(1944)
3
Bruce Eder
Rene Clair's It Happened Tomorrow (1944) represents a kind of fantasy film that they not only don't make anymore, but wouldn't conceive of making in this way today. It should, on its face, resemble a cross between a Twilight Zone episode and Somewhere In Time, about a pair of lovers (Dick Powell, Linda Darnell) who are destined to meet but also destined to be parted, all by the strange forces surrounding one of them. Instead, Clair makes this into a charming romantic comedy as much as a fantasy film. rather close in spirit to Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (1943). Indeed, the fantasy elements are used as the basis for some surprisingly affecting romantic displays by the characters, sacrificing some haunting mystery elements in favor of a much more beguilingly sentimental story. Period films were considered poison in the early 1940's, and Clair covered his bases there by framing his story around the 50th anniversary of the couple -- which places the film in 1944, the year in which it was released. Clair thus gave It Happened Tomorrow an immediacy in its own time that the movie would have lacked, had it taken place entirely in the 1890's. More important, he focuses on the human elements and the foibles of the lead characters, which carry the tale into the realm of comedy. He also takes full advantage of the range of his performers to achieve this end. Dick Powell displays a brash but tough side, lighter than the rough image he first assumed in 1944 with Murder My Sweet, but heavier and more substantial than the light leading man persona in which he specialized in the 1930's -- he's convincing as an ambitious young reporter, but equally believable at the end, as he tries to take advantage of the forces at work around him, which seemingly have doomed him, trying to secure a future for his beloved, and later fiercely fighting with a thug on a New York street, knowing that he can't die until he gets to the hotel where tomorrow's newspaper says he will die. And Linda Darnell is not only the most delectable looking brunette actress of her era (it's easy to see the allure of her character's phony mystic act, as she looks irresistable in one of her "trances"); in Clair's hands, she also displays a beguilingly innocent, wholesome, lighthearted allure, rather akin to her 20th Century-Fox stablemate Betty Grable -- the scene in which she and Powell meet and change clothes in his room is one of the most charmingly, innocently sexy pieces of film of her whole career. The rest of the cast evokes the gilded age of the 1890's in all of its rough-hewn charm, with Edgar Kennedy especially funny as a blustery police inspector and Jack Oakie, in one of his most robust performances, as well-meaning man caught between his genuine desire to protect his niece and his greed. The film represents an extraordinary balancing act between comedy and drama, romance and fantasy, briskly paced in all of the right places and reflective and myaterious where it needs to be.
releases for It Happened Tomorrow on AllMovie
It Happened Tomorrow (1944)
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It Happened Tomorrow
Kino
More
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July 22, 2003 |
