Paris, Texas

Another of those movies that would probably have been on my "Blind Spot" list if I took part in the "Blind Spot" blogathon is Paris, Texas. I've stated before that I don't take part mostly because it requires me coming up with a series of movies that I'm going to be watching over a full year. Since I generally don't know what's going to be showing up to watch that far in advance, I don't take part and just get around to watching the movies I haven't seen before when they do show up. In the case of Paris, Texas, that was quite some time back that TCM ran it and I recorded it. Once again, I watched it before it expired, and then wrote and scheduled this post.

A man walks through a desert in west Texs with just a gallon jug of water in his hands. Stupidly, he discards the jug upon emptying it. He makes it to a building that has what looks like an honor bar: take a drink and pay for it. The man takes some ice, but eventually faints on the floor. Thankfully, there was another person in the bar who takes the man to the closest thing there is to a doctor. When said doctor goes through the man's things looking for some ID, he finds a card with the name and phone number of a Walt Henderson (Dean Stockwell).

Walt lives in the Los Angeles area, where he works as a graphic designer designing billboards and lives with his wife Anne (Aurore Clément). Walt isn't exactly pleased to get the phone call, since taking time off work is going to be a hassle although that's really the least of the issues. Walt knows that the man in Texas is actually his brother Travis (Harry Dean Stanton). Travis dropped out of life four years ago, and worse, put his kid in a taxi and sent the kid to Walt and Anne's place because Travis' wife Jane similarly dropped out of life. The kid was almost too young at the time to remember his biological parents, and Walt and Anne have raised the kid, Hunter, as their own, not having any biological children themselves. So how is the kid going to deal with having this stranger back in his life?

Of course, simply getting Travis to LA is going to be tough. Travis goes on about Paris, since his and Walt's parents joked about conceiving Travis in Paris. Travis has a photo of a plot of land that he claims to own, and Walt doesn't get what this has to do with Paris since Walt doesn't yet realize that there is a town in Texas also called Paris which is where the land is. Also, Travis keeps trying to run away and doesn't talk for the longest time.

Eventually, however, they do get back to Los Angeles, and Travis starts talking. At this point, you'd think Walt and Anne would start talking with Travis about whether he might try getting a job and reintegrating into normal human life. Instead, Anne tells Travis about a bank account that Hunter has, one which gets regular deposits by wire transfer in the days when there was no internet to do such electronic transfers. The money is presumably coming from Hunter's mother Jane, and those transfers are coming from a bank in Houston, so Travis takes Hunter and drives off toward Houston in the hopes of finding Jane since apparently not so many branches could do these transfers at the time.

Travis and Hunter basically set about stalking the bank, and find a woman who looks like she could be Jane (Nastassja Kinski) and start following her, eventually coming to a nondescript building in a crappy part of Houston that serves as the home for the sort of business you wouldn't want your mother to be working for. But is this woman really Jane? And if so, will Travis be able to make real contact with her?

Paris, Texas is a movie that certainly has an interesting premise, although it's another one that I found myself thinking is full of characters who certainly wouldn't be acting that way in real life. It's also one that definitely goes way too slowly at times. The running time is about 145 minutes, and is the sort of story that I think could easily have been edited to get down to under two hours. Still, I can understand why there are a lot of people who would find Paris, Texas to be interesting for how different it is from traditional Hollywood fare. Definitely watch and judge for yourself.

The Calico Dragon

One of the non-Popeye cartoons that TCM ran in the Saturday matinee block when they had cartoons was an old Hugh Harman-Rudolf Ising Happy Harmonies entry called The Calico Dragon.

As always, this being a one-reeler, it's not like there's a lot here. A little girl (I couldn't find the name of the actress voicing her) is in bed reading a fairy tale called "The Princess and the Dragon" to three of her stuffed animals: a human doll, a Scottish terrier dog, and a polka-do horse. After reading the story, the little girl goes to sleep.

