Repeat Performance (1947) and Death Takes a Holiday (1934)

Toronto Film Society presented Repeat Performance (1947) on Sunday, January 12, 2025 in a double bill with Death Takes a Holiday (1934) as part of the Season 77 Series, Programme 3.

REPEAT PERFORMANCE (1947)

Production Company: Bryan For Productions.  Produced by: Aubrey Schenk.   Directed by: Alfred L. Werker.  Screenplay: Walter Bullock, from the novel “Repeat Performance” by William O’Farrell.  Camera: L. William O’Connell.   Music: George Anthiel.  Running time 92 minutes. Released May 22, 1947.

Cast:  Louis Hayward (Barney Page), Joan Leslie (Sheila Page), Virginia Field (Paula Costello), Tom Conway (John Friday), Richard Basehart (William Williams, the Poet), Natalie Schafer (Eloise Shaw), Benay Venuta (Bess Michaels).

Who wouldn’t want to relive some moments over again? Especially if you find yourself standing with a gun over the body of your philandering husband on New Year’s Eve!

Glamorous actress Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) is desperate to undo the circumstances leading up to that moment. She gets her wish by going back in time and reliving the year all over again, but learns that cheating fate is more difficult than she imagined. What if changing her actions over the year just backfires and creates even more dangerous consequences?

This thrilling, genre-bending blend of film noir and fantasy is notable for its early use of a time loop as a central plot device. The same plot device has since been used in a number of films, including the Groundhog Day (1993), the German film Run Lola Run (1998), and TV series such as The Time Tunnel, and the various versions of Quantum Leap, to name a few.

Discussing too much of the plotline would spoil the film, now celebrated for its narrative ingenuity.

For years, this title was more of a cult movie, known mainly to film buffs. However, this hidden gem has recently garnered renewed interest.

In 2007, a screening of the film with a guest appearance by Joan Leslie resulted in the discovery that a 35mm print had badly decomposed. The Film Noir Foundation, UCLA and others then followed up with restoration of the film, now available on Blu Ray.

Joan Leslie and Louis Hayward weren’t the first actors to be considered for the part. In fact, Alfred L. Werker wasn’t even the first director associated with the project. However, once Werker received the assignment, Leslie and Hayward became the leads.

According to writer Eddie Muller, the producers Eagle-Lion (a Poverty Row studio), thought so highly of Richard Basehart’s performance in the film that they gave him higher billing, and premiered the film in his hometown of Zanesville, Ohio.

This film was remade for television as Turn Back the Clock (1989) directed by Larry Elikann. It featured an appearance by Joan Leslie.

Alfred L. Werker directed four dozen feature films, but only a few were critically acclaimed, including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) (recently screened by TFS), considered one of the best in the original Sherlock Holmes series. His Lost Boundaries (1949), inspired by a true story of a Black doctor passing as white, has grown in critical consensus.

Joan Leslie appeared in over 50 movies, most during the 1940s-1950s, and later on TV. Her peak period for Warner Bros. included such classics as High Sierra (1941), Sergeant York (1941), The Hard Way (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Hollywood Canteen (1943). and Rhapsody in Blue (1945).

Although she attempted with other studios to shed her typecasting as the (sometimes singing) girl next door, she was still not allowed to play an unsympathetic part in Repeat Performance.

Versatile leading man, South African born Louis Hayward became a star in a number of British and US movies before enlisting in the United States Marine Corps during WWII, becoming an award-winning combat photographer. He resumed his film career in 1945.

Working at a number of different studios, he made 39 films in 20 years, including classics such as The Saint in New York (1938), The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), Son of Monte Cristo (1940), My Son, My Son (1940) Ladies in Retirement (1941) (with his then-wife Ida Lupino), And Then There Were None (1945), and The Black Arrow, Ruthless, and Walk a Crooked Mile, all 1948. Hayward later worked extensively on TV.

Second male lead Richard Basehart is known for a number of American and Italian movies, and US TV appearances.  He made his film debut with Repeat Performance (1947), and then as the killer in They Walked By Night (1948).

TV fans of a certain age will remember him as Admiral Nelson in the 1964-68 series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea!

Natalie Schafer will certainly be remembered by fans of the 1964-1967 TV series Gilligan’s Island as the high society matron Lovey Howell! She played similar supporting roles in Dishonored Lady (1948), and most of her other movies.

Notes by David Marigold

DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY (1934)

Production Company: Paramount.  Producer: E. Lloyd Sheldon.  Director: Mitchell Leisen.  Distributor: Universal.  Screenplay: Maxwell Anderson, Gladys Lehman, Walter Ferris.  Based on: the play be Maxwell Anderson, adapted from a play by Alberto Casella.  Photography: Charles Lang.  Art Direction: Ernst Fegté.

Death Takes a Holiday premiered on February 23, 1934, at the Paramount Theatre in New York.  It opened to good reviews and was Paramount’s second highest grosser of the year, after Mae West’s Belle of the Nineties.

Cast:  Frederic March (Prince Sirki), Evelyn Venable (Grazia), Sir Guy Standing (Duke Lambert), Katherine Alexander (Alda), Gail Patrick (Rhoda), Helen Westley (Stephanie), Kathleen Howard (Princess Maria), Kent Taylor (Corrado), Henry Travers (Baron Cesarea), G.P. Huntley, Jr. (Eric), Otto Hoffman (Fedele), Edward Van Sloan (Doctor Valle), Hector Sarno (Pietro).

I first saw the film more than eight years ago at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  The director, Mitchell Leisen, has related the effect the film had on its audience:

“We had seven or eight thousand letters come in from people all over the country, saying that they no longer feared death.  It had been explained to them in such a way that they could understand the beauty of it.

The son of a very dear friend of mine had committed suicide, and she was terribly broken up over it.  I took a flying chance one day.  I took her to the projection room and left her there alone and had Death Takes a Holiday run for her.  She came out a completely different person.  She said, “You’ve explained death, you’ve made it beautiful to me.  I no longer feel the way I did.”  This was worth a great deal to me, and made the effort of doing it worthwhile if you could affect that many people and explain something they have been horrified of.  As Death himself says, “Why do men fear me?”

Leisen said he had no problem with the characterization of Grazia, the character attracted to Death. He saw her as a woman who simply did to want to live, who wanted peace and quiet, which is symbolized to her by death. Leisen recalled telling Maxwell Anderson to “Just take the attitude that this girl has gone out into the garden at night, gotten pneumonia, and doesn’t have the will to live.”  He said he cast Kent Taylor as her fiancé because Taylor resembled Fredric March.  “They looked almost exactly the same, and I wanted to get the effect over that March represented Death and Taylor was life.  She loved them both, but she loved Death more.”

Death Takes a Holiday was one of Leisen’s favourite films.  Fredric March considered his role in it as one of his four best, along with Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, A Star is Born, and The Best Years of Our Lives.  The power of the film derives from an eerie, macabre, romantic feeling that it invokes. Lawrence Quirk lists the film as one of the 50 great romantic films, an example of the supernatural aspects of Romanticism.

The film’s mood is served memorably by its music, including the use of Sibelius’ melancholy Valse Triste, and by the director’s superb visual imagery.  Leisen had worked as art director for Cecil B. De Mille for more than ten years.  To make March appear transparent, as Death, he was photographed through a partially silvered mirror. The striking, larger than life set design, along with the haunting music, is what I remember the most from the Museum screening eight years ago.

Notes by Austin Whitten