Time After Time (1979)
WB DVD (region 4)
d. Nicholas Meyer; pr. Herb Jaffe; scr. Nicholas Meyer; novel. Karl Alexander; ph. Paul Lohmann; m. Miklos Rozsa; ed. Donn Cambern; cast. Malcolm McDowell, Mary Steenburgen, David Warner, Charles Cioffi, Patti D'Arbanville, Joseph Maher (112 mins)
Nicholas Meyer made inroads into Hollywood when his novel The Seven Per Cent Solution was made into a movie by director Herbert Ross. In it, Meyer demonstrated his fondness for the pairing of two known personalities, in that case one fictional (Sherlock Holmes) and one factual (Sigmund Freud). When the time came for his directorial debut, Meyer chose two well known historical personages, H.G Wells and Jack the Ripper. The Ripper case he drew upon is indeed often taken as the commencement of the modern age, at least criminologically – the seemingly motiveless sex murders were a new kind of crime that police were ill-equipped to deal with or to understand. After the Ripper, the serial killer would become the scourge of the 20th Century, especially in America. The Ripper was of course never caught and his identity remains a popular subject for speculation. Correspondingly, there has been something of a cinematic sub-culture spring up about the Ripper, with movies about the killer dating back to the silent era. Time After Time is one of the foremost stories in this Ripper cinema, though not for its psychological analysis of the killer, but for its central romance and for its novel way of suggesting the Ripper as a visionary, tying into the cynicism that Meyer would often display in his later work (particularly notable in the nuclear catastrophe telemovie The Day After, but also seeping at times into his Star Trek movies).
Time After Time begins in London in 1893, where a prostitute is murdered by Jack the Ripper. Meanwhile, H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) is having a dinner gathering for some of his close friends (among them David Warner) wherein he reveals his untested time machine. Police interrupt, looking for the Ripper. They search the house and do find the Ripper’s bag, containing his bloodied items. McDowell realizes the bag belongs to his friend Warner, who cannot be found. McDowell notices that his time machine is also missing. When it returns as programmed, he realizes that Warner has gone into the future. Wells fears that he may have let a monster loose in utopia and follows him to present day (1979) San Francisco. There he is lost, but gets information from a kindly bank teller (Mary Steenburgen) and locates Warner. He chases Warner, who is then injured in a car crash. Believing Warner dead, he pursues a romance with the willing Steenburgen. Their blossoming ideal is interrupted when McDowell realizes that Warner is not dead. He tells his story to a disbelieving Steenburgen. To prove it to her, he takes her to the time machine and transports her a couple of days into the future. She still disbelieves until she sees a newspaper with a headline announcing her death at the hands of the killer (still dubbed the Ripper). They return to the present in the hope of cheating time and stopping the killer once and for all. read more