The Kremlin Letter

A movie that's been back in the FXM rotation for a little while and that I surprisingly haven't blogged about before is The Kremlin Letter. I saw it once many years ago, and thought that perhaps I had mentioned it at some point here, but a search of the blog says no. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow (August 21) at 9:50 AM, so, having recorded it from the recent run of showings, I sat down and watched that showing to do a post here.

The first thing I noticed is that, sadly, the opening credits are letterboxed to 2.35:1, but after the opening credits, the print goes down to the 16:9 ratio of today's television sets. After the pre-credits exposition of some sort of espionage business going on in Paris, we get to the main action. Charles Rone (Patrick O'Neal) is a US Navy officer who is called into a meeting with an admiral much above him in the military pecking order (director John Huston in a cameo). The Admrial tells Rone that Rone is being relieved of his duties because civilian intelligence needs him for some sort of super-secret mission, Rone being able to speak several languages and having other qualities suitably for the spy game. Rone is supposed to go somewhere to meet with a "Highwayman" (Dean Jagger) and his assistant Ward (Richard Boone) to find out about that mission.

Rone goes to some small town and meets the two men, who inform him that a letter was written in which the Soviets told the Americans that the Communist Chinese, having gotten the bomb, were a threat, and perhaps the US and USSR should try to work together behind the scenes to neutralize mainland China (remember that at the time the movie was released in 1970, the US still recognized Taiwan as the one China). The US responded, and it's that letter that has gone missing. Perhaps Rone could go to Moscow and get that letter.

But first, Rone is going to have to get a crew together for the mission. Those are a guy codenamed "Whore" (Nigel Green), who is now in Mexico; "Warlock" (George Sanders), in drag playing piano at a nighclub in San Francisco; and "Erector Set", who can get into safes. However, he's too old for the job, so he offers his daughter, B.A. (Barbara Parkins), whom he's trained to do the work he used to do, and is able to open safes with her feet.

Meanwhile, over in the Soviet Union, there's Kosnov (Max von Sydow), the head of Soviet intelligence, who has blackmailed one of his agents in the US. Kosnov is married to Erika (Bibi Andersson), who is on her second husband, the first having died and stashed a bunch of money in a bank in the West. Rone realizes he can use her to get at Kosnov and the other Soviets. There's also Bresnavich (Orson Welles), some sort of high-up official who also has a lot of pull. The other members of the group, along with Rone, set about getting to know various Moscovites who might be able to help them.

Unfortunately, somebody on the Soviet side has learned that these Americans are in town, and they infiltrate the ring, kidnapping BA and leading Warlock to commit suicide, which is what really tips Rone off to the fact that something is terribly wrong. Ultimately, the movie is more about who's trying to mess up the operation than it is about trying to get that letter back.

The Kremlin Letter received poor reviews on its release back in 1970, and it's not too hard to see why. The plot is convoluted and hard to follow, and in the end much of what goes on doesn't really matter. Unlike a fun James Bond movie or the other spy spoofs of the 1960s, this one takes itself too seriously and winds up being forgettable for the things for which it should be memorable, and memorable for things ancillary to the movie.

One of those memorable things is Sanders in drag; another is the movie's use of Russian. There are enough Russian characters that the use of subtitles in what is supposed to be an English-langauge movie is too much. And since almost none of them are played by actual Russians, it's easy enough to go with the old Hollywood routine of having everyone speak English. After all, nobody expects characters in movies like To Be or Not to Be or Steve McQueen's version of An Enemy of the People to speak in what would have been the characters' real language. Here, however, the scenes start off with people speaking in Russian before going into a voiceover. It reminds me of another movie, Town Without Pity, that did the same thing with German. It's an extremely distracting technique.

Still, some people think The Kremlin Letter is great stuff. So it's definitely one of those movies you might want to see and judge for yourself.

Sometimes lousy, sometimes fun

Victor Mature famously said something to the effect of, "I'm not a very good actor, and I've got 68 movies to prove it!" I may have gotten the number wrong, as I think I've seen different numbers cited; in any case, it's the sentiment that counts. I can't help but think one of the movies Mature might have had in mind when he made the comment was The Tartars.

