Back to the Future Part III (Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, U-Drive Productions, 1999)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At the end of Back to the Future Part II Dr. Brown has dropped a reference to the time and place he’s really want to visit, the Old West in 1885. That in turn sets up Back to the Future Part III, which struck me as the weakest, a not terribly funny Old Western spoof in which Marty learns that Dr. Brown is going to be murdered by Biff’s and Griff’s ancestor, outlaw Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen (you guessed it, Thomas F. Wilson again!). This time the alias Marty adopts once he gets back to the Old West is “Clint Eastwood,” and I’m sure Zemeckis, Gale and their crew intended Michael J. Fox to look as ridiculous as he does in the hat and serape the real Clint Eastwood wore in his early “spaghetti Westerns.” Back to the Future Part III doesn’t have that much to offer – in this one the time travelers inadvertently arrive during an Indian attack (one wonders if these used film clips from earlier Universal Westerns the way Mel Brooks used footage from John Ford’s classic The Searchers to represent the wagon train Cleavon Little’s parents were denied admission to in Blazing Saddles). A stray arrow from the Indian hordes puncture the DeLorean’s gas tank, and while the time-travel part of the car runs on plutonium it still needs to run on regular gasoline to reach the 88 miles per hour needed for it to bridge the time barrier and move to the past or the future. There are echoes of John Ford’s late masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in the bizarre confrontation between Marty McFly and Buford Tannen, who’s out to kill somebody and he really doesn’t seem to care who.

The one genuinely moving plot line in this film is the burgeoning live affair between Dr. Brown and schoolteacher Clara Clayton (Mary Steenburgen), which achieves some of the same pathos Harlan Ellison did in his marvelous late-1960’s Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” in which Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) go back in time to San Francisco in 1930 because Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) has already inadvertently done so and screwed up the space-time continuum. The poignance of the show came in the character of Edith Keeler (Joan Collins in what was probably the greatest performance she ever gave), a mission operator and pacifist whom Kirk falls in love with, only to realize that for the future to work out the way it was supposed to, Edith must die in a car crash because if she lived, she would lead a pacifist movement that would be so successful the U.S. would never enter World War II, Hitler and the Nazis would win and history would be altered n a decidedly negative direction. (I suspect that was Ellison’s Jewishkeit coming out again.) Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale hardly get as much emotion out of this situation as Ellison did, but they do set up a similar dilemma for Dr. Brown: stay in 1885 with the woman he’s come to love or return to 1985 and preserve the space-time continuum in place. Dr. Brown also rigs up an elaborate system to accelerate the DeLorean, in the absence of fuel, to the requisite speed to get Marty back to 1985: he hijacks a steam locomotive and drives it off an uncompleted bridge, hoping that by 1985 the bridge would be complete and Marty would be able to drive the rest of the way safely.

Back to the Future Part III already was starting to qualify as steampunk (an interesting science-fiction sub-genre in which steam power becomes ever more sophisticated while electricity remains a novelty),m and it goes full steampunk in the final sequence, in wh ch the DeLorean is destroyed but Dr. Brown and Clare remain alive because the locomotive turns into a time-travel machine. I thought the ending silly, but engagingly so even though it’s obvious Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale wanted to give their saga a happy ending at long last, no matter what the consequences or how much of a pretzel twist they had to give the logic of their story to achieve it!