Wednesday, August 14 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door
THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW
Directed by Douglas Sirk • 1956
Twenty years after leaving town, design maven Norma Miller Vale (Barbara Stanwyck) arrives at the front door of her former employer, toy manufacturer Clifford Groves (Fred MacMurray), purposefully rekindling an abandoned intimacy. There’s Always Tomorrow was adapted from a popular Jazz Age novel from Ursula Parrott (who acted as the film’s co-screenwriter) and was sandwiched between the releases of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows in 1955 and Written on the Wind at the end of 1956. This virtuosic run forever established Sirk as a master of style and tone. Although all three films were shot by legendary cinematographer and frequent Sirk collaborator Russell L. Metty (also responsible for 1958’s highly stylized film noir Touch of Evil), There’s Always Tomorrow is distinguished from its Technicolor siblings by its expressive use of black and white and notedly gloomy undercurrent. The film is cast in shadows, with a plot that’s driven by whispers. As Sirk scholar Tom Ryan wrote, the film “…comes just about as close to being a film noir as a family melodrama can get without someone dying, or at least pulling a gun.” Despite leading a comfortable, all-American life with a swell wife (Joan Bennett) and three children, Clifford fears he is too close to becoming one of his own robotic creations. As portrayed by the pitch-perfect Fred MacMurray, we understand his fear; he seems to lack interiority and ideas for how to gain it. He can only project his dissatisfaction outwards, towards his own family. Norma arrives, projecting vitality (even a repressed Barbara Stanwyck is still Barbara Stanwyck). With a mutual ambivalence towards their current realities, they soak in the dry heat of Palm Valley as if it’s their last grasp at happiness. (RIN)
84 min • Universal-International • 35mm from Universal
Preceded by: “World’s Most Beautiful Girls” (Jesse Hibbs, 1952) – 20 min – 35mm
NEXT UP: You’re Dancing This Dance All Wrong on Sunday, August 25 at the GSFC
