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Posted: **Thu Jun 20, 2024 10:02 am**

WHEN TOMORROW COMES
(John M Stahl, 1939)
Release date: 23 September 2024
Limited Edition Blu-ray (UK premiere)

Pre-order here

Following the runaway success of Love Affair, Irene Dunne (The Awful Truth) and Charles Boyer (A Woman’s Vengeance) were reunited for When Tomorrow Comes, a heartbreaking romantic melodrama.

Despite differences of class and politics, concert pianist Philip (Boyer) falls in love with waitress Helen (Dunne), and they embark on a torrid romance. However, Helen soon finds that Philip is hiding something from her...

Directed by John M Stahl (Leave Her to Heaven) and based on a story by James M Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice), When Tomorrow Comes was later remade by Douglas Sirk as Interlude, and stands as a classic of the so-called ‘Women's Picture’ genre.

INDICATOR LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES

• 2K restoration
• Original mono audio
• Audio commentary with academic and curator Eloise Ross (2024)
• Geoff Andrew on ‘When Tomorrow Comes’ (2024): the writer and critic assesses the film and places it within the career of director John M Stahl
• The Mark of Cain (2024): video essay comparing When Tomorrow Comes to Douglas Sirk’s 1957 adaptation of the same James M Cain short story
• Image gallery: promotional and publicity material
• New and improved English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Limited edition exclusive booklet with a new essay by Pamela Hutchinson, an archival interview with John M Stahl, a look at author James M Cain’s reaction to the film, archival pieces in which actors Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer each profile their co-star, an overview of contemporary critical responses, and film credits
• UK premiere on Blu-ray
• Limited edition of 3,000 copies for the UK

All extras subject to change

#PHILE451B
BBFC cert: TBC
REGION B
EAN: 5060697923957

Posted: **Thu Jun 20, 2024 2:15 pm**

Oddly the Sirk remake has only been released in France-- you'd think KLSC would have licensed it if not Indicator themselves alongside this one (it's Universal, so should theoretically be available), so I assume there's something preventing its release elsewhere. Hard to picture Stahl doing James M Cain but I am intrigued-- anyone seen this one?

Posted: **Thu Jun 20, 2024 3:20 pm**

This is a favorite of mine (I already had the Kino) –– vastly superior to Sirk's, which is not a remake but a return to the source material that has vastly different results. It has an incredible scene of union-rallying and a very moving denouement. There's a very charming anecdote that Molly Haskell relates of Andrew Sarris telling her the plot of the movie and dissolving into tears (I have the quote at the ready but didn't save the source):

Spoiler

"Andrew cried even more easily at movies than I did [...] he would occasionally recount the plot of some woman's film I hadn't seen and wasn't likely to in those pre—VCR and cassette days. I remember on one occasion his telling me the story of When Tomorrow Comes, in which Irene Dunne's union activist and Charles Boyer's married musician fall in love, but, after a night in which they are stranded by a flood and think they will die, the waters subside and they must part. In the concluding scene they meet for a last meal, she wearing a new dress for which she has spent all her hard-earned wages. As Andrew began to describe Irene Dunne telling Charles Boyer about her dress, he choked up, tried to continue and couldn't. We sat there feeling ridiculous, laughing and crying together."

Posted: **Thu Jun 20, 2024 4:15 pm**

This is Stahl at his best, one of the great class-crossed lovers melodramas. Grace notes and grounded detail are intertwined perfectly, gliding from the overflowing urban flavor of the first act to the spiritual intimacy of the climax. I didn’t remember that Cain was part of the mix (I’m not sure his personality is very apparent), but Stahl clearly has stronger source material here than in Magnificent Obsession or Imitation of Life, and runs with it.

Posted: **Wed Jul 03, 2024 6:33 pm**

I agree this is great and better than the Sirk version, though I don’t think that one is necessarily bad (there’s also a 60s British version I haven’t seen). Cain indeed was not a big part of the Stahl version, saying the movie bore no relation to the original story, and the Sirk version is a remake of the film, not a new adaptation of book. Cain did have an interesting story about the movie and Stahl though:

We got into a lawsuit over that picture. They put the couple in a church overnight. In my book, Serenade, the couple spends three or four days in a church. One day [a] writer of When Tomorrow Comes sat down beside me and apologized. He told me that John Stahl, the director, had assembled the various people working on this story and told them that Universal had paid me a good round sum for this story and that he felt that if there was anything in any of my other books that would help them out, to go ahead and see what could be taken! I went home and thought to myself, "If you won't sue on that, when will you sue? You owe it not only to yourself but to other writers. So I did sue. Stahl and the producers gave depositions. Stahl denied everything. At this point I said to my lawyer, "I'm getting very disturbed about this thing. Practically everything in the record corresponds with what Stahl says. Practically nothing corresponds with the story the writer told me." My lawyer said that, since we had filed the suit already, we might as well go ahead.

