Nicholas Meyer’s first film as director (he’d previously written Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973) and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)) comes so close to being a great film, but blows it with a script that tries hard to graft and old-fashioned love story onto a more interesting time-travelling Jack the Ripper film and doesn’t quite pull it off. It’s a very good film, but its flip-flopping tone holds it back from greatness.

In The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Meyer had taken fictional characters (Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson) and pitted them against a historical figure (Sigmund Freud) and did something similar in his 1976 novel The West End Horror. In Time After Time he tries something not dissimilar, pitting two historical figures that, so far as we know, never met into a contemporary setting. He took his inspiration from the novel of the same name, also published in 1979, by Karl Alexander and adapted it into a screenplay that stuck remarkably close to the source.

It’s 1893 and a prostitute is murdered on the streets of London by a killer, apparently Jack the Ripper returned to his old ways after an absence of five years. Elsewhere, the writer H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) (in the real world he would have yet to have published his first novel though short stories and essays would have been plentiful) is proudly showing off a time machine of his own invention to a group of friends. Latecomer John Stevenson (David Warner), a surgeon, turns up just ahead of the police who inform the group of the murder but he disappears – and so does the time machine. Stevenson has escaped into the future and a reluctant Wells has to follow him to the San Francisco of 1979. While trying to track down the errant Ripper, Wells also has to struggle with a much changed world, one very far from the socialist utopia that he so fervently believed in. Following a series of clues, he finds then loses Stevenson and meets and falls in love with a bank employee, Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen) (in real life, Wells would marry an Amy Catherine Robbins in 1894). Stevenson has started his killings again and is no mood to return to Victorian London to stand trial and if he has to use Amy to keep Wells at bay, then so be it…

There are a lot of leaps of faith we’re expected to take to make Meyer’s screenplay work, not the least of which is that the 27-year-old Wells, a former draper’s apprentice and teacher, recently taken to writing to support himself, had the scientific and engineering wherewithal to design and build a functioning time machine. The script neatly skips over how he managed to do this and never explains why the machine requires the vital-to-the-plot-but-otherwise-pointless “vaporizing equalizer”, a device that will kill the occupant under certain circumstances. It’s there simply to facilitate the ending which allows Wells to neatly wrap up the problem of Stevenson being in 1979. It smacks of a writer not quite being sure how to write himself out of a corner of his own construction so coming up with a simple gimmick rather than an actual, logical solution.

All of which probably wouldn’t matter all that much had Meyer managed to work out what kind of film he was trying to make. Look past the illogicalities of Wells building the time machine and the first half is riveting stuff, up to and including the apparent death of Stevenson in a road traffic accident. McDowall, who took the role as a welcome change of pace after playing the title role in Tinto Brass’ sex and violence epic Caligula (1979), makes for a charming if terribly naïve Wells and Warner is simply marvellous as Stevenson, barely able to contain his sadistic glee as he shows Wells clips on television that prove his thesis that “I belong here completely and utterly. I’m home” (though it seems a bit harsh on Jimi Hendrix to include him smashing his guitar at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival in a montage of all the dreadful ills of the world…)

Their scenes together are terrific and Wells trying to get to grips with late 70s America is fun, but the film soon abandons Wells’ dogged pursuit of Stevenson, pretending to kill him off for a while to get on with the love story. Unfortunately, despite real chemistry between McDowall and Steenburgen (they were married shortly after production ended), the love story is never all that convincing. Steenburgen does her best with a character that simply comes across as utterly wet and she impressed Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale who, when it came to making Back to the Future Part III (1990), had her in mind from the start for the role of Clara Clayton, another woman who falls in love with a time traveller.

But when Time After Time gets things right, it does so marvellously. The humour is a bit hit and miss and one may wonder why Wells, having seen the future with all its attendant violence and social problems, returned home still clinging to his idealism as evidenced in his subsequent novels, but there’s still much to enjoy here. Meyer has noted that the Victorian London scenes at the beginning were inspired by George Pal’s 1960 adaptation of The Time Machine and they do indeed have a charming and very appropriate “out of time” feel to them; a brief but terrifying taxi ride might be a jokey reference to the car chase in Bullitt (1968); there’s a smattering of social commentary here and there (the 1979 hospital that Wells visits is really no more advanced or helpful to its users than the hospitals Wells would have left in the past); the use of the Hyatt Regency  hotel as a location is tip of the hat to the only film that Wells scripted, Things To Come (1936) whose set design inspired architect John Portman; and Miklós Rózsa’s score (one of his last) is superb.

Meyer was still finding his feet as a director and his subsequent contributions to the Star Trek franchise (he directed fan favourite Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), wrote Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) and wrote and directed Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) show real development, but he gets the film from A to B well enough, from the chess game between Wells and Stevenson near the start that hints at their battle of wills to come to the rather too glib ending.

For all its faults, Time After Time is still a lot of fun and much of that is down to the performances. The pace may slacken when Stevenson Is out of the picture and the ending certainly requires a huge grain of salt (seriously, who equips their time machine with a device that any passing stranger could use to kill you?) but the first half is a rollicking good adventure film only let down by a sudden change of tone that never really works.

Alexander wrote a belated sequel novel in 2009, Jaclyn the Ripper and some commentators noted the similarities between Alexander’s original and the 2008 Spanish-language book El mapa del tiempo/The Map of Time by Félix J. Palma which also features Wells, the Ripper and time travel. In 2016, ABC broadcast 5 episodes of a television spin-off that came and went with barely anyone noticing. Also titled Time After Time, it starred Freddie Stroma as Wells, Josh Bowman as Stevenson and Genesis Rodriguez as new love interest Jane Walker. 12 episodes were made in all but only the first five made it to air in the States though the rest have been shown elsewhere.