This Month

Thursdays | 23 Movies

Time, whether as an abstract concept in the universal scheme of things or a measurable absolute in our everyday lives, has fascinated and perplexed humans since, well, time began (assuming time is a straight line with a beginning and an end). Philosophers, scientists, artists and authors have wrestled with the big questions and taken flights of theory and fancy around the subject, wondering what it would be like to somehow conquer and manipulate this seemingly immutable, unbendable fact of our existence.

Is time travel possible? While cosmologists and physicists continue to debate that question, motion pictures, with their ability to shuffle time, to play with our perception of it through editing, special effects and narrative devices, have for decades imagined all sorts of possibilities for how we move through time and how it moves through us. This monthlong TCM series offers 23 movies that explore time through music, romance, comedy, fantasy and science fiction. 

The first night of the series screens two sci-fi movies released in the same year, 1968, that continue to resonate throughout popular culture. In Planet of the Apes, a crew of astronauts under the command of Charlton Heston travel through a wormhole far into the future and crash land on a foreign planet where intelligent talking apes are the dominant species and humans are treated like animals. The box office hit has spawned sequels, prequels, reboots, television series, parodies and too many references and homages to count. And if you don’t know why Hollywood’s Moses/Ben-Hur ends the movie shouting “God damn you all to hell!” you won’t get any spoilers here. You probably don’t know what Soylent Green is either.

The other big sci-fi movie of the year – the biggest, in fact, reaching second place at the box office – is Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, widely regarded as one of the best and most influential films in cinema history. Steven Spielberg called it his generation’s “big bang,” and Ridley Scott in 2007 said that, in spite all the imitations and references that followed, nothing can ever beat Kubrick’s masterwork, thereby rendering the science fiction genre dead – a rather stark admission from the director of Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982).

Contrary to Scott’s statement, 2001 elevated the film genre from its beginnings as fodder for Saturday matinee serials to a vehicle for serious drama and philosophical explorations, as well as big-budget blockbuster entertainment. Kubrick’s musings on life, time, the nature of human intelligence and our place in the universe have inspired and informed such works as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Interstellar (2014) and Arrival (2016).

The rest of the night’s programming showcases the kind of lower budget, melodramatic sci-fi that preceded Kubrick’s groundbreaking movie. World Without End (1956) and Beyond the Time Barrier (1960) propel their characters through time warps into dystopian futures. And fans of Dr. Who and his time- and space-defying Tardis will enjoy Peter Cushing as the enduring Time Lord in Dr. Who & the Daleks (1965) and Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966).

The second night of programming kicks off with the classic time travel movie, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella and the one most people think of when they hear The Time Machine (1960), despite a more recent but rather overstuffed 2002 remake directed by the author’s great-grandson. In this original version, Rod Taylor builds an ornate steampunk vehicle that takes him far into the future where he finds Yvette Mimieux living among a gentle race of humans subjugated by mutants. The most fun parts of the film, though, are the short stops he makes along the way.

Things get a little quirkier after that. Wells himself turns up (played by Malcolm McDowell) in Time After Time (1979), pursuing Jack the Ripper, who has stolen the time machine to escape capture. Things to Come (1936) is also based on a story by Wells, less about time travel than time’s passage as we see a new world rebuilt over the decades after a devastating war and plague. Time Bandits (1981) is visionary director Terry Gilliam’s wildly inventive and funny journey through world history as a curious young boy joins a band of time traveling thieves trying to evade the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson). The cast includes Sean Connery as Agamemnon, Ian Holm as Napoleon, the peerless Shelley Duvall and Gilliam’s fellow Monty Python mates John Cleese and Michael Palin. And you would do well to set your alarm early to catch the night’s final screening, La Jetée (1962), French filmmaker Chris Marker’s black-and-white avant-garde short (28 minutes) that plays intriguing tricks with time and space. Constructed almost completely from still photos, the highly influential picture inspired a longer (but not necessarily more impactful) feature by Terry Gilliam, 12 Monkeys (1995).

As the Earth Turns (2019) is a feat of cinematic time travel in itself. Originally a silent film shot in 1937 by Richard Lyford, the footage was lost for many years until it was discovered in 2013 by his daughter in the basement of his home long after his death. She had it digitally restored and newly scored for public release, premiering at the Seattle International Film Festival, where it was shot. The plot of the 46-minute film – something about an apocalyptic future war – is less interesting than the visual and acting styles, reminiscent of the uniquely offbeat work of Canadian director Guy Maddin. In addition to working as a director, animator, writer, producer and cinematographer for Disney, the U.S. Army and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Lyford also co-directed (with Robert J. Flaherty) the Academy Award-winning documentary The Titan: Story of Michelangelo (1950). 

