The House in the Square

A film set in London. Peter Standish is an American scientist. He works on atomic physics. In the years after the Second World War he moves into a house in London. The house came down through his family. It is in Berkeley Square and two hundred years old. He is not well. He is uneasy about his work; he worked on the bomb. He finds an old diary in the house. An ancestor with the same name lived there in 1784. He reads it. Then he memorises it. One night there is a storm. He opens the door. Outside is 1784. From there the film takes place in that period. Peter is taken for his own ancestor. Nobody notices. There is a family. He is considered engaged to one of the daughters. He is to marry Kitty. But there is another girl. Helen is quiet and like nobody else. Peter has a problem. He knows the future and cannot hide it. In one conversation he describes an invention. In another he says an event before it happens. People become uneasy. What the narrative is interested in is not time travel but escape: its idea is that the man is disgusted by his own age and takes the past for a shelter. The past is not clean either. Illness, filth, dead children and cruelty; the narrative shows them. Helen notices something. She works out who Peter is and tells him. The narrative gives that as love. The return is unavoidable. The last section comes back to the present and there is a gravestone. The source is John L. Balderston's play; the text had been filmed before. This version has colour sections. The past is in colour, the present in black and white. It was shot in England. Roy Ward Baker directed. Tyrone Power, Ann Blyth, Michael Rennie and Dennis Price are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes classic time-travel narrative and period film. Who it is not for: anyone looking for logic; the narrative never explains its rules and the last section takes an emotional shortcut.