At this point, the dolls come to life in what is presumably supposed to be a dream sequence, although it doesn't matter either way since this is a cartoon. The three characters head off to a mythical medieval-type land where there are still castles, and dragons for brave princes to fight. This particular dragon has three heads, and the main sight gag is how the three necks get knotted together, which is the way to kill the dragon. There's also the recurring theme of the cowardly dog.

One thing that will be immediately noticed is that, although The Calico Dragon is in color, it's not very vibrant color. That's because Disney had the exclusive contract to use the newer three-strip Technicolor in animation. Other animation had the choice of black-and-white (not uncommon through the late 1930s), two-strip Technicolor (as with this one), or other inferior color processes. Granted, it's not such a big deal in animation. After all, if the human and animal forms aren't supposed to be extremely lifelike, is it such a big deal if the color isn't either?

The Happy Harmonies shorts are also fairly tame. It wasn't until things like Merrie Melodies over at Warner Bros. in the early 1940s, or the Tom and Jerry shorts MGM put out, that cartoons started to get the stereotypical cartoon violence that we all think of today. In the 1930s, most cartoons were a lot less cynical and had a lot more singing and dancing.

I looked it up on Amazon, and I didn't see any Happy Harmonies box sets for sale, which rather surprises me. Considering that many other series got Warner Archives-type box sets, one would think that Warner Home Video might have released such a set. But apparently they only got a laserdisc release back in the early 1990s.

Your semiannual Daylight Savings Time reminder

Tonight is the night where most of us in the US move our clocks one hour forward. The big thing if you will in terms of a movie blog like this is that it means our favorite channel TCM has a prime time lineup which needs to be one hour shorter than normal, even for the people in Arizona who don't move their clocks ahead.

My reading of tonight's TCM lineup is that TCM does have a set of movies that fit the nine hours between 8:00 PM and 6:00 AM, but, there's still an issue with the timing:

8:00 PM The Flight of the Phoenix (142 min), in which James Stewart and others try to fix their plane stranded in the Sahara;
10:30 PM the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty (185 min), starring Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian;
1:45 AM the 1936 version of The Last of the Mohicans (91 minutes); and
3:30 AM The Flame and the Arrow (88 min), a medieval Robin Hood-type story, and not the "Roman Rebels fight against barbarians" plot the TCM synopsis gives.

Now, there are several problems on the TCM page. Unfortunately, they switched their schedule some time back to not giving the actual running time of each movie, but the length of the time slot. And somehow the TCM schedule page still lists The Last of the Mohicans as "2 HRS" even though it's clearly in a shorter time slot. Worse, the TCM page does say "1:45 AM EST" and "3:30 AM EDT", when the latter would clearly be 4:30 AM. For some reason, the TCM schedule page still lists the 1951 The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Story as coming on at 5:00 AM, which it seems to me is pretty clearly the movie that's not going to be shown tonight.

One other thing that might be an issue for some is the box guides. The last time I checked, the YouTube TV guide lists The Last of the Mohicans as running from 1:45 AM to 3:30 AM and The Flame and the Arrow as running from 3:30 AM to 6:00 AM. In a grid view, this means that The Last of the Mohicans is currently in a 45-minute slot.

For Keeps?

One of the "Stars of the Month" last summer on TCM was not a traditional star, but "Ladies of the 80s". One of the movies that I hadn't heard of before was For Keeps?. Since the synopsis sounded interesting, I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it.

In an aspirational-class part of Kenosha, WI, Darcy Elliot (Molly Ringwald) is a high-school student hoping to become a journalist and living with her single mom Donna (Miriam Flynn). Darcy is about to go off to the University of Wisconsin for a weekend to meet with people about her journalism work, but what Mom doesn't know is that she's being taken there by her boyfriend Stan Bobrucz (Randall Batinkoff).

