Beyond Tomorrow (Academy Productions, RKO, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the 1938 A Christmas Carol Turner Classic Movies showed a truly bizarre genre-bending film from RKO in 1940 called Beyond Tomorrow. It was a combination ghost story, romantic melodrama and innocent young man spoiled by success film, produced by – of all people – cinematographer Lee Garmes. This came about when the radio executives in charge of RKO hired George Schaefer to run the studio, and he decided the future of his chronically economically weak company lay in making co-production deals with independent studios and filmmakers and having them develop their own projects for RKO release. It was an idea about a decade ahead of its time – it would become how most American films got made after the dual blows of television and the U.S. vs. Paramount consent decree that forbade movie studios from owning theatre chains put an end to the studio system – and for Schaefer it had variable results. He cut a distribution deal with Sam Goldwyn that gave RKO a steady stream of mostly well produced movies that made major profits for both Goldwyn and RKO. Schaefer also signed Orson Welles and his Mercury theatre company and got two films, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, that were artistic triumphs and commercial flops. Some of Schaefer’s deals never got anything on the screen – including his contract with documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz, who wrote a script called Name, Age and Occupation that was never actually shot. The film opens in a large house inhabited by three relatively old men who are business partners – it’s not clear what business they’re in except it involves reinforced concrete and other building materials – who spend a lot of time gabbling and sniping at each other verbally. The three men are Michael O’Brien (Charles Winninger), Allan Chadwick (C. Aubrey Smith), and resident cynic George Melton (Harry Carey, playing his part edgily enough I couldn’t help thinking of Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur and how much Hitch had wanted Carey to play the part of the principal villain). One night they decide to test the honesty of the people passing by outside their home by grabbing a whole bunch of identical black wallets, putting a $10 bill and one of their business cards inside each, and seeing who – if anyone – actually brings the wallet back to them with the money inside instead of just keeping it for themselves.

The people actually honest enough to return the wallet are James Houston (Richard Carlson), son of a Texas rancher; and Jean Lawrence (Jean Parker), who works as a nurse at a clinic for poor children. The two young people are attracted to each other and go on a series of dates, including one in New York’s Central Park (is it really much of a surprise that the film takes place in New York?) in which James persuades a mounted police officer to get off his horse and let James ride it himself. The policeman is worried his sergeant will catch him having violated regulations by lending his horse to a civilian, but when the sergeant shows up all he says is, “Merry Christmas.” Also, a local radio station picks up on the couple as a potential human-interest news story, and James turns out to have a great Irish-tenor voice and seems headed for a career as a radio star. James and Jean become engaged and James is asking around whether it’s considered acceptable for him to have three best men at the ceremony, when all of a sudden the film takes a supernatural turn. O’Brien, Chadwick and Melton need to take a small plane to Philadelphia for some sort of business conference, despite storms so severe that their maidservant Madame Tanya (Maria Ouspenskaya) advises them to take the train instead. The plane they’re in crashes and they all die and come back as double-exposed ghosts. Meanwhile, James falls in the clutches of a femme fatale, established radio singer Arlene Terry (Helen Vinson, who regularly got cast in these sorts of “other woman” roles), who’s determined to seduce him away from Jean. To do that, Arlene gets James a job in her upcoming Broadway show and invites him to her private home at Lake Placid to “rehearse.” Only Arlene has a romantic complication of her own: she’s being stalked by her ex, Jace Taylor (James Bush), a former star who fell over alcoholism fueled by his jealousy over Arlene’s extra-relational activities. The three ghosts watch all this happening but, because they can’t be seen or heard by mortals, are powerless to steer James away from the evil woman and back to the one who really loves him. Ultimately, Jace confronts both James and Arlene in a restaurant and shoots both of them, leaving Arlene dead permanently because she has no soul and therefore is beyond supernatural redemption.

James is a different matter; a series of glowing streams of light appears to O’Brien’s ghost, as it had earlier when it signaled God was ready to end his ghost-hood and welcome him into heaven, but O’Brien had said he wasn’t ready for permanent death because he wanted to pull James away from the big mistake he was making with Arlene and steer him back to Jean. This time around O’Brien pleads with the unseen divine being to give James another chance at life, and James has a literally miraculous recovery on the hospital bed that his doctors can’t explain. In the end he and Jean get back together and our three ghosts ex machina can go ahead and die for real. Beyond Tomorrow is at least as much of a genre-bender as anything Preston Sturges ever made – romantic melodrama meets screwball comedy meets ghost story meets fantasy meets (at least in the person of Maria Ouspenskaya, who’s best known for playing Bela Lugosi’s mother in The Wolf-Man a year later) horror film – and it had a wildly assorted roster of behind-the-camera talents as well. The director was A. Edward Sutherland, who was best known for comedies but also made Murders in the Zoo (1933), one of the most brutal and graphic horror movies of Hollywood’s classic era. The writer was Adele Commandini (though here her last name is shorn of its second “m”), who’s also listed as associate producer. She was best known for her scripts for Deanna Durbin, including her first feature, Three Smart Girls (1936), and establishing the formula by which Durbin played either the daughter of a divorced couple who was trying to get her parents back together, or the daughter of a parent who’d died and she was trying to find a replacement mate for the survivor. And while Lester White got credit for the cinematography, it was pretty obvious that Lee Garmes was leaning over his shoulder giving him hints. There are some dazzling shots of people shadowed by grates, Venetian blinds and whatnot in the manner Garmes had learned from Josef von Sternberg shooting his films with Marlene Dietrich. Beyond Tomorrow is a quite remarkable film that deserves to be a lot better known than it is; it got passable reviews at the time and was not a big money-maker at the box office, but it holds up surprisingly well – and one of the big surprises was Richard Carlson’s singing voice. He might have had a voice double, but imdb.com doesn’t list one, and it’s hard to believe from this performance that he’d make his best known film 14 years later as the human hero of Creature from the Black Lagoon!