Groundhog Day, while clearly the most famous of the “living the same day over and over and over again” genre, wasn’t the first. Does anybody know what the first one was?
I’m talking about multiple do-overs, as opposed to “Scrooge woke up and it was still Christmas morning and now he could do it right.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
What comes to mind is Replay by Ken Grimwood. But it might not be first, certainly is not a movie, and it’s several years instead of a day.
Nietzche and the “Eternal Recurrence”???
According to the Wikipedia article “List of films featuring time loops”, it is “Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer”, a Japanese anime film released in 1984, about the students of Tomobiki high school reliving the day before the school festival over and over again.
This one https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/DeadOfNight
“Dead of Night” was made in 1945.
What about Sisyphus or the Danaids?
There’s “The Tunnel Under the World“, a 1955 short story by Frederik Pohl, where the protagonist keeps waking on June 15th and finds odd things going on with bits of his house being rebuilt and everyone subjected to aggressive advertising… turns out [SPOILERS] his town was destroyed in a chemical explosion and the place rebuilt in miniature with the population encoded in mini-robots as a testbed for marketing campaigns.
Does Run Lola Run count?
Monty Python did a sketch, “Psychology Today” where the topic was “deja vu.” But that’s TV.
How about “Edge of Tomorrow” with that little Brit chick and Tom Cr— oh wait.
But Tom Cruise did fight giant time-traveling groundhogs in that one, right?
I remember seeing bits & pieces of something w/a Barrymore and a comedian where she has a head injury and he marries her, I think, and every day is a new day for her. Logically, that makes no sense at all, but hey, it’s a movie.
A recent (and excellent!) series with something of that element, is Russian Doll, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7520794/reference
@ Andréa – The movie you are referring to is “50 First Dates” (with Adam Sandler). The reviews were mixed, but despite a few plot holes, and an unlikely medical condition, I thought it was pretty good.
Another (print) example is Brian Aldiss’ 1955 short story “Not For an Age”:
“Aliens in the far future have developed the technology to momentarily resurrect scenes from the past. As a result, Rodney Furnell replays the same day in his life in the 20th century over and over again. Although he cannot change what he did and is forced to recreate his actions over and over again, Rodney is dimly aware of the endless repetition, and cognizant of the speech of the gawking alien spectators. Little do the aliens know that Rodney is aware of their presence and the horrors of the purgatory they have imposed on him. Little does Rodney know that he has become little more than a tourist attraction.”
see also
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GroundhogDayLoop
You know, I keep reading how bad and how pathetic Adam Sandler is, but I saw one movie of his about a wedding singer, and I thought he (and Billy Squier, who was mentioned in the ‘what concerts did you go to’ thread) were good. That’s the extent of my knowledge of Sandler, tho.
Hmm, must have done something wrong with the URL for my comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tunnel_under_the_World
For the direct link to Pohl’s story.
Sort of relevant, if only ’cause of the “B” movie reference . . .
Philm, Lola was about alternate realities (like its American cousin Sliding Doors), wasn’t it? Lola didn’t repeat the day, we just watched several ways the day could have played out.
My favorite how-do-I-avoid-repeating-this reference, next to Groundhog Day (1993), is the Star Trek, The Next Generation episode, “Cause and Effect” (1992), which starts with the Enterprise having a completely disastrous head-on collision with another ship that has suddenly emerged out of nowhere. That scene is immediately followed by what seems to the viewer to be a flashback. However…
Unlike Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, the Enterprise crew is not immediately aware of the continuing repetition.
Andréa: What I usually hear is that Adam Sandler is actually a quite good actor (and I agree with that), but that he most often plays bufoonish characters in movies focused on puerile humor (and I agree with that as well). Good actor, but I wouldn’t enjoy most of his movies.
Well, that makes me feel better about actually enjoying one of his movies (enough to watch it twice), and makes a good explanation, too.
The problem Sandler has is that his serious movies tend to do relatively poorly at the box office. Even the one above he apparently (according to Wikipedia) rewrote it to make it less serious and with more typical Sandler humor.