Stan is a good kid who is hoping to get a scholarship he's applied for at Caltech, where he's going to study to become an architect. That's something his father (Kenneth Mars) has wanted for him. Dad owns a shoe store which has done a good enough business to provide a reasonably nice house although none of these people are wealthy. But Stan works part time at the family business and Dad wants better for Stan and the two younger kids, who are also stereotypically bratty and obnoxious).

Stan and Darcy being teenagers, they have all sorts of hormones flowing through them, which means they also have a desire to have sex. So on the way to Madison, the two stop and set up Stan's design for a tent with a sort of window in the roof, and make love there. Darcy has been taking birth control, not because any of the adults know she's sexually active, but because she has out-of-balance hormones that are being regulated through the Pill. If you watch any old movies, however, you know that it's only going to take the one time of having sex, and....

Darcy has no period for a couple of months, which is how she's certain she's pregnant. She's not certain what to do, in part because Mr. Bobrucz is a devout Catholic for whom abortion is an absolute no-no. Darcy's mom has been thinking for a long time -- and saving up for -- a mother/daughter trip to France, and dammit, not even a pregnancy is going to stop that, who cares what Darcy thinks. And then there's the question of how the two of them are going to be able to finish high school, let alone go to college, a question which only gets worse when Stan's father wants to disown him.

So Stan and Darcy decide that they're going to show everybody that all of the stereotypes are wrong, and that a young couple like this can make it and keep the baby. They get married and take extra jobs as well as eating into their savings to get a place of their own, with Darcy eventually going to night school instead of regular high school so that somebody will always be there with the baby. However, there are still a ton of challenges for such a young couple, and everything works against the two of them, even threatening to destroy the marriage. However, the parents mostly soften their hard edges at least a bit. That may not be enough.

For Keeps? has a plot that sounds like it should be a serious drama, although the movie is intended to be closer to comedy than drama. Not that the subject matter can allow for a film like this to be straight comedy, of course. For the first two-thirds of the movie, it does a mostly good job of being mostly a comedy with some drama mixed in. But around the point where the marriage between Stan and Darcy starts failing, For Keeps? seems to lose its way a bit. It's as though the screenwriters had written themselves into a corner and didn't really know the best way to write themselves back out of it, making the last section of the movie somewhat of a mess. It's not that For Keeps? is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination; it's more that it feels like something is missing at the end.

Still, For Keeps? is an interesting take on a tough topic, and the way people thought about it back in the 1980s.

Jeepers Creepers

Actor Dick Powell made Murder, My Sweet in no small part because he wanted to be able to show himself to be more than a light comic actor crooning away in pictures. Powell of course had that reputation going back to some of the great early musicals like 42nd Street, but watching a late 1930s musical like Going Places makes it so much easier to see why Powell wanted to do "serious" work.

Powell plays Peter Mason, who works as a clerk in a creaky old New York sporting-goods store under Franklin Dexter (Walter Catlett). It's one of those places that comes across as old-fashioned even by the standards of the 1930s, with one of the few customers being Col. Withering (Thurston Hall), who goes on fake safaris and buys stuff from the store to display as his catches to the society set who attend his lectures.

The store needs more business, but it's also the sort of store that finds advertising to be terribly gauche. They hit upon an idea, however, which is to have a famous horseman endorse their goods and mingle with the society set that would attend polo matches, the summer racing season at Saratoga, or in the case of this movie, a steeplechase in Maryland. And they even have just such a horseman under contract, Peter Randall. Unfortunately, Randall is currently racing down under, but since information traveled slowly in those days, they can just have Peter Mason impersonate Randall and none of the Maryland horse set will figure out the ruse. (Yeah, right.)

