Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (William Cagney Productions, Warner Bros., 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, April 14) my husband Charles and I watched Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, a really strange 1950 crime drama/film noir directed by Gordon Douglas from an adaptation by Harry Brown of a similarly titled 1948 novel by Horace McCoy. The name Horace McCoy was familiar to me largely as the author of the 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a grim tale about the marathon dance contests that were all the rage in the early 1930’s which McCoy was inspired to write after having briefly worked as a bouncer at the Santa Monica Pier. McCoy was living in Hollywood at the time and actually tried to make it as an actor, then as a screenwriter, and he apparently did some uncredited polishing on the classic King Kong (1933), though his imdb.com page doesn’t list that as one of his credits. Most of his credits were for “B” gangster movies, though there’s a rather intriguing one from late in his life (he died on December 15, 1955 at age 57 of a heart attack) was Bad for Each Other (1953), which he didn’t write for the screen but was based on his novel Scalpel (1952). I had a lukewarm response to Bad for Each Other at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/bad-for-each-other-columbia-1953.html when I saw it in 2023. Kiss Tomorrow Good-Bye (note the hyphenated spelling) began life as a novel McCoy published in 1948 and was filmed two years later as a co-production between Warner Bros. and William Cagney Productions. William Cagney was James Cagney’s brother and production partner on a number of his films made between 1943 and 1948, when James had successfully run out his contract with Warner Bros. and was working independently, including Johnny Come Lately (1943), Blood on the Sun (1945), and The Time of Your Life (1948).

When James Cagney returned to Warners and made one of his best films, White Heat (1949), with Louis Edelman producing and Raoul Walsh directing, William reorganized his production company and both Cagneys made this film as a William Cagney Productions/Warner Bros. co-credit. William Cagney also supplied the leading lady for the film, Barbara Payton, who’d already made her movie debut in Trapped (1949), about which I’d written approvingly in a previous post on moviemagg (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/03/rby-mark-gabrish-conlan-copyright-2023.html): “It also has one of the best-written characterizations for a woman in the entire noir canon; Barbara Payton is not a femme fatale leading an innocent hero to destruction, nor is she the standard-issue ‘gangster’s moll,’ but a tough, no-nonsense woman living her life on her own terms and expressing her sexuality as she sees fit. Her only real fault is an unwise (to say the least!) attraction to a no-good man.” I’m not sure if William Cagney was physically attracted to Barbara Payton, but he signed her to an unusual contract that obligated her to William Cagney Productions and Warner Bros. simultaneously. One major difference between McCoy’s novel and the film is that, according to Brian Greene (https://www.criminalelement.com/lost-classics-of-noir-kiss-tomorrow-goodbye-horacemccoy-brian-greene/), the book is narrated by the central character, gangster and escaped convict Ralph Cotter (James Cagney). In the film, Cotter is dead at the start of the action and the story is told in flashbacks by the prosecution’s witnesses in the trial of his seven key accomplices (John Halloran plays the prosecutor, Peter Cobbett). Once the preliminaries are over, the film begins with Ralph Cotter and Frank Carleton (an uncredited Neville Brand) escaping from a work-farm prison run by guard Byers (William Frawley, whose presence here seemed odd given that his best-known role is as Fred Mertz in all seven original seasons of I Love Lucy, though we’ve seen him playing official police detectives quite credibly in a number of “B” private-eye series films).

The escaping convicts are expecting to be picked up by a car containing Frank’s sister Holiday (Barbara Payton) and a driver called “Rushie” (an uncredited King Donovan), only before the escape was effected Frank was shot, ostensibly in a shoot-out with guards but really by Ralph because he didn’t want to carry the burden of a wounded colleague. Needless to say, Holiday is not happy that her brother was killed in the escape attempt, but by a combination of intimidation and star power Ralph is able to talk her into not only letting him use the apartment in her building she’d rented for Frank but becoming her lover. Needing money in a hurry, Ralph decides to stick up a local supermarket, only during the robbery he pistol-whips the store’s owner, who lingers in a coma for a few days before ultimately expiring. The police track down the supermarket robbers in a hurry, but fortunately for Our Anti-Heroes the cops who answer the call are corrupt: Inspector Charles Weber (Ward Bond) and Lieutenant John Reece (Barton MacLane), an intriguing reunion of the official police officers from The Maltese Falcon, show up but only to demand the loot from the robbery rather than to arrest the participants. Ralph hits on the idea of buying (or stealing?) a disc recording machine and using it to entrap the cops into a criminal scheme so he can then use the threat of exposure to blackmail them into going along with whatever big caper he cooks up. Ralph also decides he needs to line up an equally corrupt attorney to represent him in the scheme, and he looks for one in an unlikely source: a spiritualists’ meeting led by Darius “Doc” Green (Frank Reicher), who was a racketeer until two years previously, when he got out of the crime game and reinvented himself as a supposedly legitimate religious leader. Green’s assistant is Margaret Dobson (Helena Carter, whose name I remember seeing in a number of RKO “B” cast lists from the 1930’s and, since Charles and I were watching them at the height of the fame of Helena Bonham Carter, I jokingly called her “Helena Non-Bonham Carter”), daughter of the richest man in town, former governor and senator Ezra Dobson (Herbert Heyes). Naturally, even though he already has a girlfriend, Ralph is attracted to Margaret, and the two go for a thrill-seeking ride at 120 miles per hour in her sports car (whose right-handed drive indicates she’s a woman who has more money than she knows what to do with). There’s a nicely ironic sequence in which two motorcycle cops stop them for speeding but don’t recognize Ralph as the escaped con half the police in town are after.