Mature plays Oleg, leader a band of Vikings somehwere in what would probably be northwest Russia around the end of the first milennium AD. They've been living in peace, and consider the local Slavs (technically not yet Russians at the time) their friends. The Tartars, however, don't like the Slavs. Togrul (Folco Lulli; you probably won't recognize the names of a lot of the cast because they're Italians in what was an international co-production; more on that later), chief of one small band of the Tartars, meets with Oleg trying to convince Oleg to join with the Tartars against the Slavs. Oleg refuses, leading to a battle in which Togrul is killed and his daughter Samia (Bella Cortez) is taken hostage.

Togrul's brother Burundai (Orson Welles) is understandably pissed off. Samia was betrothed to Togrul and Burundai's lord, the big leader of the Tartars, who we can guess isn't going to be happy either with losing a potential wife. Burundai responds by attacking a Viking ship, kidnapping Oleg's wife Helga (Liana Orfei). The obvious solution is a hostage exchange, after which everybody can live happily ever after.

Yeah, right. While lovely Samia has been in captivity with the Vikings, she hasn't particularly liked them. However, Oleg's kid brother Eric (Luciano Marin) has taken a liking to Samia. And after a while, he's able to break down her resistance. So when the time comes for the hostage exchange, Samia and especially Eric say no dice. The fact that Eric has knocked up Samia certainly doesn't help.

Meanwhile, back at Burundai's palace, he's been trying to extract information from Helga about the Viking's manpower, since, if they're not going to help him attack the Slavs, he might as well just annihilate the Vikings, too. Helga refuses; when the time comes for the hostage exchange, it's botched and poor Helga falls to her death.

There's still the matter of Eric and Samia; the Vikings hold a vote on whether to let them get married or kill them, but before the vote can be decided, the Tartars attack, setting up the climax.

Hoo-boy is The Tartars a silly movie. Poor Victor Mature has to wear that ridiculously skimpy outfit that he's much too old for. As for Orson Welles, I can't help but think that the only reason he made this movie is for the paycheck. He was probably tying to get one or another of his movies made; based on the date The Tartars was released, I'm guessing it would be funding for The Trial. He's well into the Fat Orson phase, sleepwalking through a terrible role.

The two Americans don't mesh well with the Italian cast, but at least the location work (in Yugoslavia, another of those co-productions of the early 1960s) is nice. The movie is only 83 minutes, yet it feels longer because of an extended dance sequence and a bunch of shots of the Tartars chasing the Vikings or vice versa which look like they're there to pad the running time.

Although The Tartars is from a technical standpoint a fairly lousy film, it's fun for one watch because of what a mess it is. It got a release in the US courtesy of MGM, which is how it's ended up on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

A new(ish) Orson Welles documentary

TCM's programming for tonight is a night of Orson Welles movies, although the night is kicking off with a documentary called The Eyes of Orson Welles at 8:00 PM.

I haven't seen the documentary, as it was only released last year, and this is the first TCM showing. I notice, however, that it's directed by Mark Cousins, which gives me a bit of pause. Cousins directed the multipart series The Story of Film that ran on TCM several years back. TCM programmed a bunch of great stuff in conjunction with the series, but the series itself wasn't very good, with a lot of images that didn't seem to fit, such as a running joke on the TCM boards about whether the guy caught his bus in reference to reference to a guy, well, trying to get his morning bus. That and the coffee.

The IMDb reviews on this new documentary are sharply divided, and the synopsis also makes me wonder, as it's described as an open letter to Welles using Welles' sketchbooks. I can see why this would cause such a difference of opinion.

As always, watch for yourself. I don't know if it's on DVD.

Not as magnificent as legend has it

Another recent watch off my DVR was The Magnificent Ambersons, the 1942 movie that is probably best remembered for the fact that the studio edited it over the objections of its director, Orson Welles.

Dolores Costello plays Isabel Amberson, daughter in a wealthy family in Indiana in the late 19th century. She's being pursued romantically by Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), but Cotten makes the mistake of getting drunk while serenading her, which cases her father to break off the engagement. Instead, Isabel marries Minafer (Don Dillaway), while Eugnee goes off to become a success in life.

Roughly two dozen years pass, to around 1900. Isabel has an adult son George (Tim Holt), and they live in the old Amberson mansion together with Isabel's sister-in-law Fanny (Agnes Moorehead). Eugene, for his part, has become relatively successful as a manufacture of the new-fangled automobile. He's a widower with a daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter) who is about George's age. George has been spoiled rotten, and thinks that automobiles are an idiotic idea. Worse, he gets it in his head that Eugene has only returned for two reasons, both having to do with Isabel: one is that Eugene might still love Isabel; the other is that George thinks Eugene is fishing for an infusion of capital, specifically, Isabel's inheritance.

