The Rising Shadow

Les Podewell

Very deep inside the Harold Ramis movie Groundhog Day, an old idea is given somewhat chilling validation: the day of your death is inscribed in every cell in your body, in your tissues, and there is no way to escape it. You may see it coming, and be granted a little time to put your house in order. But when the time comes, your time, the show is over. 

Some argue that we should live every day as if it were our last day. But aside from being a little silly, it would also be acutely difficult. If you knew you were going to die on a certain day, you would naturally make preparations, like updating your will or settling debts or even gathering your loved ones around you. In other words, if there were literally no tomorrows to anticipate, your sense of purpose would be focussed on nothing but getting you to the end. Enzo Ferrari once said the ideal formula one race car would fall apart the moment it crossed the finish line. It's purpose only as finite as the checkered flag, it should disintegrate when the race was over. Or, as Saul Bloom (Carl Reiner) put it in Oceans Twelve : "I want the last check I write to bounce!" 

In the movie Groundhog Day, after a certain number of reiterations (and we never know how many there have been), Phil Conners comes to something like this same realization - that it ultimately doesn't matter whether he plays by the rules or doesn't, whether he finishes the day in his bed or behind bars or even on a slab in the morgue. The clock will be rewound and he will wake at 6 o'clock in the morning - the same morning - fully intact. So Phil never has to worry about saving his own skin, since there are no consequences for him. 

But among the many citizens of Punxsutawney whom Phil encounters in his daily repetitions is a beggar identified in the credits simply as "Old Man" and played by a veteran American actor named Les Podewell. He appears in six scenes in the film - the first five standing in the same place, a street corner, at the precise moment, or thereabouts, when Phil passes by on his way to Gobbler's Knob. The beggar does the same thing every time - he holds out his right hand for whatever change Phil can spare. On the first encounter, Phil pats himself down as if looking for his wallet. The beggar looks hopeful, but Phil walks right on by. The second encounter, when Phil is slowly coming around to the fact that something strange is happening to him, and he pats himself down for a second time, revealing that it's his standard routine when confronted by a panhandler, you can see the déjà vu on his face when he looks at the beggar. On the third encounter, when Phil is alarmed at the seeming nightmare he's in, he jumps in fear when he sees the beggar standing in the same spot on the corner. On the fourth day, Phil sarcastically tells him, "Catch you tomorrow, Pop," sure in his belief that there is no tomorrow and he can use the same line with impunity the next time. 

Forty minutes of the movie elapses before Phil meets the old man again, but by then, after spending innumerable Groundhog Days trying to get Rita into bed, all in vain, Phil is a different man. He looks at the beggar, reaches into his pocket, takes out a wad of cash and, after beginning to count it, places all of it in the beggar's hand and walks away. The old man looks in amazement at the money in his hand. Later that night, walking past an alley, Phil sees the old man struggling along a brick wall. He goes to him and says, "Hello father. Let's get you someplace warm." The old man smiles at him and Phil says, "Remember me?" 

Cut to Phil standing in a hospital waiting room. A nurse approaches him. "Are you the one who brought the old man in?" "How is he?" Phil asks. "Well, he just passed away," the nurse tells him. "What did he die of?" "He was just old. It was just his time." Phil asks to see his chart, enters the room where the old man expired and throws back the curtain. The nurse tells him, "Sometimes people just die." "Not today," Phil tells her. 

In the following scene, on the following Groundhog Day, Phil and the old man are sitting in a diner. When the old man finishes a bowl of chicken soup, Phil pushes another in front of him. "Gets hard down there on the bottom," Phil tells him. The old man smiles at him and even more food arrives. Late in his life Les Podewell was afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis, and we see his gnarled fingers, making his hands into claws. (see photo)(1) 

The following shot takes place in an alley. The old man is lying on the ground and Phil is trying desperately to revive him. "Come on, Pops, breathe!" he pleads. Phil breathes into his mouth but the air escapes as steam in the cold night air. Phil looks up at the sky in a mute appeal. As Phil learns, the old man always dies, no matter what he does to save him. But he can't save him. This scene is the real catalyst in the movie, the moment when Phil realizes what's happening to him and what he needs to do to turn it - his life - around. It's his encounter with death - implacable, inescapable, and final. This idea isn't a new one. Simply put, your death in inscribed in every cell of your body, like an expiration date, and there is nothing you - or anyone else - can do to change it, delay it, or postpone it. Witnessing the old beggar's death affects Phil deeply, and it's the catalyst for all his subsequent actions. The wonder of the film is that, no matter what he does, whether he's a good man or a bad man, Phil has to keep doing it over and over until he gets it exactly right. He is given no indication that being a loving human being will release him from the curse - if it is a curse. But he does it anyway. 

A cottage industry has grown up around Groundhog Day trying to estimate the number of days that Phil had to repeat. Harold Ramis, who co-wrote and directed the movie, estimated that Phil had to endure 10 years of repeated Groundhog Days in order to master the piano, ice sculpting, and become a loving human being. 

Ramis shows us the old man's dying in the alley only once, but there were others. There is a "deleted scene" from Groundhog Day that is available on YouTube. Because of time limits, and in the interests of the narrative flow, but mostly because he was making a comedy, Harold Ramis decided to cut the scene. But after Phil watches the old man die in the alley, does he just leave him there? In the deleted scene, Phil puts a blanket over the body, looks at his face for one long moment, and then he walks away - just before an ambulance enters the alley. Two EMTs get out and go over to the old man. One of them recognizes him as "Old Jesse." While one of them examines the body, the other finds a note in his pocket and reads it aloud: 

Every night by cold bricks' glow 

I watch the shadow rising 

from this old man in the snow 

At 8:02 he let it go. 

The other EMT pronounces Old Jesse dead. 

Phil was with the old man in his last moments - because he had no one else - for an undetermined number of nights, providing Old Jesse with companionship and comfort until the very end. It's an extraordinary act of compassion from a once selfish and cynical weatherman on his day by day road to redemption. 

(1) At his funeral service in Chicago in 1998, Podewell was eulogized by Studs Terkel.