Director – Ken Hughes, Screenplay – Charles Eric Maine, Based on His TV Play Time Slip (1953), Producer – Alec C. Snowden, Photography (b&w) – A.T. Dinsdale, Art Direction – George Haslam. Production Company – Todon Productions.
Cast
Gene Nelson (Mike Delaney), Faith Domergue (Jill Robowski), Joseph Tomelty (Detective-Inspector Cleary), Peter Arne (Dr Stephen Rayner/Jarvis), Martin Wyldeck (Dr Preston), Vic Perry (Emmanuel Vasquo), Paull Hardtmuth (Dr Bressler), Leonard Williams (Detective-Sergeant Haines), Laurence Maraschal (Alcott), Donald Gray (Robert Maitland)
Plot
Mike Delaney, a reporter for View magazine, becomes fascinated with the body of a man that has been dragged out of the Thames by police. The man has been shot but is still alive. Delaney and his photographer/girlfriend Jill Robowski identify the man as nuclear physicist Dr Stephen Rayner. However, when police go to the laboratory where Rayner works, they find him alive and well. Meanwhile, in trying to ask the other Rayner in hospital what happened, Delaney and Jill discover that he is answering their questions before they ask him. They theorise that his nearness to radiation has caused his mind to become timeslipped by 4.7 seconds. Meanwhile, Delaney uncovers that the other Rayner is an impostor who has been surgically altered and is planning to turn the reactor into an atomic explosion that will destroy London.
Charles Eric Maine was the pseudonym used by British author David McIlwain (1921-81). Maine/McIwain served during World War II and afterwards worked as a tv engineer and editor. His first work of SF was the radio play Spaceways (1952), which Maine then wrote as a book before it was filmed as one of Hammer Films’ earlier works with Spaceways (1953). Maine originally wrote Timeslip as a 30-minute tv play that was broadcast on the BBC (where the recording is alas now lost). Maine later turned Timeslip into a book The Isotope Man (1957), while the character of the reporter Mike Delaney is the hero of two other of Maine’s (non-genre) books with Subterfuge (1959) and Never Let Up (1964). Other of Maine’s works were later also adapted into the film The Electronic Man (1960), the first screen work on the dreamscape theme, and The Mind of Mr Soames (1969). Timeslip should not be confused with the later British children’s time travel tv series Timeslip (1970-1).
Timeslip was made as a quota quickie, which came about after a law was introduced in the UK in 1927 that required that a certain percentage of British films had to be British made. The initial figure was seven percent later amended to twenty percent. This remained in effect and on the books until 1985 but stricter enforcement began to decline after the 1950s with the rise of television. The upshot of this ended up being a lot of films made cheaply and often shot in black-and-white to fulfil strict mandates of the quotas.
The typical production values of the quota quickie make Timeslip a film that is dull visually. It is shot in black-and-white, which was on its way out as the predominant look for films of the era – not completely but significantly. The direction is drab. It is a talk heavy film where almost everything that happens is people standing around offices, the laboratory and the hospital talking. Furthermore, the only versions of the film available online to watch are poor quality that often make everything so dim it is hard to tell what is going on, while the sound recording makes the dialogue at least audible but not much more than that.
(l to r) Reporter Mike Delaney (Gene Nelson), doctor Martin Wyldeck and photographer Jill Robowski (Faith Domergue) puzzle over the tape recordings of Rayner
That said, Timeslip has a fascinating central idea – that of the man who has died and come back with his mind temporally dislocated several seconds in advance of everybody else. The scenes where Gene Nelson and Faith Domergue work out what has happened with a transcript and a tape recorder are the most fascinating in the film. The film does cheat somewhat on the idea – there is a scene before what is going on is worked out where Peter Arne’s Rayner is handed a glass of water and reaches out to take where if he had been timeslipped he would surely have reached out for 4.7 seconds earlier. And Maine does not follow up on the more interesting implications of what it is that he writes – the time paradoxes created for instance where questions are asked in response to statements that Rayner makes, the responses of course being answers to the questions he was given before the question is actually asked.
On the other hand, the film never does much with the idea. We never find out how the timeslip happened – presumably something to do with Rayner being a nuclear physicist. Also, for all the mystery about what happened to Rayner, his timeslipped state is not relevant to the film’s B plot – the thriller aspect about the surgical double made of him and the plan to create a nuclear detonation in London. This is resolved by people working out what had happened without the involvement of Rayner ie. Rayner could have remained comatose throughout and the outcome would still have been the same. As it is what we have it a fascinating and original idea embedded in a film that delivers it in an incredibly dull manner.
Ken or Kenneth Hughes (1922-2001) was a British director/writer who emerged in the early 1950s. Hughes made several crime films and thrillers such as Wide Boy (1952), Black 13 (1952), The House Across the Lake (1954), The Brain Machine (1955) – not an SF film despite the title – Confession (1955), Little Red Monkey (1955), The Long Haul (1957) and Wicked As They Come (1957), before having a reasonable hit with Joe MacBeth (1955), a modernisation of the Shakespeare play. He gained critical acclaim with The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Cromwell (1970). In genre material, he was one of the directors involved on the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967) and went on to direct the adaptation of Ian Fleming’s children’s book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and the slasher film Night School (1981).
