The following notes on Douglas Sirk's 1956 version of There’s Always Tomorrow were written by Josh Martin, PhD Student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A double feature of both the 1934 and 1956 versions of There's Always Tomorrow, each adapted from the same novel by Ursula Parrott, will screen at the Cinematheque on Saturday, September 30, beginning at 6 p.m. Each version will be introduced by Marsha Gordon, author of Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott. Admission is free for both screenings. Copies of Marsha Gordon's book will be made available for sale and signing before each screening, courtesy Leopold's Books Bar Caffè.
By Josh Martin
Douglas Sirk’s 1956 adaptation of There’s Always Tomorrow begins with a title card fit for a contemporary fairy tale – “Once upon a time, in Sunny California” – suggesting that fantastical dreams will be made reality in the land of bright lights and sunshine. With his trademark taste for irony, Sirk cuts immediately from this card to the streets of Los Angeles blanketed by pouring rain, establishing the gloomy mood that will define this story of lost love and domestic discontent. Amid his legendary run of Technicolor collaborations with cinematographer Russell Metty, including masterworks such as Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and Written on the Wind (1956), Sirk offers an equally astonishing cornucopia of black-and-white images in There’s Always Tomorrow, dominated by hard, low-key lighting. Though critic Christopher Sharrett notes that Sirk originally hoped to shoot in color, it is impossible to imagine the film without its ominous, noir-like ambience, even if the end result is far more pointedly devastating than outwardly sensational.
Sirk’s film is a reinterpretation of Ursula Parrott’s novel of the same name, previously adapted by Edward Sloman for Universal Pictures in 1934. Working from a script by noir specialist and regular TV scribe Bernard C. Schoenfeld, Sirk creates a film of reunions in multiple ways. The picture was Sirk’s second with Stanwyck, following 1953’s All I Desire, a film that critic Tom Ryan links thematically and stylistically with this follow-up collaboration. More crucially for a spectator well-versed in classic Hollywood, There’s Always Tomorrow reunites stars Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. While the two actors were last seen in Roy Rowland’s 1953 3-D western The Moonlighter, Stanwyck and MacMurray are better known for their collaborations in Mitchell Leisen’s tender holiday romance Remember the Night (1940) and, most famously, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), a vicious, bitter noir yarn.
Clifford Groves and Norma Vale could not be more distinct from Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson, the doomed amoral sociopaths in Wilder’s hard-boiled classic. Nonetheless, There’s Always Tomorrow plays off the viewer’s metatextual knowledge of the Stanwyck/MacMurray couple – their respective star images, their on-screen romances, and the pathos of seeing them together once again, a little older and a bit wearier. MacMurray stars as Cliff Groves, the patriarch of an all-American family and a local toy distributor. Groves lives a picturesque life in a Los Angeles suburb, but there are hints of uneasiness in his hustle-and-bustle-filled routine. At home, his three children effectively rule the roost: eldest son Vinnie (William Reynolds) and daughter Ellen (Gigi Perreau) dominate the phone lines, while youngest child Frankie (Judy Nugent) is the object of her mother’s obsessive, doting attention.
Viewers are introduced to the third member of the film’s love triangle, the perpetually busy Marion Groves (Joan Bennett), in the thick of this domestic chaos. Clifford has planned an elaborate evening in celebration of his wife’s birthday, but she declines: Frankie’s ballet recital takes the ultimate priority. As Ryan’s analysis astutely points out, “interruptions abound” in Sirk’s film, leaving desire and genuine emotional connection thwarted and disrupted. Enter Stanwyck’s Norma Miller Vale, a ghost from Cliff’s past who arrives on his doorstep on this fateful night, seemingly clearing the rain with her presence.
In large part due to a reclamation by scholars in the 1970s, Sirk’s melodramas are renowned for their withering criticisms of the racial, social, and sexual politics of American life during the postwar boom. From the taboo romance of All That Heaven Allows to the interrogation of racial identity in Imitation of Life (1959), Sirk’s excesses are always in service of a rigorously critical project. In There’s Always Tomorrow, Sirk places his characters in environments defined by artifice and the veneer of perfection. As a toy manufacturer and fashion designer, respectively, Cliff and Norma are merchants of fantasies – yet those same fantasies become suffocating symptoms of their own discontent. In one of the film’s most evocative images, Sirk’s mise-en-scène symbolically links Cliff with his prized toy design, Rex the walking-talking robot. As Cliff walks to a window, crushed by the dual weight of his rediscovered love and his mechanized, mundane life, the robot slowly waltzes out of the frame, doubling for our adrift protagonist and reflecting his notion that he’s “becoming like one of [his] own toys.” Norma, alternately, speaks of a desire for a more conventional life, away from the dollhouse world of high fashion. As a guest at Cliff’s home, she pointedly says “I’d trade every New York celebrity for a family just like this.”
The film presents spaces of regeneration that temporarily alleviate this displeasure. Removed from the stasis, frustration, and rain-soaked skies of suburban Los Angeles, Norma and Cliff reunite again in the fictionalized vacation oasis of Palm Valley, California. Cliff’s desert soiree becomes a fantasy space for the reclamation of his own virility and masculinity, a vision of a different life removed from the “rut” he claims to have slipped into. Yet all roads return to Cliff’s home – and no environment in Sirk’s film is more restrictive than the domestic sphere. What used to be “such a happy home” becomes a space of mistrust and suspicion. In a striking shot late in the film, Cliff calls Norma from his living room, visually bracketed by the columns of his staircase – columns that, at this moment, feel like prison bars.
Contemporary reviews of the film naturally seemed to miss much of the broader critique of Sirk’s ironic melodrama. Bosley Crowther, The New York Times’ longtime critic, reduced the film to a simple message: “Have mercy on Dad.” While the film’s suggestion of an emptiness at the heart of post-war masculinity is indeed critical, There’s Always Tomorrow speaks to a broader cultural malaise. The film diagnoses an intense exhaustion with everyday life, one shared by Cliff, Norma, and even Marion. The necessity of life’s divergent paths is a crushing weight on the shoulders of these characters, made worse by the stale reality of American domesticity.
Dripping with irony yet painfully touching, Sirk’s romantic reunion between Stanwyck and MacMurray paints a world with glimmers of hope and connection amidst the despair. But there is no escape. Cliff and Norma must accept their choices; they cannot go back to reclaim their youth. Their fantasies of escape and regeneration can never come to fruition. The bustling routine of the home returns. To borrow a grim turn of phrase from Sirk’s interview with FilmKritik, they are now “imprisoned animals in a zoo.” Like mechanized toys and models, they resume their roles, trapped inside the quintessentially American lives they have created for themselves.