For the Love of Film (Noir): Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951)

This is for the "For the Love of Film (Noir)" blogathon/fundraiser, hosted by my good friends Marilyn Ferdinand and Self-Styled Siren.

One of the hardest lessons I learned as a student of history came at the end of a senior research seminar. I had spent a semester on a research paper about the Women's Christian Temperance Union of Mt. Pleasant, MI, and whether their everyday activities changed after national WCTU president Frances Willard broadened the focus of the organization to include women's rights, prison reform, and other Progressive-era ideologies. I was distraught because the answer I came up with, after months of ruining my eyesight by looking through endless spools of microfilm, was "no, they did not." Frances Willard might never have existed, as far as these ladies were concerned. My professor told me that a "no" is as valuable as a "yes" to the study of history, even though it might not be as exciting.

Which is a lengthy way to say that Tomorrow Is Another Day is not a film noir, but you should still invest your time in locating and viewing it. I could describe it as a noir; it's certainly been described that way before: a recently released ex-con who's spent most of his life in prison becomes the fall guy for a bleach-blonde taxi dancer who kills a cop but lets him think he did it. You're envisioning single-source lighting and dramatic shadows, visions that grow more baroque when I say that they flee across the country, but they can't evade either the violence in his soul or the long arm of the law, no matter how far they run or attempt to pretend that they're someone else. But there's something missing, something distinctly non-noir about it. I firmly believe in noir as a genre, despite what Paul Schrader might think, but this film isn't noir.

Bill Clark (second-string Warner Bros. lead Steve Cochran) is released from prison after having spent 18 of his 33 years behind bars. The warden warns him about how strange civilian life will be: Clark has missed a lot, not least World War II and interacting with the opposite sex. He gets $222 (wages from his prison job), a bus ticket, and a hearty handshake before the door closes behind him. He heads into town and immediately reveals himself as an overgrown child: after gorging himself on pie and throwing back a couple of stiff ginger ales, he follows women around like a slackjawed Warner Bros. cartoon character. Desiring female companionship but not knowing how to talk to women, he goes to a taxi dance hall (remember, he was in prison when the taxi dance craze died off). Confusing professional friendliness with attraction (she asks for "a present," and hints that the present depends on "how much you like me"), he follows Cay Higgins (Ruth Roman) home, hires her to show him around New York City, and then invites himself in for a drink, probably the first drink of his life.

For a second-string guy who tended to play heavies, Cochran gives a convincing performance as the babe in the Big Apple. He seems uncomfortable in his adult-sized body, unsure of how to follow through on the tough-guy stances he learned in prison, full of bluster followed immediately by submission to authority when his bluff is called. He's like a Dead End Kid transplanted into a man's body, wearing a street-smart sneer to cover up the scared, neglected kid inside. That kid runs into grown-up, even noirish problems, almost immediately: Cay's "sponsor" George is waiting inside her apartment. Bill tries to sock him, George pulls a gun, Bill gets knocked out, the gun goes off, and when Bill wakes up Cay informs him that he's killed a cop, and they had better hit the road. They go first to Cay's family, who reject her because "taxi dancer" is code for "prostitute" (even though she informed him "I don't give private lessons"); then they set off across country, hopping trains and hitchhiking, stopping to get hitched because he's a gentleman and he loves her, and ending up picking lettuce in California for a kindly farmer. But the past, as they say, is never really past.

The bulk of the film is about their trip west and their attempts to start a new life as Mr. and Mrs. Mike Lewis. He buys her a watch ("it's gold plated," he beams; "guaranteed for 20 years!"); in a touching scene, she dyes her hair back to its original brown to please him and to cut ties to her life in New York; he's exhausted and burnt to a crisp from picking lettuce and wonders if it's all worth it; he befriends the boss's son, and "Mike" and Cay start to think about children. There are pauses for casual daydreams on grassy hillsides. We learn why he went to prison in the first place, and what life was like inside. "You worked a whole day just to dance a minute at Dreamland," she murmurs after learning that he made 10 cents a day as a welder. "It was worth it," he replies, and it made me tear up. But then the boss's son sees his face in a true crime magazine, and the past comes boiling up.

But not noirishly, and it's hard to figure out why, let alone explain it. It doesn't feel noir, I guess. There's no sense that Bill and Cay are doomed; indeed, there's some very weird uncertainty about the murder that made me constantly wonder whether they were fleeing from nothing at all. There's a sense that although Bill was the victim of a grave injustice as a child, the world is not an unjust place, and that people in it, from the cops to everyday folks, are probably going to do the right thing, and can be reasoned with. One character says, "We haven't got much, but what we've got is ours. Nobody had to pay for it." That's an ethos that everyone in this particular world seems to share, and I think that's what disqualifies this film from the noir pantheon. Essentially, noir is about impending doom and desperation so thick you need fog lights to see through it; it's a minefield in which there's no safe place to step; it's about having blood on your hands and not being able to wash it off. It can have those single-source lights and unmotivated shadows, but they're not necessary. It can have double-crossing dames and guys who make a single mistake and pay for it with their lives, but again, it can do without. But without that desperation, you have something else: a thriller, a mystery, a romance, a morality tale, etc. Tomorrow Is Another Day is something else. In the best possible way.

Now go check out the other entries, and donate to save The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me).