OVP: When Tomorrow Comes (1939)

Film: When Tomorrow Comes (1939)

Stars: Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, Barbara O'Neil

Director: John M. Stahl

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Sound Recording*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

The list of films that beat Gone with the Wind at the Oscars is short.  The film, considered by many to be the definition of a Classical Hollywood film, was nominated for 13 Academy Awards, winning eight, though one of those losses was against itself (in Supporting Actress, Hattie McDaniel beat Olivia de Havilland).  The list of films that beat it include classics like Goodbye Mr. Chips and The Wizard of Oz, but it also includes When Tomorrow Comes, a movie that I'd never really heard of before I noticed it leaving Criterion Streaming (if you wanna catch it, get there by the end of the month!) & that it was on my OVP "tough to find films" list.  As a result, I wanted to see who the film was that could possibly beat the landmark epic for an Oscar, and while I come away enjoying the picture, I more so come away confused.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is really two halves of a movie, as the film plays around quite a bit with genre.  The first half has Helen (Dunne), a waitress who is part of a group of striking servers demanding their due (right on!) meeting Philip (Boyer), a man she initially thinks is a spy from management but turns out to be a man who is smitten with her.  They get to know each other, and after one night (in which they scandalously spend the night together, chastely, in a church) they have fallen in love.  It turns out, though, that Philip is married to Madeleine (O'Neil), a woman who suffers from some sort of depression, and relies on Philip to keep her from spiraling.  Madeleine warns Helen off from her husband, or from Helen being his mistress, and despite the fact that she loves him, she knows she cannot breakup this marriage & look herself in the mirror.  The two refuse to say goodbye, instead simply saying "I'll see you in a bit" when Philip leaves for a flight, knowing that they likely will never see each other again.

Dunne & Boyer had earlier in 1939 made the classic Love Affair, so audiences were desperate to see more, and so this movie made sense as they'd shown they had chemistry.  If you read this blog often, you'll know I have divergent opinions on these two actors-Irene Dunne is almost always a treat, owning the screen, while I find Boyer's overwrought romance too hammy & done.  This is not quite the case for When Tomorrow Comes.  I don't like Boyer in this, but there are times he works with the film, perhaps just as well as Dunne, especially after it has a strange shift from screwball romantic comedy (complete with clumsy waitresses on a picket line!) into deep melodrama.  The film itself gave me whiplash-the shift in tones is too much, but both tones are good so I'm going with 3 stars as I liked it in spite of its clear technical flaws.

The film's Oscar win is a mystery to me, though.  Honestly-it's not a case of me not caring for the movie's sound, it's more that there is nothing specific about the sound work in the movie that caught my ear. I'm assuming it won for the hurricane scenes, but they're playing off-screen for the large part, and they are not anything different than what we'd seen in other films with large-scale storm sequences.  Boyer plays a piano player (sometimes they like musically-inclined films in this category), but he barely touches the keys the whole movie.  That this won over not just Gone with the Wind's burning of Atlanta, but also Mr. Smith's long filibuster & the bells of Notre Dame is one of the bigger Oscar mysteries I've come across in a while.