Tomorrow Is Forever (1946)

The year is 1917. America has finally entered WWI. Young John McDonald (Orson Welles) signs up to do his patriotic duty. His pregnant wife, Elizabeth (Claudette Colbert) isn't so sure that this is such a good idea. He tells her not to worry, that the war will be over in no time and he'll be back home with her. She's not so sure. Maybe she has a premonition. John walks out the door, never to walk back into it. Fast-forward twenty four years. America is on the verge of another world war. Elizabeth has been happily married to Lawrence Hamilton (George Brent) since John disappeared. She has two sons: Drew (Richard Long) and Brian (Sonny Howe). Brian is Lawrence's son; Drew is John's. Lawrence has raised him as his own son, however, so he doesn't know that he's not. One day, a man comes into Lawrence's factory to look for a job. His name is Erik Kessler. He's a chemist. He fled Germany with his young daughter Margaret (Natalie Wood). Lawrence hires Kessler. What nobody knows is that Erik Kessler is John McDonald. He was severely injured during WWI, his body crippled, his face disfigured. Instead of going home, he stayed in Germany. He didn't want to burden his young wife with a crippled husband. Better, he decides, if she thinks he's dead. He became a chemist, lived his life. Margaret was the daughter of John/Erik's best friend, Dr. Ludwig (John Wengraf), the surgeon who saved his life. When the doctor was killed by the Nazis, John/Erik adopted Margaret.

When Elizabeth first meets John/Erik, she finds him oddly familiar, but she can't place where she's seen him before. Besides, she has other problems. Her son Drew wants to enlist in the war. Elizabeth fears a repetition of the tragedy with John and refuses to let him. One rainy night, when Lawrence is out of town, Drew runs away with some of his buddies to enlist. Not able to reach Lawrence, Elizabeth turns to John/Erik for help. He goes out into the stormy night and catches up with Drew at the train station. He tries to convince the boy to wait until he has finished school before enlisting. After some serious arm twisting, Drew finally agrees and accompanies John/Erik home, still not knowing that the man in the cab with him is his true father. Later, John/Erik takes ill from being out in the storm. To his dying breath, he insists that he is Erik Kessler, even though Elizabeth knows that he is really her long, lost husband, John McDonald. Referring to Lawrence, John/Erik tells Elizabeth, "Here is the one you wait for. No other man is your husband." After John/Erik dies, Elizabeth and Lawrence adopt Margaret.

Irving Pichel's Tomorrow Is Forever is one of the finest films that Orson Welles ever made. Sure, he's great in Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil, but he's never played a more tender role than that of Erik Kessler. He is simply fantastic. His character is a broken, sad man, and the depth of passion that Welles is able to evoke with just the slightest movement of his sad eyes is unbelievable. And Claudette Colbert is fantastic as Elizabeth, the woman whose dead husband walks back through her front door one day. As the film progresses, and you watch Elizabeth slowly figuring out who Kessler is, your heart aches for these two souls, but mostly for John/Erik. And that's due entirely to the strength of Welles' performance. George Brent puts in a strong performance as Lawrence Hamilton, the man whose entire world stands on the brink of destruction, and Richard Long is great as the hot-headed Drew, the young man who wants so badly to get into the war, not understanding - as his parents do - just how destructive war can really be. Natalie Wood (this was her 3rd film) is charming as little Margaret, who knows far more about the destruction of war than Drew does. And therein lies the message of this film and the reason that it still works so well today. Tomorrow Is Forever was made just as America was emerging from its second world war in less than three decades. Americans knew well then what Americans are just finding out again - war destroys lives.

Tomorrow Is Forever is rated G. It is filmed in glorious black and white and has a running time of 105 minutes.

The Big Sleep (1946)

"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was."

That's how Philip Marlowe sums up all that's gone before in the final pages of Raymond Chandler's novel The Big Sleep. I include it here because the one thing I have always felt that Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep lacked was the internal monologue that narrates the novel. The film ends on an upbeat note, with Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) and Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) falling in love. The novel ends with Marlowe walking off by himself, leaving the corrupt Rutledges behind him. The novel is more effective. But 1946 was a different era. People wanted a happy ending - the bad guys all killed or jailed, the hero and heroine walking off together hand in hand, the world spinning in greased grooves once again. It was the effect of the war, I guess. The need for normalcy and happy endings. It's too bad too, because the film suffered on account of the lack of the monologue. Don't get me wrong though. I love this movie. It's one of my favorites. I just wish Hawks and screenwriter William Faulkner hadn't changed the story so much.