Idiotic George, for his part, announces that there's no way in hell he's going to do real work, either taking a profession like the law or doing manual labor. Instead, he's going to be a yachtsman or something; how the hell he ever thought he was going to make ends meet living like this is a mystery. General scuttlebutt is that George and Lucy would make a good couple, and they do go riding together, but Lucy wants a stable future, not a flake with no idea what he wants to do in life. George's father dies, revealing that there's not much to inherit, and to keep Isabel from Eugene, since the two really did remain friends, George takes her on a long trip which effectively kills her and depletes the family fortune.

The Magnificent Ambersons isn't a bad movie, but it's not without its flaws, and those aren't necessarily due to the editing. Welles insisted on using all sorts of camera tricks, and most of them not only add little to the movie, they detract by making the camera tricks the focus of the movie and not the plot. The story and acting are good, although George is an irritating enough character that at times when he's on the screen I found the movie a bit tougher to watch.

Supposedly, the original cut of the movie flopped badly in previews, which is why RKO edited it down by chopping about 50 minutes and leaving us with an 88-minute movie. Would Welles' original vision be better? I wouldn't be surprised if it would. But I also don't think it would be the masterpiece a lot of people believe it would have been. My guess, since none of the cut footage is known to survive, is that the original cut probably did need some editing since it came in at nearly two and a half hours, but that it wouldn't have needed to be cut down to 90 minutes. Also, the studio did have the impetus of that disastrous preview showing, Welles' going over budget, and changing tastes thanks to the American entry into World War II. And as I said above, The Magnificent Ambersons is still pretty good.

Tyrone Power in period action flick #15872745689207583548267

It's said that Tyrone Power grew tired of making all those swashbuckling movies. Heaven knows he made enough of them. One of those costume pieces I haven't blogged about before is coming on on FXM Retro tomorrow morning at 11:00 AM, and again early Saturday morning: Prince of Foxes.

Power plays Andrea Orsini, a man in the court of Cesare Borgia (Orson Welles). Borgia is trying to gain more territory for himself, and has some very clever ideas about how to do it. One of the little dukedoms in what is now Italy -- remember that the place was a lot of city-states and small kingdoms back in the early 1500s -- is the Città del Monte. Borgia sends Orsini there ostensibly to be the ambassador to the tiny dukedom, but in fact it's to gain intelligence on the place's defenses: much of the place is a fortified city-state atop a mountain, run by Count Verano (Felix Aylmer). Along the way, Orsini stops in Venice, where he meets the Countess Verano (Wanda Hendrix), not knowing who she really is. Also he gets waylaid by a would-be assassin Mario (Everett Sloane), and stops off at a nice farm, where he sees his mother, at which point we learn that Orsini is a made up identity and that Andrea is in fact of low birth.

Anyhow, Orsini eventually makes it to the Città del Monte and as he works there, he begins to discover that the Count is in fact a decent man, unlike Orsini's boss. It's enough to make Orsini think about changing loyalties, but there's also the problem that Orsini was smitten by the Countess from the first time he met her, and the feeling might be mutual. Eventually, Orsini decides to join up with the Count even though their situation vis-à-vis the Borgias is wholly untenable: the Borgias' forces could destroy the Città del Monte any time they'd like.

Sure enough, Borgia comes along and attacks; the Count dies during the battle, and then the Borgias lay siege to the city it's going to lead to the city's eventual surrender. But since Tyrone Power is playing the good guy, you know that he's goign to come back and save them from those horrid Borgias....

Prince of Foxes is a solidly good movie, although if you've seen enough of Tyrone Power's historical movies this one will blend in with some of the others quite a bit. Power is just fine in his role as are most of the male actors; Wanda Hendrix is an almost nonentity as the Countess which is down to her bland acting and not the script. Worse, however, is that the movie is in black and white. There are several theories as to why Fox wouldn't make this in Technicolor when the movie just screams for brilliant color -- especially because it was filmed on location. I thought I read someplace that they weren't able to film in color because the Technicolor cameras required so much light that the Italian authorities were afraid it would damage the interiors of the historic sites where they were going to do shooting, although that may be another movie, as IMDb doesn't mention that theory. There's also the possibility that Fox was using blocked funds that they couldn't get out of Italy to make the movie, and they didn't have enough to bring over Technicolor cameras from America. Whatever the reason, the movie is in black and white, which is a huge shame.

Prince of Foxes is available on DVD, although the TCM Shop page for it claims the movie is in Technicolor.

The Long Hot Summer

Coming up at 4:00 PM today on TCM is The Long, Hot Summer.

The film opens up with young Ben Quick (Paul Newman) walking along a road in rural Mississippi, trying to hitch a ride. He eventually gets picked up by a convertible with two young ladies in the front seat: Clara Varner (Joanne Woodward) and her sister-in-law Eula (Lee Remick). They take him to town, which is also where they happen to live. Ben discovers that their father is the richest man in town and pretty much owns everything there is worth owning in the town, so Ben plans to approach the Varner father to ask about getting a job.

The only thing is, Dad isn't home just now because he's recuperating in hospital. So Ben has to ask the son, Jody (Tony Franciosa) about getting a job. Jody manages the general store for Dad, but it's not exactly a great relationship that father and son have. Dad Will (Orson Welles) thinks that his son isn't enough of a man, evidenced in part by the fact that Eula seems quite interested in sex, but Jody hasn't been able to get her pregnant an produce an heir to the Varner fortune yet. As for Clara, she's the local schoolteacher. She's got a bit of a man in her life in the form of Alan (Richard Anderson), but he isn't enough of a man for Will, either. He's under the thumb of his mother, afraid to ask for Clara's hand in marriage.

So you can probably guess that Will begins to take a shining to Ben, since Ben is a take charge sort of guy and exactly the sort of strong man that Will thinks the family needs to produce a strong heir. And you can also tell from the opening scene that eventually the sparks are going to fly in one way or another between Ben and Clara. Will begins to give Ben more responsibilities, which understandably irks Jody to no end. But Ben also has a past, which is another thing you probably should have been able to tell from that opening scene. As with Montgomery Clift's character in the opening of A Place in the Sun or John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice, seeing somebody hitchhiking into town at the beginning of a movie implies that there's something the character is trying to get away from. In the case of Ben Quick, it's accusations that he burns barns, and had to make a quick escape (no pun intended) from the last town he was in when another barn burned down. And sure enough, once you learn that, you can guess that there's going to be a barn burning in this town too, although it's made quite clear who started the fire.

It goes on like this for close to two hours, being overheated and never quite going anywhere, thanks to the fact that it's based on material by William Faulkner. I think I've stated before that I've never been the biggest Faulkner fan, probably going back to the days when I had to read As I Lay Dying for a high school English class. He's not as much of a slog as Tennessee Williams, although the screenplay here comes across almost as though it could have been from Williams' material as much as Faulkner's. Still, it's physically a well-made movie. Everybody acts well, and there's lovely cinematography and sets. It's just that the story made me want to reach through the screen and smack some sense into these people.

The Long, Hot Summer is available on DVD, so if my relatively short notice in mentioning this film made you miss today's TCM airing, you've still got a chance to see it.

Fridy Night Spotlight: Orson Welles

Now that we're in a new month, we get a new Friday night spotlight on TCM. Film critic David Edelstein will be presenting the work of Orson Welles, both as a director and as an actor, as there's going to be one night of movies that have him in the cast but which he did not direct. After all, you can't really put the spotlight on Orson Welles without showing The Third Man.

Anyhow, tonight's first night of the spotlight looks at the early part of Welles' career, starting at 8:00 PM with Citizen Kane. The one that sounds interesting is Too Much Johnson at 1:45 AM, which was conceived as incidental pieces to accompany a stage play which was never produced, and which was considered lost for decades. I haven't seen it, so I can't comment on it. Orson Welles is one of those filmmakers I prefer in smaller doses, however.

I also don't watch CBS Sunday Morning or listen to NPR's Fresh Air much, so I don't know much about Edelstein as a critic or how well he's going to do on TV. But if he's been working on a show like CBS Sunday Morning, that shouldn't be a problem.

That film they "destroyed"

TCM is showing The Magnificent Ambersons tonight at 8:00 PM in honor of costume designer Edward Stevenson. I have to admit that this is one of those movies that I've always found a tough slog for whatever reason, and I don't think I've actually seen it all the way through. It's one of those movies that I first learned about, I believe, from watching some documentary or another on PBS back in the days where you had to be in a huge city to have more than four or five TV channels. It was mentioned, of course, because it's the Orson Welles movie that was "destroyed" by the studio. Those evil studio bosses, ruining the movie!

Ever since I first tried to watch the movie, though, I've wondered how much of the problem I had is because of the studio editing it, and how much is down to the movie perhaps not being quite as good as it's cracked up to be. Finally having done a bit of online research, I'm still not certain. Apparently, Orson Welles' original edit of hte movie was quite a bit longer than the roughly 90-minute version we have today. There's nothing wrong with longer movies, of course; even Welles' previous Citizen Kane ran two hours and is damn good at that running time. But, for whatever reason, the preview audiences didn't like the first cut, or a second preview that had brief edits. It's after this tht the big changes were made.

Robert Wise, who worked as an editor on the film, this being before he became a top-notch director, would later claim that Welles' original wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. Composer Bernard Herrmann, on the other hand, so a large portion of his score go when about a third of the movie was excised, to the point that he decided he didn't want his name on the credits. They also changed the ending, although supposedly the studio ending is more true to the book. I haven't read the original book either, and my relatively brief searching didn't yield much information on what Tarkington himself thought. He died four years after the movie was released but was blind by the end of his life.

The impression I'm beginning to get now is that there probably was a great movie to be made from Tarkington's original source material, but that neither the 1942 movie we got, nor what Orson Welles conceived, was quite it. Kind of like Greed in that regard. But judge for yourself.

The Roots of Heaven

The Fox Movie Channel had at lunchtime today the 1958 movie The Roots of Heaven. My box guide lists the movie as being on FMC again tomorrow morning at 9:15 AM. But Amazon claims you can get a digital copy of it, or an out-of-print Blu-Ray, or a DVD import from Europe, so I gues it's worth mentioning here.

Errol Flynn gets top billing, although he's not the lead by any stretch of the imagination. The actual lead is Trevor Howard, playing Morel. Morel is an early conservationist working in French Equatorial Africa, in what is now Chad. He's tryin gto protect the majestic African elephant, without much success. Indeed, he's been trying to get the colonial authorities to sign his petition to outlaw elephant hunting, but he can't get in to see them at all. In fact, when he finally does get to see the colonial governor, we find that the governor is trying to make things as perfect as possible for the upcoming visit of US TV commentator Sedgwick (Orson Welles, in a small role).

What's a guy like Morel to do? Why not take extreme measures, like shooting would-be elephant poachers in the buttocks? Not to kill them, but to send the message. And it certainly does send a message once Sedgwick gets shot: he goes back to Amreica vowing to use his TV show as a vehicle for ginning up support for Morel's ban on elephant hunting (on the set of that TV show about a half hour in is actually the last we see of Sedgwick). It also has an effect on a couple of locals. One, the barmaid Minna (Juliete Greco) actually becomes the first person to sign the petition. She's followed by Forsythe (the aforementioned Flynn).

Morel goes out into the bush to protet those elephants, while the authorities are after him for obvious reasons. Minna tries to convince the authorities not to arrest Morel, but when they don't agree to that, she goes off with Forsythe in search of Morel! They also wind up not being the only ones to join Morel's Robin Hood-like band of animal lovers. Some, such as colonial administrator Paul Lukas, seem to be sincere; others, especially the native Africans who are in an uprising against the French colonists (the movie was released in 1958, a few years before the big decolonialisation year of 1960) are more trying to use Morel as a way to get their own message out to the west. And if all that weren't enough, about an hour and 20 minutes in to the movie, American press photographer Eddie Albert survives a plane crash not far from where Morel and his crew are hiding, and he joins them as long as it's convenient from him to be working with them.

Unfortunately, The Roots of Heaven descends into a convoluted mess. There are a lot of interesting ideas here, but the plot doesn't resolve very much. Characters also disappear (Orson Welles) and appear (Eddie Albert) too quickly. It's all a bit of a shame, because there is a fair bit about the movie that's good. Errol Flynn's part is a small one, but he does quite well with it. Trevor Howard is very good, playing the sincere man with a lot of Don Quixote in him. Eddie Albert's character provides some comic relief. There's also a scene in which Morel and his supporters punish the matron who runs a safari business -- by spanking her in the middle of a ballroom! It sounds nuts, but fits in well with Morel's preference to be relatively nonviolent (at least not to kill) if he doesn't have to.

John Huston directed, and in that regard I'd have to say The Roots of Heaven makes an interesting bookend with his other film A Walk With Love and Death: both have a fair amount of worthwhile stuff, but otherwise end up misfiring to an extent.

The Black Rose (1950)

Not to be confused with Fox's earlier The Black Swan, FMC is running the 1950 film The Black Rose tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM.

Both movies star Tyrone Power and both are historical adventure movies, something with Power did quite a bit of during his career. The Black Rose sees Power in the 13th century as William of Guthrie, a Saxon Englishman who still doesn't like the Normans because his father married a Norman and left him a bastard child, even though it's been two centuries since the Battle of Hastings, and the Norman/Saxon conflicts we saw in The Adventures of Robin Hood had in real life been resolved generations earlier. When William's father dies, William leads an attack on what had been the family castle, an attack which unsurprisingly is rather against the law, and rightly so. Left an outlaw and without much funds, William and his liege Tristram (Jack Hawkins) decide to go east, not to grow up with the country, but to seek fame and fortune, having heard about the riches in Cathay.

The first place that William and Tristram end up is not Cathay, but the Near East, although to be fair, it's more or less on the way if you assume it's easier to do the first part of the journey by boat instead of overland through Europe. After some adventure, our two heroes wind up in a caravan that's heading for Cathay, one guarded by General Bayan (Orson Welles). Going in a caravan from the Holy Land to China would make for a boring movie, so to liven things up, the screenwriters included a young lady hostage named Maryam (played by Cécil Aubry). She doesn't want to be sent to China, and believes that somehow, she's destined to end up in England. So, unsurprisingly, when William and Tristram show up, she believes that they were sent by God to save her from Bayan and take her to England. Needless to say, that's not Bayan's plan, and wasn't exactly William's plan, but Tristram talks so glowingly of England that William eventually decides to help the two of them try to escape.

None of this was part of Bayan's plans. Bayan, for his part, wants riches of his own, and plans to gte them by conquest. Bayan sends Walter ahead to tell the Emperor of Bayan's superior strength and why it would be better for the Emperor to become a vassal instead of having to deal wiht all that nasty violence, but Walter, on meeting the Chinese and seeing such things as gunpower, decides that siding with the Chinese offers him the best chance of escaping the clutches of Bayan and getting back to England.

The Black Rose is silly escapist fare, and has little if any grounding in real history as far as I can tell. (I'll admit to not being an expert on this period of history, however.) But damn if it isn't an entertaining movie. Power had played in this sort of movie quite a bit, and to be honest looks too old for the part, but it's a part he could have played in his sleep and he does a professional job. Welles is also good, not going over the top when he easily could have (much as I like The Third Man, Welles' line about Italian Renaissance violence versus Swiss peace is probably my least favorite part of that film by a good ways). The Black Rose was made over at Fox's British unit, meaning that much of the supporting cast is British, which is no bad thing.

The Black Rose got a DVD release as part of a box set of Tyrone Power's historical dramas, but I'm not certain if the set is still in print.

Tomorrow is Forever

Tonight kicks off the first night for TCM's June Star of the Month, Natalie Wood. Wood is one of the rare child stars who also had quite a bit of success as an adult actress. This first Monday in June sees several of her younger roles, kicking off with Tomorrow is Forever at 8:00 PM ET.

Wood is by no means the star; that honor goes to Claudette Colbert. She plays a woman in World War I whose husband (Orson Welles) goes off to fight. Unfortunately, Welles doesn't return, and Colbert gets word that he's been killed in the war. End of story.

Er, maybe not. Welles knocked up Colbert before going off to fight, leaving Colbert either to raise the son alone, or else get married to a nice man like George Brent who will help raise a stepson. And that's not all. Fast forward to 1939. Coming over from Nazi Germany to escape is the mysterious Mr. Kessler with adopted daughter Margaret (Natalie Wood); a man who looks somewhat like Colbert's first husband. But he's dead of course. Or is he?

To be honest, I find this sort of movie to be the typical horribly melodramatic stuff that constituted a lot of the "women's pictures" of the day. There are good love stories out there from that time period, even good stories that have Natalie Wood playing the precocious kid. (See The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.) Tomorrow is Forever, hoewver, isn't to my taste.

That isn't to say that it won't be to anybody's taste. There are a lot of people out there who like those "women's pictures". And, there are also a lot of people out there who enjoy Orson Welles more than I do. There might even be some people who like George Brent. There's nothing in Tomorrow is Forever to say that the acting is bad, so if you like those actors, there might well be no reason why you wouldn't like the movie.

Tomorrow is Forever doesn't seem to have been released to DVD, though, so if you want to watch it, you'll have to catch the rare TCM showing.