Repeat Performance

New Year's Eve. Sheila Page is an actress in the theatre and there is a pistol in her hand; she has shot her husband. Going down the stairs she makes a wish: if she could live the past year again she would do everything differently. The wish is granted and she finds herself on the New Year's Eve of a year earlier. She knows what is coming and tries to prevent it. But every intervention carries events to the same place by another road. Alfred L. Werker directs. Joan Leslie plays Sheila, and Richard Basehart appears as the poet William Williams in his first film. The picture sits between film noir and the fantastic. The images and the tone belong to noir while the premise is supernatural, a combination rare in American cinema of the period. The idea is not that the course of fate cannot be changed but that changing it would require the character herself to change. Sheila tries to manage the people around her and stays the same. It was a low budget production noticed for its construction, and it was remade for television years later. It is cited as one of the early examples of the time loop narrative in film history. Who it is for: viewers who like forties noir and narratives about time. Who it is not for: the means were limited, some supporting parts stay functional, and the ending is predictable for a viewer today.