I had a gun before
2020-01-05 06:55I don't know how much of a noir Repeat Performance (1947) is, but it's a great little weird tale. Instead of a ghost story for Christmas, it's time travel for New Year's. Those liminal spaces will get you every time.
New Year's Eve, 1946. The nighttime panorama of Manhattan burns like an incandescent mirror of the stars in which the narrator wonders whether our destinies are truly written or not. For Sheila Page (Joan Leslie), the question is not academic—as the bells ring out across the city for 1947, she's fleeing the apartment where she just fatally shot her alcoholic, abusive husband, desperately wishing the disastrous events of the last year undone. "It's like a play," she grieves, an out-of-town tryout with a bad third act that could have been saved with last-minute rewrites. "That's what I'd like to do with the year I've just lived—rewrite it, play it over again. But I can't. It's too late." Like a dream or a haunting, time seems to give her just that do-over chance, rewinding as she rounds a flight of stairs to the first confetti-twirled moments of 1946, when no one but Sheila knows what the future might hold. Overjoyed as Scrooge on Christmas morning or George Bailey restored to Bedford Falls, she runs home to the arms of a sober, slightly startled, but quite alive Barney (Louis Hayward), swearing to herself to avoid all the mistakes of 1946 Prime. She won't take the lead in Paula Costello's Say Goodbye; it's a surefire smash backed and directed by her old friend John Friday (Tom Conway), but she can't risk introducing her husband to the coolly glamorous, London-based playwright with whom he spiraled into his resentful, destructive affair. If he starts drinking again, she'll take him to California to dry out, get them away from the tight-knit theater world where the quondam next great American dramatist is now routinely greeted as "Sheila Page's husband." She can even spare some foreknowledge for her dear friend William Williams (Richard Basehart), a sensitive poet who should steer clear of Mrs. Shaw (Natalie Schafer), the ravenous serial patron who last time around had him committed to a sanitarium when his unstable genius played badly with her taste for grateful protégés. It all looks so simple, each well-defined jumping-off point with its own decisive antidote, and yet as soon as their New Year's party is underway, the door swings open to reveal a stylish, accidental party crasher (Virginia Field) as yet unfamiliar to the audience, but at whom Sheila stares as if into the gaze of the Gorgon. "I won't believe this year is laid out before me like a pattern and nothing I do can change it," she vows, but how confidently can she say that with Paula Costello already chatting up her husband, dropped straight into their living room as if by some impatient, corner-cutting fate? Now the theatrical title begins to sound as threatening as the nightmare tableau of the film's opening, the two shots and the dead man and the disheveled girl throwing a mink coat on over her nightgown and stumbling out into the mockingly merrymaking streets. Sheila wanted a re-do. She may get only a re-run.
There is obviously a lot in this looping, darkling premise that suggests a proto-installment of The Twilight Zone (1959–64), especially with the Vergil-like narrator (an uncredited John Ireland) guiding the audience through the dreamlike moment of changeover when time shifts around Sheila, resetting even her clothes and hair to the clock of an exact year ago:
"William won't answer. William is gone. He was there, just a moment ago. But in that moment, time stopped for Sheila. Time ran backwards. She made a wish—a tragic one, at a magic time, when the New Year was beginning. And now that wish is coming true. She's going to live the old year all over again. Sheila doesn't know that. Not yet. But she will—very soon."
If you don't expect to see Rod Serling leaning up against the door to John Friday's apartment after a speech like that, smoking his way to the next commercial break, you grew up on different TV than I did. By the final click of the twist into place, I was also startlingly reminded of Fritz Leiber's Change War stories, specifically "Try and Change the Past" (1958) with its inexorable elucidation of the Law of Conservation of Reality. The film plays with such ideas of appointments in Samara, oracles only fulfilled faster by attempts at evasion. Among the poems fatefully published under the auspices of Mrs. Shaw, William includes one titled simply "To Sheila": If you would flee from fate, first learn to flee from your shadow under the full moon. If you would run from destiny, first learn to run through snow leaving no footprint. Just as compellingly, however, the screenplay by Walter Bullock considers the question in psychological as well as speculative terms. Is Sheila incapable of changing the past because some all-overriding "Destiny" will foil her ironically at every turn? Or is it just that she can change her own past actions, but she can't change other people? Though we are properly introduced to him at a tender moment, cleaned up, affectionate, and prepared to toast the new year with "beautiful sparkling ginger ale, vintage 1945," it does not take the audience long to notice there are problems with Barney Page. The original Broadway production of Out of the Blue was a formidable calling card for both its author and its leading lady, but in the years since their power-couple marriage, only Sheila's star has continued to rise. Barney's has rather slumped into a shot glass, and so has their romance. Cute as they are together, their reunited scene is filled with little prickling warnings, like Barney remarking as he breaks their long, breathless clinch, "You really did have me worried, you know. Serves me right, I suppose, for the times I've worried you. There, I beat you to that retort!" The uncorking of the ginger ale is prefaced with a fleetingly bitter reference to himself as "the guy who can't take just one," and on hearing that his wife performed a scene from his first and so far only play at the night's benefit, another blurt of acid slips out when he wonders if the audience remembered the author of Out of the Blue or only its star. The love triangle as it emerges between Sheila, Barney, and Paula is shot through with his double-edged insecurities, creative as well as sexual—the other woman can give his wife something he no longer can, but he can give her something that rightfully belongs to his wife. It's a messy, frustrating part that escalates into full-scale bête noire and Hayward plays it with a kind of vicious fecklessness, like a nastier, more knowing version of his romantic object in Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), destroying himself to get at the wife who expects better of him. It is difficult to imagine any decision of Sheila's ultimately preserving their happiness, even the sacrifice of her own career. Whichever 1946 they lived in, Barney would have needed to choose to change, too.
