Perhaps Vernilak was wounded by the poor critical reception of Prisoners. Perhaps he felt that he had served his time producing films catering to aesthetic sensibilities inferior to his own. Perhaps the serious illness that afflicted the leader in the mid-1960s gave him a sense of greater freedom, perhaps the souring of his affair with Alexi Elvira put him into a less heroic and more pessimistic state of mind. Whatever the case, As It Was (1965; also known as Kill Hitler! and Time and Again) represented a major break in style, tone and substance from the films of the interplanetary trilogy, and is unique among his oeuvre. It is entirely located in a foreign country – Germany, no less – and features many historical elements.
His new leading man is now Josip Circassian, playing Jakob Streek, head of a research laboratory in present-day Germany (whether East or West is not specified, which gave rise to some dispute: the film’s reception in West Germany was mixed, and it was never publicly shown in the DDR). Circassian was chosen for the role because, after dying his hair, he was seen to have stereotypically Aryan features. Or such is Vernilak’s account – the story that Vernilak and Circassian began an affair during the making of the film, and it was this that had destroyed his relationship with Elvira, was apparently well-known at one time. If this was indeed the case, the two actors were professional enough to have continued to each play a role in As It Was.
Streek’s laboratory is working on “triple resublimated” thiotimaline, an Asimovian material that, when placed in extremely intense rotating magnetic fields permits movement backwards in time. (Remarkably, there are a few mentions of this material online.) Time travel (backward or forward) is not unknown in movies, though generally it has been achieved by magic or hypnosis, or sometimes by accident; only rarely by deliberate use of equipment. The great exception is George Pal’s The Time Machine (1960). While Vernilak’s film came some years after this, there is little sign of this having been an influence. The two could hardly be more different in terms of characterization and content, only being linked by the Wellsian notion of time travel – and this too is handled very differently. In As It Was, small shifts (of seconds) are easy to achieve, but the technology is nothing like Pal’s rather quaint – or as we would now say, steampunk – apparatus. There is no “flying” chair, rather a complex grid of metallic and ceramic materials. The problems of displacement of past matter by the object moved from the present being overcome by transporting the displaced matter forward.
There is an amusing early scene where it is first understood that the mouse that has been transported (together with its cage) is not the mouse that was sent back a few moments in time. This is about the only moment of lightness in the film, whose general atmosphere is tense and ominous. A “time machine” is constructed, large enough to accommodate a human being, small enough to be carried around Berlin. Exponentially large amounts of energy are required to send a human being back further in time – the mid-1940s is the earliest that can be managed with the laboratory’s power resources. Equivalent energy also has to be consumed in recovering the time traveler from, and substituting a volume of air to, the past. The main problem is getting the time traveler to be in the right location at the right time. This becomes a major source of dramatic tension. The physics of time travel are not addressed in more detail than needed to give a sense of plausibility, so the matter of the Earth’s rotation and its movement around the Sun – itself moving in the Galaxy, itself moving in relation to other galaxies and the possible origin of the Big Bang – is elided. (This is a theme taken up by philosophers and physicists as well as film critics, though Hy and his colleagues claim that there is solutions to this problem in the theories of special relativity and quantum entanglement.)
Streek secures funding for his project by stressing the prospects for repairing faults in materials before they cause catastrophes such as the bridge collapse with which the film begins. But it becomes apparent that he has a hidden agenda. His parents were victims of Nazi persecution, and he is determined to stop Hitler. (The reasons for the persecution are political, not racist – and the name Streek may have been deliberately chosen to make this clear.) An early scene sees Streek being led by an eminent historian, Professor Arianne Hulmer, played by Elvira, to archives where he is able to locate his parents’ names in a list of executed political subversives.
Since the scope for going back in time is limited, a mission to prevent Hitler’s birth or terminate his childhood is impracticable. After consultations with Hulmer, with whom there are hints of a romantic spark, Streek reluctantly decides that it is most feasible to achieve Hitler’s death by a slight nudge to history. While there had been earlier assassination plots (back into the 1930s) it was in 1943 (Operation Spark ) and 1944 (the better-known Operation Valkyrie) that bombs nearly ended Hitler and his reign. In both cases the plotters had hoped to bring the war to an earlier end, and at least some of them had wanted to limit the Holocaust and other atrocities that they saw as tainting the German people. Streek also mentions that their success might also have limited the mass suicide of Germans following the fall of the Nazis (a circumstance that was little known to Vernilak’s contemporaries, and we wonder how he gained knowledge of this).
