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About This Film
Broadway actress Sheila Page shoots her unfaithful husband just before midnight on New Year’s Eve and wishes she could live the year over. When the clock turns, she finds herself exactly one year earlier with a chance to prevent the choices that led to murder. Alfred L. Werker’s strange hybrid of noir, melodrama, supernatural fantasy, and time-loop story makes New Year literal: the cultural fantasy of starting over becomes an impossible second chance. Sheila can alter behavior but discovers that other people remain themselves, making fate a social problem rather than a puzzle with a clean solution.
Famous Quote
“Destiny's a stubborn old girl. She doesn't like people interfering with her plans.”— William Williams
Vibe
New Year —
Watch For
- Watch how the film uses familiar noir fatalism inside a supernatural second-chance premise.
- Track what Sheila changes versus what stubbornly repeats.
- Notice New Year clocks and parties as thresholds between two versions of the same year.
- Pay attention to Joan Leslie’s performance as optimism gradually gives way to recognition that control is limited.
Production Notes
TCM describes the premise as beginning just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, when Sheila murders her husband and is transported back one year. UCLA records the 91-minute feature and its preservation funded by the Packard Humanities Institute and Film Noir Foundation. The restoration history is part of the film’s modern identity: Repeat Performance became a major recovery project after decades of obscurity and fragile surviving materials. The Film Noir Foundation later premiered a restored 35mm print at NOIR CITY.
Trivia
- Joan Leslie plays Sheila Page.
- The film begins on New Year’s Eve with a murder just before midnight.
- The story sends Sheila back exactly one year to relive events.
- UCLA and the Film Noir Foundation restored the film.
- Richard Basehart appears in one of his earliest screen roles.
Legacy
Repeat Performance is now valued as an unusual genre hybrid and a fascinating precursor to later time-loop narratives. Its restoration substantially changed its historical visibility, transforming a nearly inaccessible title into a film that can be discussed alongside both noir and fantasy classics. New Year’s Eve is the perfect mechanism for its conceit: the wish to start over becomes literal, while noir fatalism questions whether a new calendar can actually change character or destiny. That gives the film a distinct place beside Groundhog Day and The Phantom Carriage in the collection’s repetition-and-renewal lineage.