Watched: 12/16/2025
Format: Kanopy
Viewing: Second
Director: Alfred L. Werker
I'd seen Repeat Performance (1947) a few years back, I assume during one of the windows where blogging was on pause, because I have no write-up of the movie. I'm very sure I saw it as part of Noir City Austin, but if I found out it was under different circumstances, okay then.
I didn't remember it particularly well, just a few impressions that turned out to hold. I remembered it had a really solid ending that kind of saved the movie for me, the lead was a little aimless, and it sagged in the middle. But it also was a curious exploration of a concept that would be pretty popular now and would withstand a remake.
The film opens on Joan Leslie murdering a "Barney" (Louis Hayward) and then fleeing to find friends at a New Years' party. She's asking for help, and Richard Basehart takes her to see George Sanders Tom Conway. En route, she makes a wish to have the whole year to do over - and she gets it.
After Joan Leslie has adjusted to the idea that she is living over 1946, she races home to change things.
But no matter what she tries to do, fate keeps bending back to the inevitable conclusions of the year before. Her husband, Barney, will play around on her with playwright Paula Costello (Virginia Field). She's star in Costello's play. Richard Basehart will find himself under the thrall of Mrs. Howell Mrs. Shaw (Natalie Schafer), a wealthy financer of the arts, who will do him dirty. And it doesn't matter what Joan Leslie changes.
If marching inevitably toward one's doom is a feature of noir, then this slam dunks so hard it shatters the noir backboard. But it is a weird fantasy movie, and for this sort of stuff that lived mostly in pulp magazines and would become more familiar with TV anthology series like Twilight Zone, it feels really early for a movie to be pulling mystical hoo-har in a movie like this.
If I'm looking for a way to strike it as noir, it's one part "oh, magic", and one part "this movie has a femme fatale, but our female lead is both dumb and spineless".
That's no shade on Joan Leslie, who nails what she's given... but two years after WWII, it seems very, very odd that wed have a movie where a woman - who has murdered her philandering husband and is given another chance - once she sees how things are lining up - wouldn't kick his ass to the curb and avoid, you know, MURDER a second time. He's also a terrible drunk, emotionally abusive, capable of physical abuse, and not once does he demonstrate why anyone wants to spend time with him. He's arguably also the least handsome guy in every scene.
And still this lady is clinging onto him after he humiliates her and ruins himself. It's kind of painful to watch.
Virginia Field as the evil Paula Costello is actually pretty great. Hats off. She is one stone cold b.
Anyway, not my favorite, but it's interesting.
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