Interestingly, the film offers her no obvious alternatives or even temptations, the other men in her life being platonically well-established rather than romantic also-rans. Conway could be saturnine in his sleep, but as the producer-director who throws wonderful New Year's parties he's kind, efficient, patient with the quirks and jags of Sheila's re-encounters with the remix of 1946: if it's love, it looks more avuncular than anything. On her birthday, he forges a card from Barney to send her the traditional white roses her husband has neglected in his infatuation with Paula. When she runs to him in distress, it's for advice. Troubled and intuitive, with a trickster's quicksilver still waters, Basehart's William looks better-suited to carrying a torch, but if so, he's going about it in the same fey, deflecting manner as the rest of his life. Quite seriously in 1947, he hears out a shocky confession of murder and then responds, "I wish it had been me that shot Barney. I would have if you'd asked me, Sheila." Then again, at the party that opens 1946 2.0, he's hiding out in the bedroom where guests dump their coats, plucking the petals from a sunflower she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not until he announces as if he's just made a major scientific discovery, "You know, this works much better if you have no one in mind." Despite explicit forewarning, he's easily scooped up by Mrs. Shaw's gushing quotation of one of his more carnal poems; it makes no difference to his role as confidant, the one person who doesn't question the truth of Sheila's time warp even before it lands him in the no-sharps wing again. He is as usual not quite joking when he refers to himself as "much madder than average," but I'd take his true-blue loose screws over Barney's sloppy self-pity any day. He's the first person to see the hope rather than the fatalism in the minor variations even as the shape of their days sweeps on toward the same violent end: "That means that Destiny slipped a little. Maybe we can escape from her while she's picking herself up." Repeat Performance was significantly remixed from its 1942 source novel by William O'Farrell and while I don't at all mind the arc-swap of Barney and Sheila, especially since it gave the twenty-two-year-old Leslie a successfully adult, astringent role after she had litigated her way out of perpetual ingenue-hood at Warner Bros., I regret that it would never have been possible to realize the poet character onscreen as originally written, namely as a genderqueer cross-dresser by the name of "William and Mary." Narratives of liminal knowledge should have a Teiresias and Basehart in his film debut is so beautiful that he could have pulled it off. At least he gets the last word with his odd little smile, double-speaking and sincere: "Happy New Year, Sheila."
Repeat Performance was a production of Eagle-Lion Films, a B-studio responsible for several notable noirs by Anthony Mann, the directing debut of Ida Lupino, and also the American distribution of films by the Rank Organisation; it was a B-movie with an A-heart and it looks great for its economy, even stealing a little location shooting in Santa Monica for the California interlude. Under Alfred L. Werker's direction, scenes can turn on a dime from banal to spine-tingling, ghosted suddenly by Sheila's double vision of the year. The photography by Lew W. O'Connell saves its shadows for when it needs them most, like the concentrated noir of not quite the same New Year Janus-bracketing the picture, but there's always that current of the uncanny to tap into. The soapier and the supernatural elements of the story crash satisfyingly together in the final sequence which finds Barney lurching his way through the paper-streamer, party-blower crowds of New Year's Eve like a vengeful inversion of Sheila's guilt-stricken flight, opening like an abyss the eleventh-hour question of whether murderer and murderee are interchangeable in the eyes of Destiny, so long as murder is committed in the Page apartment at five minutes to midnight. I wish I could point toward a home release for the recent restoration by the Film Noir Foundation which I watched courtesy of a seasonal premiere on TCM's Noir Alley, but like the rest of us in the normal flow of time I will have to wait until one comes into existence. Catch it wherever you can. I love that Richard Basehart had a touch of the otherworld right from the start of his career. It is realistically unfair that a terrible person can snap off a retort as screwball as "Yes, California is wonderful—if you're a grapefruit." This revision brought to you by my reliving backers at Patreon.
