FANTASIA OBSCURA: What if Nazis Invented a Time Machine to Win WWII?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you need an abject lesion in why “Tell, don’t show” is a horrible, horrible piece of advice…
The Yesterday Machine (1965)
Distributed by: Carter Film Distribution
Directed by: Russ Marker
For years, one hoary old trope found in genre works (and some straight-up thrillers and suspense pieces as well) was that of old Nazis trying to bring back the Third Reich. And boy, have we suffered through a few here so far…
And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, well… Uberraschen, leben!
We open cold with two kids next to their car, which is apparently not going anywhere as Howie Ramsen (Jay Ramsey in his sole acting role) is tinkering with the motor, while his girlfriend Margie Del Mar (Linda Jenkins in the first of her only two roles) is there to…
Well, you tell me, ‘cause damned if I really know:
After this ends, the kids note in passing with Texan accents as the credits roll over them that they’re going to be later for the big game that weekend, and that maybe the old house they passed a ways back might have a phone they can use to get the car fixed. And so, they walk towards the house, them without much guile and us without newspapers and water guns handy, but get distracted by a campfire, where they encounter some bad people…
We know they’re bad because they talk with harsh tones and shoot Howie; we never actually see these people, however, even as Howie runs off (with the credits still superimposed on the drama) and collapses in the road, when…
We find ourselves suddenly at the offices of The Daily Sentinel, where reporter Jim Crandall (James Britton in his only credit) can’t stop bitching about how he hasn’t had a vacation in three years. And that rest time is interrupted when he’s given one last assignment before he heads out. And so, rather than talking to an organizer from WGA East, he ends up interviewing the kid in the hospital…
Who, of course, is Howie, who’s account he told to Doctor Blake (Charles Young) is related to the reporter by the physician, during which we see much of the same footage we’ve already seen, but this time get a look at his assailants:
After some laborious extension on the story, it gets relayed as sort of an afterthought that Margie is still missing. So, our reporter goes to see her sister Angie (Ann Pellegrino in her only role), who does a musical number (written by the director) that does nothing to move the plot forward and very little to convince us that she would see anything in our vacation-deprived scribe before the two start getting chummy.
It also seems kind of random that Jim’s got a decent enough working relationship with Police Lt. Partane (Tim Holt), who doesn’t think to try and keep Jim and Angie from going to look for Margie over an active crime scene. You’d think the amount of time he spends talking about the investigation, he’d have said something (intelligent). But, go they do, where things get a little weird as they encounter a gentleman on a horse, who tells them it’s 1789 and that Jim’s lighter makes him in league with the devil:
The encounter is brief, and as soon as Yankee Doodle Dimwit is gone, Jim and Angie find themselves in the basement of the old house Margie was heading for. They encounter their host, Professor Ernst Von Hauser (Jack Herman in his last role) who then explains his plan…
He goes on about the nature of time, interrupting his spiel now and then how he was the genius on the Nazi brain corps, with the obligatory throwing of shade at Einstein that most Nazi scientist in bad movies do. Imagine, if you will, the blackboard scene from Back to the Future Part II being redone by someone who didn’t know what he was talking about…
Which is one of the big problems with this whole overly-long sequence. If he really had a time machine with which to re-write history, why bother boasting about? Why not just use the damn thing and talk about it after the fact, like real smart people do? Why not just go back and rewrite history, do all the work then, und geniesse einfach seinen sussen Sieg, nein…?
And “talking” is the main problem with the film. We get this long discussion about the nature of time from someone who doesn’t need encouragement to get monologing, coming after long sequences of strange encounters being discussed without showing them in real time. Howie’s shooting, Herr Doktor’s plan for how he intends to use his device; it’s like Maker either never learned or didn’t care about the craft of storytelling, giving the term ‘vanity project’ a bad name.
And that may have been true; Maker, who seems to have suffered delusions of competence been inspired by the infamous Larry Buchanan, another Texan auteur likewise confined by lacks of talent and resources, made this film for a small company that had only two films to its credit. At a breezy but talkative 78 minutes, he threw his not very professional crew and cast (with the exception of Holt, whose career had seen its highs years ago) through their paces, then vamoosed. This pic met standards far lower than the ones American International had, then played its run quickly before it too fled. This allowed Marker to concentrate from then on as an actor, starting with an uncredited role in Bonnie and Clyde and then getting the rest of his roles in anything that shot in Texas, including four appearances on Walker, Texas Ranger.
Other than that, he doesn’t have much to show for himself…
NEXT TIME: We continue to remember 80 years since World War II began, with a tale about a vessel so bad, the Kriegsmarine wanted nothing to do with it; after watching the film, you may not, either…
