One More Tomorrow

I mentioned the other day that I had a movie on my DVR called One More Tomorrow. It's going to be on TCM tomorrow at 6:00 AM as part of a morning and afternoon of the movies of Ann Sheridan, since she was born on Feb. 21, 1915.

Sheridan nominally gets top billing, but the real star here is Dennis Morgan. He plays Tom Collier III, a playboy who lives in Connecticut in a house that's probably been in the family, and not just his outright, since his father (Thurston Hall) is the one who's the wealthy businessman. Tom is hosting a party for the swell society people, where his seeming best friend Pat Regan (Jack Carson) is serving as butler; said party is right around September 1939 when World War II kicked off in Europe. Odd for a movie released in 1946, but more on that later.

One of the guests at the party is Cecelia Henry (Alexis Smith), a gold-digger who seems intent on getting Tom for a husband; at least, she seems like she might be the right social class for him. Also showing up at the party, but not as a guest, is a crew from the "liberal" magazine Bantam, headed by photographer Christie Sage (that's Ann Sheridan). "Liberal" here means not just being openly anti-Nazi when that wasn't quite so prominent (since the movie is set before the US entry into World War II), but also papering over the evils of Soviet Communism. Tom follows Christie back to New York and the Bantam offices, and sparks fly.

Tom is eventually able to buy out Bantam, but not to neuter it. Instead, he lets the editor, Jim Fisk (Reginald Gardiner), keep the magazine's editorial line. But although Tom loves Christie and the feeling is clearly mutual, there's no way they can get married since Tom has his father and all those "polite society" people. So he marries Cecelia, and nobody lives happily ever after.

Some time passes, and Christie has dealt with the pain of being dumped by Tom by going to Mexico where she does some sort of avant-garde photo shoot (we never actually see the photos), before returning to New York to display the photos at a hoity-toity gallery. Tom gets an invite, and is planning on going, at least until Ceceli shows herself to be a controlling jerk. It's not only that, however; she impresses upon Tom the need to get rid of Pat as a butler.

Tom feels bad about having stood Christine up again, so he goes into New York to see her, although she doesn't want to see him since she can't deal with the emotional pain of his being unavailable to her. Meanwhile, back at Bantam, Jim has gotten a story about corruption in the defense procurement industry. It's a juicy one, but running it means that there's a pretty darn good possibility some of the people in Tom's social circle will be caught up in the scandal and go to prison for it. Cecelia resorts to underhanded means to spike the story.

One More Tomorrow came across as a movie that was really odd in tone, and looked like a lesser print. Indeed, it felt like something that shouldn't have come out after the end of World War II, having been released in mid-1946. A search on IMDb shows that the movie was actually filmed in mid-1943 and held back for three years for whatever reasons Warner Bros. had in mind. That 1943 filming date would explain a lot of the film's politics. (If Warner Bros. had really wanted to be daring, they could have tried making Bantam a magazine that opposed the rampant corruption of the New Deal.) As it was the height of World War II, there was a sense that the Soviets, as our nominal allies in the war, needed to be made more palatable, something seen in movies like The North Star and the thoroughly revolting Mission to Moscow which completely whitewashes Stalin's crimes against humanity.

The resulting tone makes One More Tomorrow a movie that's a little tough to take. A lot of the dialog feels forced, as though everybody needs to go through the motions of making wartime propaganda. But even then, there were movies made during the war that clearly promote the war effort and do a good job of it. One More Tomorrow is heavy-handed even in that way. As a result, it's a movie that'll probably be of interest mostly to completists of one or another of the stars.