The Man Who Could Work Miracles

The Man Who Could Work Miracles
Directed by	Lothar Mendes
Produced by	Alexander Korda
Written by	H. G. Wells Lajos Bíró
Starring	Roland Young Joan Gardner Ralph Richardson
Music by	Mischa Spoliansky
Cinematography	Harold Rosson
Edited by	Philip Charlot William W. Hornbeck
Production company	London Film Productions
Distributed by	United Artists
Release date	8 February 1937 (UK) 19 February 1937 (US)
Running time	82 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English

The Man Who Could Work Miracles is a black-and-white 1936 British fantasy-comedy film directed by the German-born American director Lothar Mendes. Reputedly the best-known of Mendes' 20 films, it's a greatly expanded version of H. G. Wells’s short story of the same name and stars Roland Young with a cast of supporting players including Sir Ralph Richardson and in a London Films production from the famous Hungarian-born British producer, Sir Alexander Korda. H.G. Wells himself worked on the adaptation, the plot revised to reflect Wells's socialist frustrations with the British upper class, and the growing threat of Communism, Fascism and Nazism in Europe at the time, something to which Mendes, Korda and Wells were all committed to combating in their creative work.

The film begins in the celestial realms, with three superhuman entities--gods, or perhaps angels--regarding the planet Earth - one of whom is played by a young, highly-made-up, shirtless George Sanders in an early role. Despairing of these "animals" that one of them continues to care about, two of them dare the third to conduct an experiment using these lesser creatures of that world to see if they can handle the kind of power over reality that might allow such beings to deserve to reach the stars. Choosing a human subject at random - though, necessarily, an ordinary if not downright foolish British subject - they bestow miraculous powers just short of their own upon one George Fotheringay, (Roland Young), an English middle-class haberdasher's assistant. Fotheringay enters the Long Dragon Pub and begins arguing with his friends about miracles and the impossibility of them. During this argument he calls upon his "will" to force a change and inadvertently causes a miracle: he makes an oil lamp turn upside down, without anyone touching it and with the flame burning steadily downwards rather than righting itself. He soon runs out of his miracle-sustaining willpower and is thrown out of the pub for spilling oil on the floor and causing a commotion.