Enjoyable in it's own melancholy way. Russell Johnson is playing bridge with some friends in The Potomac Club in Washington. (Johnson is the telephone lineman who stared into the sun in "It Came From Outer Space.") The players are arguing about whether events can be changed if one were able to travel back through time. Johnson scoffs at the idea. "Enough metaphysics," he says, bids them good-night, and exits the club, only to find that it is now the night of Abraham Lincoln's assassination and he has only about an hour to do something about it -- if he can.
Well, in a word, he can't. He makes a nuisance of himself pounding on the Stage Door of Ford's Theater and winds up in the police station, where his story is taken for the gibberish of a drunk. But he's remanded to the custody of a well-dressed gentleman, named Jonathan Wellington, who has dabbled in diseases of the mind.
Johnson himself should have dabbled in a few more coffee table books because, if he had, he would have realized that Jonathan Wellington (and the actor who plays him, John Lasell) is a dead ringer for John Wilkes Booth, a handsome heart throb of the time and the man who shot Lincoln in the back of the head with a Derringer.
Booth drugs Johnson and the assassination takes place as it did historically. The murder couldn't be prevented, but small things can be changed. The lowly cop who believed Johnson and tried to stop the killing has become a powerful political figure and millionaire. And when Johnson finds himself back in the present, the man who was the doorman at the Potomac Club is now one of its wealthiest members, a descendant of the good cop.
It's vaguely reminiscent of "The Woman in the Window" and the first episode of "The Twilight Zone: The Movie." It lacks some of the impish tricks of other episodes. No genie in a bottle sends Johnson back in time. Instead, he suffers a spell of dizziness and, poof, instead of cars he's looking at hansom cabs. His return to 1961 seems equally arbitrary. And "the grandfather paradox" is never mentioned. If you traveled back in time and murdered your own ancestors, how could you come into being and travel back in time to murder your own ancestors?
Still, Russell Johnson does a good job in the role, and Lasall as Booth is a commanding figure. He should be arrogant, of course, but his forceful demeanor immediately suggests that his identity as a dabbler in medicine is somehow askew. And -- good grief -- how he resembles John Wilkes Booth's best-known photograph.
Well, in a word, he can't. He makes a nuisance of himself pounding on the Stage Door of Ford's Theater and winds up in the police station, where his story is taken for the gibberish of a drunk. But he's remanded to the custody of a well-dressed gentleman, named Jonathan Wellington, who has dabbled in diseases of the mind.
Johnson himself should have dabbled in a few more coffee table books because, if he had, he would have realized that Jonathan Wellington (and the actor who plays him, John Lasell) is a dead ringer for John Wilkes Booth, a handsome heart throb of the time and the man who shot Lincoln in the back of the head with a Derringer.
Booth drugs Johnson and the assassination takes place as it did historically. The murder couldn't be prevented, but small things can be changed. The lowly cop who believed Johnson and tried to stop the killing has become a powerful political figure and millionaire. And when Johnson finds himself back in the present, the man who was the doorman at the Potomac Club is now one of its wealthiest members, a descendant of the good cop.
It's vaguely reminiscent of "The Woman in the Window" and the first episode of "The Twilight Zone: The Movie." It lacks some of the impish tricks of other episodes. No genie in a bottle sends Johnson back in time. Instead, he suffers a spell of dizziness and, poof, instead of cars he's looking at hansom cabs. His return to 1961 seems equally arbitrary. And "the grandfather paradox" is never mentioned. If you traveled back in time and murdered your own ancestors, how could you come into being and travel back in time to murder your own ancestors?
Still, Russell Johnson does a good job in the role, and Lasall as Booth is a commanding figure. He should be arrogant, of course, but his forceful demeanor immediately suggests that his identity as a dabbler in medicine is somehow askew. And -- good grief -- how he resembles John Wilkes Booth's best-known photograph.
