Reeling Backward: "It Happened Tomorrow" (1944)

 

"It Happened Tomorrow" combines several of my favorite things: movies, journalism, romance and the supernatural.

Dick Powell plays Lawrence Stevens, a young newshound who magically starts receiving the next day's newspaper and tries to twist this foreknowledge to his advantage -- especially with regards to wooing his new lady love, Sylvia Smith (Linda Darnell), who ironically stars in a stage show in which she pretends to go into a trance and predict the future.

She's a charming faker, but everyone knows it and enjoys the deception, while he's telling the truth, yet no one believes him.

Fast-paced and filled with rapid-patter dialogue, it's part "Groundhog Day," part "His Girl Friday," a dash of "It Happened One Night" and "It's a Wonderful Life," with a little vaudeville blarney thrown in. It's typical B-movie mid-century cinematic fare, featuring middling stars and production values. 

It's amusing and worth a look, though not a film to linger long in the memory. It's out in a handsome new Blu-ray edition from Cohen Media.

It was directed by René Clair from a screenplay he wrote with Dudley Nichols -- both former newspapermen themselves -- adapted from an unproduced script by Howard Snyder and Hugh Wedlock, which may have been "inspired" by a one-act play by Lord Dunsany from 20 years earlier.

Clair wanted Cary Grant for the lead role and couldn't get him, and the project knocked around Hollywood a bit before finally getting made as a downscale production. At 85 minutes, the movie moves along quickly, almost in a hurry.

As the story opens Larry has just completed his 500th obituary for The Evening News, marking his elevation from newsroom lackey to journalist. After a celebration of hard drinking, he is surprised to see the elderly clerk, Pop Benson (John Philliber), back at the office and is even more startled when the old fellow hands him a copy of tomorrow evening's edition with Larry's byline on the lead story about the opera being held up. 

However, Pop -- who is later revealed to be a ghost or angel a la Clarence from "Wonderful Life," having passed away that first night -- repeatedly warns that even knowing what the future brings will not win Larry the advantages he thinks.

The subtext is hard to miss in the middle of World War II is hard to miss: having all the pleasures and advantages you desire will not guarantee you happiness.

Larry uses the paper to force a raise from his editor (George Cleveland), since he always seems to be where the news is happening, and win the admiration of the more seasoned reporters. Brimming with newfound confidence, Larry pitches woo at Sylvia after catching her act with her uncle, Oscar Smith (Jackie Okie), who goes by the stage name Cigolini and wears some tremendously ostentatious outfits, even when he's not performing.

A framing story is set in 1944 when Larry and Sylvia are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary surrounded by a huge family gathered in their mansion, so we know from the start things turn out well for them. Larry wants to tell the truth about his magic newspapers, though Sylvia is worried their loved ones will think he's a loon.

In 1894, people get around in horse-drawn cabs and telephones are the two-piece kind, often with a crank for electricity. The mores are a little more restrictive too, as in a scene where Sylvia gets drenched in the rain while out with Larry so he loans her one of his old suits to wear. The old biddies at the boarding house where she lives see her sneaking in the window and think a male masher has made his way in for a dalliance. 

Cigolini arrives to protect her honor but, seeing the suit stashed under the bed, thinks Larry has run off without his clothes determines to shoot him the next time they meet.

There's also a fun sequence where Larry finally thinks to place bets on the winning horses at the races the next day, quickly amassing a fortune with which he and Sylvia can live happily ever after. Unfortunately, by this time he has seen the third day's paper announcing his death in a shootout on the front page. So he's actually depressed when each horse wins, seeing it as more evidence of the surety of the newspaper's predictions and another nail in his coffin.

But it turns out to be a case of mistaken identity. The thief who took off with the $60,000 Larry won at the races -- just shy of $2 million in today's dollars -- is the one who gets gunned down, misidentified by having Larry's wallet on his person. So Larry and Sylvia get their happily ever after, after all.

I liked "It Happened Tomorrow" well enough, though it's a bit slapdash and superficial. I would've liked to have seen another version played for pathos, with Larry haunted by the tragedy of always knowing the future, never being able to stop it. But this movie ain't that animal.

Reeling Backward: "No Way Out" (1950)

I first became aware of "No Way Out" because it shares the same title as a largely forgotten 1987 political thriller starring Kevin Costner, Sean Young and Gene Hackman that I am particularly fond of. Then I found out it was the first film appearance by Sidney Poitier, and also starred the great Richard Widmark in one of his inimitable villain roles. I knew I had to see it.

The movie was directed by Golden Age giant Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who also co-wrote it along with Lesser Samuels, and the two men shared an Oscar nomination for their original screenplay. It's a taut potboiler that accomplishes its narrative goals while also being quite brazen in its tackling of racial animosity circa 1950.

