The acid test for any beloved film from the past is “How does it hold up?”
In the case of the sentimental crowd-pleasing “Time After Time” from 1979, the answer is “pretty well.”
I remember being almost giddy leaving the theater after this one, a witty, well-acted romantic thriller wrapped in a sci-fi period piece package. The giddiness may be gone, but its old-fashioned-with-a-modern-edge charms endure.
The conceit — that science fiction novelist H.G. Wells built his “time machine” only to have Jack the Ripper rip it off and escape to the future — was quite clever. And of that era, perhaps Nicholas Meyer was the only writer/director who could have pulled it off — a smart, suspenseful, funny and touching date movie for a sci-fi filmgoing audience that had just experienced the old fashioned “gee whiz” delights of the Christopher Reeve “Superman” movie.
Writer-director Meyer would go on to an almost revered status in sci-fi fandom for his writing and directing work in the first generation of “Star Trek” movies. But he already had an Oscar nomination for scripting one period piece — the Sherlock Holmes “The Seven Percent Solution” mystery thriller — and an Emmy nomination for the great TV film about the Orson Welles radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”(“The Night that Panicked America”).
Some of this film’s time-traveling-forward-to-modern-day San Francisco luster was lost when Meyer sort of repeated himself, giving the final script polish to “Star Trek IV,” a time travel romance that brought the U.S.S. Enterprise crew (in a Klingon ship) back to San Francisco. Co-star Mary Steenburgen echoed her performance here as a school marm love interest for Doc Brown in “Back to the Future III,” further watering down the novelty of “Time After Time.”
Doing a Q & A with screen legend Malcolm McDowell at a film school a few years back, he seemed put out that almost none of the aspiring moviemakers seemed to have caught this title from his resume. The star of “If…,” “A Clockwork Orange” and “Blue Thunder,” a mainstay in films, TV (“Mozart in the Jungle”), animation and video games and B-movies of every stripe rightly considers this one of the jewels of his resume.
McDowell plays a youngish H.G. Wells who gathers a few trusted friends for an 1893 “going away” dinner party in which the “free love,” religion-mocking socialist “futurist” shows off his time machine. He plans to depart Victorian England for a more civilized future. Humanity is no more than “three generations away from Utopia,” he figures.
His guests are skeptical, no one more than the late arriving Dr. Stevenson (David Warner), a surgeon who always beats Wells at chess “because I know how he thinks.”
The police break up the party, and the jolt of all involved realizing that that surgeon with the bloody white evening wear gloves tucked into his medical bag is in fact, Jack the Ripper, is nothing compared to Wells’ own shock.
Stevenson nicked the time machine to make his escape. Luckily, the capsule has a return to origin point mode, and it comes back. Wells must dash off because he has “unleashed Jack the Ripper on Utopia!”
Wells, hot on Stevenson’s trail, drops into 1979 San Francisco, where his time machine is part of an “H.G. Wells: A Man Before his Time” museum exhibit. Wells, a fish out of water dining at “that Scottish restaurant, ‘McDonald’s,” a Victorian English gentleman in spats and deerstalker hat, must turn Sherlock Holmes to track down his quarry.
That’s how he meets the modern liberated woman banker Amy Robbins (Steenburgen) who makes cracks about finding an interesting “straight” man in San Francisco, of all places, and comes on to Wells with purpose.
As the bodies pile up as the Ripper starts ripping through disco era San Francisco, nobody — not Amy and certainly not the SFPD (Charles Cioffi) — takes Wells’ story, when he finally dares to tell it, seriously. And even if he finds “Jack,” how can be best a murderous, unscrupulous cad who “knows how” he “thinks?”
Wells’ “proving” his honesty to Amy involves a short time trip and the movie’s most charming “reveal.” Doubting Amy picks up the museum’s copy of the day’s newspaper, which is a couple of days into the future. Steenburgen registers shock at the realization that she’s traveled in time, melting affection about “Herbert” Wells’ being honest with her after all, and terror at the headline of a story about her being the latest victim of this new “ripper” in the City by the Bay.
That moment, lushly scored by Golden Age of Hollywood legend composer Miklós Rózsa (“The Four Feathers,” Double Indemnity,” etc.), highlights the old-fashioned-with-a-modern-edge nature of the film and ties to the similarly sentimental “Superman,” which just preceded it on the Warner Bros. release calendar.
The “ripping” violence is tastefully kept off camera. The villain is urbane, a “gentlemen” in name only, and a “modern” man in his mania for murders he plans to continue getting away with.
Warner, who got his start at the same time and in the same sort of iconoclastic ’60s Euro cinema (“Morgan!” in Warner’s case) as McDowell, would be pretty much typecast as heavies after “Time After Time” and the original “Tron.”
The quirky, winsome Steenburgen was on her way to an Oscar which she’d win two years later for Jonathan Demme’s “Melvin and Howard.”
McDowell’s career has had many acts — (“Caligula” anyone?) — with his gift for glint-eyed villainy (“Blue Thunder” to “Thelma”) keeping him employed to this day.
Durable character actress Patti D’Arbanville turns up as a modern victim of the Ripper. And keen-eyed viewers will spy young and innocent Corey Feldman as a little boy who wonders who the weirdo sitting in the time machine in the museum is, and character actor Joseph Maher (“In & Out,” I.Q.,” TV’s “Anything But Love” and “Seinfeld”) plays one of Scotland Yard’s finest.
One curiosity I picked out on watching “Time After Time” anew was the script’s repeated references to Israel — its founding is recognized in the audio time travel montage, as is the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre — and it’s in scripted news bites and the like. Post Gaza, that really calls attention to itself.
Meyer, the son of a concert pianist and a psychoanalyst, had a few scripts where his Jewish identity impacted the story, most famously when he adapted novelist Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain,” something he talked about when I interviewed him about that film, if memory serves.
The pre-digital effects were simple, even by the standards of the day,, and the pace was deliberately inconsistent — lulling us into bits of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” whimsy and a “futurist” forced to confront a future he both predicted (air travel, women’s suffrage and sexual liberation) and got completely wrong.
But the film’s charm endures.
What makes this time travel story timeless are its leads. Steenburgen and McDowell are the beating heart of the culture clash romance and they make the characters’ shared post-religion and “free love” mores love connection believable.
It was no shock to anybody that edgy Englishman and plucky Arkansas gal next door married after the film came out and stayed that way for a decade
Rating: PG, violence, profanity
Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Mary Steenburgen, Charles Cioffi, Patty
Patti D’Arbanville and David Warner.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicholas Meyer. A Warner Bros. release on Tubi, Youtube, Amazon, other streamers.
Running time: 1:52
