Mania Grade: A-
Disc Grade: B+
Reviewed Format: DVD
Rated: PG
Stars: Malcolm McDowell, David Warner, Mary Steenburgen, Charles Cioffi
Writer: Nicholas Meyer, based on a story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes
Director: Nicholas Meyer
Distributor: Warner Home Video
Original Year of Release: 1979
Retail Price: $19.98
Extras: widescreen anamorphic; Dolby 2.0 Surround; all-new digital transfer; audio commentary; theatrical trailer; cast film highlights; French Dolby Surround; English, Spanish, French and Portuguese subtitles

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TIME AFTER TIME

To me one of the great mysteries of the wacky world of cult movies is why Somewhere In Time has developed a Trekkie-sized fan following while Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time hasn't. Time travel movies have always had a terrific romantic appeal: the chance to journey back to a more genteel time, the comic possibilities of a fish out of water, and the aching resonance of their themes of fate and predestination. Somewhere In Time pays off a few of those tropes, but Time After Time hits the time travel ball out of the park.

Working off a story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes, Nicholas Meyer got his first directing gig by having a young H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) travel to contemporary San Francisco in a time machine of his own invention. The reason? One of Wells' closest friends, John Lesley Stevenson (David Warner), a London physician, has been revealed to be none other than Jack the Ripper, and after Wells unknowingly demonstrates the operation of his time machine to this monster, the Ripper uses the device to travel forward in time and escape his Scotland Yard pursuers.

The pursuit of Jack the Ripper through time ought to be enough of a peg on which to hang any motion picture, but as a charming Nicholas Meyer points out in his incisive commentary on the DVD, the writer/director wasn't all that interested in Jack the Ripper. Time After Time turns on character and takes great pains to establish the persona and beliefs of Wells, a utopian optimist who believes that the future holds a perfected, egalitarian society. In an early chess game between Wells and Stevenson the physician chides Wells on his Pollyanna outlook, assuring him that man's essential brutality will continue to endure well into the future. Wells, in fact, is an innocent, rather full of himself and pompous to begin withbut Meyer has other things in store for the author. Wells leaps forward into the future with both a terrible sense of responsibility ("I've turned that bloody maniac loose upon Utopia!") and an incredible sense of excitement, convinced that he's about to see the fruition of all his theories of social development put into practice.

Alas, 1979 San Francisco turns out to be a little different than H.G. Wells imagined. In fact, it's kind of a raving sleaze pit, and while Wells is initially dazzled, jotting down observations in a notebook while discovering McDonald's french fries and jetliners, he soon begins to observe the naked underbelly of a society in which crime and violence are not only still present, but actually celebrated by an invention Wells never anticipated: television. Wells eventually tracks Stevenson to a hotel and in an understated little scene that perfectly encapsulates Meyer's philosophical thrust for the film, both men watch a panoply of explosive violence unfold on channel after channel of television. "The future isn't what you thought," Stevenson observes, "It's what I am!"

Stevenson assaults the unprepared Wells and escapes, while Wells retreats into the arms of a slightly befuddled bank teller named Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen). Amy is a modern, "liberated" woman who tests Wells' ideas about equality between the sexes, and she eventually becomes a pawn in the Ripper's game to keep Wells at bay.

Time After Time works on so many levels that it's almost an annoyance to hear Meyer in his commentary pick apart the film's technical flaws. It's not a great-looking movie and Meyer's first-time directing job shows itself as unusually intelligent without revealing him to be any sort of visual stylist. He simply tells the story and supplies the viewer with all the tools and information he or she needs to understand the implications of what's happening. In short, Meyer is such a good writer and so good with his actors that it doesn't really matter that he hasn't lit and framed every shot in Time After Time in a way that David Lean would approve of.

The movie grabs hold of you and entertains. McDowell, playing a character diametrically opposed to the punks and monsters he'd essayed heretofore (he had just come off the uplifting Penthouse charnel house Caligula when he chose to do Time After Time), creates the most charming and loveable character in his entire repertoire. His journey from a pompous little prig to a desperate lover, pleading on his knees for the life of Steenburgen's character, is a textbook example of dramatic character development at work. David Warner is the perfect foil: deeply cynical, disturbed but (almost) always in control, Warner's ineffable charm makes the Ripper all the more dangerous and frightening as he stalks the streets of San Francisco. And Steenburgen's charmingly eccentric romantic lead sells the love story effortlessly. McDowell and Steenburgen actually did fall in love while filming Time After Time and later married, and the chemistry between the two leads is mesmerizing and terribly funny.

Time After Time works as comedy, romance, social commentary, and as a nail-biting thriller, all the more so because Meyer takes the time and care to construct fully-fleshed out and wholly believable characters. There are devastating moments of sadness and fear, all colored by the inevitability of any time travel story. The Warner Bros. DVD features a beautiful new 16x9 transfer of the movie and while the extras are slim, they do feature Meyer's commentary along with Malcolm McDowell's, and both make you appreciate this gem of a movie even more. The film's time travel effects are on the chintzy side, but the story is so involving you'll barely noticecompare this to the recent remake of The Time Machine, where the special effects were spectacular but the story anemic: that's where we are in movies today. Time After Time is a reminder of how much amazing quality we took for granted in the '70s and early '80s, and Meyer's intention was to take audiences back even further by using the old Warners shield and Max Steiner's fanfare from the '40s to clue audiences in that they were about to watch an old-time romp. To that end Meyer hired legendary film composer Miklos Rozsa (Ben-Hur) to write the movie's score, perfectly capturing Wells' 19^th-century mindset as well as fashioning one of the most rapturous and affecting love themes in the composer's repertoire. It was Rozsa's last great film score and Meyer had to fight to keep Warners from dumping it for a pop score.

Listening to Meyer's commentary on this and Paramount's Wrath of Khan special edition reminds us of this rather unheralded artist's important contributions not just to the sci fi genre, but to film in general. He is not a great filmmaker but neither Time After Time nor The Wrath of Khan required one: they each just required someone of a certain amount of taste and intelligence, someone who respected the genre but also possessed enough irreverence about it to play with formats and expectations and in so doing, pump new life into it.