The word "nigger" gets bandied almost as much as your average Quentin Tarantino feature, along with a host of other racial epithets like coon, darkie and so on. Poitier, whose screen presence was defined by intelligence and grace, shows prodigious quantities of both as Luther Brooks, a first-year intern at the large county hospital who is on the receiving end of nearly all that vileness. Just 22 when the film was shot, Poitier is boyishly handsome and painfully thin.

On his first night working the prison ward, a pair of brother bandits from Beaver Canal are brought in with serious but non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. The elder, Ray Biddle (Widmark), leers and taunts at Dr. Brooks -- outraged that a black man is putting his hands on his brother. When Johnny Biddle (Dick Paxton) dies during a spinal tap because Brooks suspects he is suffering from a brain tumor, it turns into an all-out war of wills between the two men.

If Poitier is celebrated for his smarts, then perhaps no actor accessed anger as well as Widmark. In the right role -- like Tommy Udo in his screen debut in "Kiss of Death" just three years earlier -- hatred and resentment just emanated from Widmark like waves of a radiation from a nuclear meltdown.

Something about his rawboned face, the way his skull seemed to want to pop right out of his skin, set off by those enormous sapphire eyes, gave him a jackal's ravenous charm. Many of his characters, including Ray Biddle, drip with poisonous strain of humor that's funny only to them. He laughs at you, but the dead glint in his eye lets slip that he's kill you as soon as sneer at you.

Some predictable stuff happens -- Ray breaks out of the hospital prison ward, with the help of his "deef and dumb" other brother, George (Harry Bellaver), who can read lips and acts as a sort of spy for the family, visually eavesdropping on the conversations between the doctors and policemen who guard the prisoners.

Insisting that Brooks is responsible for Johnny's death, Ray whips up a race riot, rounding up his lug friends to stage an attack on the African-American part of town. The black men in the community get the drop on them, though, learning of the preparations and sending an even larger force to beat them to a pulp.

This results in perhaps the film's most singularly powerful moment, in which family members of the injured men crowd inside the hospital as their loved ones are brought inside. One woman can't stand to see Brooks treating her guy, and spits in his face. The stunned doctor simply walks away, fleeing out into the night.

Notable aside: screen icons Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee turn up in supporting roles as Dr. Brooks' brother and his wife. Though they did not get a screen credit, these are far meatier roles than the usual sort of background screen cameos you saw in this era. The husband leaves their shared home to go join the fight, talking about going for a walk. When his wife tries to stop him, his mother quietly admonishes the younger woman to let the man make his own choices.

I was expecting the Davis character to turn up dead or gravely injured -- that's how these kinds of movies normally go -- and was glad to see the film avoid the usual tropes. 

The film wastes some time and energy on Johnny Biddle's ex-wife, Edie (the sloe-eyed Linda Darnell), who gets sucked into the story. Ray refuses the doctors' request to perform an autopsy on his brother, ostensibly because he doesn't want to see him cut open but really because he fears Dr. Brooks was correct in his diagnosis of a brain tumor. So the chief resident, Dr. Wharton (Stephen McNally), and Brooks track her down thinking she's the next of kin.

Edie has escaped Beaver Canal, just barely, living hand-to-mouth in a tiny apartment with a job she hates. She goes to see Ray at the hospital, and here it's suggested they had an affair behind Johnny's back while she was still married to him. Ray, who has a brute's sense of cunning, stokes Edie's nascent racial resentment and convinces her to help him.

Her heart gets turned around, however, by Dr. Wharton's warm-hearted maid, Gladys (Amanda Randolph), who nurses her back to health after a drunken bender. Things wind up with Edie helping Dr. Brooks against Ray -- whose shield of raging machismo comes crashing down when his shot-up leg starts pumping blood all over.

I respected the way the filmmakers give depth and breadth to even the smallest characters, such as Lefty Jones, a black orderly played by Dots Johnson. Lefty has an angry scar down the side of his face, compliments of the likes of Ray Biddle. He and the other orderlies view Dr. Brooks as something of a personal hero, and are angry when he shows restraint at all the racial taunts. Their alignment is underscored by the similarities in the white outfits worn by the orderlies and Brooks' doctor kit.

It's a pretty bold thing for a movie in 1950 to show the righteous anger of the black man -- Lefty and his fellows don't even appear to get arrested for their assault on the Beaver Canal gang. "No Way Out" is one of those good movies that gets better the more you think about it.

Reeling Backward: "It Happened Tomorrow" (1944)

I first heard of "It Happened Tomorrow" when a local blogger and former colleague at The Indianapolis Star, Ruth Holladay, approached me asking for names of newspaper movies for a post she was writing. She already had this 1944 picture starring Dick Powell and Linda Darnell on her list, and I admitted I'd never heard of it before.

