Nicholas Meyer, who in The Seven-Percent Solution introduced Sherlock Holmes to Sigmund Freud, here unites H.G. Wells and Jack the Ripper, and packs them off in a brazenly bejeweled time machine to modern-day San Francisco, where Wells the socialist, the pacifist, the feminist, is discovered to be less a man of the future than the Ripper, who makes a point of his athomeness by flicking the TV dial from a football game to a Jimi Hendrix concert to a news broadcast, etc. The time machine, one of the most infernal inventions in all of fiction, opens up more possibilities than Meyer (or Wells for that matter) is prepared to cope with. Why, for instance, should the beguiling bank clerk, played by Mary Steenburgen as if she has set her mind on becoming the new Jean Arthur, go into hysterics when she reads of her death in the San Francisco Chronicle after jumping ahead one day in the time machine? Why, instead, shouldn't she respond, "Whew, I'm glad I skipped that day"? Why, still more, should she agree to go back again in time in an effort to avert the disaster which she has obviously already averted? With Malcolm McDowell and David Warner. (1979) — Duncan Shepherd
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