Film: 'It Happened Tomorrow' (1944)

It's sweet, unexpected, and really rather kooky. It may be the only time I get to see Dick Powell in a movie, and thankfully is is a good one. He was great in 'Richard Diamond, Private Detective' on the radio, and he's good here. As is Linda Darnell, rehabilitating herself from the dodgy performance in 'The Mark Of Zorro', and director Rene Clair, who made the extremely flimsy 'I Married A Witch' (IMAW). 'It Happened Tomorrow' (IHT) feels much better than than IMAW, which was almost disturbingly vacuous. There is a lot more of a through-line here, and the ending would have been unexpected in 1944. The ending to what? Is it time for the obligatory plot explanation. Not quite yet. We need to do some background.

Ah, some background, there was a show in the 1990s called 'Early Edition', which had a wonderful first season, and then stopped being aired in the UK. It was about a man who started receiving tomorrow's newspaper a day early, delivered by a cat, and set out to try and save people from the calamities occurring in the headlines. Apparently, the latter seasons fell apart, but I couldn't say so from personal experience. It was a nice season of television, and it may have been inspired partially by this movie, which in turn was inspired by a story by Hugh Wedlock and Howard Snyder, and was very similar to a one-act play by Lord Dunsany. Have we never mentioned Dunsany yet here on the Quirky Muffin? Corr! It must be some kind of hideous anomaly! IHT also keeps to a lesser known indicator of good movies: the presence of Sig Ruman. Hurrah! He's back again!

In IHT, a reporter in the late nineteenth century makes a flippant bet with a veteran colleage at his newspaper, after a bizarre conversational interlude, that he would do very well out of getting the paper a day early. Pops, the colleague, promptly shows up later and hands him one before vanishing into the night, and we get a bizarre string of narrative feedback loops over the next few days as Stevens, the reporter, is both influenced by and ends up guaranteeing the stories that he's reading early. He also becomes involved with some stage psychics, gets robbed, and ultimately is scared witless by reading his own obituary. Of course, that may not have been quite what it seemed...

In common with IMAW, this movie has a deep supernatural element, and a probable angel, but it also has a lot more story happening. It's much more interesting. The plotting is in fact very clever, as it never quite unravels in the ways that you think it might, and the last few sequences are very impressive as we chase over parts of the city and eventually down a chimney into the one fatal place that Stevens absolutely did not want to visit...

Dick Powell is quietly very good, Linda Darnell is capable and very pretty in places, and Jack Oakie is excellent as her uncle, with much mugging and fainting during a great and profitable interlude at the race track. It's all lots of fun. Hurrah for fun movies! And hoorah for movies told as flashbacks. Recommended.

O.