Learning on ScreenProjecting Tomorrow
Drawing on various American and British archives, each chapter offers a production and reception history, and situates the particular film within industrial, social and cultural contexts. For the specialist, it is generally the case – as Cull’s informative chapter on the largely-forgotten The Hellstrom Chronicle demonstrates – that the less canonical the film, the more there is to learn, but with the better-known films there is little that is new or surprising beyond the occasional nugget of information. For example, although I knew that Paramount bought the rights to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in the 1920s as a potential project for Cecil B. DeMille, I had no idea that it was also a project Sergei Eisenstein considered in his brief Hollywood sojourn, or that he provided the link, via Ivor Montagu, to the British-Gaumont attempt to produce a version in the 1930s. And although I first saw The Night That Panicked America (1975) a couple of decades ago, I was unaware that the idea of making a movie about Orson Welles’ 1938 radio adaptation of Wells’ novel was first proposed in 1951 (it was rejected by an executive who noted that adapting the novel itself had greater commercial appeal, but it is unclear whether this prompted Paramount to put Byron Haskins’ The War of the Worlds into production). Other tidbits – such as the fact that Forbidden Planet’s indebtedness to The Tempest went unnoticed by US reviewers but seemed obvious to UK reviewers, or that the UK’s ABC cinema chain released The Quatermass Experiment and Quatermass 2 in double bills with the French films Rififi (1955) and …And God Created Woman (1956) – might seem trivial, but they do offer intriguing insights into film culture.
So this is not really a book for the specialist. However, if you are looking for a clearly written and accessible introduction to sf films suitable for FE and undergraduate students, and one that treats in detail a small number of movies and some of the contexts necessary for understanding them, Projecting Tomorrow has no serious current competitor.
Mark Bould
