In his introduction to a double bill of "showbiz noir",
Alan K. Rode stated that those in the audience who were
habituers of Noir City would recall that
Repeat Performance (1947) screened at the festival in 2008.
Joan Leslie was the featured guest that year and was given an on-stage tribute, despite the unfortunate fact that a 16mm print was the best that was available to screen at that time. So when Todd Weiner and company at the
UCLA Television and Film Archive asked the
Film Noir Foundation (FNF) to partner in a 35mm restoration, FNF immediately said yes.
Repeat Performance is historically important for a number of reasons. Although
Eddie Muller's notes in the souvenir program guide describe the film as a backstage melodrama crossed with
The Twilight Zone, Rode described
Repeat Performance as the film noir version of
It's A Wonderful Life. "Who else," he posed, "gets the chance to relive the past year after they've killed their husband on New Year's Eve?"
The film was made in 1947 and directed by
Alfred Werker, better-known for
He Walked By Night made the following year. Originally,
Jules Dassin had been hired to direct the film with
Franchot Tone in the lead role but in Hollywood—then as now—all that changed and Werker stepped in to direct and
Louis Hayward was cast as the male lead instead. Hayward was a major star married to Ida Lupino who went off to war in the Pacific, saw quite a lot of combat action, and—as with many people involved in the war—came back a changed man, divorced Lupino, and ended up increasingly in B pictures; though in 1947 he was still a major star.
Interestingly enough, the Assistant Director on
Repeat Performance was
Robert Stillman (who produced
Try and Get Me!). Stillman went on to become
Stanley Kramer's partner on a number of productions into the 1950s.
Repeat Performance also featured
Virginia Field,
Tom Conway (who took a break from playing The Falcon at RKO to play a role that his brother George Sanders might have been better suited for), and
Natalie Schafer (better known for playing the wife of Thurston Howell III on
Gilligan's Island).
But most notably,
Repeat Performance was the feature debut of a quite young and beautiful
Richard Basehart. Basehart had received the New York Drama Critics Award for his performance in the Broadway production of
The Hasty Heart and was brought to Hollywood amidst great fanfare. He didn't end up at MGM, or Warner's, or 20th Century Fox but at Eagle-Lion, a studio that was trying to build itself up as a solid competitor, with
Repeat Performance being one of their key projects in their effort to produce A films. The problem lay in the fact that the major studios at that time also controlled the theaters. Eagle-Lion became involved in the infamous lawsuit that resulted in the studios having to divest themselves of their theaters, thereby breaking that monopoly and ushering in the collapse of the studio system.
Repeat Performance premiered in Richard Basehart's home town Blainville, Ohio. Basehart, of course, went on to star in many other films and television projects, including the memorable narrative voiceover for the 1984 Olympics.
Watching this gorgeous restoration print of
Repeat Performance reminded me that it was one of the first films to focus my attention on the use of
Diego Rivera's Cargador de Flores as set decoration—not only here but again in such noir favorites as
Walk A Crooked Mile (1948) and
The Prowler (1951)—which I wrote up for
The Evening Class for Noir City 6.
