Good sign for the new year

Every New Year's Eve, I am faced with the same compelling, seemingly unanswerable question -- "what was the name of that bizarre New Year's Eve movie with the girl who got to live the year over again and the poet who was obsessed with having his poetry published in a book with morocco endpapers?" This question has haunted me since I saw the movie, more than 20 years ago. It doesn't help that my wife now has no memory of this and suspects I'm crazy. And through the years I have done various searches to try to figure this out, but without knowing the year it was made, the actors in it or even a snippet of plot, I've been driven crazy without much to go on.

And every year on New Year's Eve we try to think of New Year's Eve movies other than "The Apartment," and every year I end up stymied in figuring out what this movie was. But today I thought to Google "time travel in movies," and found a very comprehensive site (because the Internet is truly The Promised Land for anal retentives) of time travel movies and tv shows. Big and lots to browse through, but by focusing on a likely decade of release, I finally found it: Repeat Performance, 1947, starring Joan Leslie, Louis Hayward, and with Richard Basehart in his first movie role as the poet who wants a sugar mama to publish his imperishable words in a bound volume with morocco endpapers. Tragically, not available on DVD or VHS.

Always nice to start off a new year with a success, anyway. Snow on the way -- and here are the girls, eating the last snow of 2007: