I had never seen Christopher Reeve in any non-Superman movie except The Remains of the Day, where his role was too minor for my synopsis. Indeed, no other titles in his filmography rang a bell for me, not counting TV shows and lesser remakes. So I opted to check out a cult classic from early in his career.
Chicago playwright Richard Collier (Reeve) is approached by an unfamiliar old woman (Susan French) who hands him an antique watch, implores, "Come back to me," and leaves without explanation. Years later, on a whim, he checks into a Michigan hotel and sees a photo of her as a young adult (Jane Seymour). Obsessed with her beauty, he does research and learns that she, now dead, was Elise McKenna, an actress once quite famous but with little known of her private life. Richard recalls a theory of time travel and implements it in order to court Elise in 1912, when she was a guest at the hotel.
Yup, a stalker so dedicated he'd leave his proper decade behind indefinitely. I find it annoying enough when characters fall in love at first sight. Elise isn't even that big a star yet, so she can hardly imagine how a stranger would claim to know "everything" about her, nor does he apparently ever tell her. But she doesn't take long to warm up to him, if only because her manager, W. F. Robinson (Christopher Plummer), warned her that someone along his lines would come.
OK, it's not clear whether Robinson is a true prophet or just anticipated a man capable of changing her life. He doesn't actually know much about Richard. What is clear is that he disapproves of Elise seeing anyone, because he believes it'll interfere with her budding career. This is not an unfounded fear; she does consider becoming a housewife. Unfortunately for Robinson, his heavy-handed, basically villainous approach leads her to distrust his judgment of Richard. Maybe she takes an interest just to spite her manager. She certainly knows even less about Richard than vice versa.
The (relatively) unusual method of time travel adds another obstacle. Richard uses no technological advances or unobtainium; he simply wills himself to believe that it's 1912, and there (then?) he is. Only one other person, Dr. Gerard Finney (George Voskovec), reports having done anything like it, and that was very fleeting, because the presence of anachronistic objects snapped him back. It'd hard to believe that Finney never got the nerve to try again and nobody else ever replicated his findings. Anyway, you can guess roughly why Richard and Elise couldn't stay together.
Between ludicrous premises, exaggerated feelings, and the general zaniness of time travel (with a stable loop in this case), the story seems ripe for comedy. More's the pity; the only remotely comedic moments are a couple times when Richard gets gawky from inexperience with the era. For the most part, the movie asks us to take it dead seriously, especially in the end.
Looking back, maybe I shouldn't harp so much on the idea of practical strangers hooking up so readily. After all, taking time to develop the romance would threaten to distract from the innovative setup and run too long. Then again, when the first half hour had passed, I marveled at how little had happened. I wasn't bored, just finding it slower and emptier than necessary.
While I tend to enjoy love stories with a sci-fi or fantasy twist, this one simply did not strike a chord with me. I get the feeling that its fans crave a sense of destiny binding two people together, even if it ends disastrously. For me, that is the opposite of romantic. Let everyone have the free will to love only when it makes some kind of sense.
A film like this can't help but have a cult status, neither more nor less. I suspect I'd have preferred the book on which it's based, Richard Matheson's Bid Time Return, which reportedly avoids some of the adaptation's problems. But it'll be a while before I care to tackle that.
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