Time Flies 1944

On tour, entertainers Bill Barton George Moon and Susie Barton Evelyn Dall perform across towns until Bill’s old friend Tommy Tommy Duggan arrives with a flashy pitch for Time Ferry Services Limited. Bill has already given Tommy $10,000 to help Professor Stewart McAndrew develop the Time Ball, a primitive time machine. Enraged, Susie goes to the lavish apartment where Tommy and the Professor are staying to demand the money back. The group soon discovers that Tommy is actually a valet who has been pretending to be wealthy by borrowing his employer’s clothes and apartment. His boss calls the police, and the group hides inside the Time Ball.

Tommy closes the hatch and accidentally activates the invention, sending them back to Elizabethan London where Tommy befriends Captain Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth. He starts a fresh swindle by claiming to “own” America and selling off parcels of land to members of the court.

The Professor is arrested and jailed in the Tower of London for being a Scottish spy, trapping the group in the past. Meanwhile, Susie meets William Shakespeare and feeds him some of his own lines, which he eagerly writes down. Susie and Bill then encounter Captain John Smith and Pocahontas in a tavern, swap identities to gain an audience with the queen, and urge her to pardon the Professor. Their ruse is soon unmasked, and they, along with the Professor and Tommy, are sentenced to be executed. The queen’s soldiers attempt to burn them alive inside the Time Ball, but the Professor manages to fix the device and they return to the present—arriving several weeks too early and slowly fading away due to a temporal paradox.