The Man from Yesterday

This peculiar melodrama - set in yet another of those big country houses everyone lived in in postwar austerity Britain - resembles a cross between John Gilling's 'The Reptile' (1966) and Pasolini's 'Teorema' (1968) with a dash of Agatha Christie thrown in. The resemblance between this and 'The Reptile' can't be accidental, since Gilling also scripted this.

Veteran character actor Henry Oscar isn't exactly Terence Stamp however, which makes his magnetic hold over the women in this film one of several overwrought plot elements which the cast stolidly take in their stride but - aided by George Melachrino's flavourful score - makes the film strangely compulsive viewing until a 'twist' ending that made me groan out loud in outrage and disbelief.

This movie is of most interest as an early script by John Gilling and an early performance by Laurence Harvey. Henry Oscar shows up at John Stuart's luxurious country home, where Harvey is engaged to Stuart's daughter, Gwynneth Vaughan. He's just back from India, spouting some vague tosh about transmigration of the souls which everyone talks about about as if they'd never been to Church. Miss Vaughan tootles a tune on the piano she can't identify and quarrels with Harvey, and gradually Oscar's malign influence seeps throughout the household.

I suppose it's a bit much to ask of a quota quickie and of a genre I don't particularly care for, but as I watched this, I kept wondering what country they were living in and if there were any religious convictions lurking about the landscape. For solid country people dressed in good British tweed, eating hearty breakfasts to listen to talk about the Dalai Lama being reborn as a young child, and responding with a vague hope of some sort of afterlife in the garden, while there's not even a shaken head in the servants' quarters strikes me as beyond straw man arguments -- it's the sort of intellectual gammon that makes me think these people are idiots who deserve whatever happens to them. One would think none of these people had never heard of the Church of England. Since that seems impossible, and since they place no credence in it, do any of them deserve to be saved?

THE MAN FROM YESTERDAY is a rare little movie of interest for its script by John Gilling, who of course would later go on to make some of my favourite Hammer horrors including THE REPTILE and others of its ilk. This low budget melodrama is set in a sprawling country house, where a woman is trying to contact the spirit of her former husband and ends up employing the services of an unscrupulous medium who ends up insinuating himself into her life. Henry Oscar makes for a sleazy-looking villain, but the film is a crushing bore to sit through, plodding along from one non-exciting scene to another, all leading to one of those exasperating twist ending which doesn't take much guessing.