Alexander Korda's lavish production of an H. G. Wells story features stunning futuristic sets by Vincent Korda and designs by John Armstrong, the Surrealist artist whose work is included in the museum exhibition Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art. Armstrong was an official war artist for Britain, and, as Louisa Buck notes, it was during the war that he produced some of his most disquieting scenes of deserted landscapes in which stranded objects found themselves in unexpected places. In 1935, Things to Come was an uncannily accurate forecast of World War II, beginning in 1940 with a surprise air attack on London. Wells' pessimism regarding life on earth permeates the tale, which carries the war into the sixties, leaving cities and towns battered, and citizens, plagued with "wandering disease," effectively regressed to a state of near savagery. It's Road Warriors of 1935, until a handful of scientist-aeronauts alight to make the world safe for technocratic dictatorship. Cut to the year 2036 and a futuristic maze of spiraled rooftops and fantastic flying machines: in this sterile Utopian environment overseen by one Oswald Cabal (Raymond Massey), a revolt brews to return to the days of humanity and frailty.