Rent There's Always Tomorrow (1956)
3.8 of 5 from 78 ratings
1h 21min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- Disregarded and neglected by his family, executive toy manufacturer Clifford Groves (Fred MacMurray) is unexpectedly reunited with his former co-worker Norma Miller (Barbara Stanwyck). As the old friends catch up on lost time, his children's suspicions and hostility to the new relationship threaten to push their father away permanently and throw into disarray the lives of all concerned.
- Actors:
- Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Joan Bennett, William Reynolds, Pat Crowley, Gigi Perreau, Jane Darwell, Race Gentry, Myrna Hansen, Judy Nugent, Paul Smith, Helen Kleeb, Jane Howard, Frances Mercer, Sheila Bromley
- Directors:
- Douglas Sirk
- Producers:
- Ross Hunter
- Writers:
- Bernard C. Schoenfeld, Ursula Parrott
- Studio:
- Eureka
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama, Romance
- Collections:
- The Instant Expert's Guide, The Instant Expert's Guide to: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
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Reviews (2) of There's Always Tomorrow
Domestic Drama. - There's Always Tomorrow review by Steve
This stands apart from the rest of Douglas Sirk's melodramas for Universal in the fifties most obviously as it is in black and white, and because it focuses on a male protagonist. But it satirises the materialism of the American suburban middle class just as succinctly.
Fred MacMurray plays an affluent husband and father of a certain age who begins to feel stifled. He has become the financial support system to three awful kids and an indifferent wife (Joan Bennett). Temptation arrives with a visit from an old colleague (Barbara Stanwyck) who has been carrying a torch for him over many years.
This is Fred MacMurray's best performance. He's not cast against type as he was successfully by Billy Wilder, but he feels like the inevitable culmination of the sitcom dads he played over many years, but here, grotesquely trapped. He is identified, quite hideously, with the sci-fi robot his toy business is rolling out to the American market.
This is a slender, compact film which focuses minutely on the condition of its distressed hero. Sirk tells us that the conventions of American society mass produce depressed, maladjusted people. Watching MacMurray being pinned by degrees to a profound emotional pain, purely through getting everything that he ever wanted, is actually quite distressing.
1 out of 1 members found this review helpful.
Sales Pitch - There's Always Tomorrow review by CH
It is with a start that one finds the name of Ursula Parrott in the opening credits of There’s Always Tomorrow (1956). Who? She died in obscurity the following year but has recently come back to attention for her bestselling first novel, the torrid Ex-Wife (1929) - a title which created the term.
Hers was a wild a life, partly funded by sale of work to Hollywood, which included this story. It was previously filmed at the time (1934), a version now elusive; to see it would make an interesting comparison with this one, a lesser-known part of Douglas Sirk’s work in America. Among its unexpected turns is much use, in various renditions, of “Blue Moon” - and, all the more so, some appearances by a robot. The latter is a potential product for Fred MacMurray’s toy-manufacturing firm - and, before long, an emblem of the life which has tied him to a suburban house run by Joan Bennett and peopled by three ungrateful children (there were five in the 1934 incarnation).
Unlike most Sirk’s other takes on Fifties life, this one is in black and white, as was All I Desire which also featured Barbara Stanwyck. There she created some dust, and she does again. Having risen in the fashion design world, she has returned to the West Coast and looks up this old flame. As these things go, it is innocent enough, with something of Brief Encounter about it, but wildly misunderstood by the children after one of them chances to witness a meeting during these tumultuous days.
So much soap, one might thing. The way in which it is paced (at eighty minutes), with many of Sirk’s typical interior set-ups, makes for something much more involving than that. Barbara Stanwyck does not unbalance the ensemble playing. Here are people whose lives are an emblem of hopes entangled by the fate they were unable to shrug off twenty years ago - and one which might have the children caught in their turn. As for “Blue Moon”, how many recall that the song went through many versions before finding its final, romantic form? Somebody could yet re-discover the version which includes “I could be good to a lover, / But then I always discover / The bad in ev'ry man".
1 out of 1 members found this review helpful.