In the film, Marlowe is called to the home of dying millionare General Sternwood (Charles Waldron). Sternwood's being blackmailed. His youngest daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers) has been gambling. General Sternwood wants Marlowe to take care of it. The conversation rolls around to Sean Regan, Sternwood's right hand man. Seems he's gone missing. There's talk he ran off with Mona Mars (Peggy Knudsen), the wife of big-time raketeer Eddie Mars (John Ridgely). As Marlowe is leaving, Vivan asks him if her father hired him to find Sean. Soon, Marlowe realizes that a lot of people would like to know what happened to Sean. Later, Marlowe discovers Carmen drugged and half naked with a dead man lying at her feet. Marlowe takes her home and returns to the scene of the crime, only to find that the dead man is gone. At this point, all hell breaks loose. The Sternwood's chaufer is murdered and dumped into the ocean. Eddie Mars seems to be everywhere. Carmen keeps popping up like a Whack-a-Mole. Marlowe finds out that he's being followed by Harry Jones (Elisha Cooke, Jr.). He's trying to help out Agnes (Sonia Darrin) who used to work for the guy who was killed at Carmen's feet. Then a couple of more people get dead. Sound confusing? It is. In fact, the novel is so confusing that Faulkner and co-writer Leigh Bracket couldn't figure out who killed one of the characters. They asked Chandler to tell them who done it, and Chandler himself was unable to point the finger at the culprit. But it all works out in the end. As I stated above - a happy ending for all of the good guys and gals.

Part of what makes The Big Sleep work, in spite of its transgressions, is the incredibly snappy dialogue written by Faulkner and Bracket. There is a lot of reparte' in this film. Consider Marlowe's first exchange with Eddie Mars:

Mars: Convenient the door being open when you didn't have a key.
Marlowe: Yeah, wasn't it? By the way, how did you happen to have one?
Mars: Is it any of your business?
Marlowe: I could make it my business.
Mars: I could make your business mine.
Marlowe: But you wouldn't like it. The pay's too small.
Mars: All right, I own this house. Geiger's my tenant. Now what do you think of me?
Marlowe: You know some nice people.
Mars: I take it as they come.

Or Marlowe's explanation of how the first two murders took place:

"You see, the dead man was Owen Taylor, Sternwood's chauffeur. He went up to Geiger's place 'cause he was sweet on Carmen. He didn't like the kind of games Geiger was playing. He got himself in the back way with a jimmy and he had a gun. And the gun went off as guns will, and Geiger fell down dead."

It's this snappy dialogue that sets this movie apart and really saves it. The film's other saving grace is Humphrey Bogart. Bogart had already established himself as the tough guy with his own code of honor in such films as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and The Petrified Forest. He cashes in on that persona here, playing Marlowe as smart and tough, yet sensitive to the needs of others who get caught up in the web of deceit that he finds himself tangled up in. Marlowe, is genuinely concerned for General Sternwood, as well as for Harry Jones and Agnes, two people who don't deserve the hand they get dealt. Hired to solve a minor blackmail case, Marlowe goes on to bring down Eddie Mars and discover how Sean got killed and who killed him, if for no other reason than to give the general some closure.

The Big Sleep is rated G and is filmed in Glorious black and white.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

The Hindenburg III glides silently above the streets of Manhattan. I kid you not. It docks at the Empire State Building. A nervous passenger has a package sent on ahead of him. Then the passenger vanishes, and a name is scratched off a list. Meanwhile, over at the Tribune, ace reporter Polly Perkins (Gwynneth Paltrow) gets a cryptic message to meet someone at Radio City Music Hall. She goes and meets an aged scientist who's terrified for his life. He will say only one name - Totenkoff. Before Polly can find out any more, New York is attacked by a horde of giant, flying robots. An immediate call goes out to Sky Captain, aka Joe Sullivan (Jude Law), who flies to the rescue in his own P-40 Flying Tiger. After dispatching several of the behemoths, he flies off to his secret base, where Polly is waiting for him. Seems they once had the thing going on that ended badly. As they are hashing out old times, the base is attacked by bat-shaped aircraft that flap their wings. Joe and Polly fly after them, shoot down several and finally escape by diving into the ocean in Joe's plane which promptly turns into a submarine. By the time they get back to Joe's base, the place has been destroyed and Joe's loyal side kick, Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), has been kidnapped. Polly and Joe, following clues left by Dex, fly to Nepal where they find Shangri La, then head out over the ocean in search of Totenkoff's secret base. When they get there, they find that Totenkoff (the very late Laurence Olivier) has been a very naughty boy indeed, and now the entire world is in danger. Folks, I repeat, I am not making this stuff up. Somebody else already did that for us. And they put it all into a movie called Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Written and directed by Kerry Conran, Sky Captain is a loving homage to all of the movie serials of the 1930s and 40s - like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and The Undersea Kingdom - complete with mad scientists, robotic villains, secret bases, rocket ships and ray guns. The film was shot almost entirely against a blue screen background - only the actors were real, and the scenery and props were all added later digitally. This allowed Conran to create the New York that he wanted to, set in 1939, yet in some strange alternate universe, where the Nazis never came into power and where supersonic aircraft and ray guns were invented. It is a happy, mythical reality that begs us to forget the realities of history as we knew it and come along to a better place. The sub-title the World of Tomorrow is taken from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, as do the Trylon and Persiphere that they find deep in the Himalayas. In Conran's hands, the World of Tomorrow envisioned in 1939 actually existed and much of the world of then never materialized. Would that it had been the case. The sepia tone of the film lends it an air of nostalgia, and the dim lighting and deep shadows bring to mind the lighting techniques of film noir. Unfortunately, it also lends the film a cartoon-like quality that takes away from its magical realism. Probably the film's most memorable performance is by the late Laurence Olivier. Conran took archival footage of Olivier and digitally manipulated it to speak the words he had in his script. In some sense, we truly are in the world of tomorrow if we can get dead actors to keep right on performing years after their demise.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is not going to be to everyone's liking. It's just too fantastical for some people, who apparently have a difficult time suspending their disbelief long enough to enjoy a good adventure yarn. The acting is a bit formal and stiff, much as it was in those old 30s and 40s serials, but after a while you really don't notice too much. Probably the most difficult part of the film to buy is Joe's airplane, which has the ability to fly at near supersonic speeds over unimaginable distances and, as an added bonus, turn itself into a submarine when needed. My favorite World-of-Tomorrow gadget - if you will - was the giant, hovering aircraft carrier. I've seen something similar in old Mechanix Illustrated magazines from that period. They dreamed of it then. Conran's dreaming of it still. We can too, thanks to his movie.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is rated PG-13, and it is available in sepia-toned color.

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Nighttime. The California coast. A classy, Deco-style beach house. A man in a tuxedo Stands in front of a mirror, holding a cigarette. Shots ring out. He drops dead. A gun is thrown down beside him. A car speeds away into the fog. So begins Michael Curtiz's classic film Mildred Pierce. Based on the novel by James M. Caine, the film tells the story of a divorced woman who is willing to do just about anything to provide her worthless daughter with a comfortable lifestyle. Mildred (Joan Crawford) is a divorced mother of two daughters - sweet tomboy Kay (Jo Ann Marlowe) and her twisted older sister Veda (Ann Blythe). Veda wants every good thing that money can buy, without actually having to work for it herself of course. Veda is shocked when Mildred takes a job as a waitress and bakes pies and cakes at home for extra income, but not too shocked to spend the money. With the help of an old friend and realtor, Wally Fay (Jack Carson), Mildred opens her own chain of restaurants, which makes her quite wealthy. When she gets romantically involved with Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott), a down-at-the-heels socialite, Veda is thrilled. Monte will give her access to the upper crust of society. You can probably see where all of this is heading. Veda tries it on with Monte, and Mildred catches them in flagrante dilecto. Mildred has a gun and the gun goes off, as guns do, and Monte falls down dead. Seems he's allergic to lead. Ah, but who made the gun go bang? That's the question. The police want to know. You probably do too, but I'm not telling.

Mildred Pierce is a wonderfully crafted piece of film noir, full of deep shadows and rainy streets. Numerous times the actors are completely blacked out, appearing as nothing more than silhouettes against a slightly lighter backdrop. Even the daytime scenes seem dense with shadows. The darkness limits our field of vision, forming the boundaries of the possible world, blocking off potential escape routes, and creating claustrophobic mood that heightens the tension and the desperation of the characters. Notice how the light and airy beach house becomes a labyrinth of shadows when the night rolls in. See how Curtiz barely lights the office of Inspector Peterson (Moroni Olsen). The scene where Mildred is waiting to be interviewed by the Inspector is one of my favorites. She sits in the echoing room in the middle of the night, the only sounds the ticking of the clock, the tapping of a typewriter, and the occasional rustle of a newspaper. Mildred's tension builds. So does ours. The buzzing of the intercom causes her to jump. I nearly jumped with it. I see now that HBO has done a remake of Mildred Piecrce starring Kate Winslett. I'm sure Winslett will be good, but she'll never be Crawford. And while the color ciematography is appropriately dark and moody, it cannot match the original with its velvety blacks and its all too numerous shades of gray.