The first thing Peter and his boss find when they get to Maryland is a wild horse that only responds to the musical stylings of extremely musically talented groomsman Gabriel (Louis Armstrong) singing the standard "Jeepers Creepers" which here is the original. One of the next things the find is Col. Withering, who knows the ruse but has his own reasons for not revealing it: namely, that his sister-in-law who funds the safaris, has been threatening to cut him off. Another of the rich set is Ellen Parker (Anita Louise), and she and Peter immediately hit it off. But that's because Ellen thinks of Peter as the horseman, not as a lowly clerk there to imitate the horseman and advertise the store. Ellen is also pursued by Col. Withering's nephew Jack (Ronald Reagan).

Eventually the big race comes up, and there's going to be a lot of betting on who's going to win. Trying to influence the betting, albeit in a decidedly less-than-legal way, are the professional gamblers Maxie (Harold Huber) and Droopy (Allen Jenkins). Eventually Peter winds up having to ride the wild horse we saw at the beginning, even though he's barely able to ride a horse at all.

As I said at the beginning, watching a movie like Going Places, it's obvious why Powell had started to chafe having to make all these musicals with increasingly lesser music and even worse plots. Still, Warner Bros. had a lot of talented musical people, so the song and dance numbers mostly work for those who enjoy musical movies. Going Places is not a great movie by any means, but I suppose it could have been much worse considering some of the much more dire horse racing movies I've seen.

24 Hours to Kill

Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month back in December 2024, and as I've mentioned I recorded several of his movies. One that I failed to record, or else I would have recorded it then and written up a post for a subsequent airing that I did in fact record, was 24 Hours to Kill. At any rate, having watched what I'd recorded from the Star of the Month tribute, I eventually got around to watching this one to to write up this review.

Mickey Rooney plays Norman Jones, who works as part of the crew for an airline that flies between Europe and Asia, although notably not having any flights to Beirut for reasons that will become clear not too far into the movie. The current flight is piloted by Jamie Faulker (Lex Barker), who has a back story of his own in that he's got a wife, is carrying on an affair with one of the stewardesses, and the stewardess isn't certain whether the relationship should continue.

One of the engines in the plane goes out, which sucks, but airplanes in the jet era have been designed to work with one of the engines going out. However, a second engine goes out as well, which is going to necessitate an emergency landing. This landing is in... Beirut, and is also going to require a 24-hour stopover so that the plane can be repaired and the flight can continue. Remember, the airline doesn't fly to Beirut so it's not as if they've got another plane there that can take off instead and require less flight juggling.

Now here is one of the first plot holes: the bad guys seem to figure out almost immediately that Jones is on the flight as they start following him to the hotel. Malouf (Walter Slezak) has sent them to the airport to figure out where the crew is going to be staying during the stopover. As you might well guess, Jones and Malouf have a past together, one that Jones has been trying to escape. You'd think he should just hole up in the hotel room, but no. Worse, he's dishonest with Jamie as to what that past entailed.

Jones had worked for a different airline in the past that did in fact fly to and from Beirut, and he worked with Malouf to smuggle stuff into and out of Lebanon. Norman claims that Malouf tried to double cross him, which is why he quit the airline and started working for one that expressly didn't fly to Beirut. (Another plot hole: couldn't Malouf have someone go after Norman outside of Lebanon?) In fact, Norman is the one who double-crossed Malouf. So Malouf wants his henchmen to force Norman to pay up. They're also willing to go after other members of the crew in order to put pressure on Norman, leading to an abduction and the climax....

The big drawing card for 24 Hours to Kill is that it was filmed mostly on location in Beirut as it was back in the mid-1960s when it was a relative oasis in a dreary Arab world, before the civil war that started in 1975 destroyed the country. The locations are relatively nice, except that the film used the Techniscope process that isn't quite as crisp as some other formats. Much worse, however, is the plot which is slow and full of plot holes, making 24 Hours to Kill rather a disappointment.

