Time After Time
                                                                                
Director: Nicholas Meyer
Year: 1979
Rating: 7.5
When this was first released, I was a huge fan of the film and like most of America I had a crush on Mary Steenburgen that has lasted till this day. Lucky Ted Danson and before that she married her co-star in this film, Malcolm McDowell, right after the film was finished. That might explain the tender chemistry between the two of them. They really were in love or headed that way. It was only her second film but McDowell was already a star with a series of British films - If, Clockwork Orange. O' Lucky Man and Royal Flash. His performance in Clockwork Orange seared itself into our collective brains and still resides in mine. He had just finished the controversial Caligula and wanted something more mainstream. He gets it here in this delightful romantic time travel slasher movie. The film was the love product of Nicholas Meyer, famous at the time for the Sherlock Holmes novel The Seven Percent Solution (he has written other Holmes novels since) that was made into a successful movie. He had come across a half-finished novel that this became. He loved the pulpy concept of throwing H.G. Wells and his Time Machine and Jack the Ripper into the same film, wrote the screenplay and got permission to direct it - his debut. After this film, he was called in to save the Star Trek film franchise in the second film - The Wrath of Khan.



Time has tempered my love for this film a bit, but still it is very enjoyable. And I am still infatuated with Steenburgen. A lot of the fish out of water moments don't work as well anymore - because San Francisco in 1979 feels almost as long ago as Victorian England did in the film. There were also a few logic points that jumped out at me that I don't think did before. For example, why does H.G. Wells go into the future to capture his friend, Jack the Ripper? Why not go a day backwards and have the police waiting in his home? And if I knew I was going to be killed at 7pm and it was mid-afternoon, the last thing I would do is take a sleeping pill. And that she is so proud of her job as a female currency clerk at the bank feels very old-fashioned in light of what has happened since then. These ideas shot through my head as I watched but did not in any way diminish this spunky film for me.



The beginning is clever - Wells sitting around the table with a group of intellectual friends who beg him not to begin to lecture them again about Socialism, free-love and Utopia. Wells besides writing some of the best fantasy books ever was also a famous essayist, lecturer, religious thinker and windbag and these were the ideas that he believed in. He also practiced them - especially free love having a myriad of affairs while married to his wives - in particular his second wife. He predicted world wars, tanks and the atomic bomb. Now we know how he did it. He lived long enough - died in 1947 - to see it all come true. But Utopia remained a far-off dream. San Francisco though came closest to free love and certainly he is amenable to it.



His good friend John (a perfectly quietly malicious David Warner) comes late to the gathering - Jack to his friends. He has just killed a prostitute. Now to a nice chat with his elite friends. H.G. shows them his time machine in the basement - not yet had the courage to try it he says. The cops knock on the door looking for a killer. H.G. realizes later that Jack has used his machine. In the book the protagonist goes far far into the future to a time when mankind are food for the Morlocks. Here he sets it only for 1979, same as Jack, and goes in search of him. He does find him and the discussion between H.G. and Jack is a classic. Here is your Utopia H.G. - and clicks on the TV to show him the news. This is not your time H.G. but it is perfect for me. I am a 20th Century man. What I do is inconsequential compared to the mass murder everywhere. H.G also meets Amy, the bank clerk and she eyes him like a nicely done steak. At least he is not gay she tells her friend. The film kicks into suspense when H.G. realizes that his once good friend is up to his old tricks again and realizes that he has to stop him and somehow convince Amy that he is from the past and is THE H.G. Wells. It gets very good.