There is a condition with some people affected in similar ways to Barrymore’s character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterograde_amnesia
That condition is presented in interesting ways in the movie Memento, and in the series of Latro novels by late great Gene Wolfe.
The Sandler movie I thought was quite good was Punch Drunk Love. Before PTA got overripe.
Far from the first, but so are most of the others mentioned here, a favorite of mine is a made-for-TV movie from the ’90s entitled 12:01.
One of two buddies who are total losers and a tiny cog in the personnel department of a science-based corporation is the only one knocked just out of the timeline enough to remember the day repeating. After suffering a long series of frustrations and getting in a few hilarious jabs at the frustrations of that day, he ultimately stops the crooked boss scientist from firing up the “superaccelerator” responsible and both saves the life and wins the love of his crush, a brilliant and beautiful young scientist played by Helen Slater.
Fun movie.
According to “The Matrix”, when you notice that you’re going through the same loop again, it’s just a glitch in the software of the matrix.
This is not the one that Bill was looking for, but in Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse 5“, the main character (Billy Pilgrim) blinks back and forth through the entire timeline of his life, reliving scenes at random (and taking the reader along for the ride). Billy has no control over the sequence, and cannot “change” what happens during the repeats.
Luckily, when CIDU Bill repeats a post, we do not have to live through the exact same comments. This makes me wonder: Other than the (intentional) Veterans’ Day reposts, has there ever been a comic that came back a third time for a CIDU “three-peat”?
P.S. The thing that bothers me about Adam Sandler is not his acting, nor the quality of the movies in which he has appeared, but his heavy, repetitive, and schmaltzy hand as a scriptwriter and producer. It’s perfectly OK for a single occurrence, but it gets tiresome after a while. The “Sandler” effect was particularly odious in “Hotel Transylvania 2“.
P.P.S. Another “one trick pony” (in terms of acting style) is Hugh Grant. I liked him in “The Englishman who Went up a Hill but Came down a Mountain“, but every time I’ve ever seen him since then, he seems to be playing exactly the same character.
P.P.P.S. I know that Michael Caine has appeared in some good movies, but he has appeared in so many stinkers that I would hardly treat his name as any kind of an indicator of quality (more like the opposite thereof).
Hugh Grant can be rather different from his Four Weddings and a Funeral persona in some films… in An Awfully Big Adventure he was somewhat unsympathetic… the imdb synopsis says his character “reveals himself to be a cruel, apathetic man who treats Stella and everyone else around him with scorn and condescension and has a long history of exploiting young men.”
He was also going a bit with and against his typecasting when playing the debonair but devious Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p065sk93 ). Thorpe was a British Liberal party political leader who evidently tried to get his lover Normal Scott killed, though the gunman succeeded only in shooting Scott’s dog.
” . . . though the gunman succeeded only in shooting Scott’s dog.”
Thanks for that warning – I could NEVER watch this.
One of the funniest Adam Sandler moments came when he hosted SNL last spring, and they did a sendup of the Perillo tours commercials. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=244&v=TbwlC2B-BIg
I saw Gilda Radner, from 1979, but no Adam Sandler.
I saw the “Romano Tours” clip.
However, zbicyclist should have removed the time stamp as that put it at the end of the clip.
I saw this online once – never realized it was Adam Sandler (which must mean he really IS a good actor).
And of all the things I’ve seen online exploring the time loop trope, none I’ve seen yet have mentioned the fun episode of “Xena: Warrior Princess” that took it to the playground in wonderfully campy fashion.
We have been going through a sort of Groundhog day problem since the start of last October. Whatever we do we seem to have to do it over and over again. I have been trying to get a copy of the changes to our reenactment unit’s insurance since mid May – still not resolved. I have been trying for over a month to get a printout of our payments for our medical insurance so we can apply for a senior real estate tax exemption. Took a month of calling weekly or more often towards the end to get the paperwork for a meeting room for my embroidery group – and then I was told that I was applied too late (yeah I still managed to get the room). And so on. I am hoping that this year at the Jewish high holy days we get written into the book of life for the year for a better year so that last year does not repeat.