As expressed elsewhere, my fourth Sirk film confirms him as a filmmaker I like and respect tremendously, and consistently, but he has never been the satisfying whole experience I always expected him to be. Opulently framed, veiled critiques of 50s society are perhaps not so intrinsically interesting to me as I imagined—or I get too stuck in the superficial silliness of it all to really take pleasure in the underlying ironies as I watch. There’s Always Tomorrow is much less opulent, and much less veiled, a more direct and effective portrait of the effects social constructions have on the unwary, the great majority of perfectly decent people who will not fight for something real and before they know it it has become an impossibility. It is an unflattering and insightful portrait of contemporary masculinity (the robot metaphor was adorable, and much too much), and husbands and wives—and Joan Bennett’s chilling assertion of what a woman really wants is a sort of fascinating chicken- »»»