Somewhere in Time (1980) Review
7/10
A playwright is approached at an opening night by an elderly woman he’s never met, who presses a pocket watch into his hand and says come back to me. Eight years later he sees a photograph in a hotel and recognizes her. The 7 is for a film that commits entirely to one emotional idea and executes it with more discipline than its reputation suggests. The time travel has no machine, no science and no visual effect. A man lies on a bed in a period room and talks himself backward.
The three points come off for the pacing in the middle and for Christopher Plummer’s Robinson, who’s written as an obstacle and given no reason for what he does beyond possessiveness. A 7 undersells how much this movie moves me. A man talking himself into 1912 on a hotel bed sounds silly on paper, and the film plays it so straight that I go along with every step of it.
Time Travel by Self-Hypnosis
Matheson adapted his own novel Bid Time Return, and the mechanism is the strangest and best decision in either version. Richard finds a physics professor who believes the mind can be persuaded that it’s in another year, and that the body will follow.
So the method is furnishing. He removes every modern object from a hotel room, buys a period suit, writes the date on paper in period ink, and lies down repeating it to himself for hours. What defeats him repeatedly is a detail from the present intruding, and what carries him across is finally believing.
That’s a far better device for this story than any machine would be. Time travel by conviction means the journey is emotional work, and it means something as small as an object in a pocket can trigger the return trip. That’s exactly what happens. The 1979 penny is the cruelest ending in this whole genre and it’s set up carefully. He never changes his coat. The film shows the coat, shows him dressing, and lets the audience carry the danger for an hour without mentioning it once. The penny scene guts me. It’s the meanest trick I know of in any romance, and it’s completely fair, because the film showed me that coat an hour earlier.
A magic system built on belief makes your protagonist’s interior state into the plot mechanism. Doubt becomes a physical obstacle and conviction becomes an achievement. The rule that follows is that the exit must be as fragile as the entry. If belief carries him in, then a single fact that contradicts the year carries him out, and the audience understands the risk without being told.
Plant the fatal object early, in plain view, doing something ordinary. The coat is a costume detail for forty minutes before it’s a weapon.
The Hotel Does Half the Work
The Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island opened in 1887, has the longest front porch in the world, and sits on an island that’s banned cars since the nineteenth century.
That last fact is why the location works. The production needed somewhere that could photograph as both 1912 and 1980 without a fleet of set dressers, and Mackinac supplies it because the present day there already looks like the past. The reduced budget forced the choice and improved the film. Universal originally set eight million dollars and only approved the picture at half that, so the production had to find a place that was already the film instead of building one. Isidore Mankofsky shot it in soft warm light throughout, and the period sequences are graded slightly differently in a way most viewers tone without noticing. The past in this film is only slightly kinder.
The hotel has since embraced it entirely. Rooms are named for the film, the theater screens it, and the staff can tell you which corridor is which. A location that was chosen because it cost less than building one now sells tickets on the strength of a picture that ran three weeks.
Isidore Mankofsky shot it in soft warm light throughout, and the period sequences are graded slightly differently in a way most viewers register without noticing. The past in this film is only slightly kinder, and he was right to keep it that subtle, because a heavier hand would’ve turned 1912 into a postcard.
Christopher Reeve made this between Superman and Superman II, at the point where he could have taken anything, and chose a romantic fantasy at a fraction of the money. The performance is the reason the premise survives. Richard’s obsession is obsessive and Reeve plays the discomfort of that. He’s rude to people, he abandons his life, and he pursues a dead woman’s photograph with a single-mindedness the film doesn’t soften.
Jane Seymour has the harder job, because Elise has to fall in love with a stranger who knows things he shouldn’t, and she plays the wariness first. The scenes where she’s trying to work out what he is are better than the scenes where they’re happy, and I think Seymour is the more interesting half of the couple.
Her best moment is on stage. Elise breaks from a rehearsed line mid-performance and speaks directly about a man who has come a long way, and the company has no idea what she’s doing. Seymour plays it as somebody deciding in public. That’s the only scene in the film where a character risks anything in front of witnesses.
John Barry’s score is doing enormous work and it’s the reason people who can’t recall the plot remember the film. He builds it around the eighteenth variation of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. It’s diegetic in the story and becomes the emotional structure of the whole picture. Barry’s theme is the part of this film I’d fight hardest for. It’s lush and makes no apology for being lush, and without it I think the movie would play as a curiosity.
Borrowing an existing piece of music as a plot object gives you a theme the audience already has feelings about. The risk is that the borrowed emotion substitutes for the feeling your scene should create. This film gets away with it because the piece belongs to the characters before it belongs to the audience. Elise plays it, Richard owns the record, and it exists inside the story before it starts reinforcing it.
The general form for any borrowed element: give it a job in the plot first. Then it can carry meaning without feeling imported.
Everything Went Wrong at Release
It opened on the third of October 1980 into a Screen Actors Guild strike. That meant Reeve and Seymour were barred from promoting it, since publicity appearances count as work.
So a film with no stars available, a studio that had already halved its budget and shown little faith in it, and no positive advance word went out into hostile reviews. Metacritic’s retrospective sits at twenty-nine. It ran about three weeks and took under ten million dollars.
Then television and video found it, and the audience the marketing never reached arrived on its own over a decade. It’s especially popular in Asia, which nobody at Universal predicted.
In 1990 a fan organization formed, the International Network of Somewhere in Time Enthusiasts, and it’s run an annual gathering at the Grand Hotel where several hundred people arrive in period costume. Very few films acquire a convention. This one acquired a pilgrimage.
Why the Audience Was There All Along
The critical dismissal in 1980 was about sentiment. The film is unashamedly romantic, there’s no irony in it anywhere, and 1980 wasn’t a year that rewarded either. I think the critics got it wrong, and I’ll take this kind of sincerity over a knowing wink any day.
What the reviews missed is that the film isn’t optimistic. Richard gets one day, loses it to a coin in his pocket, and dies of what is effectively grief in a hotel room. The ending is a consolation only if you accept its metaphysics, and the film has done nothing to prove them.
That combination is what the cult responds to. It’s a love story with a bleak middle and an ending you have to choose to believe, and the choosing is the participation the audience keeps coming back for. The rating is honest about the flaws. The middle sags, Plummer’s character is a device, and some of the dialogue in the 1912 sequences is stiff. What holds is a mechanism nobody else has used this well and a hotel that was already the film.
Matheson wrote the novel, the screenplay, and a good deal of the best American fantasy of the century besides, including the source for I Am Legend and a large share of The Twilight Zone. This is the most romantic thing he did and it runs on the same engine as the rest of his work: an ordinary man, one impossible rule, and no escape from the consequences of it.
Sincerity dates in cycles. Work that’s unfashionably earnest at release often finds its audience later, because the fashion that rejected it passes and the emotion doesn’t. That’s not license to be sentimental. The distinction is whether the feeling is paid for, and this film charges its protagonist everything for one day. On distribution: people had to find a film with no promotion and no reviews by accident on television for ten years before it had an audience. The work survived because it was repeatable, and repeatability is a property you can design for.
Should you watch Somewhere in Time?
Yes, and watch the coat. It’s a 7 for me because the middle drags and Plummer’s Robinson never becomes a person, and both of those bother me in a film this careful everywhere else. What I love is a tragedy hiding in a costume detail for an hour and the best argument any romance has made for time travel without a machine.
