Suppose you knew what was going to happen tomorrow? Would it be a curse or a blessing?
The charming exercise in the ironic consequences of knowledge in It Happened Tomorrow (1944) may remind many viewers of the more impish episodes of The Twilight Zone or the more recent television series, Early Edition, burnished to a high Hollywood gloss thanks to the taste of the filmmakers, director Clair and his producer, Arnold Pressburger. The film's sense of fun and just a suggestion of life's deeper mystery flavors the nimble, beautifully made fairy tale photographed in creamy black and white by Eugen Schüfftan (Le quai des brumes, Eyes Without a Face) and Archie Stout (Beau Geste, Fort Apache), with maximum use of a sense of space teeming with life, as seen below in a scene set in a Victorian variety hall.
While action occurs in the foreground, there is invariably more occurring deep within the frame of this movie--sometimes it is the significance of snow falling in May, or a box office being robbed while new lovers are enraptured by Nellie Melba and one another, or a performing ham milks his audience for applause. This film is a pleasant way to spend a brisk 85 minutes, with the zest and brevity seldom seen anymore, though the technical mastery of the film and the metaphysical elements of the story make it a rich experience when viewed more than once.
Dick Powell plays the role of the brash and ambitious young reporter who is seen celebrating his promotion from obituary writing to straight reporting in the film's opening scenes, gathered with his reporter friends in the dank offices of their newspaper, drinking beer and crowing with high spirits. When Powell's character, Larry Stevens, stretches out on one of the tables in the publication's morgue, resting on a page of an old newspape bound into a book, he is gently chided by Pop Benson (John Philliber) for his lack of insight into the significance of what Larry and his friend's dismiss as "ancient news" for laying right in the middle of 1843. "Time," Pop explains, is only an illusion." Bemused and intrigued by the old man's philosophical ramblings, Larry asks for tomorrow's newspaper, to enable him to see the front page for his first story. Warning that such knowledge of the future is no good and that knowing the future twenty years before your death might "poison every day."
This role may have appealed to Powell (after it was turned down by Cary Grant) in part because it allowed him to avoid singing, which had been his bread and butter in movies up till the 1940s, when the canny actor made a conscious change in his career path. According to his wife at the time, Joan Blondell, the actor hated singing in public and once he broke through into dramatic roles, he never even sang around the house. After a decade scampering through some good and some terrible musicals at Warner Brothers, the aging juvenile, (who reportedly loathed musical performing) was astute enough to realize that if his career were to endure, he must change his image. The dramatic arc of Powell's career transition from a singing fool in so many entertaining Busby Berkeley musicals into his mature noirish roles in films such as Murder, My Sweet (1944) and later to one of the most successful producers in the new medium of television have overshadowed his ability as a comic actor. As he proved in the nearly unknown early Preston Sturges' film, Christmas in July (1940) and George Marshall's True to Life (1943), Powell sometimes demonstrated a gift for comic timing, a nice way with a cynical turn of phrase and he could occasionally suggest a man with a normal sex drive (despite the Production Code).
The latter quality is understandably quite palpable when Powell appears in several provocative yet frolicsome scenes opposite the dark, opulent beauty emerging in Linda Darnell, who was also making a transition in her on-screen persona. From his first glimpse of the character played by Darnell, who is glimpsed as an unbelievably dreamlike figure on a poster, the actor expresses skepticism, mentioning that "they never look like their poster." When first seen, however, the reporter immediately begins to toy with the girl, who is supposed to be in a trance as part of the magic act performed by her uncle (the irrepressible Jack Oakie) as shown in this clip:
Their rapport grows throughout the film from simply flirtatious to beleaguered lovers besotted with one another, despite the buffeting they are receiving from fate. Initially cast in movies as a personification of sacred love (see The Mark of Zorro, Chad Hanna, Brigham Young, Blood and Sand and an unbilled appearance as The Virgin Mary in Song of Bernadette for examples of these roles), Darnell was proving herself fully capable of more nuanced characterizations blending comic and sultry sides of her nature in the mature and complex characterizations she created in Summer Storm, Fallen Angel, My Darling Clementine, A Letter to Three Wives and No Way Out during the remainder of the decade. It Happened Tomorrow, made away from her home studio of 20th Century Fox at United Artists, may have been a turning point for the then twenty year old actress. Often complimented by the critics for her beauty but rarely for her acting, and on the outs with the powerful due to her hasty marriage to the much older cinematographer, Pev Marley, the part in It Happened Tomorrow allows her both sumptuously appealing in the turn of the century costumes and nimbly aware of her own allure. This is especially clear when circumstances lead to Powell and Darnell spending the night together (fairly innocently, though the film is sophisticated enough to and a provocatively amusing scene when she dresses in men's clothing, with a helpful assist from Powell in assembling her masculine ensemble, as seen below.
When his knowledge of the future repeatedly gets him into hot water (the police, personified by Edgar Kennedy, want to know how he knew about a certain robbery), Powell's reporter tries to make contact with Pop Benson at the paper, only to learn that the old man had died on the night when they first discussed the fluidity of time in the newspaper morgue.
Darnell plays a seraphically beautiful and playful seer in her uncle Oscar's act, (Oscar is Jack Oakie, who's a delightful fraud as Cigolini), which seems to take place in an upscale beer hall-vaudeville house. The setting in the Gay '90s is wonderfully evoked by the chiaroscuro of the cinematography of Eugen Schüfftan and Archie Stout, the gloriously detailed costumes, the beautifully crafted sets and the characters who show up, (which include Edgar Kennedy as a cop, Sig Ruman as a bigtime producer, Edward Brophy as a racetrack tout, and George Bancroft as a fellow reporter).
The best feature of this movie may be Linda Darnell, (seen here as she appeared in another 1890s period film, Hangover Square), who was perhaps at the height of her breathtaking beauty. She appears as the personification of the lines "she walks in beauty, like the night" in her costume from the vaudeville act, which seemed to be a dark, gossamer cloud highlighted by those diamante stars that the late Victorian women loved to use to decorate their hair. Yet, in a nice twist, she is not simply a mannequin, but a humorous participant in many of the proceedings, especially in the scene in which she is forced to don Powell's clothes to return home. The love scene between Powell and Darnell in his apartment probably gave the Production Code office conniptions, but it was sensual and lovely, as well as sprightly and humorous. This movie was like a nice champagne cocktail. Perhaps not the most nourishing beverage, but refreshing.
Another excellent reason for seeing this film is the presence of Jack Oakie. The actor, born Lewis Delaney Offield in Sedalia, Missouri in 1903, grew up in Oklahoma, which led to his adoption of the term for his last name for theatrical purposes, with the "Jack" drawn from the name of the first character he played on stage. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Oakie's family was not deeply rooted in the the theater. His father's vague presence in the actor's life was made up for by his distinguished mother's mark in academia. Oakie's mother, Mary Evelyn Offield, was an educator who established several schools and was a pioneering teacher in the field of psychology at Columbia University in New York. Who knew he was going to make a career of playing playing card sharps, racetrack touts, band managers and superannuated college boys?
I hope that you'll comment on this film if you've seen it.
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*More about John Philliber, man of mystery (and a good actor) here:
http://moirasthread.blogspot.com/2017/11/john-philliber-late-bloomer-man-of.html
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