Repeat Performance

I intimated the other day when I recommended Peggy Sue Got Married that TCM is running a night of movies tonight dealing with going back in time, with Peggy Sue Got Married being one of the movies. But I had already planned to blog today about another of the movies, Repeat Performance, which comes on at midnight.

Joan Leslie plays Sheila Page, a stage actress in New York married to Barney (Louis Hayward), about to celebrate New Year's 1947, this being Dec. 31, 1946. However, before she can do this, she shoots Barney dead! She then escapes their apartment, going to a club where a bunch of her friends from the theater world are. Among them are obnoxious Bess (Benay Venuta) and gay poet William Williams (Richard Basehart).

William is about the only one Sheila has felt she can trust, so she pulls him aside and tells him what happeed. William isn't quite so certain what to do, but he knows just the guy who would, that being John Friday (Tom Conway), the producer of Sheila's latest hit play Say Goodbye. So the two leave all their friends behind at the club and head out to John's apartment.

A funny thing happens on the way to the apartment, however. Just before Sheila is about to knock on the door of John's apartment, she turns around to say something to William, only to find out that he's suddenly disappeared. The strange things continue when John lets Sheila in, complimenting her on the lovely dress she's wearing. Except that when she fled the apartment, she put a fur coat on over her nightgown. And she hasn't worn this particular dress in months. Eventually, Sheila asks John the crazy question of what day it is.

John tells her that naturally, it's New Year's. And then he points out that it's Jan. 1, 1946. But wait! Sheila knows it's really 1947! She begins to get the funny feeling that perhaps for her it's still 1947, with her having all the knowledge of what happened in 1946, while for everybody else it's the start of 1946, with none of the things that happened to them having occurred yet in this new timeline. Sheila knows that she has the chance to start anew, and is especially relieved to go hom to her apartment to find Barney is still very much alive.

Sheila resolves that she and Barney should not go to London, as they did in the previous 1946, because that's where the two of them met Paula Costello (Virginia Field). Paula is the author of Sheila's hit play Say Goodbye, but she and Barney have an affair. To be fair to Paula, however, Barney is a womanizing alcoholic who more or less throws himself at Paula, and the drinking has been a big bone of contention in the Page household.

1946 starts off again with a party in Page's apartment, which is where Sheila meets William. She warns him not to meet with wealthy but eccentric patron Eloise Shaw (Natale Schafer) because Eloise is going to have him committed to a mental institution later in the year. Sheila wants everybody else to avoid their bad fates, too. Unfortunately, William has already met Eloise. And then, who should knock on the Pages' door by accident? Paula Costello, whom Sheila knows and takes an instant dislike to, really confusing everybody else at the party.

That meeting with Paula was definitely not in the original 1946, leaving Sheila to wonder what she can do to keep the previous 1946 from happening all over again, while the more poetic William wonders if fate is something that simply can't be avoided.

Repeat Performance is a really interesting movie with a nice ensemble cast of mostly people who never quite made the A list. As with Peggy Sue Got Married, a movie of this type always has the potential problem of how the timeline is going to be resolved, but in this case, it's actually handled fairly well, with events ending right around the midnight between Dec. 31, 1946 and January 1, 1947), or about the same time the movie begins.

Eddie Muller aired this on TCM at the end of last year as part of Noir Alley, and while I'm not so sure I'd call it a noir -- it's definitely more of a fantasy like It Happened Tomorrow -- I can see why others might put it in with noirs. In any case, it's definitely worth a watch. The bad news is that at the end of the Noir Alley airing, Muller said the movie was going to be getting a new DVD release, but that doesn't seem to have materialized so far. There's a 1996 movie with the same title but a completely different plot which is available on Prime Video; this 1947 Repeat Performance isn't, as far as I can tell. So you're going to have to catch the TCM showing.

Love Song

Some months back I recorded Song of Love when it ran on TCM. It's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post here.

Katharine Hepburn plays Clara Wieck (1819-1896), a pianist and sometime composer who had a long career as a concert pianist. The movie starts off with one of her performances in 1839 (but to be fair to Hepburn, who was about 40 when she made the movie, the movie quickly moves to parts of Wieck's life closer to Hepburn's actual age at the time). Among the people in attendance at the concert are composer Robert Schumann (Paul Henried), who studied music under Clara's father (Leo G. Carroll who only gets the one scene). Indeed, Clara has fallen in love with Robert, 10 years her senior, something which her father really disapproves of.

But Clara, having fallen in love with Robert, marries him against her father's wishes. Cut to ten years later, when Robert and Clara have a whole bunch of kids (I think in real life they had eight in all, although I'm not certain if all of them survived infancy). Clara has become a housewife, managing the home with the help of a housekeeper, while Robert has gone on giving lessons and composing, trying to get an opera written and staged.

Knocking on the door one day is Johannes Brahms (Robert Walker). Now, if you know your music you'll know that Brahms is a fairly famous composer. But back around 1850 he hadn't yet earned the fame he'd have later in life and retains to this day. He had been given a recommendation to see Prof. Schumann. Seeing what a mess the household is in, and not having anywhere else to be, Brahms offers to rent a room, helping with the household management and apparently paying in to keep the place running and the increasingly indebted Schumanns afloat.

As this happens, bad things are happening to Robert. During music performances, we get shots of Clara or Johannes and hear the normal music, cutting to Robert, at which point the soundtrack has a dissonance added. This is the way the filmmakers signified what was some sort of mental illness. Of course, mental illness was not so well understood back in those days, with the condition being called melancholia; the modern-day best guess being bipolar disorder. Whatever the condition, however, it increasingly affected Schumann's life, leading to a suicide attempt and a couple of years in a mental asylum before he died, although this is glossed over in the movie.

Meanwhile, Brahms falls in love with Clara, although she's never going to return the affection. Not because of any dislike of Brahms, but because she could never hurt her husband like that, even though he ultimately realizes that Brahms has difficult feelings of his own to work through. Brahms doesn't want to hurt Robert either, not telling Robert that a publisher has rejected the opera Robert was working on. (In real life, the opera did get performed, but it's not part of the repertoire of commonly-performed operas today.)

Robert Schumann died in 1856 in the mental asylum, and Clara would live another 40 years, giving piano performances and trying to keep the legacy of Robert's music alive, with help from Brahms.

As I understand it, Song of Love gets the broad events of Robert Schumann's life correct, although the movie has a disclaimer at the beginning that it moves events around and dramatizes them for the sake of making a better movie. For example, Brahms did live with the Schumanns, but apparently it was only a couple of months.

Hollywood license aside, Song of Love is a movie that anybody who's a fan of classical music should really enjoy, thanks to all the good music that's pretty well presented, although it would be nice to hear more of Robert's orchestral works. I'm not certain if it will hold as much interest for people who aren't that into classical music, however, as the movie is certainly deeply rooted in the 1940s. But even for those people, Song of Love is definitely worth a watch.