Not the champ

Tomorrow's lineup in 31 Days of Oscar is movies set in Mexico. Among the movies being shown is the 1931 version of The Champ at 10:30 AM, which I blogged about back in 2010. There was a remake of The Champ in 1979, which will be airing at 3:45 AM on March 11 as part of a prime-time lineup (starting on the evening of March 10) of movies with people who have drinking problems. In between those two there was another version which isn't being shown because it didn't get any Oscar nominations. That movie is titled The Clown.

Red Skelton plays the titular clown, a man named Dodo Delwyn. He used to be big, but as you can guess he has a drinking problem and can no longer get good jobs as a result. He's reduced to a job on Coney Island as a clown making the guests getting off amusement park rides part of his act. He ticks off one such person to the point that man fights back, and Dodo's boss not only blames Dodo, but gives Dodo reason to believe he's accusing Dodo of having gone back to the drink. There goes your job.

Dodo, meanwhile, has a son who admires him in the form of Dink (Tim Considine) and basically takes care of Dodo every time Dodo goes on another drunk, which is about to happen soon now that Dodo is once again out of a job. Now, in a lot of movies this single dad with a son relationship would be down to Mom having died, thank you Production Code. That's also the lie Dodo has been telling Dink. But here, the reality is that Dodo's wife Paula (Jane Greer) couldn't handle her husband's alcoholism and more or less abandoned his fate, divorcing him and marrying another man and having a daughter by that man. How she didn't get custody of Dink is never well explained.

It doesn't take much to guess that Paula is about to meet Dodo again. That happens when Dink goes to one of Dodo's old agents from the talent agencies who gets Dodo a temporary job that Dodo considers do degrading that he doesn't want Dink to see the act. Among the people in the audience is Paula, who wants to see Dink again. She knows that she and her second husband can offer Dink so much more than Dodo can, and tell Dink they'd be more than happy to bring him into their new family, although for obvious reasons Dink is none too happy about this because he still loves his father and considers Dad his hero.

It's going to take a lot for for Dad to hit bottom, which even includes smacking poor Dink. But just as Dodo hits bottom, his old agent realizes there's a new technology out there: television! This would be a great chance to show Dodo to a new audience and possibly get Dodo a stable job if only Dodo can remain sober. The worst that could happen, one supposes, is that the show flops on its opening episode and gets treated as a one-off special rather than a series. But Dodo seizes the lifeline. If you've seen either version of The Champ, however, you know how this movie is going to end....

The most surprising thing about The Clown is the opportunity it offered Red Skelton to do straight drama, since he was mostly known for his physical comedy. Of course, as a clown, that also provides lots of chances to put that physical comedy into the movie in a way that integrates seamlessly into the plot. Skelton shows that he really did have the acting chops necessary to do at least melodrama; I don't know if anybody would have ever taken him seriously if MGM had put him in a straight drama like The Bad and the Beautiful the year before, or Executive Suite a year later. But in The Clown Skelton is by far the highlight in what feels like another of those movies MGM was churning out while trying to fund the Freed Unit musicals.

Sadly not a drama

Another of the movies that I recorded and was getting close to expiring from the DVR was the later Gene Kelly musical It's Always Fair Weather. It's on TCM tomorrow, Mar. 3, at 10:00 AM, so I've watched it in order to be able to put up this review.

The movie starts off with an introductory sequence set at the end of World War II. Soldiers are being demobbed, and three of them are spending their first day back on American soil at a bar in New York: Ted Riley (Gene Kelly), would-be artist Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey), and Angelo Valentine (Michael Kidd). They have way too much to drink and go on a drunken dance sequence, this being a Gene Kelly musical after all. At the end of the day, the three "best friends" who made their way through Europe together vow that they'll meet at the same bar ten years from now, or October 11, 1955.

To remember this vow, each of them takes a third of a one-dollar bill and writes the date one it, so sure enough, when the main action of the film opens up on October 11, 1955 (oddly enough about a month after the film was released), they all see that they have a reminder of the day. Doug wanted to go back to Europe to become the great American artist, but wound up using his art skills to go into the more lucrative field of advertising. He's based out of Chicago, where he's in an unhappy marriage, but created the ad campaign for a New York-based slice-of-life show hosted by Madline Bradville (Dolores Gray), so he was going to be in New York anyway and shows up at the bar.

