Gordon Hessler's The Woman Who Wouldn't Die (1965) and Alfred Werker's Repeat Performance (1947)

Gordon Hessler's The Woman Who Wouldn't Die reminds one of Alfred Hitchcock's television series, so one is not surprised that Hessler was a producer on that show.  I was a kid when I watched Hitchcock's show but even then I knew how subversive it was, with criminals getting away with their crimes and Hitch coming on at the end to satisfy the censors with the ironic tale of how they were eventually caught.  Hessler does a good job of directing the low-budget The Woman Who Wouldn't Die, with the help of an excellent script by Daniel Mainwaring, who wrote Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), and rich black-and-white cinematography by Arthur Lavis, who photographed Terence Fisher's The Earth Dies Screaming in 1964,  Sinister Gary Merrill kills his wife because he is in love with a younger woman (Jane Merrow), then kills another woman in a burning car crash to cover it up, with the help of disgruntled Neil McCallum, who worked for Merrill's wife.  Any regular viewer of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" knows what's really happening when Merrill's wife (Georgia Cookson) seems to come back from the dead to haunt him, thought Hessler draws it out effectively and elegantly.

While The Woman Who Wouldn't Die looks back to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Repeat Performance, 1947, looks forward to Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," which started in 1959.  Alfred Wexler's film starts out on New Year's Day 1947 when Joan Leslie shoots her alcoholic and abusive husband and as she flees their apartment she finds herself on New Year's Day 1946 and realizes she has the whole year to do everything over.  She tries to change everything, especially to get her alcoholic play-writing husband to stop drinking, stop philandering and finish his play.  She has limited success.  The screenplay, by Walter Bullock from a novel by William O'Farrell,  has one of the most detailed and scary portraits of an alcoholic that I have ever seen, in an industry where drinking is too often portrayed as humorous, and Louis Hayward, as Leslie's husband, plays the role to the hilt. Leslie's friend William Williams, played by Richard Basehart, escapes from a mental hospital (Leslie tries to prevent him from ending up there in her re-lived year) and shoots Hayward when he tries to attack Leslie. As Basehart says at the end, "Destiny's a stubborn old girl.  She doesn't like people interfering with her plans.  But we tricked her, didn't we?  Anyway, I don't think she cares about the pattern so long as the result is the same."  Repeat Performance is one of a number of good films that uses New Year's eve and day for important dramatic purposes, including Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember (1957), Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1966), and John Stahl's Only Yesterday (1933).  As for Alfred Werker, director of Repeat Performance, he was a workmanlike director who is remembered, unfortunately, for replacing Eric Von Stroheim on Hello Sister (1933) and being replaced by Anthony Mann on He Walked by Night (1948).