Perhaps it's because "Tomorrow" is less a movie about journalism than a fantasy-slash-morality tale. An enterprising young reporter receives the next day's paper a day early, and uses that information to advance his career and love life. It's amusing enough, but I suppose because I was expecting something completely different, it underwhelmed a bit.

The film opens with a clumsy framing device. An old man and woman are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in a grand mansion. Rows of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are lined up to greet them when they begin arguing over a newspaper. Powell and Darnell -- shown only in long shot to disguise an inept attempt to age them up -- talk about an article he wants to publish about his life, and she forbids it to save him embarrassment.

It brings a note of awkwardness to the film's opening and closing, and I don't see what it really adds.

Powell -- who directed last week's classic film subject, "The Enemy Below" -- was at this time a song-and-dance man who had grown tired of being cast in lite musicals and comedies. After "Tomorrow," he refused his next assignment and broke his contract to star in the film noir "Murder, My Sweet."

The setting is turn-of-the-century New York. Powell plays Larry Stevens, a young reporter for The Evening News who's just written his 500th obituary, and has now graduated to full-scale reporter. He and several colleagues are celebrating with some two-fisted drinking in the newsroom after closing out that evening's edition -- a much more common practice in the trade than is generally known

(By the time I broke into newspapering in the 1990s, overt imbibing had disappeared, but a few old-timers were known to keep a bottle somewhere in their desk. And I saw more than one editor put together the next day's section in a red-eyed, bleary state.)

Stevens and the other fellows josh around with Pop Benson (Hoosier actor John Philliber), the ancient curator of the paper's morgue, who tells them that every day's edition contains both the past and the future. Larry offhandedly claims he'd give up 10 years of his life to see the next day's news ahead of time. Pop, who we later learn actually died that night, appears to Larry over the next three days to hand him a copy of the following day's Evening News.

Larry uses the information in the manner of any hungry reporter: To be present wherever the next day's biggest news is going to happen so he can get the front-page scoop. Of course, when Larry gets the paper it already has the story under his byline, so he doesn't even really have to write it, just copy it down.

His first blockbuster is a shoot-out a the opera house between some bandits and the police. Interestingly, Larry makes no attempt to stop any untoward behavior, but simply uses it to make a name for himself.

If you think that's ethically shaky, it's also not unusual in the hyper-competitive world of newspaper reporting, where front-page bylines are the mark of relevance. When I moved from my first job at a tiny newspaper to my second at a middle-sized one, I heard tell of one unscrupulous reporter who brazenly stole from her own colleagues. The editors asked each reporter, before they left for the night, to enter what they planned to work on the next day in a shared file.

This newshound made it a habit to show up early every day, scan the list of proposed articles, and start working on the most promising idea -- whether it infringed on another staffer's beat or not. When the other reporter showed up later that morning or afternoon -- a typical schedule for that ilk -- the editors would invariably say, "Well, she's already deep into it, so we'll let her finish." She had a lot of front-page stories, and few friends.

Any way, Larry becomes enchanted with Sylvia (Darnell), a girl working in a magic act with her uncle Oscar, who goes by the stage name of Cigolini. He pretends to put her in a trance, while she stands out in the audience and makes predictions about the future. Cigolini/Oscar is played by Jack Oakie, who was known for doing a tongue-twisting Italian accent, despite being from Oklahoma by way of Missouri. He used this same skill in his most famous role as Benzino Napaloni, the caricature of Mussolini in Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator."

The Larry/Sylvia romance is one of those swept away deals where they're getting married two days after meeting. By this time Larry has received the last day's early paper, with his death notice on the front page. Morose, his only goal is to marry Sylvia, win a bunch of money at the horse track, and leave her with a comfortable inheritance.

Reticent before to change the future, Larry now does everything in his power to avoid being at the appointed time and place of his demise. Of course, events conspire to bring him there anyway, where he learns the paper had his death wrong. The thief who made off with the $60,000 he won at the track is shot dead by the police, who find Larry's wallet on him. The error is not discovered in time before the first edition of the Evening News goes out with the incorrect identification.

This begs lots of metaphysical ponderables: Was Pop always bringing Larry the first edition? Why not the last, most factually complete one? What kind of slipshod ghost/guardian angel is he?

And why exactly is Pop's ghost passing out newspapers a day early? He says something about not being able to change the future despite knowing it in advance, but it seems to have a major impact on Larry's life. Also, if Larry lost his winnings -- the cash is missing when the wallet is recovered from the thief -- how did he ever become rich enough to afford the mansion we saw?

More a daffy comedy than a true newspaper movie, "It Happened Tomorrow" left me with more questions than answers.

2 stars out of four

(I couldn't find an embeddable clip from the film, but Turner Classic Movies has one here.)