Review of There's Always Tomorrow

Virtually unknown among Sirk's catalog, which is reasonably when you consider his classic films like 'All That Heaven Allows' and 'Imitation of Life.' But for a film this good to have not seen a DVD release is criminal. I had the good fortune of being able to see this gem at a public screening this week. This is easily one of the best films to come out of the studio era. The film concerns Clifford Grove (Fred MacMurray) a toy developer, whose family neglects him. His wife bails out on their plans constantly, for the children, and the children pay no attention to their loving father. Clifford runs into an old flame, who is back in town and begins to innocently spend some time with her while she's in town. But his sneaky children become suspicious of his activities and start to follow him, his son begins to convince his siblings that their father is having in affair. Their begin to psychological torment their father and ultimately drive him to desire leaving his family. It's painfully dark, and Fred MacMurray is brilliant. The psychological effect on the viewer is tremendous. It's dark and hopeless. If children were shown this on the advent of puberty, no one would ever get married. The stark black and white cinematography is always telling more than the story, with sneaky, sweeping pans and dollies the film keeps you guessing the duration. It's the kind of backhanded studio film, that was rarely produced, where the director gives the audience only ambiguities for resolution, cyclical images void of hope for Clifford, but ambiguous enough to get by censors at the studio, enough to imply that maybe things turned out for old Clifford. This is studio-era cinema at it's best. If you get a chance to catch a screening of it on the new 35mm that is, supposedly, circulating art-house cinemas around the U.S., go. It's a shame that it is not more widely available, a radiant film from the 50s (though troubled and moderately sexist, symptomatic of the time period, but not so blatant that it can't be overlooked in the same way that critics can overlook the racism in 'Birth of a Nation').