Beyond Tomorrow (1940)

Review Essay

Beyond Tomorrow is very much a film of its era, which means that I suspect it’ll land very differently for different folks, more so than usual.  If you’re a fan of standard-issue 1940s movies to the extent that you even admire their quirks – the relatively stationary camera in most scenes, the forced Transatlantic accent, the aggressively sentimental orchestral scores, etc. – then there’s plenty to appreciate here.  If you find most of that stiff and stagey, well, this may not be such a “forgotten classic” for you.  I lean in favor of appreciating 1940s filmmaking, so for me this was a fun movie to encounter, at least as an object to examine and analyze.

The first half of this film is where almost all its best moments live.  It’s bursting with holiday energy, a montage of wreaths and bustling shoppers and a big old house getting ready for Christmas Eve dinner.  For a film of its era, it’s at least nodding in the direction of diversity – the all-white cast, anyway, encompasses folks speaking with lilts and brogues that run the gamut from English patrician to Texas buckaroo, from Russian emigre to Irish blarney.  There’s something nicely cosmopolitan about the energy, and the setup is cheerfully Christmassy, as the three old guys realize they’re running out of friends (in part because, as we learn, one of them has recently been in some kind of ethical or criminal scandal, and basically everybody but his two closest buddies has deserted him, and therefore all three of them).  That’s not what’s Christmassy, of course – the holiday vibes here come when the three of them place a bet, tossing three wallets into the snow out their window, with nothing inside but ten dollars and their three business cards.  Two of them are sure humans are good and will return the wallets with money intact; the third is at least allegedly misanthropic enough to believe they won’t, but you sense right away that it’s mostly bluster.  The film’s charmingly open about its philosophy – a character says out loud “There are no strangers on Christmas Eve” – and the outcome’s a lovely dinner with two young people, Jimmy and Jean, who are young and single and attractive and talented….exactly the sort of people who it’s most difficult to imagine finding themselves without a place to go on Christmas Eve, but whatever, this is a holiday fantasy and it’s fun.

At first it seems like we’re probably being set up for the old guys acting as a kind of three-headed Cyrano for Jimmy, but instead they all die in a plane crash.  Yeah, sorry, that was abrupt and spoilery, but a) it’s the movie’s actual premise, even if it arrives 35 minutes in, so I couldn’t figure out how to talk about the movie without acknowledging it, and b) it’s that abrupt in the movie too.  After that, this is actually a moral fable, as Jimmy turns the money and encouragement he got from the three old guys into the kind of A Star Is Born quandary that Hollywood loves – it turns out that being a celebrity means encountering unscrupulous people (especially, of course, she-devil women who want to lure you to the dark side).  Jean’s job is to be sad about things in general but not to talk too much about it.  The three old ghosts are allegedly here to help sort things out, but they seem to have almost no power over the living, and in any case the rules of the afterlife seem to slowly interfere with the possibility that they’ll be able to do much of anything at all.  I won’t spoil the ending but also if you think you know how this will end, I bet you’ll be at least partly right.  It’s a 1940s moral fable: it’s not trying to surprise you much.

And to be clear, it’s a very 1940s film in ways that will rightly bother some people – I think the only sign of a person of color is a single Black taxi driver who is at least given a generous tip from the one person who found a wallet and didn’t return it.  The old Englishman, Chadwick, says some truly appalling things about colonialism and how nice it is for the world that the United Kingdom conquered so much of it – he has other good qualities, but oof, that one conversation’s rough.  The cinematography (and writing) of the era doesn’t lend itself to naturalism, which means that depicting grief on screen doesn’t hit all that hard (Jimmy and Jean’s mourning the loss of the old guys never really resonates, though a couple of other characters manage to convey real loss, at least in a moment or two).  And, yeah, as aforementioned, the whole “Jimmy may get lured to his ruin by the sexuality of an eeeeevil woman” is pretty bad in terms of what it implies about the genders – there’s no sense that this woman might have any complexity (she’s called “soulless” at one point, not as an insult but as an implicitly “accurate” description), and there’s also no sense that Jimmy bears literally any moral responsibility for, you know, being a grown adult man who’s entertaining the idea of cheating on his fiancee.

If you’re not up for that kind of thing, I get it.  I get enough out of the movie’s first half to be able to let the second half stumble along past me, but I’ll admit, the messages I want to take away from the film are not probably the principal messages the filmmakers wanted to convey.  To me, this is a tale about generosity and the possibility of a Christmas peace being so pervasive that it can remake not just moments but lives.  I don’t have much interest in what it goes on to say, either about men and women, or about “young people these days”, or even about fame and fortune (though the movie’s probably not completely wrong to be wary of them): there’s one good thing about the 1940s, though.  They keep their feature films short.  If you like it, it’s breezy fun, and if you don’t, it’s over fast. 

