William Cameron Menzies – Movie Musings

Soapy melodrama on the surface, viciously biting satire underneath – making it as two-faced as the town it’s about

Director: Sam Wood

Cast: Ann Sheridan (Randy Monaghan), Robert Cummings (Parris Mitchell), Ronald Reagan (Drake McHugh), Betty Field (Cassie Tower), Charles Coburn (Dr Henry Gordon), Claude Rains (Dr Alexander Tower), Judith Anderson (Harriet Gordon), Nancy Coleman (Louise Gordon), Kaaren Verne (Elise Sandor), Maria Ouspenskaya (Madame von Eln), Harry Davenport (Colonel Skeffington)

There are few things more idealised than the decent American small-town, where everybody knows your name and people leave their doors unlocked safe with their trusted neighbours. That ideal is comprehensively dismantled by Kings Row. Like some sort of proto-Twin Peaks, it presents a small-town that is all picket fences and porch swings on the surface, but a seething morass of petty jealousies, hypocrisies, lies, cruelties and sadism underneath. Kings Row was adapted from a best-seller by Henry Bellerman many considered unfilmable (among the things it features that are obscured in the film are incest and assisted suicide) and is a searingly successful melodrama.

Covering the 1890s to the 1910s, Kings Row follows the lives of four young people, all suffering from the older generation’s pettiness and wickedness. Parris Mitchell (Robert Cummings) is a young man, training to be a doctor, in love with his austere mentor Dr Tower’s (Claude Rains) sensitive daughter Cassie (Betty Field). His best friend Drake McHugh (Ronald Reagan) is an amiable lothario, denied engagement to Louise (Nancy Coleman), daughter of the snobby Dr Gordon (Charles Coburn) and his wife (Judith Anderson). After personal disasters and tragedies for both men, Parris travels to Venice to train as a psychiatrist and McHugh finds true love with daughter-of-the-railroad Randy (Ann Sheridan). But the dark forces of Kings Row demand a price from Drake.

Kings Row is a sensational plot-boiler, bought to life with great care and a delicious sense of the tender and salacious by Sam Wood. Working closely (again) with William Cameron Menzies on the design and tone, this must have been a glorious change of pace for the pair after the worthy (but flawed) Our Town, which treated similar ideas with reverence. There is none of that in Kings Row, with its frequent recourses to moody skies and Gothic storms via James Wong Howe’s Oscar-nominated expressionistic lighting of its imposing local buildings. This is not a town of homespun values and decency, but lean, mean cruelty and possessiveness, with dark secrets behind every door.

You get that sense from the start, as our characters bound around the town as children. As a young girl, Cassie Tower’s birthday party competes with the announcement Louise Gordon will hold hers on the same day. Sure enough, Parris alone attends Cassie’s – the humiliated torment of this girl at the head of a large empty table, loaded with food, is agonising – while the rest of the town piles into the Gordon’s party. This is a town that plays favourites, and the Gordons are at the top of the social tree. But then, the Towers are not pure as the driven snow. Rains gives a horrific air of quiet, suggestive menace to Tower’s controlling iciness, a grim ogre at the heart of his Gothic pile. Glimpses of Tower’s wife are seen upstairs, confined in isolation like Jane Eyre’s Bertha. His control extends over every inch of Cassie’s life, keeping her isolated and firmly in place.

This continues well into her adulthood – there is a lovely transition here, with a close up of young Parris’ foot stepping over a style with a distinctive brush of the surface, and his adult foot (with the same brush) crossing back over in the same shot – a control that has helped turn her into a flustered, anxious, neurotic, played with intensity by Betty Field. She still attracts the love of Robert Cummings – who does well in a rather thankless role as our quietly, stoic centre – but its doomed by her father’s possessive assumption that he knows what’s best for both her and Parris. The shockingly brutal action Tower takes – and the, on reflection, under-the-carpet brushing of this deed the powers that be carry out – is a clear sign this midwestern town is in fact a ghastly place.

