HG Wells – { feuilleton }

The Magic Shop, a film by Ian Emes

An illustration by Arthur Wallis Mills from The Strand Magazine, June, 1903.

I had not thought the place was there, to tell the truth—a modest-sized frontage in Regent Street, between the picture shop and the place where the chicks run about just out of patent incubators—but there it was sure enough. I had fancied it was down nearer the Circus, or round the corner in Oxford Street, or even in Holborn; always over the way and a little inaccessible it had been, with something of the mirage in its position…

Despite writing about an HG Wells adaptation only a week ago I hadn’t gone searching for more of them when this one turned up anyway, rather like Wells’ mysterious shop. I’d actually been looking at the filmography of the late Ian Emes, a director best known for the short animations he made for Pink Floyd’s concerts, although his career encompassed animated shorts like The Beard as well as longer films for television and the cinema. The Magic Shop, which was made in 1982, looks as though it might have been another of those shorts that used to be programmed as supporting titles for first-run features in British cinemas. Andrew Birkin’s Sredni Vashtar was one of these, a film which is also under 30 minutes in length and an adaptation of a popular piece of Edwardian fiction.

HG Wells’ story was first published in The Strand Magazine in June 1903 then collected in Wells’ Twelve Stories and a Dream a few months later. It’s been one of my favourite Wells stories since I first read it at the age of 11, as I mentioned in this review of the 1964 TV version. Wells’ fantasy reached me just as I was beginning to get very interested in conjuring tricks. I’d also been reading Victorian ghost stories in the reprint collections being published by Puffin and Lion, so a story about a shop that sold magic tricks, where the premises and proprietor had a slightly sinister quality, was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to read.

Ian Emes’ adaptation is a more successful Wells film than The Door in the Wall, and a much better adaptation of the story itself than the attempt to update the tale for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, but Emes still doesn’t really capture the spirit of the story. The main flaw is that the actor playing the boy who wants to explore the shop is too old for the role. The narrator’s son in the story is around five or six years old, and much of the tension in the telling comes from the way that the boy sees everything that’s happening as delightful and magical while the father experiences rising alarm at the unfolding events and the situation in which the pair find themselves. The second half of the story, in which father and son are led by the shopowner into the labyrinthine warehouse behind the shop, is also lacking. Emes’ production may have been compromised by its budget but there’s no sign of the surprises that you might have expected to be filmed by a former animator. Derek Jarman regular Karl Johnson plays the father, Ron Cook is the shopowner, and there’s a cameo near the beginning from William Rushton as the man whose whining son is denied admittance to the shop. (Rushton had earlier provided the voice of the afflicted shaver in The Beard.) At the end of Emes’ film father and son find themselves teleported to what looks like a back street somewhere near the river instead of being returned to a busy London street. This reminds me that the first time I visited Regent Street myself at the age of 13 I had half a mind to go looking for the “Genuine Magic Shop”—or to try and identify the place where it might have been. The elusive nature of Wells’ establishment makes it the forerunner of the chemist shop owned by the malevolent Grail-seekers in Charles Williams’ War in Heaven, which makes me wonder now whether Williams borrowed the idea from Wells.

Ian Emes’ film may be seen at his Vimeo channel (log-in required, or you can use the Vimeo app). The story can be found in a collection of fifty-four of Wells’ short stories at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Door in the Wall, 1956
• Claude Shepperson’s First Men in the Moon
• The Beard, a film by Ian Emes
• Uncharted islands and lost souls
• Doctor Moreau book covers
• The Island of Doctor Moreau
• Harry Willock book covers
• The Time Machine
• The Magic Shop by HG Wells
• HG Wells in Classics Illustrated
• The night that panicked America
• The Door in the Wall
• War of the Worlds book covers

The Door in the Wall, 1956

The Door in the Wall is one of HG Wells’ most popular short stories, a fable-like piece which has slipped across the genre barriers into collections as diverse as Tales of the Unexpected (1924), More Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales (1927), The World’s Great Mystery Stories (1943), The Dream Adventure (1963), Magazine of Horror (1965), The Sixth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1970), Tales of the Occult (1975), Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1983), Classic Science Fiction Stories (2022), and many others. The categorisations are more an attempt to fill out a contents list with quality material than a reflection of the story itself. Most readers would regard The Door in the Wall as a straightforward work of fantasy, in which a small boy discovers a door in a wall in a very ordinary London street, a portal which leads him into a paradisiacal garden. When the boy grows into man he remains haunted and eventually tormented by his memories of the enchanted world he found beyond the door.