I Know That Face: There’s surprisingly little overlap here with the prominent Christmas classics of the 30s, 40s, and 50s – I was expecting someone to have played a bit part in Miracle on 34th Street or to have been in a crowd scene in It’s a Wonderful Life.  Still, though, there’s some interesting intersections with more holidays-adjacent movies.  Alex Melesh, playing Josef the Russian butler, had played a waiter in The 3 Wise Guys, which is a flick co-written by Damon Runyon that opens on Christmas Day, with later climactic and culminating events on subsequent Christmases – not one I’ve seen (yet).  Harry Carey, who plays the curmudgeonly George Melton, starred as Bob Sangster in the original 1916 silent film The Three Godfathers, and the remake 3 Godfathers in 1948 is actually dedicated to him – both films are Westerns that pull some elements of the Magi from the Christmas story into the tropes and conventions of that genre, and tomorrow, in fact, I’ll be reviewing a movie that’s (very) loosely inspired by them.  And two cast members appear in different Little Women adaptations: Little Women famously opens at Christmas, and basically every adaptation of the novel involves some fairly prominent holiday scenes as a result.  From the Beyond Tomorrow cast, C. Aubrey Smith (the aging Brit, Chadwick, here) plays Mr. Laurence in the 1949 adaptation of Alcott’s novel, and Jean Parker (Jean Lawrence, the sweet young romantic interest here) plays Beth March in the 1933 adaptation.

That Takes Me Back:  Again, this is such a 1940s film – there would be plenty to call attention to, much of it both nostalgic and yet also not exactly fondly recalled, you know?  I mean, there’s an old-fashioned zing to the sight and sound of fingers tapping furiously at a typewriter, but of course here (as often, in the old days) it’s a bunch of nameless women taking dictation while one or more important old white dudes talk, and then they’re out of the way before we can learn anything about them.  It’s a reminder, I guess, of the ways that technology has leveled certain things about the world, even as it in many other ways hasn’t.  More pleasantly, I did enjoy the old school vibe of these senior citizens drinking Tom and Jerrys, a classic holiday 19th century punch that really doesn’t get much play these days (but maybe it should? If you’re drinking one tonight, let me know in the comments).  Also, one method by which exposition is delivered is a montage of images from a handwritten daily diary, and it reminded me of diary entries and letters I’ve seen from my own family from earlier decades, where just noting things they did that day was commonplace.  And sure, in a way, it’s what we do with social media, except it’s also not, you know?  Overall, if you want to glide back in time, Beyond Tomorrow will gladly take you there, but whether or not you like what you find will vary widely.

I Understood That Reference: Despite the setup being, as I noted above, something like a forgotten Dickens novella or an O. Henry short story, as far as I could tell there wasn’t a mention of any classic Christmas tales or figures of any kind.

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Holiday Vibes (5/10):  It’s just all so front-loaded – if somehow the whole film could have taken place on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, they really had it working.  I felt like I was at a celebration worth attending, and I was mostly enjoying the old fellows in the room while trying not to pay too much attention to the occasional racist remark….some of you are saying “hey, uh, that is actually just how Christmas with my family goes,” so it’s hitting the mark there.  I liked the messaging, too, around belief in humanity’s capacity for good, etc.  It’s just that the film wanders away and never really comes back to it – in the end it didn’t feel as Christmassy as I was expecting from the opening scenes.

Actual Quality (5.5/10):  I mean, it’s hard to pick a number here.  The Jimmy and Jean plot is so rough: she has so little agency, and weirdly, so does he?  But the three old guys, there’s really something there – the power of friendship, the desire to see people happy, etc.  It sucks that their version of the afterlife is a lot kinder to the most vocally racist of the trio than it is to the guy who’s challenging his colonialist paternalism, though.  I get some good feelings from some scenes later on in the film that do carry some emotional heft about the question of being ready to go, or what you’ll find on the other side.  But the film hasn’t really set up the rules or expectations of the afterlife in a way that the audience can follow.  Ultimately it’s both an underbaked film about ghosts and letting go of the Earth, and an underbaked 1940s romance.  I wish it had been courageous enough to do one of them well (ideally the first of those options).

Party Mood-Setter?  I think no, overall – there’s just not enough holiday here.  Though since the movie’s best stuff happens early, and after that you really only want to pay attention to the big splashy moments, it could work for a gathering where you just kind of want to be able to tune out over time, or chuckle occasionally at the ways it gets increasingly weird and outdated?

Plucked Heart Strings?  Okay, so, hear me out – I became genuinely emotional when one of the old guys got ready to step into the beyond, and suddenly out of the shadows emerged a dead loved one, who died too young, years before.  So, is this a great or even a good film?  I am (clearly) not making that argument.  But I can’t deny, there was a moment (and maybe one other, even closer to the film’s end) where I felt really moved.  The premise has power.  This is one of those 1940s films that really deserves a thoughtful remake.

Recommended Frequency:  Honestly, unless the 1940s stuff I’ve mentioned is just too likely to trigger bad reactions for you, I’d suggest you watch it once, sometime when you haven’t got anything else to do.  The premise and some of the acting/writing do enough that thinking about what you’re liking (and what’s not working) is honestly really interesting, I think, and again, you’ll get enough of a holiday kick from the first half that you’ll enjoy thinking back on that dinner table (while you look up a recipe for Tom and Jerrys).  I think once is all I’ll ever bother with, but I’m glad I did.
If you’d like to watch Beyond Tomorrow, Amazon Prime is streaming a colorized version with ads (it’s their Freevee service), and if you’d rather watch ads on a non-Bezos-related site, this old movie is available almost everywhere on free ad-supported services like Tubi and Pluto and Plex (and more).  Tubi and Plex are showing the original black and white version, and Pluto’s is in color.  You can, if you find ads too tedious, pay to rent it at Amazon Prime, Fandango, or Apple TV, and Amazon will also sell you a DVD version if this is one you want to own.  It’s on DVD in libraries, too, of course – more than a couple hundred, according to Worldcat.