Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are watching Comfy, Cozy movies this September and October and this week we are discussing Somewhere in Time.

I am going to warn you that I know this movie is sacred to many, but that I am going to pick a bit here. If you are a fan, take my teasing as affectionate teasing. There were aspects I liked and aspects I just didn’t get.

Somewhere in Time was released in 1980 and stars Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour, and Christopher Plummer. It is based on the book Bid Time Return by science fiction/horror author Richard Matheson who also wrote a few other well known books I Am Legend (1954), What Dreams May Come (1978), Hell House (2008), and The Omega Man (1975). Many of his books were made into movies. He also wrote the screenplay for Somewhere In Time.

The story is about a playwright who travels back in time by merely wishing he can be there.

That’s pretty much the plot of the movie, but I’ll explain further.

Richard Collier is approached by an elderly woman after one of his plays and she hands him a watch and says, “Come back to me,” and then leaves.

It’s a creepy moment, if you ask me, and in real life Richard would have said, “Who was that old lady?” and then thrown the watch out. But this is Hollywood so he holds on to the watch and eight years later when he hits a slump in his career he decides to head to Michigan to take a break from life – because that’s the first place I think to go when I need a break from life. Not Hawaii or the Bahamas but Michigan.

This is a joke Michiganers! Honestly, I’m so jealous when Erin tells me of all the lovely places Michigan has. Sometimes she even sends pictures to rub it in more! *wink* Plus a ton of cozies I read all take place in Michigan. So it is either very lovely or there are a lot of murders there. Either way – much more exciting than Pennsylvania.

Okay, back to Richard. He travels to Michigan and Mackinac Island where he decides to visit The Grand Hotel because as a student at a nearby college he’d always heard about the hotel but had never visited it.

We, the viewer, have already heard of the hotel because this is where the old lady in the beginning of the movie returned to after she gave Richard the watch.

While staying at the hotel Richard becomes enamored with a photo of Elise McKenna (Seymour) who was an actress from the early 1900s. She performed at the hotel in 1912. He begins to research everything he can about her and finds an up to date photo of her in a library book and realizes she’s the woman who gave him the watch.

After visiting a former caretaker/friend of Elise’s, Richard learns Elise died the night she gave him the watch. While visiting the woman he also finds a book on time travel and for some unexplained reason, Richard decides he must find a way to go back in time to meet Elise.

Conveniently, the man who wrote the book about time travel is also in Michigan and tells Richard that to go back in time he must lock himself in a room and remove all distractions that would make him think he was still in modern times. He must instead focus solely on what time period he wants to go to and say over and over he is actually in that time period.

Sigh. Yes. As if the movie already wasn’t a bit cheesy – this is where it turns the ridiculous corner.

There were so many moments in this movie that I am sure were meant to be romantic or moving or suspenseful but all I could do was giggle.

The way the light hits her photo in the beginning of the film like a spotlight from heaven and the cheesy music starts playing – super, super loud? That was one of them.

Then when he’s trying to go back in time he looks like he ate too much shrimp at dinner so he’s having major cramps.

I should add that before he tries to go back in time he buys a suit he thinks fits the time period and then uses a pair of scissors and the hotel room mirror to cut his hair perfectly to fit the time period. Yeah. Okay. Like he could do that all by himself. Ha. But it’s a movie so we will go with it.

Since you already know the movie is called Somewhere in Time you know that he arrives in the past. I won’t say much beyond this other than there was so much more I wanted them to do with the time the couple had together. Like Erin said to me, the pacing of this movie felt off – things were so rushed and squished and sort of discombobulated.

Despite that, I somehow sort of liked the movie. Reeve, Seymour, and Plummer (who plays Elise’s manager/guardian since she was 16. Let us not focus too much on what that means. Ahem. I believe he really was just her guardian) acted well giving great – or at least commendable – performances. I think this was only Reeve’s second movie with his first being Superman.

The concept of the movie was very interesting and it was a lovely location for a movie as well. Much better than San Diego, where the book was set.

You can read Erin’s post to learn more about the location because I’m sure she mentions that she has visited the location a few times since she lives near there.

The book, by the way, had Richard visiting the Hotel del Coronado because he had an inoperable brain tumor and wanted to spend his last days there. It’s while there he sees Elise’s photos and things proceed like the movie in most ways. The only thing is the ending of the book makes more sense than the ending of the movie, in my opinion. I won’t share either ending here but I will say I didn’t like the ending of the movie so I wish Matheson had not changed it for the movie. Not sure why he did.