Given the popularity of the story and its simple narrative you’d expect there to be more film adaptations than there are. This short from 1956 (links below) was the only directorial effort by Glenn H. Alvey, and a very odd film it is. What might have been a worthy if uninspired transcription of Wells’ tale is here confounded by Alvey’s “Dynamic Frame”, a trademarked invention which involved filming the whole thing in VistaVision then masking portions of the frame with a matte that continually changes the aspect ratio of the picture to suit the action, even following the actors around the screen. Adjusting the aspect ratio while the film is running isn’t an uncommon technique but Alvey’s process is a distinctly obtrusive one, which no doubt explains why it wasn’t further developed elsewhere. As for the adaptation, the enchanted garden beyond the door turns out to be nothing more than a large and very typical English country estate, with a few parrots and a pair of caged budgerigars providing some exotic flavour. (Now that London has wild parakeets roosting in its trees even these details are no longer exotic.) Wells’ garden is a numinous and magical place, one that might have been better represented with a change from black-and-white to colour, as when Dorothy opens the door to Oz. Alvey’s adaptation is worth watching more for its views of ungentrified post-war London streets than it is for the drama. It also features an unusually restrained musical score by James Bernard, a composer better known for the thundering soundtracks he provided for many Hammer horror films. Bernard aside, HG Wells’ stories deserve better treatment than this.

• The Door in the Wall: part one | part two

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Claude Shepperson’s First Men in the Moon
• Uncharted islands and lost souls
• Doctor Moreau book covers
• The Island of Doctor Moreau
• Harry Willock book covers
• The Time Machine
• The Magic Shop by HG Wells
• HG Wells in Classics Illustrated
• The night that panicked America
• The Door in the Wall
• War of the Worlds book covers

Metropolis Magazine, 1927

When Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was released in Britain the distributors, Wardour Films Ltd, produced a 32-page guide to the film filled with production stills and brief pieces written by the cast and crew. I have a facsimile copy of this publication, a limited reprint by Phantasm Press, but the original document is also available for reading or downloading at the Internet Archive. Publications like this were the standalone equivalent of promotional pieces created for the readers of film magazines; Metropolis was Ufa’s most expensive production to date so there would have been a need for serious promotion.

None of this effort helped make the film a success, however. Lang’s epic is a masterpiece of direction and production design but Thea von Harbou’s script was the kind of absurd and naive fare you often get from writers incapable of projecting the complexities of the present day into their visions of the future. (HG Wells was unsparing in his review of “the silliest film”.) A lack of audience enthusiasm prompted foreign distributors to take out their editing scissors, but cutting a quarter of the footage didn’t help either, especially when the cuts made nonsense of the motivations of Rotwang the inventor. One thing you can see in the programme is shots from sequences like the race-track scene which were subsequently removed and wouldn’t be seen in anything other than still form for many decades.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Blade Runner vs Metropolis
• The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss
• Metropolis!
• Metropolis posters

Corgi SF Collector’s Library

Cover artist unknown.

“Here, for the connoisseur, for the devotee of the SF genre, and for those who like their reading to combine excitement with good writing, is the Corgi SF Collector’s Library – a series that brings, in a uniform edition, many of the Greats of SF – standard classics, contemporary prizewinners, and controversial fiction, fantasy, and fact…”

Only in the 1970s would you find a line of SF paperbacks with all the titles set in Thalia, a Victorian typeface revived by the post-psychedelia predilection for any design that was florid and ornate. Corgi’s SF Collector’s Library was published from 1973 to 1976, arriving just as my reading was moving from child-friendly SF to adult fiction. Consequently, I bought quite a few of these books, and still own a couple of them. The design was uniform but with a surprising amount of variation for such a short-lived series. The background colours ranged from deep blue to purple, while the card used for the covers was regular paperback stock for some of the titles with the majority using textured card, a treatment that further distinguished the series from its rivals on the bookshelves.

Art by Joe Petagno.

Looking at these covers again I’ve been wondering if the idea of framing the artwork in a circle was borrowed from Penguin’s run of HG Wells reprints from 1967. Corgi had done something similar the same year with their Ray Bradbury series (all with art by Bruce Pennington) but the Wells editions went through several reprints, and the SF Collector’s Library follows their form even down to allowing the artwork to break the frame.

