Time After Time

Time After Time (1979) is a movie that sees H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) chasing Jack the Ripper (David Warner) through ninety years via the famous Time Machine to San Francisco, circa 1979, where Wells meets and falls in love with thoroughly-modern Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen), who gets swept up in the dark drama unfolding between Wells and his Victorian nemesis.

The film has a special place in my development, being one of the earliest movies I can remember seeing as a child. The opening scenes, wherein Jack the Ripper invites a boozy whore into an alley for a fatal dalliance, a scene replete with the cliche fog and darkness, the tall, cloaked Ripper wearing the de riguer top hat and white glove, carrying a medical bag, has stayed with me for decades (admittedly, I've seen the film numerous times in my life). This ripper (the audience shares his point of view) has a peculiar watch with a tinkling, haunting melody playing from it. The top half is the photo of a woman, who could almost be John Merrick's mother. Who is she? Someone that hurt him once?

The Whitechapel whore, lifting her petticoats, gives vent to pleasurable moans and groans, right before the "ripping" sound of her flesh. Her eyes seem to freeze over, her face becomes a shocked, inert mask. A single splatter of blood darkens the ledge upon which the watch rests. The white gloves of the killer are now stained with red. His task is complete, he folds his watch, leaves the alley, his back always turned. He is followed immediately by a London policeman with a bull's-eye lantern, blowing a whistle.

Wells and Stephenson play chess at Wells' soiree, but when the police come calling, Stephenson departs aboard the Time Machine. Wells, realizing what he has helped unleash upon the future, follows him, and, to his amazement, ends up in San Francisco where his machine has been moved for a museum exhibit. Here, amid "motorcars," Hare Krishna, television, fast food restaurants, and the general wonders of the "modern" world, Wells, meets bank manager Robbins (Mary Steenburgen), an affable, worldly young woman with modern sensibilities, who is immediately taken with the nave, charming and oddly-dressed "fish out of water." Half the fun of the film is watching Wells try to adapt to modern conveniences and technology, such as a Mickey Mouse telephone and an electric toothbrush. There is a certain wistful poignancy to Wells' conception of the future, as seen through the eyes of Robbins, as, at one point, she tells him "I met my ex-husband at an antiwar demonstration."

"Ah yes," he says, trying to sound natural. "The Second World War."

Of course, she laughs at the strange new man in her life, asking him "How old do you think I am, Herbert? The VIETNAM war..."

Indeed Wells, ever the humanitarian and socialist dreamer of utopias, is set against Stephenson, whose view of the world, as he is, in reality, Jack the Ripper, is expectedly cruel, harsh, Darwinian. "We live in a cosmic charnel house," he observes. "We hunt, we're hunted. That's the way it has been. That's the way it shall always be."

They argue this philosophical point over chess, and it is a subtle and recurring theme between them. "One day," Wells tells Stephenson, "I shall win."

"Yes," replies Stephenson, "When you know how I think."

Wells is disabused of his notions of a 'perfect, harmonious" tomorrow by the dreadful treatment of the poor and marginalized on his first night there. lying down homeless on a park bench, he says the word "utopia." It is a powerful, resonating, and memorable scene.

Stephenson, who has been to the bank where Robbins works to exchange British currency, figures out the relationship between Wells and Robbins, pegging her as the one who gave him up to Wells. He threatens her to give him The Key to the Time Machine, which will assure him of escape without the machine returning to where it originally departs from. He continues his incessant murdering. Wells, reveals himself to Robbins and proves to her the reality of the incredible story which he has just told, and to his identity.

In the museum, they discover a newspaper with a shocking headline. I won't reveal the rest. No need to spoil the picture for those who have never seen it.

Dialog between H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) and Jack the Ripper (David Warner) in Time After Time (1979).

The film has a few inordinately grim and haunting images: a bloodied apartment and a severed arm lying on the floor, and the murdered body of a prostitute, hanging, dragged from the water, and lit eerily by harsh white lights. Likewise, there are scenes of passion that prove that display the yearning love that Robbins feels for the naive and bumbling, but brave and brilliant Wells. "Well, we're killing more efficiently, but we're still killing. Well, I won't stoop to that man's barbaric level." He then quotes the Chinese proverb: "The first man to raise a fist is the man that has run out of ideas."

"I love you," she responds to him instantly. She has never met a man in her own time his intellectual or spiritual equal. It is a very small but moving moment.

Time After Time is based on a novel by Karl Alexander, who I thought for years was a pseudonym of director Nicholas Myer, who has written the Sherlock Holmes pastiches The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) and The West End Horror, the latter of which, however, has never been made into a film. He has also directed the popular films Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). He is, however, NOT Karl Alexander, who has since died.

Time After Time is a blend of so many elements, humor, romance, science fiction, horror, yet, it is flawless, seamless, and almost perfect, complete entertainment. It has an underlying social message that the viewer can either take or leave. It examines where the future, or what was the future over FORTY YEARS ago, was headed. It has not, seemingly, changed trajectory. Seen through the eyes of Wells, his world of 1893 must seem far more reasonable.

"You go back Herbert," Stephenson tells him. "The future isn't what you thought. It's WHAT I AM."

As if in reply, in the end, Wells observes, "Every age is the same. it's only love that makes any of them bearable."

And so it is. Time after time.