New Year's Eve, 1946. The nighttime panorama of Manhattan burns like an incandescent mirror of the stars in which the narrator wonders whether our destinies are truly written or not. For Sheila Page (Joan Leslie), the question is not academic—as the bells ring out across the city for 1947, she's fleeing the apartment where she just fatally shot her alcoholic, abusive husband, desperately wishing the disastrous events of the last year undone. "It's like a play," she grieves, an out-of-town tryout with a bad third act that could have been saved with last-minute rewrites. "That's what I'd like to do with the year I've just lived—rewrite it, play it over again. But I can't. It's too late." Like a dream or a haunting, time seems to give her just that do-over chance, rewinding as she rounds a flight of stairs to the first confetti-twirled moments of 1946, when no one but Sheila knows what the future might hold. Overjoyed as Scrooge on Christmas morning or George Bailey restored to Bedford Falls, she runs home to the arms of a sober, slightly startled, but quite alive Barney (Louis Hayward), swearing to herself to avoid all the mistakes of 1946 Prime. She won't take the lead in Paula Costello's Say Goodbye; it's a surefire smash backed and directed by her old friend John Friday (Tom Conway), but she can't risk introducing her husband to the coolly glamorous, London-based playwright with whom he spiraled into his resentful, destructive affair. If he starts drinking again, she'll take him to California to dry out, get them away from the tight-knit theater world where the quondam next great American dramatist is now routinely greeted as "Sheila Page's husband." She can even spare some foreknowledge for her dear friend William Williams (Richard Basehart), a sensitive poet who should steer clear of Mrs. Shaw (Natalie Schafer), the ravenous serial patron who last time around had him committed to a sanitarium when his unstable genius played badly with her taste for grateful protégés. It all looks so simple, each well-defined jumping-off point with its own decisive antidote, and yet as soon as their New Year's party is underway, the door swings open to reveal a stylish, accidental party crasher (Virginia Field) as yet unfamiliar to the audience, but at whom Sheila stares as if into the gaze of the Gorgon. "I won't believe this year is laid out before me like a pattern and nothing I do can change it," she vows, but how confidently can she say that with Paula Costello already chatting up her husband, dropped straight into their living room as if by some impatient, corner-cutting fate? Now the theatrical title begins to sound as threatening as the nightmare tableau of the film's opening, the two shots and the dead man and the disheveled girl throwing a mink coat on over her nightgown and stumbling out into the mockingly merrymaking streets. Sheila wanted a re-do. She may get only a re-run.
There is obviously a lot in this looping, darkling premise that suggests a proto-installment of The Twilight Zone (1959–64), especially with the Vergil-like narrator (an uncredited John Ireland) guiding the audience through the dreamlike moment of changeover when time shifts around Sheila, resetting even her clothes and hair to the clock of an exact year ago:
"William won't answer. William is gone. He was there, just a moment ago. But in that moment, time stopped for Sheila. Time ran backwards. She made a wish—a tragic one, at a magic time, when the New Year was beginning. And now that wish is coming true. She's going to live the old year all over again. Sheila doesn't know that. Not yet. But she will—very soon."
If you don't expect to see Rod Serling leaning up against the door to John Friday's apartment after a speech like that, smoking his way to the next commercial break, you grew up on different TV than I did. By the final click of the twist into place, I was also startlingly reminded of Fritz Leiber's Change War stories, specifically "Try and Change the Past" (1958) with its inexorable elucidation of the Law of Conservation of Reality. The film plays with such ideas of appointments in Samara, oracles only fulfilled faster by attempts at evasion. Among the poems fatefully published under the auspices of Mrs. Shaw, William includes one titled simply "To Sheila": If you would flee from fate, first learn to flee from your shadow under the full moon. If you would run from destiny, first learn to run through snow leaving no footprint. Just as compellingly, however, the screenplay by Walter Bullock considers the question in psychological as well as speculative terms. Is Sheila incapable of changing the past because some all-overriding "Destiny" will foil her ironically at every turn? Or is it just that she can change her own past actions, but she can't change other people? Though we are properly introduced to him at a tender moment, cleaned up, affectionate, and prepared to toast the new year with "beautiful sparkling ginger ale, vintage 1945," it does not take the audience long to notice there are problems with Barney Page. The original Broadway production of Out of the Blue was a formidable calling card for both its author and its leading lady, but in the years since their power-couple marriage, only Sheila's star has continued to rise. Barney's has rather slumped into a shot glass, and so has their romance. Cute as they are together, their reunited scene is filled with little prickling warnings, like Barney remarking as he breaks their long, breathless clinch, "You really did have me worried, you know. Serves me right, I suppose, for the times I've worried you. There, I beat you to that retort!" The uncorking of the ginger ale is prefaced with a fleetingly bitter reference to himself as "the guy who can't take just one," and on hearing that his wife performed a scene from his first and so far only play at the night's benefit, another blurt of acid slips out when he wonders if the audience remembered the author of Out of the Blue or only its star. The love triangle as it emerges between Sheila, Barney, and Paula is shot through with his double-edged insecurities, creative as well as sexual—the other woman can give his wife something he no longer can, but he can give her something that rightfully belongs to his wife. It's a messy, frustrating part that escalates into full-scale bête noire and Hayward plays it with a kind of vicious fecklessness, like a nastier, more knowing version of his romantic object in Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), destroying himself to get at the wife who expects better of him. It is difficult to imagine any decision of Sheila's ultimately preserving their happiness, even the sacrifice of her own career. Whichever 1946 they lived in, Barney would have needed to choose to change, too.