Angie had been hoping to become a quality chef, but life didn't work out that way for him either. Instead, he got married (and as far as we can tell is happily married) running the sort of hamburger joint up in Schenectady that Thelma Ritter ran in The Mating Season. And as for Ted, he's a native New York who had been hoping to become a lawyer and marry his sweetheart. However, in the opening scene on October 11, 1945, he's learned that that sweetheart couldn't wait for Ted to come home and married another man, leaving Ted embittered. Instead of becoming a lawyer, he got into the fight game, training a second-class boxer who probably had pretentions of greatness at one point but is now being asked to take a dive.

Doug has an expense account, so he offers to take his two old friends to a swanky restaurant where the three find out that they really have nothing in common other than their service in the war. Ted and Doug think Angie is a hick; Ted and Angie find Doug snobbis; and Doug and Angie see Ted's act as kind of scammy, which in many ways it is. Especially when they run into some of the staff from the show who are having a business meeting in the same restaurant. This includes segment producer Jackie Leighton (Cyd Charisse), on whom Ted immediately starts putting the moves, only to discover she's much too smart for that stuff.

Except that there's a bit of a problem, which is that the show goes live, and the subject for the show's "surprise" segment won't be able to do it. So Jackie figures a surprise segment of having the three soldiers appear together on live TV for their 10th anniversary reunion would be a great thing. Except that she doesn't quite realize that the three men, having met each other, don't really want to see each other any more. So they're going to have to engage in some minor deception to make the reunion work. Meanwhile, Jacke and Ted learn about the fixed fight, which gives some extra motivation to what goes on later that evening.

It's Always Fair Weather is another of those movies with a really good premise, that unfortunately doesn't quite work in the execution. For me, I think that's for a different reason than a lot of the other reviewers I've read. Everybody else loves the Gene Kelly dance numbers, but I found myself thinking that this is the sort of plot that shouldn't have been set to the genre constraints of a musical. It's the sort of thing that could be a drama, either serious or somewhat lighter considering the finale is clearly being played for its comic effect.

I missed Georges Méliès' birthday back in December

One thing that mildly irritates me about YouTube TV is the way the DVR takes some of the documentaries about the movies, as well as the collections of shorts packaged together, and doesn't show them when I look for movies to watch. To be fair, the "documentaries" weren't necessarily made for original theatrical showing so they wouldn't be movies. In any case, I only see them when I search for stuff about to expire from the DVR. TCM ran a documentary called The Méliès Mystery back in May of 2025, but I only finally got around to watching it just before it expired.

Now, I assume most people reading a blog like this are aware of Méliès' film A Trip to the Moon from 1902, which is considered one of the more famous very early movies. Méliès was one of the pioneers of cinema, making movies from about 1896 to 1913, just before tastes changed and then the Great War made Méliès' type of movies passé. He fell into obscurity and dire financial straits, which led him in a fit of desperation to burn the negatives of his films that he possessed. This was a move that he would quickly come to regret.

However, it turned out that prints of some of the films survived, and only much later it was rediscovered that for a surprising reason there were negatives in the Library of Congress that over the past several years have been undergoing a painstaking restoration process back in Méliès' native France. Today, roughly half of the 520 or so films that Méliès made in his career are known to survive, which is actually pretty good compared to the percentage of a lot of other's people's work that has been lost.

