena: "You are a monster. You and your kind are monsters. Your science and your new orders have taken away your souls and put machines and theories in the place of them. It is well I left you when I did."
    Cabal: "And you have come here - you have insisted on seeing me in order to tell me that - now."
    Rowena: "Not only that. I forbid you to send our daughter on this mad expedition."
    Cabal: "Our daughter! My daughter. You left her to me when you went away. And she goes - of her own free will."
    Rowena: "Because you have poisoned her mind. She, I suppose, is one of the new sort of women just as you are one of the new sort of men. Do you think I do not care for her, simply because you have never let me see her?"
    Cabal: "Usually you have been on the other side of the earth. Love-hunting."
    Rowena: "Reproach me! All the same I care. Who left me love-hungry?. . . . Cabal, have you no pity? Have you no imagination? If I cannot forbid - well, then I implore. Think of that body of hers - scarcely more than a child's body - crushed, broken, frozen!"
    Cabal: "I won't. One can think too much of bodies, Rowena."
    Rowena: "Hard you are and terrible. What are you doing with life, Cabal?"
    Cabal: "Soft you are and sensuous. What are you doing with life?"

    Rowena: "You turn it to steel."
    Cabal: "You fritter it away."
    Rowena: "Who made me fritter it away? I have been wanting to meet you face to face for years, and have this out with you. I hated leaving you. But you made life too high and hard for me."
    Cabal: "I hated your going. But you made life too distracted and vexatious for me. I loved you - but loving you was an all-time task. I had work to do."
    Rowena: "What work?"
    Cabal: "The everlasting work of fighting danger and death and decay for mankind."
    Rowena: "Fanatic! Where are danger and death to-day?"
    Cabal: "In ambush everywhere."
    Rowena: "You go out to meet them."
    Cabal: "I had rather be the hunter than the hunted."
    Rowena: "But if you are hunting danger and death all the time, what is there left of life?"
    Cabal: "Courage, adventure, work - and an increasing power and greatness."
    Rowena: "Give me love."
    Cabal: "You left me for that. Poor love-huntress. My love wasn't good enough - not flattering enough - not sedulous enough. Have you ever found that love of your dreams? Was there ever a lover who made you feel as glorious as you wanted to be? Could any lover do that? Wherever you found love, you gripped it as a child plucks a flower - and you killed it."
    Rowena: "Have I been anything but human?"
    Cabal: "No."
    Rowena: "I have loved after my nature. Even if at last I have to grow old and die."
    Cabal: "But let me live after my nature. You may want love, but I want the stars."
    Rowena: "But love too! You wanted human love once, Cabal."
    Cabal: "I wanted my work more."
    Rowena: "But isn't that girl of ours at least human? As I am? Isn't she entitled to the freshness of life - to the novelty of life? Is she to begin where you leave off? Suppose after all love does come to an end - gets found out? Why shouldn't she have her years of delusion and excitement?"
    Cabal: "And end in futility? Left behind by all your loving? Painted? In all imitation of youth? Clinging to passion?"
    Rowena: "Oh, you can sting. Which of the two is futility? To obey your impulses or deny them? That girl, I tell you, is a human being, and she has to follow the human way. She's a woman."

    Cabal: "Not one of the old sort, Rowena. Not of your sort. Do you think that everything else in human life is going to alter, scale and power and speed, and men and women remain as they have always been? This is a New World we are living in. It drives to new and greater destinies. And that desperate old love story which has been acted and told so often, as though it was the very core of life, is almost finished with."
    Rowena: "And you think she has finished with it?"
    Cabal: "What do you know of our daughter? What do you know, you love-huntress, of the creative drive a woman can feel as well as a man? She has loved and she loves; she has found a mate and they are driving on together. Shoulder to shoulder. Almost forgetting each other in their happy identification. She lives for the endless adventure - as he lives for the endless adventure. And that is the increase of human knowledge and power - for ever. . . ."
    Rowena: "Cabal, all men are fools about women. All of them. That girl of yours. And your endless adventure! You think she is a new sort of woman. There is no new sort of woman. She flies off - with her lover. Well, what sort of woman wouldn't - old sort or new sort? What could be more glorious?"
    Cabal: "Anyhow she shall fly off."
    Rowena: "The new sort of man seems to me to be very like the old sort of mule. Now tell me, tell me, if men are going to give themselves to this everlasting adventure of yours, what is to become of women?"
    Cabal: "There's no sex in that sort of adventure. It is as open to you as it is to us. Drop the old sex romance. Come and work with us."
    Rowena: "Work with you!"
    Cabal: "Why not? You have hands and brains."
    Rowena: "You mean, my dear, work for you. There speaks the old sort of man asking woman to be his slave. When it comes to women, is the new sort of man any different from the old?"
    Cabal: "Why for us and not with us?"
    Rowena: "Because you men have a way of taking the lead and getting hold of things."
    Cabal: "Very well! For us if you like. And why not? Pick your man for the work he does, and the powers he has. Follow him and be his woman?"
    Rowena: "We, we women, are to help and comfort and cherish - play the role of handmaid - to the end of things?"
    Cabal: "If that's how you are made, and it seems to be how you are made; why not?"
    Rowena: "It isn't how we are made."
    Cabal: "If you are not made for knowledge and power as men are, if you are not made to serve knowledge and power, then what on earth are you made for? If you are more than a love-huntress, what do you dream you are hunting?"
    Rowena: "Oh, we argued like this fifteen years ago?"
    Cabal: "Fifteen years ago! This argument began before the Stone Age."
    Rowena: "And it will end----! Will it ever end?"
    Cabal: "Never for us, Rowena. Never - for generations yet. You go your way after your fashion-and I go mine."
    Rowena: "And that is your last word for me - you who once knelt at my feet!"
    Old memories come back to Cabal, a rush of forgotten emotions. He turns towards her. He seems full of things he cannot express and he says nothing.
    Fade out of the two facing each other in the twilight, man and woman, bereaved of all the illusion they ever had for one another and still - perplexed.