The plot is convoluted and tense, but the core is simple enough. Streek voyages back in time twice, once to assist Operation Valkyrie, once Operation Spark. In each case, his presence leads to the failure of the plot. It is heavily implied that Hitler might have been killed had not the attempts been made to influence history. The July 1944 effort is undermined by the conspirators’ panic after one of them claims to recognize Streek as an SS agent sent to spy on them. Streek escapes and just makes it back to what we would now call a “portal” in time to be transported back to the present. But von Stauffenberg’s ability to set both of the bombs he had intended to use is impaired. The one bomb that he does activate is hastily planted in an inadequate location, so Hitler survives. On his next mission, to 1943, Streek encounters the conspirator who denounced/was to denounce him in 1944. Streek realizes that it is his presence now that led to his being recognized in 1944. It is his turn to panic, and he slips up in maintaining the identity he was trying to assume. Under suspicion, and fearing that he might inadvertently subvert Operation Spark, he tries not to intervene in events. But he is nonetheless seen as responsible for the failure of the bomb to detonate. Whether this is the case is ambiguous: there are hints that his presence was enough distraction to lead to fumbling among the plotters.
In any case, Streek is again suspected of being an agent of Hitler’s loyal supporters, and pursued back to the portal point, which he manages to make with seconds to spare. Wounded, he decides nevertheless to embark on a mission to a yet earlier period: the city’s power supplies are hacked into, and there is a striking scene where the lights go out all over town as the thiotimaline chamber is operated. The film does not follow Streek into the past: he fails to return. The historian Hulmer is left to speculate on what might have happened to him. It is concluded that he died of his wounds or through misadventure. But there is a strong hints that he changed his mission and managed to save his parents; their names have disappeared from the list of victims that Hulmer is shown inspecting in the final scene. A heavily made-up Circassian plays the aged man who watches her as she leaves the archives. This scene was omitted from initial showings of the film, which end at the point that Hulmer destroys the time machine. Vernilak had intended its inclusion, and the abruptness of the incomplete ending was widely criticized; later releases of the film did feature it. (Circassian is not credited as playing the old man in the closing titles.) The ambiguity of the message of this sequence led to much speculation. Are we meant to assume that Streek gave up on his grand plans and instead just focused on his own family? Is it implied that we can change small things, but the course of major events is much less tractable? Would the efforts to kill Hitler have succeeded without the interference, or would they have failed anyway?
This film was a turning point for Vernilak’s reputation. His popularity had been largely confined to SF fandom and young audiences. Though there was much adventure and tension in As It Was, this film was seen as struggling with important ethical and philosophical questions. It was also well-acted and the settings were generally plausible. The pseudoscience was underplayed, but the technology of time travel looked convincing enough. The process of being sent back or forward in time in many ways anticipated the iridescent/transparent effects of being “beamed” by a Star Trek matter transporter (not shown on TV till 1966). As It Was won several international awards, and had wide showing in countries whose audiences were comfortable with foreign-language films. It is still often shown in festivals and, of course, SF fan events. SF connoisseurs have often bemoaned the fact that few later films have really investigated the paradoxes of time travel that Vernilak pointed to in this movie. There has been little exploration of the personal significance of the plot. But is seems reasonable to ask whether the film hints at his own family’s experiences, even an unfulfilled desire to have acted differently in the past to save family members? Streek is not overtly Jewish, of course, but that would be expected of a film made in that particular time and place.
There has, too, been surprisingly little effort to discuss what it might have to say about its own political moment. Was Vernilak regretting his own past commitments and wishing he could rewrite history? Was he endorsing a great man theory of history, something that official Marxism both rejected with its talk of “inexorable historical forces”, and surreptitiously endorsed in its panoply of great leaders, from the holy father of Marx on through Lenin, Stalin, Mao and of course the General himself? Was he whitewashing Germany’s inner essence, as one film critic claimed? The discussion of such issues has more or less spluttered out, while the film itself remains revered for its cinematic qualities: a truly timeless tale of time travel.
It is only recently that an early draft of the screenplay has been unearthed, in which a rather different temporal entanglement is posited. The idea is intriguing, but the script works towards a rather disappointing ending. In this version, Streek is not injured in escaping the Operation Spark debacle. Realizing that it is his own interventions that have led the plots to fail, he decides that he has to prevent his own actions. He transports himself back just a few weeks of present time, to warn himself not to interfere with history. (It could be argued that since the plots have failed before the time travelling begins, this could be futile, but the script does not tackle this paradox.) When he confronts his earlier self, however, he wakes up – it was just a dream, the time travelling equipment is not yet even functioning. Or was it a dream? As so often in speculative fiction, the final shot of the film would have homed in on a clue that he really had travelled in time and changed reality. Vernilak was clearly unhappy with this version, possibly because of the “just a dream” cliché, possibly because of the intense paradoxes of such an effort to forestall one’s own actions. The confrontation between the two Streeks could have made for a powerful moment, if the technical challenges of portraying the actor could be overcome. Nevertheless, in my judgement, the version that was realized is, if not flawless, far superior to the abandoned conclusion.
Otherwise 