Crimes in Time
Saturday, June 17 | 2 Movies
What if you could travel through time to prevent a murder? If you had a second chance to make things right, would it be possible to change the timeline for a better outcome or is destiny inevitable? In TCM’s prime time lineup Crimes in Time, two movies in particular explore this very idea. Repeat Performance (1947) and Time After Time (1979) examine whether good intentions are enough to redirect the course of events to prevent bad things from happening.
Repeat Performance (1947)
While it didn’t make a big splash upon its initial release, the conceit of Repeat Performance was so memorable that it has stuck with viewers over the decades. Directed by Alfred L. Werker, Repeat Performance stars Joan Leslie as Sheila Page, an actress and rising star on the Broadway stage. Set on New Year’s Day in 1947, the film begins with Sheila with a gun in her hand standing over her dead husband, theatrical producer Barney Page (Louis Hayward). Realizing that she’s just committed a murder, Sheila frantically seeks the help of her writer friend William Williams (Richard Basehart). Wishing for a do-over with the insistence that she would not make the same mistake twice, Sheila gets her wish and relives the year of 1946 all over again. It may seem simple to her to just change the course of events to a different outcome. However, her volatile husband Barney—whose penchant for booze, wandering eye and jealousy towards Sheila’s blossoming career makes him a mercurial figure in her life—will not deviate from path of self-destruction, no matter what Sheila does.
Repeat Performance was based on the pulp novel of the same name by writer William O’Farrell. While the screenplay maintains some of the novel’s original concepts, including the time travel element, it deviates quite a lot from the book. Most notably, Walter Bullock’s adapted screenplay shifts the focus from Barney to Sheila, giving star Joan Leslie a more substantial role.
In a case of art imitating life, the role of Sheila was a second chance for Joan Leslie who was reinventing herself as an actress after a disastrous fall out with her home studio Warner Bros. She’d grown tired of ingenue roles assigned to her and felt that the studio wasn’t taking her seriously as an actress. The last straw for Leslie was when she failed to get top billing for the movie Two Guys from Milwaukee (1946). She took her studio to court to get out of her contract by arguing that the contract was null and void because she had signed it as a minor. The California Supreme Court ruled in the studio’s favor and thereafter Leslie was a free agent.
Amid this professional turmoil, Leslie was contracted by the newly formed Eagle-Lion Films to star in Repeat Performance. Eagle-Lion began as a distributor of British films in America and soon became the latest Poverty Row studio to churn out several low-budget pictures. Repeat Performance was the studio’s inaugural foray into big-budget productions and there was a substantial effort to make this movie a success. However, there were some misguided attempts with the marketing which portrayed Joan Leslie as a sexy femme fatale—something that ultimately angered the star because she felt it misrepresented her image and her role.
Repeat Performance received mixed reviews from the critics and fell into relative obscurity. However, the movie’s time travel conceit lingered on. Noir Alley’s Eddie Muller went on to say "over the years [many people] have told me about seeing Repeat Performance when they were young and it stuck in their mind. There is something about the premise of this film..." Decades later, a made-for-TV version of Repeat Performance, entitled Turn Back the Clock, premiered in 1989 on NBC with Joan Leslie appearing in a cameo role. In the decades that followed, Repeat Performance has had its own second chance at success. It has garnered new fans thanks to Noir City screenings, a restoration by the Film Noir Foundation and Packard Humanities Institute and a Blu-ray release from Flicker Alley.
Time After Time (1979)
When we talk about the idea of a time machine, we must give props to the inventor of this concept: fantasy author H.G. Wells. His novel “The Time Machine,” published in 1895, introduced the concept to the public. Since then, countless writers have been inspired by the idea of traveling backwards or forwards in time. H.G. Wells himself proved to be an inspiration for the 1979 science fiction drama Time After Time. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, the film stars Malcom McDowell as H.G. Wells. It begins in the Victorian era, when Wells discovers that his surgeon friend Dr. John Stevenson, played by David Warner, is in fact the elusive serial killer Jack the Ripper. When Stevenson uses Wells’ time travel machine to travel to 1979 San Francisco, Wells follows him in an effort to prevent history from repeating itself.
Putting two real, but otherwise unconnected figures from history into a fictional story was not new to screenwriter turned director Nicholas Meyer. His novel and screenplay for The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) places Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in a fictional scenario with famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. In fact, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution provided the germ of an idea for writer Karl Alexander. Along with Steve Hayes, the two wrote a short story that would become the basis for Time After Time. Alexander was developing the story into a novel when his writer friend, Nicholas Meyer, read an early and incomplete draft. Immediately excited about the idea of making the story into a movie, Meyer leveraged the success of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution to get a studio deal for Time After Time. He optioned the story with his own money, wrote the screenplay in just one week and presented it to producer Herb Jaffe with the condition that Meyer himself would be the director. In his memoir Meyer wrote, “I felt that this was the sort of project a studio might permit me to direct… The iron was hot; it was time to strike.” The project caught interest from Warner Bros who financed it along with silent partner Orion Pictures.
In a role that was in stark contrast to his breakthrough role in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Malcolm McDowell was cast in the lead as H.G. Wells. He bore a striking resemblance to Wells but that was the extent of the similarities. McDowell decided to give audiences an interpretation of Wells rather than approach the role with more historical accuracy. In fact, Time After Time leans into a fictional interpretation of both Wells and Jack the Ripper that captures the essence of their personas. Wells is civilized, open to new societal norms and is driven by a desire to help humanity. David Warner’s Stevenson is much more vague—mimicking the elusiveness of the real Jack the Ripper’s identity. He’s destructive with no real motivation other than a disdain for what society has become.
Time After Time offers some biting social commentary. It mourns the loss of some of the finer aspects of Victorian society and offers a critique on modern day values. Through Mary Steenburgen’s portrayal of Amy Robbins—the bank worker who is a fictional interpretation of H.G. Well’s second wife—the story is also given a feminist angle. Robbins introduces Wells to the concept of a modern woman— one who enjoys the independence her career gives her and is more forward about her sexuality. This is just the sort of feminine image that enrages Jack the Ripper and puts Robbins herself in grave danger.
Time After Time had potential to be a massive success but a wide theatrical distribution hurt the film’s chances. Meyer felt that opening the film in too many theaters, too soon, prevented word-of-mouth momentum to build up anticipation. The film did prove to be a crowd pleaser, however, and made an impression on audiences who enjoyed how the movie’s time travel elements and the portrayals of real-life historical figures. It also proved pivotal in the execution of another time travel classic, Back to the Future (1985). In his memoir, Meyer wrote that producer Steven Spielberg and his team “studied Time After Time, running it again and again” to help make the time travel concepts more plausible. Time After Time inspired more interpretations including a musical in 2010 and a short-lived ABC series in 2017.
