Things To Come - 1936

GREAT movie, LOUSY video transfer
NOTE: Unfortunately, I think the new colorized Harryhausen version has the same problems. See more below.

"Things to Come" was the "2001" of its day.

In the late sixties, I saw a clean print of this movie in a New York theatre and it blew me away. Although it is in black-and-white, it is visually spectacular; the story is exciting; and it has a wonderful score. The sound was mono optical sound, but it was crisp and clear and capable of delivering the impact of the Arthur Bliss music.

For years, I've owned a disappointing VHS copy, which looks as if it were made made from a dirty, blurry, over-contrasty 16mm print, and the sound quality is poor. I've yearned to see a clean copy.

So when I got my DVD player, one of the first things I did was to buy this release, which says that it "features a pristine new film-to-video transfer from original source materials."

I am sorry to say it looks EXACTLY like the cruddy old VHS version, and...

Buy the VHS From Englewood!
I have loved "Things To Come for over twenty years and have taught it in my classes. It is slow and talky for many viewers, but it is also indisputably a great film---in fact, with "2001: A Space Odyssey" and a few others, it is that rarest of works: a genuine, serious science fiction movie.

However, be warned. Most of the public domain prints out there are simply horrible, as many of the reviews on this page attest. I have viewed numerous prints of this film and had long ago given up hope of ever seeing the movie in anything resembling reasonable condition---and then came the Englewood Entertainment video, with its glorious "neon" packaging. The picture has been cleaned up a good deal, and is much less shaky and spliced than other versions;but the glory of this edition is the soundtrack. Major work has been done here, eliminating hiss and pops and rendering the dialogue easily comprehensible for the first time in my lifetime and revealing the fully rich...

A Good Movie Made Unviewable
Having seen Things To Come on VHS, I looked forward to buying it on DVD. When I received it, however, the reproduction was so poor as to render it essentially unviewable. In the initial scenes the images are so murky that I was often unable to make out the faces of the principal characters. I only knew who was speaking because I'd seen the movie before. In all scenes the image is extremely fuzzy, looking exactly like the background when a camera is tightly focused on a face in the foreground. Sadly then, this DVD is worthless and you should wait for a better version. Note that the movie itself is a science-fiction classic, and ought to be seen by anyone interested in the part of the genre that was not usually shown in drive-ins. Note carefully, however, that most of the reviews are based on the VHS version, not the DVD. These reviews of course give no hint of the unacceptably low technical quality of the current DVD release. Just as an aside, I hope I'm not one of...

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