Perhaps the only decent person of the older generation is Maria Ouspenskaya, very heartfelt as Parris’s Russian grandmother. As her health deteriorates, it’s commented by the town’s higher ups that with her passes an era of decent values: an inadvertent satirical comment in itself, since this representative of American values is a Russian accented immigrant. Real Kings Row values are controlled by the Gordon’s: Harriet (played by Judith Anderson in sub-Danvers form) is a bitter snob, while Charles Coburn’s Dr Gordon is the must unsettling character he ever played, a sadistic quack who refuses anaesthetic (and worse) to patients he deems morally inferior and treats the town’s working classes as his personal societal petri dish.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the one guy everyone in the town thinks is a nailed on cad, is the most decent guy there. Ronald Reagan never had a better role than Drake McHugh (his most famous line “Where’s the rest of me!” became the title of his first autobiography). Reagan makes Drake warm, likeable, refreshingly loyal and honest, a ladies man but also a man of his word, treating everyone around him with respect. Kings Row is, in many ways, a parade of events to crush his decency, losing the chance to forge his own business, his trust fund filched, his body mutilated by a sadist doctor.

The dramatic and emotional force ends up being our wish that Drake survives everything the town throws at him. He has the support of best friend Parris, a horrified witness to the evils around him, and Randy played with a charisma and charm by Ann Sheridan that makes an instant impact, despite only making her first appearance an hour into the film. Randy becomes the force of good and hope in the film: alongside her working-class family bastions of true decency, in a town where everyone else seems two-faced, wicked or willing to shove their heads in the ground pretending everything is fine.

After all, nothing can be allowed to rock the boat in Kings Row. You could argue Harry Davenport’s Colonel Skeffington, who good-naturedly wants to keep everything ticking over, is even the real villain. There seems to be nothing he won’t hush up: fraud, murder-suicide, an epidemic of surgical maiming… Nothing can challenge the idea Kings Row presents on a sign at the town’s boundary: it is “A Good Town. A Good, Clean Town. A Good Town to Live In and a Good Place to Raise Your Children”. Doth the town protest too much?

With this darkness and clear-eyed vision, Kings Row may frequently feel soapish, but it’s a vicious satire exploding a particular all-American ideal and exposing it as rotting garbage, a fountain of lies where the decent and vulnerable (like Drake and Cassie) suffer the most. It makes Kings Row, in its own way, one of the most consequential films of its kind, the sort of denunciation (dressed up as reassuring melodrama) that Hollywood would wait decades before daring to repeat.

HG Wells ultra-serious view of the future is stilted but also visionary

Director: William Cameron Menzies

Cast: Raymond Massey (John Cabal/Oswald Cabal), Edward Chapman (‘Pippa’ Passworthy/Raymond Passworthy), Ralph Richardson (The Boss), Margaretta Scott (Roxana Black), Cedric Hardwicke (Theotocopulos), Maurice Braddell (Dr Edward Harding), Sophie Stewart (Mrs Cabal), Derrick De Marney (Richard Gordon), Ann Todd (Mary Gordon), John Clements (Enemy pilot)

Alexander Korda was thrilled. He’d secured the rights to the legendary HG Well’s new novel. Even better the Great Man would work, hand-in-glove, with Korda’s team to bring The Shape of Things to Come to the screen. It would be a grand science-fiction hit, that would echo the success of American films based on Wells’ work (films, to be fair, Wells pretty much hated apart from The Invisible Man). It became a continual struggle before the final flawed-but-fascinating film arrived in cinemas.

Things to Come opens in the (then) near future in 1940 as war tears “Everytown” on Christmas Day and flies 100 years into the future. Bombing destroys the city and hurtles the world into over twenty years of never-ending war that leaves civilisation wrecked by carnage, advanced weapons and poisonous gases. A legacy of the war, “the wandering sickness” devastates the survivors, killing half the remaining population. In the ruins of Everytown in the 1960s, the Boss (Ralph Richardson) rises to take power, one of many warlords across the world being challenged by the “World Communications” alliance of engineers and scientists in Basra, Iraq. When they reshape the world, decades of progress lead to a new civilisation in 2036 aiming at the stars.

