Time After Time (1979 film)

Time After Time is a 1979 American Metrocolor science fiction film starring Malcolm McDowell, David Warner and Mary Steenburgen filmed in Panavision. It was the directing debut of screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, whose screenplay is based largely on the uncredited novel of the same name by Karl Alexander which was unfinished during the time the film was made and a story by the latter and Steve Hayes.

In 1893 London, popular writer Herbert George Wells Malcolm McDowell displays a time machine to his skeptical dinner guests. After he explains how it works including a nonreturn key that keeps the machine at the travelers destination and a vaporizing equalizer that keeps the traveler and machine on equal terms, police constables arrive at the house searching for Jack the Ripper. A bag with bloodstained gloves belonging to one of Herberts friends, a surgeon named John Leslie Stevenson David Warner, leads them to conclude that Stevenson might be the infamous killer. Wells races to his laboratory, but the time machine is gone.Stevenson has escaped to the future, but because he does not have the nonreturn key, the machine automatically returns to 1893. Herbert uses it to pursue Stevenson to November 5, 1979, where the machine has ended up on display at a museum in San Francisco. He is deeply shocked by the future, having expected it to be an enlightened socialist utopia, only to find chaos in the form of airplanes, automobiles and a worldwide history of war, crime and bloodshed. ........

Source: Wikipedia