Interestingly, the film offers her no obvious alternatives or even temptations, the other men in her life being platonically well-established rather than romantic also-rans. Conway could be saturnine in his sleep, but as the producer-director who throws wonderful New Year's parties he's kind, efficient, patient with the quirks and jags of Sheila's re-encounters with the remix of 1946: if it's love, it looks more avuncular than anything. On her birthday, he forges a card from Barney to send her the traditional white roses her husband has neglected in his infatuation with Paula. When she runs to him in distress, it's for advice. Troubled and intuitive, with a trickster's quicksilver still waters, Basehart's William looks better-suited to carrying a torch, but if so, he's going about it in the same fey, deflecting manner as the rest of his life. Quite seriously in 1947, he hears out a shocky confession of murder and then responds, "I wish it had been me that shot Barney. I would have if you'd asked me, Sheila." Then again, at the party that opens 1946 2.0, he's hiding out in the bedroom where guests dump their coats, plucking the petals from a sunflower she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not until he announces as if he's just made a major scientific discovery, "You know, this works much better if you have no one in mind." Despite explicit forewarning, he's easily scooped up by Mrs. Shaw's gushing quotation of one of his more carnal poems; it makes no difference to his role as confidant, the one person who doesn't question the truth of Sheila's time warp even before it lands him in the no-sharps wing again. He is as usual not quite joking when he refers to himself as "much madder than average," but I'd take his true-blue loose screws over Barney's sloppy self-pity any day. He's the first person to see the hope rather than the fatalism in the minor variations even as the shape of their days sweeps on toward the same violent end: "That means that Destiny slipped a little. Maybe we can escape from her while she's picking herself up." Repeat Performance was significantly remixed from its 1942 source novel by William O'Farrell and while I don't at all mind the arc-swap of Barney and Sheila, especially since it gave the twenty-two-year-old Leslie a successfully adult, astringent role after she had litigated her way out of perpetual ingenue-hood at Warner Bros., I regret that it would never have been possible to realize the poet character onscreen as originally written, namely as a genderqueer cross-dresser by the name of "William and Mary." Narratives of liminal knowledge should have a Teiresias and Basehart in his film debut is so beautiful that he could have pulled it off. At least he gets the last word with his odd little smile, double-speaking and sincere: "Happy New Year, Sheila."
Repeat Performance was a production of Eagle-Lion Films, a B-studio responsible for several notable noirs by Anthony Mann, the directing debut of Ida Lupino, and also the American distribution of films by the Rank Organisation; it was a B-movie with an A-heart and it looks great for its economy, even stealing a little location shooting in Santa Monica for the California interlude. Under Alfred L. Werker's direction, scenes can turn on a dime from banal to spine-tingling, ghosted suddenly by Sheila's double vision of the year. The photography by Lew W. O'Connell saves its shadows for when it needs them most, like the concentrated noir of not quite the same New Year Janus-bracketing the picture, but there's always that current of the uncanny to tap into. The soapier and the supernatural elements of the story crash satisfyingly together in the final sequence which finds Barney lurching his way through the paper-streamer, party-blower crowds of New Year's Eve like a vengeful inversion of Sheila's guilt-stricken flight, opening like an abyss the eleventh-hour question of whether murderer and murderee are interchangeable in the eyes of Destiny, so long as murder is committed in the Page apartment at five minutes to midnight. I wish I could point toward a home release for the recent restoration by the Film Noir Foundation which I watched courtesy of a seasonal premiere on TCM's Noir Alley, but like the rest of us in the normal flow of time I will have to wait until one comes into existence. Catch it wherever you can. I love that Richard Basehart had a touch of the otherworld right from the start of his career. It is realistically unfair that a terrible person can snap off a retort as screwball as "Yes, California is wonderful—if you're a grapefruit." This revision brought to you by my reliving backers at Patreon.
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