HG Wells saw Things to Come as a polemic, an ambitious and optimistic look at how mankind should progress, leaving behind war and politics to embrace rational thought and the quest for knowledge. Written at a time when tensions were high in Europe, it would show the world torn apart, devastated and reborn greater than it ever was before. Never-the-less at every point, the unambitious, myopic and power-hungry gather to hold back progress. What he didn’t really see it as was a conventional “drama” or those involved as “characters” more devices, ciphers and mouthpieces for his viewpoints.

Which helps explain the curious project that made it to the screen. Wells was guaranteed approval over the dialogue, which remains flat and heavy handed. Actors felt constrained within the sonorous phasing and over-written prose. It wasn’t helped by director William Cameron Menzies’ discomfort with dialogue scenes. Whenever two people stand around (which sums up the blocking) and chat, the film is frequently a little dull, settling for a semi-disguised lecture on humanity, science and progress. Korda correctly identified the dialogue problems and cut as much of it as possible.

In doing so, he snipped away much of the narrative framework of the film. In a film that flies forward through time and world-changing events, we frequently get confused about the exact details of who goes why and where and what makes characters do the things they do. Characters disappear and reappear, fly across the world in seconds, form and break alliances and argue and drop cases all on a sixpence. Raymond Massey later talked about how hard he found his character (a man and his grandson, bridging all timelines) to bring to life with dialogue largely devoid of emotion. Much of Things to Come can be dry-as-a-bone.

But yet… Away from the weaknesses of the script, much of Things to Come is quite awe-inspiring. While the characters might be a little flat, the energy of the film’s first two acts (in 1936 and 1966) offers a host of striking scenes and images. Things to Come remains powerful and horrifying when it looks at the darkness and damage of war. The 1936 bombing attack on Everytown still shocks with its superbly assembled shots of buildings exploding, crowds panicking, dead bodies slumped in cars, terrified faces and dead children in the rubble. Imagine watching this with the Blitz just a few years away. Menzies may not direct acting or dialogue with much inspiration, but his skill with visuals and editing is clear. The montage carrying the world over the next thirty years is a masterful mix of fake news-footage and technological innovation as ever more advanced tanks and airplanes roll past the screen. The film’s use of design and visuals is frequently haunting and impressive.

It carries across to the bombed-out design of Everytown in the 1960s. A shell of a city, where wrecks of cars are pulled by horses. Those suffering from “the Wandering Sickness” move like zombies through the city. Homes and buildings are gutted remains. Newspaper headlines – of newspapers that become ever more basic in printing and more expensive in price – had previously helped communicate the passage of events. Now the news is chalked up onto a board outside the home of the Mussolini-like Boss (the film’s finest performance of charismatic swagger and delusional power-mad greed by Ralph Richardson). Clothing is basic and functional, pulled together from scraps leftover from the war, in a world largely devoid of all technology.

This wasteland makes the futuristic designs even more striking. The “Wings Over the World” organisation – growing from the cradle of civilisation in Iraq – is sleek, metallic and efficient in its construction. When John Cabal (Raymond Massey) lands back in the 60s ruin of Everytown, he looks like a spaceman. He might as well be. His fleet of unimaginably vast airplanes have inspired visions of futuristic flight right up to the mighty airbases the Avengers operate in the MCU.

While you can snigger a little at the utopiaish version of the future – very Star Trek in its flowing robes and shoulder pads – it’s vision of subterranean cities full of everything from wrist communicators to widescreen TVs feels quite prescient. Everything is clear, polished and perfect – much of it doesn’t look a million miles away from an Apple store. While the villains of the future (a band of luddites led by Cedric Hardwicke) may be little more than paper tigers, given only the vaguest motivations, the grand engineering accomplishments of the future and their glances at the stars feel inspired in their detail and ambition.

It’s where Things to Come triumphs. It might not often have much to listen to, but every single scene carries a slice of design or visual interest. Its frequently assembled into effective – and even terrifying – montages. And its design of the future – based on Wells vision and bought to life by Menzies and his technical team – is a perfect mix of striking and prescient. Things to Come isn’t always the best drama, but as a forward-looking piece of design it’s truly memorable.