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H. G. WELLS VS. JACK THE RIPPER: In one of Nicholas Meyer’s unique spins on the science-fiction genre, the great writer Herbert George Wells (Malcolm McDowell) not only conceives of a time machine but also builds just such a device to pursue the world’s most infamous killer through time and space. Courtesy: Warner Bros./Orion.
CREDITS
Orion Pictures/Warner Bros.; Nicholas Meyer, dir.; Karl Alexander, novel; Meyer, Steve Hayes, scr.; Herb Jaffe, pro.; Miklós Rózsa, mus.; Paul Lohmann, cin.; Donn Cambern, ed.; Edward C. Carfagno, prod. design; Jim Blount, Larry L. Fuentes, Kevin Pike, F/X; Richard Taylor, Chad Taylor, visual/optical F/X; 112 min.; Color; 2.35:1.
CAST
Malcolm McDowell (H. G. Wells); David Warner (John Leslie Stevenson/“Jack the Ripper”); Mary Steenburgen (Amy Robbins); Charles Cioffi (Police Lt. Mitchell); Kent Williams (Assistant); Andonia Katsaros (Mrs. Turner); Patti D’Arbanville (Shirley); James Garrett (Edwards); Leo Lewis (Richardson); Keith McConnell (Harding); Corey Feldman (Little Boy at Museum); Shelley Hack (Docent).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
Ninety years ago, I was a freak; today, I’m an amateur.
STEVENSON TO WELLS IN 1979
BACKGROUND
Nicholas Meyer (1945–) established his reputation as a science-fiction author in 1973 with his script for Invasion of the Bee Girls, a marvelous combination of an alien invasion thriller and a spoof on that 1950s genre. Known for writing three of the best Star Trek films, he also worked on two of the best TV films of the 1970s with genre themes: The Day After (1983), an atomic war drama in the tradition of On the Beach (1959), and The Night That Panicked America (1975), about the impact of Orson Welles’s 1930s radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Meyer’s friend Karl Alexander showed him the first few pages of a novel he was writing called Time After Time; Meyer optioned the piece, not only selling the project to a major company but also insisting that he direct the film.
THE PLOT
In 1893, H. G. Wells shows something special to his dinner guests: a time machine. The machine is not merely a work of imagination for a new novel but, in Meyer’s fictionalized “origination story,” it is something that Wells truly did build. What that author/scientist cannot know—at least not yet—is that Stevenson, one of his supposedly respectable friends, is actually Jack the Ripper. When authorities track their suspect to Wells’s house, the Ripper escapes in the as-yet untested device. When the time machine returns, owing to a homing apparatus, Wells summons his courage and follows the killer to November 5, 1979, in hopes of putting a stop to any upcoming reign of terror. Wells meets Amy, a bank executive who has seen the Ripper and is willing to help this fish-out-of-water hero track down the villain while also falling in love with Wells.
THE FILM
There is one notable flaw in the plot. Wells and Amy travel into the future so that he can convince her of the truth of his strange story. Then they head back to try and prevent a fourth murder, suggesting it is too late to do anything about the first three. However, if the time machine allows for travel to and from any point in history, why don’t they go back several days earlier and prevent all the killings?
The time machine, as envisioned by Wells, could move through time but not space. To make the film more commercial in a Hollywood sense, it was necessary to have the “modern” story take place in California. This was explained by having the film’s Wells realize this physical shift occurred because of the eight-hour time difference.
Time After Time includes numerous references to previous thrillers. When Wells and Amy walk among the redwoods, the sequence resembles the shot of James Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). When hero, heroine, and villain confront one another at night under huge columns, the sequence recalls the one in which Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, and Walter Matthau face off in Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963), which Hitchcock was originally slated to direct.
THEME
Meyer’s film, like Alexander’s novel, contrasts the utopian values of Wells, and his belief in the future perfection of humankind through science and technology, and the dystopian, or negative utopian, form of sci-fi that would evolve after Wells’s death. This is established in the symbolic nature of the film’s Ripper. If he seemed something of a terrible aberration in the Victorian age, Stevenson self-admittedly fits in beautifully (“I’m home!”) in the amoral era that confounds all of Wells’s earlier high hopes for humanity.
TRIVIA
The homing device and corresponding key, as well as yet another key that can send a person into a wormhole to oblivion, are not present in Wells’s original book, The Time Machine. As he built on Wells’s book for his own purposes, Meyer added both the device and the key to ensure that the plotting of his own piece could work out successfully in the film’s final moments.
Wells here attempts to pass himself off as Sherlock Holmes, the great fictional detective of his era. Five years before penning this screenplay, Meyer wrote a novel called The Seven-Per-Cent Solution in which Holmes meets Sigmund Freud, two Victorian-era notables in a parallel pairing to the Wells-Ripper match-up found here.
Amy Robbins was the actual name of Wells’s second wife.