When the last of the English Pendrels dies and leaves a London estate house to American Ralph Pendrel, the young Pendrel travels to England and finds himself inhabiting the body of an even earlier Pendrel. Unfortunately, when Henry James himself died, that’s as far as he’d gotten in writing the book, although the posthumous publication included James’s notes on the conclusion—plenty enough to inspire a litany of followers from countless versions of Berkeley Square to H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time.”

Leslie Howard reprises his dual role of two Peter Standishes from the 1929 Broadway stage performance of Balderston’s Berkeley Square, which in turn was loosely based on Henry James’s unfinished novel The Sense of the Past. The timeslips result in 18th-century Peter exchanging places with his 20th-century version, and they occur via thunderstorms and an overpowering belief by present-day Peter that the house and a diary he found there are somehow calling him to the past.

John Balderston’s play Berkeley Square is updated to the 1950s where Peter Standish, now an atomic scientist, is once again transported back to the 18th century (unfortunately, not via a nuclear accident) to woo beautiful Kate Petigrew.