“You don't waste time, do you?” John Oldman's friends ask him as he's loading his pickup truck, getting ready to leave his friends and his job teaching history.

The film The Man from Earth (written by Jerome Bixby) will seem familiar to connoisseurs of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. Bixby wrote one of the best remembered episodes of that series (“It's a Good Life”) but he didn't write the Twilight Zone story that must have inspired his film The Man from Earth. That episode was written by Charles Beaumont , one of the most prolific writers of the series.

Beaumont's story was called “Long Live Walter Jameson,” and starred Kevin McCarthy (in perhaps his best role after the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers) as a history professor in a liberal arts college, whose methods of teaching history make his students believe they are there, that the past isn't “another country.” Jameson brings the blood and death of the Civil War to his mid-twentieth century students by reading from the diary of a soldier who was there, Major Hugh Skelton.

Jameson is about to marry the daughter of one of his colleagues, Professor Kittridge, who has discovered Jameson's secret: he really was Major Skelton. (Kittridge identifies Jameson as Skelton through a photograph.)

The past comes alive

Jameson admits he is an immortal being, whose memories go back centuries, who never ages, and who periodically leaves those close to him and begins again. The old Professor Kittridge won't let Jameson to ruin his daughter's life as he has ruined other women's lives before.

But even more, Kittridge wants Jameson's secret of eternal life. He is sick and dying, and he wants to live. But there is no secret, at least not that Jameson is aware of. He just lives on.

As is inevitable in the Twilight Zone, Jameson's past catches up to him.

Walter Jameson and Professor Kittridge

Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth takes place forty years after “Long Live Walter Jameson.”

History Professor John Oldman has suddenly decided to leave his teaching post. Several of his friends (and one enemy) from the faculty follow him back to his cabin in the woods to find out what's making him abandon everything and everyone, including Sandy, the woman who loves him. (John's colleagues find him putting what looks like an undiscovered van Gogh in the back of his pickup truck.)

John Oldman's friends are worried about him

The Man from Earth is a suspenseful film (despite the title, which doesn't seem to mean anything).

The Man from Earth is serious, philosophical science fiction about adults. Most of the characters are in their thirties and forties. The one character who is in her early twenties, the student Linda, is the first one to take John's story at face value when he says he is 14,000 years old and is moving on because people have started to notice he doesn't age. For once, John says, he wants to say goodbye as who he really is, not as what he pretends to be. Linda accepts his insane story because, in her credulity, she doesn't see how monumental the implications of it are—if it's true.

The young student: credulous but not naive

Linda's also the one who sees through the pun in Oldman's name, and is the only one who looks like she still believes his story at the end, when he's forced to recant.

At first, John's friends assume he is just playing an intellectual game with them.

John Oldman: 14,000 years old?

How could a “caveman” survive from the Upper Paleolithic era until today? The biologist says if cells regenerated somehow a human might not die of disease. The human body was “meant to last about a hundred and ninety years.” We just die of “slow poisoning”--bad air, food, drink.

Dr. Gruber, a psychiatrist friend of John's, is similar to Professor Kittridge in “Long Live Walter Jameson”--he's old and sick and doesn't believe John has the right to live forever. Gruber isn't as selfish as Kittridge, because it's the death of his wife, not his own desire to live at any cost, that makes him resent John's claimed immortality and threaten him with a gun.

Dr. Gruber: Is John really immortal?

The way John describes his 14,000 years, he has been a seeker, a student. He knew the man who did the cave paintings near Lascaux. He migrated east and studied with the Buddha. As a pig farmer in France (“I like working with my hands”) he talked with van Gogh about the nature of art. Even though John has often been a scholar, he's never been a genius like a Darwin or an Einstein. (The archaeologist Dan, John's best friend, presupposes their hypothetical “caveman” would only need to have “normal intelligence” to keep up with new knowledge as human beings uncovered it.)

Edith is a little older than the rest, in her late forties, and she's obviously been in love with John since he came to teach at their school ten years ago. (Another thing that's good about this film is how these interactions between people are shown in the kind of verbal and nonverbal shorthand we all use everyday, not in the dramatic speeches of blockbuster movies. The way the characters bounce ideas off each other is like a good stage play.)

At first Edith's anger at John when he tells his story is motivated by jealousy more than anything else. Then the movie takes an unnecessary detour.

John is asked if he knew anyone mentioned in the Bible, and there's a forty-minute theological debate with the devout Edith on one side and the rest of the scientists on the other. John offends Edith when he quotes the 18th-century mathematician and astronomer Laplace on God: “I had no need of that hypothesis.” Even if the filmmakers needed to pad out the movie, they could have had the characters argue about something less like The Da Vinci Code.

The psychiatrist Dr. Gruber wonders if John is “a vampire”--witting or unwitting, who stays alive by stealing the life force of those around him, preying on “normal people.” John says at first he thought there was something wrong with everyone else who aged and died. Gruber's fearful reaction to John is not unlike that of John's Cro-Magnon contemporaries 14,000 years ago. (The story of a vampire who becomes a university professor is reminiscent of Suzy McKee Charnas's excellent novel, The Vampire Tapestry, about the solitary immortal being Edward Weyland.)

The Man from Earth has a surprise ending that Rod Serling would have been proud of.

We do get an answer to the question of whether John is telling the truth, though it might have been more interesting if we didn't.