Mildred Pierce is one of my all time favorite movies. It ranks right up there with Casablanca (also directed by Curtiz) and Citizen Kane. It's a early moral tale about how much overcompensating by parents who feel guilty about a broken home can damage children for life. At one point in the film Veda tells Mildred, "You made me what I am." She's right - partly. Mildred's obsession with having her daughters succeed didn't turn Veda into a heartless, social-climbing, money-grubbing monster. Kay, had she lived, wouldn't have turned out that way. Mildred only opened the door to that world. Veda ran through it with her eyes wide open.

Mildred Pierce is rated G and is available in moody black and white.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

The McGuffin* is a bird. A statue of a falcon. About a foot tall. Made of gold and encrusted with jewels, covered all over with a coating of black enamel. It's value? Priceless. A thing that people kill for. The stuff that dreams are made of. So says Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) at the close of John Huston's The Maltese Falcon. Huston's film was the third screen adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's book. It was first filmed in 1931 with Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez, then again in 1936 with Bette Davis and Warren Williams. But who remembers those films? Huston shot his film almost word for word, scene for scene, from Hammett's novel. It was a smart move. It created a masterpiece. And Humphrey Bogart has become everyone's vision of who Sam Spade is, even though Bogie doesn't look anything like the character described in the book. Who cares? It's Bogart.

One day, Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) shows up at the office of Sam Spade and his partner Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) with a cock-n-bull story about a missing sister and her evil abductor. She flashes money at them. They take the case. As private detectives, Archer and Spade are mostly honest, mostly ethical, but not afraid to bend a law, or a person, to the breaking point for a hundred bucks. Archer is killed that night. Brigid disappears. Spade finds her, grills her, is unsatisfied with her new story. Then Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) shows up, wearing a fancy suit and smelling like a rose garden. Wants to know if Sam has the bird. Is willing to pay for it. Next on the scene is Casper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) and Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jr.). They want the bird too. During their first meeting, they ask nicely. During their second meeting, they take their gloves off. The Falcon is delivered to Sam's office late one night by a dying man. Captain of a tramp freighter. Case of lead poisoning. Now Sam's got a bargaining chip.

Sam calls a meeting at his apartment. All of the interested parties attend. They talk figures. They need a fall guy. Sam says Wilmer is made to order. They agree to stitch him up, much to Wilmer's dismay. Sam sends for the bird. When it arrives, Gutman eagerly unwraps it. His excitement is palpable. He starts to scratch the black enamel off the Falcon, only to discover that the bird underneath is not made of gold but of common lead. But Gutman knows who made the switch, and he and Cairo head off in search of the real Falcon. Wilmer takes it on the lamb. Sam has other plan's for Brigid, and they don't include a honeymoon cottage. After all, Sam may not be entirely honest, or entirely ethical, but he does live by a code of honor. It says when someone kills your partner, they have to pay. Brigid will pay.

The Maltese Falcon is one of those Hollywood films, like Casablanca, that wasn't a big or an important movie while it was being made. But once it was finished, they knew they had a gem. The movie takes place on a human scale. No grand vistas here. Huston filmed most of the exterior scenes on city streets, at night, with lots of fog and rain. Interior scenes are filmed in cramped apartments, offices, hotel rooms. Lots of shadows. Lots of atmosphere. This is the beginning of film noir. Interestingly, this was also the screen debut of Sydney Greenstreet. He'd been a stage actor for years, when Huston cast him as Casper Gutman, aka the Fat Man. Another bit of trivia - when Sam calls Wilmer a "gunsel," he doesn't mean that Wilmer is a hired gun; he's hinting at Wilmer's sexual orientation. According to the IMDb, "The Yiddish term 'gunsel', literally "little goose", may be a vulgarism for homosexual." Who knew?

The Maltese Falcon is a fun movie that keeps you guessing right up until the end. Who killed Miles? Who killed the captain of the steam ship? Is there really a Maltese Falcon? We aren't given the answers until the concluding scenes. It's a satisfying conclusion too.

The Maltese Falcon is rated G and is filmed in deliciously moody black and white.

*McGuffin was Alfred Hitchcock's term for whatever the object or idea is that spurs the characters to action and moves the plot along.