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FilmsMEDIAScifi

Turn Back The Clock (1933): a film mini-review by Evelyn C. Leeper.

‘Turn Back The Clock’ (1933) is a fantasy film that showed up on Turner Classic Movies in April during their Thursday movies about time. Most of these were familiar, eg ‘The Time Machine’, but this was unfamiliar. Also, the plot is familiar: Joe Gimlet (Lee Tracy) regrets the decisions he has made and wishes he could live his adult life over and guess what?

He is hit by a car, knocked unconscious and wakes up back in 1914. The problem is that he is even more of an idiot than William Feathersmith (Albert Salmi) in ‘The Twilight Zone’ episode ‘Of Late I Think Of Cliffordville’ or Paul Driscoll (Ana Andrews) in ‘No Time Like The Past’.

Not only does Gimlet keep telling people that he knows what’s going to happen but he cannot seem to remember that he is in his past and remember things like the date of the Armistice, even though he was a soldier, or when the stock market crash happened. This may be because Tracey was primarily a comedy actor and this film decided it needed to be a comedy.

Most of the plot seems to be about how he chose the wrong woman to marry and keeps talking about that. I suppose it’s amusing enough, but considering how much he presumably knows and tries to change, there is no real alternate history to speak of.

Evelyn C Leeper

June 2022

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