After three eccentric businessman arrange for a young couple to get together right before the holidays, a plane crash kills the three men. However, their ghosts remain on Earth to watch over the couple and to take care of some unexpected holiday business. The film is a holiday film and a comedy and a romance and a musical and a ghost story and a melodrama and finally an oddly sincere meditation on life and death.
From 1940, here’s Beyond Tomorrow!
I’m standing at the edge of tomorrow
And its all up to me how far I go
I’m standing at the edge of tomorrow
I’ve never seen such a view before
A new world before my eyes
So much for me to explore
It’s where my future lies
Today I’m standing at the edge of tomorrow
From here the future looks bright for me
And it’s all up to me how far I go
It’s my time to break away
I’m standing at the edge of tomorrow
Today
Beyond Tomorrow is a strange film from 1940. Technically, it is a holiday film. It takes place during the Christmas season and there’s a lot of very peppy scenes featuring people celebrating the holidays. I watched the movie with my friends in the Late Night Movie Gang. We’re a pretty sentimental group but even we felt that some of the characters went a bit overboard with the holiday cheer. The film is also comedy and a romance and a musical and a ghost story and a melodrama and finally an oddly sincere meditation on life and death. That’s a lot of weight for one film to carry and there were more than a few times that Beyond Tomorrow seemed like it might collapse in a heap of Christmas ambition. Fortunately, the film always righted itself and, in the end, it actually managed to be …. well, definitely more interesting than what any of us were expecting!
The film opens with three businessmen (Harry Carey, C. Aubrey Smith, and Charles Winninger) living in a mansion with their Russian housekeeper (played by Maria Ouspenskaya, who was also the old gypsy lady in The Wolf Man). As almost something of a lark, the three men arrange for James (Richard Carlson) to meet Jean (Jean Parker). Jean is a teacher. James is a singing cowboy from Texas. Together, with the encouragement of the three businessmen, Jean and James get together. Awwwww!
Unfortunately, the three businessmen are then all killed in a plane crash. However, their ghosts remain on Earth and watch over the growing love between James and Jean. Unfortunately, James become a singing sensation on the radio and soon, he’s being tempted to cheat. Meanwhile, Jean’s ex-husband is running around with murder in his heart and a gun in his hand! This romantic comedy has suddenly taken a very dark turn!
While the three ghosts look after James and Jean, they consider why they’re still on Earth and not in the afterlife. One ghost is eventually greeted by his son, who died during the Great War. Another one of the businessmen is haunted by vaguely defined sins and, even in death, he refuses to repent because he feels that he doesn’t deserve to go to Heaven. Instead, he continually walks off into the darkness. The last businessman continually tries to push James and Jean on the right path but it turns out that it’s not easy for the dead to talk sense to the living.
You can probably give yourself whiplash trying to keep up with the film’s tonal changes. It starts out with romance and comedy and then suddenly, it’s turns into an existential rumination of love, forgiveness, and guilt. Once the three businessmen die, it becomes a totally different story. Suddenly, soldiers are returning from the dead and the gates of Hell are beckoning. And, on top of that, James keeps breaking out into song every few minutes!
It’s a very strange film. Unfortunately, from the start, the pacing feels off. By today’s standards, Beyond Tomorrow gets bogged down in all of the songs and the scenes of holiday mirth-making. That may not have been as much of a problem for audiences in 1940 but I have to say that, speaking as someone trying to watch this film in 2020, Beyond Tomorrow made my ADD go crazy. If not for my friends and their patient willingness to inform me what was going on in the film, I probably wouldn’t have been able to follow the film’s storyline.
That said, the film was fairly well-acted and the final scenes, with the heavenly gates in the sky, are undeniably effective. Speaking as a history nerd, I found it interesting to see how the shadow of World War I still hung over a film that was made 21 years after that war ended. As the scenes in which one of the ghosts is a reunited with son showed, America was still dealing with trauma and horror of the first modern war. (One year after the release of Beyond Tomorrow, Japan would bomb Pearl Harbor and America entered World War II, a conflict that many hoped to avoid precisely because they remembered the all of the men who didn’t make it home during the previous war in Europe.) Messy though the film may be, Beyond Tomorrow functions well as both a historical document and a bit of sentimental wish fulfillment.