The third night of the series finds us looking backward to “simpler” times, rather than racing ahead to uncertain, scary futures. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949), based on the satirical novel by Mark Twain, transports a mechanic who sings (because Bing Crosby) from 1912 back to ancient Camelot, where he dazzles the population with his 20th century technology and meddles in court politics. In Turn Back the Clock (1933), a financially struggling tobacconist (quintessential 30s fast-talker Lee Tracy) awakens after being hit by a car to discover himself transported 20 years earlier with the chance to correct his mistake in not marrying a wealthy woman. And a young boy is magically carried back in time to Blackbeard’s ship on the high seas in The Boy and the Pirates (1960).

Working in the U.S. from 1935 to 1945, French director René Clair (Under the Roofs of Paris, 1930; À Nous la Liberté, 1931) made three fantasy films, all of them comedies with a supernatural twist: The Ghost Goes West (1935), I Married a Witch (1942) and the half-forgotten comic gem It Happened Tomorrow (1944) about a news reporter (Dick Powell) who finds he can predict the future when he gains access to the following day’s newspaper. To avoid having to deal with the realities of World War II, Clair and co-writer Dudley Nichols set the story near the turn of the 20th century. Although he was never particularly fond of the picture, Clair later admitted, “the last twenty minutes are the best thing I did in Hollywood.”

The line-up also includes Berkeley Square (1933), with Oscar-nominated Leslie Howard as an American who tries not to alter the course of history when he goes back in time to meet his ancestors in the London house he has inherited. The story is based on an unfinished novel by Henry James. Before attempting to destroy humanity (or at least some of it) in 1970s disaster movies, writer-director-producer Irwin Allen took a stab at saving it in The Story of Mankind (1957). The Spirit of Man (Ronald Colman, in his final screen appearance) and the Devil (Vincent Price) argue whether humankind is worth saving after the invention of nuclear weaponry, traveling through history to show both the good and bad of the species. Along the way they look in on some notable historical personages, played by an all-star cast that includes Hedy Lamarr, Virginia Mayo, Agnes Moorehead, Peter Lorre, Dennis Hopper and the Marx Brothers in their last film, although they do not appear in the same scenes together.

There’s love and music in the air the final Thursday of the series, starting with A Matter of Life and Death (1946) by the key British film partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (Black Narcissus, 1947; The Red Shoes, 1948). David Niven plays an RAF pilot who goes down in his bomber over the English Channel. The guide sent to escort him up the grand staircase to the Other World (giving the film its initial U.S. release title Stairway to Heaven) misses the pilot in the thick fog, and Niven finds himself alive against all laws and logic of the universe. To complicate matters, he meets and falls in love with June (Kim Hunter, cast on the suggestion of Alfred Hitchcock) and must prepare a defense for an appeal before a celestial court. In the end, according to a line near the movie’s conclusion, “nothing is stronger than the law in the universe, but on Earth nothing is stronger than love.”

Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, follows an apparently immortal young nobleman through the centuries, from Elizabethan times to the 1990s, dabbling in art and poetry along the way and transforming into a woman who must fight for the estate bequeathed by the queen. Who else but Tilda Swinton could have played the androgynous title character? Potter had seen her in a play and was impressed with the “profound subtlety about the way she took on male body language and handled maleness and femaleness.” Although the story was deemed by industry executives to be “unmakeable, impossible, far too expensive and anyway not interesting,” the film received high praise from many critics, inspired a 2020 Costume Institute exhibit at New York’s Met museum and has been the subject of many queer theory studies and performance projects.

Time is a factor in two featured musicals based on Broadway plays. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) is really more about reincarnation (a kind of spiritual time travel) as a therapist (Yves Montand) falls for a kooky patient (Barbra Streisand at the height of her early stardom) when he hypnotizes her and uncovers her past life as a glamorous social climber in Regency era England. Brigadoon (1954) is the name of a mysterious Scottish village that appears for just a day every 100 years. Two Americans (Gene Kelly and Van Johnson) stumble upon the magical town, and Kelly falls for one of the local lasses (Cyd Charisse). Economic restrictions set by MGM forced director Vincente Minnelli to film entirely on studio sets rather than on location and to use the less expensive one-strip Metrocolor process. The one Lerner and Loewe song to outlast the film’s disappointing initial run is “Almost Like Being in Love.” 

Also showing: the romantic fantasy Somewhere in Time (1980). Christopher Reeve, fresh off his success in Superman (1978), wills himself back to the early 20th century to meet the actress (Jane Seymour) whose photograph has obsessed him. Although the film was not a box office success, the much-praised score by John Barry (Born Free, 1966; Out of Africa, 1985; most of the original James Bond movies) became a best-selling soundtrack album.