    Commotion of people clearing out of the way. At a distance, they pause to look back. Then a re-arrangement of all the people to show passage of time. It has grown darker and the clouds have moved. Stillness.
    The gun fires.
    Whirlwind. Collapse of a subsidiary fabric of girders.
    Theotocopulos and his staff are seen buffeted and torn by the wild rush of air.
    Cloaks, sun hats, papers, banners, light gadgets, straws, dead leaves, everything, flying wild.

By the publication of the Film Story, this had been toned down:

    The table and the hand in the observation chamber. The seconds hand of the clock dial moves towards a marked point. As it does so the finger extends and presses a button.
    Thud.
    Large scale effects of concussion. Gun recoiling. Whirlwind sweeping the crowd.
    Theotocopulos, standing out against the sky on a great metal girder, is caught in the whirlwind, and his cloak is blown over his head. He is left struggling ridiculously in his own cloak, and that is the last that is seen of him.
    Clouds of dust obscure the screen and clear to show the crowd after the shock. Some press their ears as if they were painful, others stare under their hands up into the sky.
    Then the crowd begins to stream back towards the city. Shots of them re-entering the city, in a straggling aimless manner, and pausing ever and again to stare at the sky.

What we have now been left with is the Gun actually firing and some reverse smoke effects, but at least one photograph - of Theotocopulos's followers being felled by the concussion in the tunnels beneath the Gun - survives:

One reason for the radical re-working of this part of the film may lie in the fact that Cedric Hardwicke was not actually the original choice for Theotocopulos. The Film Treatment describes him thus: "a tall, slender man, bearded... like one of the figures in a picture by his ancestor [Domenikos Theotokopoulos] El Greco." In fact, all of Theotocopulos' scenes were initially shot with Ernest (Bride of Frankenstein") Thesiger in the role, but these were discarded because (ironically!) Wells was supposedly dissatisfied with the actor's voice. Nobody bothered to tell Thesiger this, and he actually turned up at the premiere in the full belief that he was still in the film, although he did successfully appear in its companion piece, The Man Who Could Work Miracles the following year. Some long-shots of the crowd approaching the Space Gun appear to show Thesiger, rather than Hardwicke, who only appears in these scenes in close-ups of him surrounded by a tight knot of his followers.

The lateness of Thesiger's replacement is also proven by an unlikely source. One oft-seen still shows a head-and-shoulder shot of Hardwicke on the large screen in the Square of the Everytown of 2036. Since no footage actually shows him on the screen as such, this would appear to be a dummied-up publicity shot, especially since a version exists of the same, except with Thesiger instead of Hardwicke, which has even been used on the packaging of some video releases:

This picture probably shows Margeretta Scott either departing for or arriving at the former Brooklands racing track, which was the location used for the aerodrome used by the Boss's "air force."

H.G. Wells, Pearl Argyle and long-suffering director William Cameron Menzies.

Publicity portrait of Pearl Argyle. The original caption on the reverse reads: "When your grandchildren drop in for tea in 2036 their hostess will receive them in an afternoon gown like this worn by Pearl Argyle in 'Things to Come', if H. G. Wells has correctly anticipated the curator's whims of that day, in his first motion picture story."

Test shot of the costume originally intended for Margaretta Scott's Rowena character.  In the end, the more simple outfit seen in previous photographs was used.

A reflection of the publicity for the film when showing in the United States, with huge crowds outside the Rivoli Theatre, New York..

RETURN TO THINGS TO COME INDEX

07/04/04	First upload
03/01/05	New images
27/03/06	New images
21/01/07	New images