Somewhere in Time

Adapting his own novel Bid Time Return, and with characteristic indifference to current film taste, Richard Matheson has here provided one of the most idiosyncratic scripts of 1980, about a writer who wills himself back in time to the early 1900s in order to fall in love with a distinguished actress. In its unashamed romanticism, this is the kind of thing David O Selznick was producing in the 1940s; but scripts cannot make themselves, and Somewhere in Time is cursed with truly atrocious staging, plus Christopher Reeve looking awkwardly man-of-steelish as the hero. A few emotional echoes remain, and one climactic coup in which the hero is dragged forward in time; otherwise this must go down as a missed opportunity.