Tomorrow Is Another Day (Warner Bros., 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After running the DVD of They Shall Have Music I switched to Turner Classic Movies for their “Noir Alley” presentation of a little-known and only marginally noir movie, a 1951 film from Warner Bros. directed by Felix Feist and written by Guy Endore and Art Cohn called Tomorrow Is Another Day. With that title you might have expected a Gone With the Wind knockoff about those wonderful antebellum days on the Southern plantations until those danged Northerners started kvetching about slavery, triggered the War Between the States and ruined everything, but instead it’s a melodrama about a convict, Bill Clark (Steve Cochran), who was imprisoned at age 13 for murdering his father (we get hints dropped that the old man was physically abusive) and has served an 18-year stretch. The warden (Harry Antrim) tries to prep Bill for life outside, pointing out that a lot of social changes have occurred while he’s been “inside,” including a lot of veterans who’ve returned home after fighting in World War II. He’s given the $220 or so remaining in his prison account and offered a train ticket anywhere in the United States, but at first he chooses not to use it because he’s determined to stay in the same city (which was also where his crime occurred) and make a new life for himself.

As soon as he’s released from prison he’s stalked from a car by a mysterious stranger, whom at first we assume is either a Javert-like cop convinced he will commit another crime or a criminal who wants to enlist Our Anti-Hero into another crime. Instead he turns out to be Dan Monroe (John Kellogg), who pretends to befriend Bill but is really a reporter pumping him for a story without identifying himself as such. The next day, when Monroe’s story comes out, Bill goes to the paper’s office and assaults him. Other staff members call the police and it looks like Bill is on his way back to prison almost as soon as he got out, but Monroe, conscience-stricken over the dirty trick he played on Bill, refuses to press charges. Bill uses his train ticket to go to New York City and on his first night he goes to the “Dreamland” dime-a-dance hall and meets dance hostess Catherine “Kay” Higgins (Ruth Roman, top-billed and looking silly in a blonde wig), a hard-bitten woman who’s also the mistress of married police lieutenant George Conover (Hugh Sanders). Kay has brought Bill up to her apartment when Conover shows up unexpectedly; Bill, who has no idea either that Conover is a cop or that he and Kay have a relationship, confronts him and gets the cop’s gun away from him, and there’s a squabble in which They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for allowing him to be an early investor in IBM) -- only in the end it’s Kay who shoots Conover, though since Bill is unconscious at the time she’s able to frame him for it.

Conover escapes the apartment on his own power but dies from his injuries later, and Bill and Kay realize that their fates are tied together. They “ride the rods” on a freight train to Chicago and make one leg of their escape inside one of six cars being transported to a dealer on a large trailer truck -- an interesting sequence if only because it reminded me that at one time these old-fashioned looking cars were new and state-of-the-art transportation. Eventually they get picked up by a family on their way to California to work as lettuce pickers, headed by Henry Dawson (Ray Teal) with his wife Stella (Lurene Tuttle, primarily a radio actress who worked with Humphrey Bogart on a 1945 broadcast of James M. Cain’s novel Love’s Lovely Counterfeit over a decade before the book was filmed as Slightly Scarlet) and their son Johnny (Bobby Hyatt). When they get to California the film, which has already veered between romantic melodrama, couple-on-the-run movie and film noir, suddenly becomes The Grapes of Wrath -- though Charles thought it looked more like a Soviet film singing the praises of life on a collective farm. While all this has been going on Bill and Kay have got married, though he used the phony name “Mike Lewis” inspired by his memories of learning about Lewis and Clark, and that’s the name the Dawsons know them by.

The climax occurs when Henry Dawson goes on a fishing trip, he invites “Mike” but Mike begs off, and Dawson is the victim of a nasty accident involving an oil tanker and is badly burned. His doctor tells him he needs an expensive operation only offered in Los Angeles, and to get there on time he will have to be flown there -- and Stella, who’s realized from a true-crime magazine who “Mike Lewis” really is, turns him in because the $1,000 reward offered for Bill Clark will pay for her husband’s life flight and his care. In the ending, Bill and Kay are both arrested for Conover’s murder, they both confess to it and the cops originally think they’re scamming the police because if both take the blame for the killing there’ll be reasonable doubt if either of them are tried (a gimmick that’s also been used in several Law and Order episodes). The lead investigator plays Bill Kay’s confession on a wire recording (one of the few films in which I’ve seen a wire recorder in action -- in fact the only one I can recall) and ultimately it turns out that George Conover, who even though he was keeping a mistress was at least a professionally honest cop, made a statement on his deathbed that acknowledged that Kay shot him but did so in self-defense. According to “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller, this was an ending forced on the studio after preview audiences objected to the original, though apparently there’s no original script or any other documentation of what the original ending was (it reminded me of the similar controversy over Douglas Sirk’s couple-on-the-run movie Shockproof, based on a script by Sam Fuller which ended in a shoot-out, but was rewritten to Sirk’s disgust by producer Helen Deutsch to give it a sweetness-and-light finish similar to the one we have here), but unlike Shockproof this is already a sentimental enough movie I didn’t find the ending objectionable or out of place with what had happened before.

Muller also referred to Cochran as the “noir Elvis,” and indeed there’s a striking resemblance between Cochran and Elvis Presley that I’d never noticed before -- though the real surprise in this movie is that Cochran, despite his ex-con status, is playing a sympathetic character. Usually Cochran was cast as a psycho villain, and even when Cochran played a cop, as he did in Don Siegel’s interesting Private Hell 36, he played a corrupt cop. Tomorrow Is Another Day isn’t a great movie, but it’s an intriguing one even though one actor famous for a much better and more classic film noir, Lee Patrick (Sam Spade’s secretary in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon), is wasted in the unimportant role of Kay’s disapproving sister-in-law. Felix Feist is one of those directors who had a long career but I’ve never been able to get a handle on him -- the only two films I’m familiar with are his 1936 MGM musical short Every Sunday with Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin, and the 1953 feature Donovan’s Brain (which might plausibly be considered the first science-fiction film noir, anticipating the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers by three years, but it’s really not the film it could have been if producer Allan Dowling had allowed Curt Siodmak, author of the original story, to write and direct it himself) -- and his work here is technically assured but without anything “special.” There’s also a sense of relief in this film when Ruth Roman doffs her blonde wig (since it’s combed differently from her real hair I’m assuming it was a wig, not a dye job) and appears two-thirds of the way through the movie as the brunette nature and the gene pool made her.