After "Emma" is killed, "Alexander Hartdegen" is soon after shown for the first time making an excursion in the time traveler machine. He gets it wound up and it is surrounded by some kind of time bubble and he accidentally drops a photo of "Emma" to the floor of his workroom. The floor is outside the time bubble and when "Hartdegen" reaches down to pick up the photograph of "Emma," as he is still sitting on the time traveler machine, his hand goes through the time bubble and that seems to cause him pain. Unless I am mistaken, you can see his fingernails quickly grow longer and so you assume his hand, the part of his hand that is outside the time bubble, is aging rapidly while his physical body within the time bubble is aging normally. In a later scene, he is fighting with the "Morlock" leader, portrayed by the actor Jeremy Irons, and Jeremy Irons and he are both inside the time machine, which is in operation, and Jeremy Irons is once again choking the neck of Guy Pearce and Jeremy Irons is thrown outside the time bubble while his hands are still choking Guy Pearce's neck. Jeremy Irons' character quickly withers away while outside the time bubble and Guy Peace is left with only the corpse hands around his neck.
Guy Pearce then goes back, rescues the woman, whose character name I forget and that in this film seems to be the equivalent character of the actress from the 1960 film who has the same birthdate as Stephen Hawkings, and then "Hartdegen" uses his watch to set off some kind of time bomb, which destroys the time machine, and I was mildly confused about that the first time I watched it in the theatre back in 2002. I have never had that same sense of confusion when I watched it later times.
http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/89725/Shadow-of-the-Law
TCM
Shadow of the Law (1930)
A woman being pursued by an intoxicated man breaks into John Nelson's apartment, imploring his help. Nelson, a young engineer, confronts the man, who accidentally topples through a window to his death. Unable to prove the circumstances, Nelson is convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. With the aid of his cellmate, he escapes and under an assumed name becomes manager of a textile mill in North Carolina. Later, his former cellmate, Pete, is commissioned to find Ethel Barry, the woman who can clear him so that he may marry Edith, the mill owner's daughter; but Ethel forces his hand through blackmail. Detective Mike Kearney tracks him down, but when Montgomery (Nelson) mutilates his hands in a machine to erase his fingerprint identity, Kearney decides to force Ethel to clear him.