Art by Bruce Pennington.

The samples here are a small selection of the series which featured a fair representation of British SF illustrators of the time. None of the artists were credited on the covers, however—a poor showing on the part of Corgi—so a few of them remain unidentified.

Art by Tony Roberts.

Cover artist unknown.

Continue reading “Corgi SF Collector’s Library”

Virgil Finlay’s magazine illustrations

The Time Machine by HG Wells; Famous Fantastic Mysteries, August 1950.

This one will be popular, I’m sure. One of the recent uploads at the Internet Archive is a massive collection of Virgil Finlay’s interior illustrations from the magazines that published most of his work—Weird Tales, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Amazing Stories, etc, etc—together with the astrological illustrations he created later in his career, plus other material, including a few pieces that never appeared in print. Pencil drawings, lithographs and hundreds of meticulous renderings in ink on paper or scratchboard; 1888 illustrations in all. Whoever put the haul together has been much more thorough than I’d have expected. Rather than a stash of random drawings you get 10 separate folders (best appreciated in the cbz format; see the note below) with each illustration tagged with the name of the story it was illustrating, and the date of publication. The contents are a mix of reproductions from later reprints, together with cropped pages from magazine scans. Taken together, this must comprise almost all of Finlay’s published work excluding his magazine covers and other paintings.

Earth’s Last Citadel by Henry Kuttner and CL Moore; Fantastic Novels Magazine, July 1950.

Virgil Finlay (1914–1971) can be a frustrating artist for anyone who admires his work. He was massively prolific, and maintained a high level of quality for almost 40 years; but his interior illustrations were often printed on pulp stock, the kind of paper that offers the worst kind of print reproduction, and which darkens and eventually crumbles into dust unless it’s carefully stored. Descriptions of his illustrations often note that his drawing style evolved to compensate for the deficiencies of the printing but much of his artwork was very finely rendered, and I’m not sure his minute stipple effects would have printed any better (or worse) than the traditional cross-hatching which he used from time to time. His drawings have at least been well-served by reprint collections, where the white art paper makes his striking compositions leap off the page. Inevitably, the best of these—Gerry de la Ree’s seven-volume collection from the 1970s, and a four-volume set from the 1990s—are all out of print. The sheer quantity of illustrations also presents a problem for any reprint collection: what to include…or leave out? All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this accumulation of his interior art may be unauthorised, and even frowned upon by some, but it benefits Finlay by keeping his work in circulation and showing the full range of his career.

The Faceless God by Robert Bloch; Weird Tales, May 1936.

With 1888 illustrations to choose from, picking out a representative selection is a hopeless task, so what you see here are a few favourites. I said that Finlay maintained a high level of quality but there are unsuccessful Finlays, especially in the early years when his style was still evolving. (It should be noted that he was in his early twenties when he was creating pieces such as these. His errors are a lot less grievous than mine were at the same age.) One of the hallmarks of the Finlay style is a frequent use of photo-reference, especially for faces, and it’s the disjunction between faces and bodies which occasionally jars. Disparities between the size or angle of a head and a body are common in photo-collage but you don’t expect to see them in a drawing. Occasionally the disparities worked for him, as in his illustration for The Faceless God by Robert Bloch, a drawing that so impressed HP Lovecraft that he responded with a short poem praising both picture and artist. The reference images used for his later work are much more seamlessly integrated, and in the 1940s and 50s he seemed to be using posed models as frequently as the illustrators for the big American magazines.

The Man Who Mastered Time by Ray Cummings; Fantastic Novels Magazine, March 1950. Remove the fungi from this illustration and you’d have an almost abstract image.

Regarding cbz or cbr files: these are simply folders filled with jpegs or pngs which have been zipped then given a new suffix. They can be browsed using a suitable comics-reader application; I use Simple Comic for the iMac and ComiCat for the tablet. The files can also be opened with any unzipping software to give you access to the images inside. I find these files so much easier to use than pdfs, especially for image-heavy publications, that I’ve taken to exporting pdf pages as jpegs then zipping a folder of the images into a cbr. One of the advantages of the cbr format is that the readers allow you to extract an image without unzipping the whole file. The only drawback with the Finlay files is that ComiCat doesn’t let you see the file name the way that Simple Comic does.

Full Moon by Talbot Mundy; Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1953.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Virgil Finlay’s Tarzan
• Virgil Finlay’s Salomé
• The monstrous tome