Repeat Performance

This one is a real sleeper from Eagle-Lion. If you get a chance to see this on TCM or on Amazon please see Repeat Performance by all means. It's a melodramatic fantasy about a Broadway actress who is given a chance to live the last year of her life all over to see if she can avoid the terrible way she ended the year.

What Joan Leslie did is no less than shoot her husband, playwright Louis Hayward on New Year's Eve. But while running to tell her friend and producer Tom Conway of the tragedy when she opens the door she realizes quickly enough that it is last New Year's Eve, but she knows how the year is to end. Or does she? Can she avoid the oncoming tragedy of her killing her spouse?

Louis Hayward is someone whose work is worthy of a second look that he's not likely to get. He freelanced and didn't have the benefit of a major studio building him up as they did for Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn for example. But Hayward got to play a variety of parts that their studios would never let Power or Flynn play. Hayward did the swashbucklers as well as Power or Flynn, but did considerably more. He's wonderful as the dissolute husband of Leslie.

Richard Basehart made his screen debut here as the friend and confidante of Joan Leslie. Had this been made today Basehart's character would be most definitely gay. He's a poet and he acquires a patroness in rich Natalie Schaefer.

It certainly isn't Schaefer's fault, how could she know that she would wind up playing THE millionaire wife 20 years later taking a cruise on the SS Minow. But seeing her I wonder if this was how she was spending Thurston Howell's money. She's different here than the rich patroness of the castaways.

Virginia Field plays another playwright who starts paying attention to Louis Hayward and puts the Hayward/Leslie marriage on the rocks. This role is the typical Gail Patrick/Helen Vinson part of the other woman and Field plays it with gusto.

Repeat Performance is a great sleeper of a film and absolutely catch this one if broadcast.