Compared to holiday classics like the original Miracle on 34th Street and It’s A Wonderful Life, Beyond Tomorrow is relatively unknown. Certainly, it’s no classic. But, for fans of both Christmas and old movies, it’s still an interesting trip into the past.
I cannot stand the phrase “pay it forward.”
The idea is that somebody does something nice for you and then they say, “Pay it forward” and suddenly, you are magically required to go out and do something nice for someone else. For one thing, I hate the obligation of it all. I have this fear that as soon as I finally get finished paying it forward, some stranger is going to hand me a Coke and say, “Pay it forward,” and suddenly I’ll have to do it all over again! And really, honestly, I shouldn’t have to pay it forward just because someone gives me a Coke. If you’re going to tell me to pay it forward, at least give me a car or a Victoria’s Secret gift card or something.
Ultimately, “pay it forward” is something that people say to make themselves feel good but it’s actually a pretty shallow concept.
The same thing can be said about John Doeism, the philosophy that rests at the center of the 1941 film Meet John Doe, our latest entry in Shattered Politics. John Doeism is a grassroots political movement that is based around the slogan, “Be a Better Neighbor.” Much like “Pay it forward,” “Be a better neighbor” sounds good and it’s easy to say but its main appeal is that it doesn’t require that much thought. If anything, it sounds like the first step on the road to serfdom…
That said, I still like the film.
Meet John Doe opens with lay-offs at a major metropolitan newspaper. (These lay-offs are signified by a handsome young man who points at people and then runs his finger across his throat.) Among those laid off is columnist Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck). However, before Ann is officially let go, she is told to write one final column. Understandably angry over her treatment, Ann responds by making something up. She writes and prints a fake letter from a man calling himself “John Doe.” John Doe explains that he’s unemployed and that he will be committing suicide on Christmas Eve.
Well, quicker than you can say twitter death hoax, everyone in the entire country reads John Doe’s letter and demands to know who he is. The newspaper’s editor, Henry Connell (James Gleason), rehires Ann and puts her in charge of finding the real John Doe.
When numerous unemployed and homeless men start to show up at the newspaper, claiming to be the real John Doe, little do they realize that they are, in fact, auditioning. Ann finally decides that Joe Willoughby (Gary Cooper) has what it takes to be the public face of John Doe. Not only does he have a compelling personal story (he’s a former baseball player whose career was ended by an arm injury) but he looks and sounds like Gary Cooper.
(And, as I typed that last sentence, it suddenly occurred to me that Meet John Doe managed to predict American Idol…)
Joe is soon a celebrity, reading speeches that have been written for him by Ann and encouraging people across the nation to be a better neighbor. And Ann is falling in love with Joe. However, Joe is not comfortable with his new role. For one thing, he doesn’t like being a hero for telling a lie. Secondly, he knows that rival newsmen are eager to expose him as being a fraud. And finally, there’s a sinister publisher named D.B. Norton (played by Edward Arnold, who previously played corrupt Boss Taylor in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington) who is eager to be President of the United States. He wants to turn John Doeism into a fascist political movement and, unless Joe endorses him, he’ll reveal that Joe’s a fraud…
Meet John Doe was Frank Capra’s follow-up to Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. It features many of the same themes as Mr. Smith, with the main difference being that Meet John Doe is a lot more preachy. Whereas Mr. Smith saved its big speech for the end, Meet John Doe has several big speeches spread throughout its running time. (There’s also a scene where a guy named Bert tells the story of how he was inspired by John Doe and, I swear, it literally goes on forever.)
So, no, Meet John Doe is definitely no Mr. Smith Goes Go To Washington but I still liked it, mostly because of the chemistry between Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. I wanted to be Barbara Stanwyck’s character. Seriously, watching a film like Meet John Doe, leaves me convinced that I was born several decades too late. If I had been born in 1918, I could have been a quick-witted, cynical, and secretly romantic intrepid girl reporter at a major metropolitan newspaper.
Even better, I would never have to worry about ever being told to “pay it forward.”
Through the Shattered Lens 