Retro Review - "Time After Time" (1979)

In all the years of me being a film buff, I am often asked for movie recommendations from family, friends and co-workers. Of all the films I have recommended to people I have yet to hear a negative reaction to my recommendation of a 1979 romantic thriller called Time After Time.

Time After Time is a delightful, yet suspenseful (and unexpectedly violent in one scene) that deals with love, murder and time travel. How can these three things mix together and come out completely satisfying? Well, let me tell you a little about it.

Set in England in the late 1800's, Time After Time tells the story of novelist H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell), author of The Time Machine. The film presumes that Wells not only wrote the novel but actually built a time machine himself believing the future would offer a Utopian society.

As the film opens Jack the Ripper attacks his latest victim but the police are in the vicinity and hot on his trail. Wells, meanwhile, is having some friends over for an evening of drinks and is going to use the opportunity to show off the time machine. Unbeknownst to Wells, his best friend Dr. John Louis Stevenson (played with magnificent villainy by David Warner) is the Ripper. As Wells shows off his time machine to his friends (all of whom, especially Stevenson, fancy him a bit eccentric), the police arrive and soon find the bloody gloves and murder weapon of the Ripper in Stevenson's bag. As the house is searched Wells discovers that Stevenson has taken the time machine to 1979 and when the machine is returned (because Wells has the master key to it), Wells embarks on a journey to present day to find his friend and bring him back to bring him to justice.

Upon entering 1979 (where he comes out of the machine at an H.G. Wells exhibit at the museum), Wells almost immediately discovers there is no Utopian society and that catching Stevenson is going to be much harder than he thought. He tracks Stevenson to a bank that exchanges foreign currency and meets a teller (the lovely Mary Steenburgen) who directs Wells to the hotel where she had directed Stevenson earlier. Wells confronts Stevenson who, in one of writer/director Nicholas Meyer's best lines, tells Wells after reading the newspaper and watching television, "90 years ago I was a freak. Today I am an amateur." The two wrestle for the master key and a chase ensues culminating with Stevenson being hit by a car and Wells mistakenly believing his old friends is dead. Wells goes to see the bank teller again and she volunteers to show him around San Francisco and a romance develops. Everything seems well until a woman turns up dead in the style of the Ripper and soon the chase is on as Wells goes hunting for Stevenson, while Stevenson hunts for Wells to get the master key to the time machine.

And that's just the beginning. To reveal anymore would be to spoil the many pleasures of this fine film. McDowell (best known to film buffs as the head thug in Stanley Kubrick's masterful A Clockwork Orange but, sadly, is probably wider known to today's audience as Dr. Loomis in Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween) plays Wells at a perfect pitch. He is an English gentleman who reserves himself only until things seem hopeless. Warner (best known as Billy Zane's bodyguard in Titanic but who has made a career of character roles) is just right as the Ripper. Charming in one moment he can be equally as frightening in the next (illustrated best in a scene where he sneaks up behind Steenburgen in the bank and asks her to pass along a message to Wells). Steenburgen displays a sense of innocence that is totally charming and makes the romance all the more believable.

When Time After Time opened in the fall of 1979 the reviews for the film were strong but, for reasons I can't possibly understand, it was a box office flop. The film lasted two to three weeks at best and then disappeared. If you ask people about this film most will stare blankly at you having never heard of it. The film was marketed correctly (though the original trailer seems to make it a little more light hearted than it is) but people simply failed to find the film. Thirty-two years later a lot of people still haven't found the film and this is a terrific film worth searching out.

First time director Meyer (best known at the time for his Oscar nominated screenplay to the Sherlock Holmes adventure The Seven Percent Solution) shows a little rust in his execution but announced himself as a major director to watch in the future. His best efforts after this were as director of Star Trek II, Star Trek VI and the powerful made for television movie about life after a nuclear blast, The Day After. His screenplay is whimsical and exciting but a tad predictable. This is not a perfect film (today's kids will probably laugh at the special effects '" effects that are brief and not integral to the plot) but it's one that will have you sitting on the edge of your seat when you are not sitting back and smiling at it all.

When it's over you will want to watch it all over again. What better thing can be said about a movie? I hope you seek this film out and if you do, let me know about it. I cannot imagine anyone not enjoying this movie.