The Méliès Mystery is part biography, looking at the filmmaker's life starting as the son of a man who owned a shoe factory and expected his sons to follow in the family business, to learning magic in London, through to discovering film with the Lumière brothers, at least if you believe this version of the life story. From what I've read, some of it is legend that has been reprinted as fact like in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. As for the negatives that ended up in America, Méliès sent prints to the US in the early days of movie exhibition, but thanks to poor copyright protection everybody basically pirated everybody else's movies. I think I've mentioned in conjunction with the Griffith shorts box set that I have that companies would include their logo somewhere on the set as a sort of anti-piracy watermark, but the duplicators simply scratched those logos out! So Georges sent one of his brothers over to America and used a two-camera system to make multiple negatives, so that his company would have original prints of his own films to distribute. Those negatives went through a life of their own.

The Méliès Mystery is a well-made movie that I think would serve as a good basic introduction for anybody who doesn't know much about Méliès or about filmmaking as it was in those very early days. For people who are more knowledgeable, there may not be that much new here. But the footage from the original movies is definitely worth watching again.

Somewhere in Time

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time that I only recently got around to watching is Somewhere in Time.

Christopher Reeve, fresh off Superman, plays Richard Collier. As the movie starts, it's 1972, and Collier is a college senior drama major who has just written a play and is getting it presented on stage. Sitting in the audience is a mysterious old lady, who approaches Collier and gives him an expensive pocket watch and makes a comment that implies they've met before or will meet again.

Fast forward to the present day, in 1980. Collier has moved from the small college town to Chicago, where he's become a published playwright who has had several of his plays staged. But his personal life remains unfulfilled, and that's beginning to screw up his professional life too. So Richard decides what he needs is a break from Chicago, going back to his old college town. He's also earned enough that he can finally stay in the Grand Hotel that served wealthy tourists in the summer and, one might guess, wealthy alumni in the other three seasons.

A small museum in the hotel celebrates actress Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour), who gave her final performance at the hotel's summer theater back in 1912 before retiring like Greta Garbo. But for whatever reason, Richard is intrigued, and decides to study up on her career, leading to the startling conclusion that this must have been the woman who gave him the pocket watch several years ago. Laura Roberts (Teresa Wright) worked for Elise in her later years and literally wrote the book on her, and still lives in town, rather conveniently. Richard goes to see her, showing her the pocket watch which is a pretty good way of showing he really does have a connection. Richard also learns that Elise had an interest in time travel, and had a book by one of Richard's old college professors.

Richard talks from the old professor and learns the professor's theory that through the power of self-hypnosis, time travel just may be possible. Richard gets obsessed with doing the same sort of self-hypnosis experiment that his college professor did, but with the difference that he's going to wake up on that day in the summer of 1912 when Elise retired from the stage, as Richard now believes he's fated to meet Elise again even though in the real world she's been dead for eight years already.

After the first experiment goes wrong, Richard wakes up from a second experiment to discover that it seeming is 1912! And young Elise is there, looking just like she did in the photos at the Grand Hotel. However, meeting her is going to be a bit difficult, as the 1912 version of Richard doesn't have any relations or good excuse for seeing Elise. She's also got a somewhat complicated personal life. Her manager William (Christopher Plummer) holds a fairly tight rein over her career, as he's grooming her for stardom. When he finds that Richard is in his view harassing Elise, he's none too happy.

Needless to say, Richard continues to pursue Elise, and perhaps it really is because of Richard that Elise retired from acting, staying here to look for him. But then how did young Richard wind up being reborn in time to graduate from college in 1972?

Upon its original release, Somewhere in Time got fairly poor reviews, although in the intervening years it's developed a cult following for various reasons. The good reason for that is the location shooting on Mackinac Island, a resort located on an island between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. James FitzPatrick did a Traveltalks short on the island, since even in the early 1940s it was known for not allowing motorized vehicles. The location shooting is lovely, and it's easy to see why people with a love for Mackinac Island would have a soft spot for the film. As for other people, I'm not quite certain why. I don't think Somewhere in Time is as bad as the critics of 1980 thought, but it's still a movie with a ridiculous premise and for me a ton of plot holes that aren't well explained. But it's definitely another of those movies you'll want to watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions.