The Screening Log
There’s Always Tomorrow
Posted December 24, 2009 with 3 comments

1956, US Dir Douglas Sirk Cast Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Joan Bennett IMDb

"I had to escape because I was still alive. Alive, and wanting you."

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-and-egg prospect. It is a tender and cynical film, just as beautifully realized by Sirk & Metty in b&w, but still marred from me as always by the fact that a character will say whatever s/he needs to say to advance the plot: the whole scene where MacMurray’s children visit Stanwyck feels sabotagingly wrong. The compulsory corniness and standard-issue hand-wringing is I suppose what keeps me from engaging with Sirk fully—is this really what all this angst is about? Because the adults sound exactly as silly as the daughter who charmingly laments her “emotional problems.”

 

3 Comments »

I think this one is my favorite Sirk. The corniness that keeps you from fully connecting with his films is (I speculate) what really hits me — I am always ALWAYS surprised when ideas so sincere and emotions so clear bubble up from that corniness. They shouldn’t be there. I find the angst in this film all too real. It is a spike through the all the fake.

Now I am writing just to write, hoping that it will encourage you to blog some more.

Comment by Ian — 27 December 2009 @ 27 December 2009

It does encourage me–thank you! :)
I love the new light-weight feel ’round here… but now I need to have some thoughts. Much more serious business.

There are moments of such sincerity, but also moments that ring utterly false. I think I would feel the same way you do if the sincerity of the central characters carried through — trying to pinpoint why I enjoy some melodrama just as corny and with much less visual effort, and I think it’s that. I believe the characters in spite of it all. The corniness was much less jarring than scenes like when the children visit Stany, I didn’t believe a word of her reaction and she just said it so The Point of the movie could be articulated. That was really jarring. But I’m sure that’s something I’ll get over in time as much of the rest of it pleases me so.

I’m wildly overstating my objections: it’s a terrific film, and also my favorite Sirk yet. Did you read elsewhere Robert Osborne called it weak! :o

Comment by Lauren — 27 December 2009 @ 27 December 2009

Robert Osborne does not get Sirk. I remember several years ago when Molly Haskell chose Written on the Wind as one of The Essentials. (This was actually my first encounter with Sirk.) Robert was not happy.

Comment by Ian — 27 December 2009 @ 27 December 2009

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