The attorney Ralph finally recruits via Green’s tip is Keith “Cherokee” Mandon (Luther Adler), with whom he insists on using the pseudonym “Paul Murphy” (as Holiday calls herself “Caldwell” through most of the film, though why she didn’t change her distinctive first name as well is something of a mystery). Mandon warns Ralph against tangling with the Dobsons, whose far-reaching influence would destroy anyone who crosses Ezra about anything. Mandon says he’ll withdraw from Ralph’s case if he has anything to do with the Dobsons, but Ralph ignores it and not only continues to date Margaret (pissing off Holiday, of course) but even secretly marries her, taking her to another state for the wedding, ostensibly so they don’t have to endure the three-day waiting period their own state (whatever it is) imposes but really because they needed to avoid Ezra’s influence. When Ezra catches Ralph in Margaret’s bedroom (they’re supposed to be married to each other but they still have to sleep in the Production Code-obligatory twin beds!), Ezra demands that Ralph agree to file for an annulment on the spot. Ralph does so but later Ezra thinks better of it and decides not to file the annulment papers because he’s decided Ralph is just the right man to tame his wayward daughter. Meanwhile Ralph has settled on his next big crime: to hijack the receipts of the town’s leading bookie, Romer (Larry J. Blake). His plan is to stick up Romer’s three collection agents, then kill them and hide their cars in a convenient quarry, so Romer will think his agents absconded with the money themselves and disappeared. The plan succeeds and the crooks meet at Holiday’s apartment to divide the loot, only Holiday sees Ralph canoodling with Margaret, realizes she’s about to be dumped, and shoots Ralph dead. There’s a neat gag scene in which her revolver fails to fire, Ralph reminds her that he once told her never to trust a revolver but insist on an automatic, then she finds a bullet in her gun after all and kills him with the second shot. Before she fires at Ralph she shows him a bullet which she says is the one with which he killed her brother Frank. (How did she know? Did she have access to the police’s ballistics tests?)

I’d seen Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye only once before, in the mid-1970’s courtesy of a late-night TV airing, and I hadn’t cared for it, especially since it was a major letdown following the incandescent energy of White Heat (still my favorite James Cagney film). One thing I didn’t like about it then was the sheer complexity of the plot; there are so many intrigues, acting at cross-purposes with each other, including the one in which the town’s (honest) police chief Sam Tolgate (John Litel) gives the corrupt plainclothesmen 48 hours to find the real crooks who robbed the supermarket and killed its owner. (The bad cops hadn’t known until that moment that the owner had died and therefore they were now liable for a murder charge.) I found it a bit better this time around but it’s still not a great movie. Part of the problem is Gordon Douglas’s direction: like most of his films it’s competent and workmanlike but never rises to the sheer energy level both the plot and the stars deserved. (Imagine this film with Fritz Lang directing it; in 1953 Lang would get a somewhat similar script and make a masterpiece, The Big Heat.) Also, though I was watching this movie largely as part of a Barbara Payton tribute (her excellent performance in the otherwise rather sorry The Ferguson Boy a.k.a. Bad Blonde had made me curious about her other work, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is generally considered her best film), the most interesting character this time around was the other female lead. Margaret Dobson is a fascinatingly drawn woman who’s much more a femme fatale than Holiday Carleton, and since she’s not only alive at the end but is not ensnared in Ralph’s crimes it’s interesting to imagine whatever future she might have. Helena Non-Bonham Carter plays her with a cool efficiency that actually makes her considerably more chilling than Barbara Payton’s role, and though she’s dark-haired she has something of the affect of the “Hitchcock blonde,” the woman of class and breeding whose well-damped sexual fires are just waiting for the right sort of wrong man to set them off again. Unsurprisingly the original trailer for the film (included as a bonus on our Blu-Ray disc from Kino Lorber as well as on imdb.com, and the imdb.com transfer was noticeably better in visual quality) emphasized James Cagney’s action credentials – Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye has been called Cagney’s last major gangster movie – but through much of the movie he seemed bored, as if he’d gone to the well too often with these particular character tropes and saw the diminishing returns, both artistically and commercially, of these story tropes.