Incidentally, the book was inspired by a true story – sort of.

According to information I read and watched online, Matheson was traveling with his family when he was entranced by the portrait of American Actress Maude Adams that was hanging in the Piper’s Opera House in Nevada.

“It was such a great photograph,” Matheson said, “that creatively I fell in love with her. What if some guy did the same thing and could go back in time?”

Matheson proceeded to research her life and became fascinated with her being a recluse. To write the novel he stayed at the Hotel Del Coronado for several weeks and dictated what he saw and learned into a tape recorder, personally experiencing himself in the role of Richard Collier. He based most of the biographical information about Elise on Adam’s life and said the books original title came from a line in William Shakespeare’s Richard II: “O call back yesterday, bid time return.”

I am personally glad the name was changed for the movie. It made it much more marketable, even though from what I read about this movie, Universal Pictures did very little to promote it, which may be one reason it wasn’t a huge commercial success.m at the time. It did, however, become a huge cult classic.

Of the book Matheson said: “, “Somewhere in Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death…. I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.”

There you go – now you can keep that in mind if you ever choose to read the books, or if you have read them.

If you would like to know more about Maude Adams, by the way, you can visit this Wikipedia page (which can easily be changed and manipulated as we have learned over the years, so also look at legit sources for your facts): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maude_Adams

While looking for reviews and trivia about this movie I found a hilarious review by movie critic Roger Ebert.

I do not recommend reading this review if Somewhere in Time is a favorite of yours or holds some kind of sentimental value. While the review made me giggle, it is quite harsh. You can find it here: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/somewhere-in-time-1980

Erin told me about a Somewhere in Time package you can book at The Grand Hotel and I’ll include that link here without the jokes she and I made about what the package would include since sharing the jokes would include spoilers.

https://www.grandhotel.com/packages/somewhere-in-time-weekend/

While reading about the package I learned that Jane Seymour still visits the hotel often for personal and professional reasons. Sadly, both Plummer and Reeve are no longer with us and can’t visit.

This movie was not a box office success, as I mentioned above, but over the years it has developed a cult following, hence the hotel offering a package in its name and hosting events related to it.

The theme song of Somewhere in Time, in case you are wondering, was not written for the movie like some might think. It is “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” by Sergei Rachmaninoff, written in 1934.

A few more trivia tidbits I found online included:

• Score creator John Barry’s parents both died shortly before he began to work on the film, making the music that much more emotional. (source TVTropes.com)
• Christopher Reeve took the role even though it didn’t pay as much as others because he was very touched by the story and script. (source TVTropes.com)
• The first time Richard sees Elise is also the first time Christopher Reeve saw the picture because the director Jeannot Szwarc wanted his authentic reaction. (source TVTropes.com) (Thank God he looked enamored because otherwise they might have had to edit out his reaction. Not that I can imagine anyone making a disgusted expression when looking at Jane Seymour.)
• According to Seymour, she and Reeve really did fall in love while filming and they hid the relationship from the cast and crew but that the relationship ended when Reeve found out his ex-girlfriend was pregnant with his child. The two remained close friends and Seymour even named her son after him. (source TVTropes.com)

• While Christopher Reeve was filming this movie, the local theater decided to show his latest hit Superman (1978). Many of the “Somewhere” cast joined the locals for the event. Early into the screening, the sound went out. Reeve, who was seated next to Jane Seymour, stood up in the audience and delivered all the lines. (source imbd.com)
• As of 2008, the numbers of Elise McKenna and Richard Collier’s rooms do not exist at the Grand Hotel. However, there is a Somewhere in Time suite. (source imbd.com)

Here is a trailer of Somewhere in Time if you’ve never seen it and think you might want to:

I will add that Roger Ebert suggested another movie that he felt better represented a time travel movie with romance included.

It sounds quite a bit darker to me but here is a preview for Time After Time:

I watched this movie on Amazon but it can be rented from a variety of streaming services, purchased on DVD, and probably found at local libraries.

Erin’s post about the movie can be found here: https://crackercrumblife.com/?p=25718

Next up for our movie-watching pleasure is another pick by me, Ladies in Lavender.

The rest of our schedule can be found here:

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I hope you will join in or at least follow along as we discuss these movies.

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