{"product_id":"0014381987928","title":"Things to Come","description":"\"First, a bit of explanation. There's never been a legitimate home-video edition of Alexander Korda's production of Things to Come (directed by William Cameron Menzies), and, in recent years, precious few legitimate broadcasts, either. The U.S. copyright of the movie, like many British films of its period, was allowed to lapse (in 1964); at the time, it hardly seemed to matter as there was little in the way of a theatrical or 16 mm market for anyone possessing prints to take advantage of, and no commercial television station of the period would deal with anyone other than large legitimate distributors for their movies. That changed somewhat with the advent of low-power UHF stations in the late '70s and more so with the switch by public television stations (increasingly in search of low-priced programming to fill their air time) into the vintage film marketplace at the outset of the 1980s. Still, this movie, along with the Alexander Korda productions of The Scarlet Pimpernel and Fire Over England (which had also fallen out of copyright), still had legitimate distribution, from authorized agents who had access to high-quality master materials, until the middle of the 1980s. In the midst of all this legal and commercial activity in America, rumors spread that a complete 108-minute edition of the film -- unseen at that length since the 1930s -- had been found or restored in England. (There has since been no sign of that full-length edition). The Samuel Goldwyn Company bought out the Korda library's American rights during the 1980s, including Things to Come, but has never seen fit to release it on video in any form. The situation doesn't seem to have altered much in the wake of MGM\/UA's buy-out of the Goldwyn collection.   Image Entertainment's release of Things to Come on DVD, courtesy of the Wade Williams Collection -- which usually specializes in so-bad-they're-entertaining sci-fi and horror titles like Plan 9 From Outer Space, interspersed with a few legitimate postwar American titles such as Destination Moon and Invaders From Mars (1953) -- is as close to a legitimate release in quality as this movie has ever seen. The source print used is generally very clean, apart from some very rough spots, generally at the reel-change points. Equally important, the print is reasonably consistent in its brightness, contrast, and detail -- one suspects that a fair amount of time and money was spent on the film-to-video transfer to achieve this consistency, and this is in sharp contrast to every other DVD edition of the movie (as of the fall of 2002), which utilized crude, dark \"\"one-light\"\" transfers from substandard sources. In comparison to those other DVD editions, this disc is a pleasure to watch, and even more so to listen to. The audio track is remarkably consistent, with only a lingering (but not too severe) drop in volume at 28 minutes in, from which the audio gradually recovers. Equally important, the audio track is clear and well-defined, which does justice not only to the dialogue but to Sir Arthur Bliss' score, one of the earliest bodies of serious, concert hall-quality music written for a feature film. The 14 chapters break down the plot (which is, itself, divided into three \"\"acts\"\") more than adequately, and the disc goes to the menu automatically on start-up. One wishes that there were more of a history of the film included in the packaging, but the one bonus feature here almost makes up for it -- a reissue trailer running nearly five minutes that shows how the movie was marketed to audiences in its own time and a half-generation removed from that time, distilling down many of the more dramatically intense scenes. It's not a completely perfect release -- the package claims a running time of 97 minutes, but it's actually the standard 93-minute reissue version of the film -- but until MGM\/UA decides to do something about the movie (and they've been very slow about issuing any of the Korda titles, even the 1939 version of The Four Feathers), it's likely the best that will be available for purchase.\"","brand":"IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47092165476592,"sku":"0014381987928","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/0014381987928_p0.jpg?v=1763766528","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/0014381987928","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}