John Stahl took the witness stand. And here is what I am leading to: the contrast of an honest man, wrongly accused, with Watergate and Nixon. My lawyer fired a pretty sharp question at him, and Stahl's lawyer objected, saying, "Irrelevant and immaterial." "Sustained," said the judge. But Stahl, who kind of had a Brooklyn way of talking. said, "Your Honor, I'd like to thank the court for giving me the benefit of the law. Yet since Mr. Cain made his charge in good faith, this is my one chance to clear my name. I will answer any question, and I don't care how irrelevant or immaterial or how plain silly."

There went my case. He convinced me, and I hardly heard the rest of it. My lawyer still gave him a pretty hot ride and asked him who thought of having the scene in the church. "I don't remember." Stahl answered, "but if it helps any, I did." Now you contrast that with the shifty, cover-everything-up stonewalling of Nixon and his people.

But why did the writer fabricate the story?
Someone suggested thay he had a guilt complex and was always accusing himself of something, always beating his chest. I'd been to the little boys room when I met him in the hall. I said “Why did you tell me this goddamned cock and bull story? There's not a word of truth in it." He stammered, and he said that I didn't understand him correctly. He had this mea culpa complex. Also he was one of those literary guys who was much hipped on my book, Serenade, and he'd rather say he was directed to steal from Serenade than be caught snooping around my literary pants. Serenade deals with a theme [homosexuality] he probably flinched from admitting.

Music was a major subject of Cain’s writing, he tried to be an opera singer before becoming a successful writer and I sometimes wonder if that was his real passion and the hard boiled crime stories were what paid the bills. One of the changes made from Mildred Pierce in the film is changing Veda from an opera singer to a pianist and it’s a bigger part of the novel, which is partially replaced by the murder aspect of the film. There’s actually more Cain adaptations about music in the 30s-50s than noirs, including a couple of comedies.

Posted: **Thu Jul 04, 2024 1:58 pm**

Something similar happened with Patricia Highsmith in 1977 - I don't think she actually sued Wim Wenders over it, but she tartly (and correctly) observed that he hadn't limited himself to Ripley's Game, the novel that he'd actually licensed as the basis of The American Friend.

Posted: **Thu Jul 04, 2024 2:13 pm**

That story def makes me like Stahl, thanks for sharing it!

Posted: **Tue Sep 17, 2024 9:00 am**

Final specs:

Posted: **Tue Sep 17, 2024 9:12 am**

Red Screamer wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2024 4:15 pm This is Stahl at his best, one of the great class-crossed lovers melodramas. Grace notes and grounded detail are intertwined perfectly, gliding from the overflowing urban flavor of the first act to the spiritual intimacy of the climax. I didn’t remember that Cain was part of the mix (I’m not sure his personality is very apparent), but Stahl clearly has stronger source material here than in Magnificent Obsession or Imitation of Life, and runs with it.

It was fascinating reading the Cain source for this - often referred to as "a short story", it was actually a four-part magazine serial later published as a novella. Basically, what Stahl took from Cain is the union activism (something that Cain had been interested in since his days as a labour correspondent in the late 1910s) and the basic idea of a working-class woman going out with a man several notches higher up the social scale, to the visible chagrin of her union-organiser colleague. But the man isn't married, and his deep dark secret is that he's totally under the thumb of his truly monstrous mother, very much the villain of the piece (to say that she does not approve of her son marrying a mere waitress would be putting it mildly) and with no equivalent in the Stahl film.

And while part one of the serial is very close indeed to the film, it diverges significantly from the start of part two, and by part four it's become completely unrecognisable - in the film, the union subplot is neatly tied up in a matter of seconds (it being no longer relevant to the central romance), whereas in Cain's original it has an entire second act, whereby

Spoiler

the victory over Karb Restaurants is just the first of many, and while Carrie - Cain's protagonist - works on various union campaigns to bring down bigger organisations than Karb, she's simultaneously placing large bets on the stock market thanks to her insider knowledge that the companies' fortunes may be about to change dramatically thanks to major strikes.

As for the scene allegedly lifted from Serenade, the judge correctly ruled that while both the novel and film feature a scene in which the couple shelters from a storm in a church, that in itself is such a commonplace scenario (since churches are traditionally places of literal as well as spiritual shelter) as to be non-copyrightable.

What was crucial was the tone, in which respect the two works couldn't have been more different, with When Tomorrow Comes being quiet and chaste, while in Serenade the couple basically has rampant animalistic sex right in front of the altar, something that's impossible to imagine Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne's characters even so much as thinking about, let alone actually doing. By the end of the hearing, Cain himself was convinced that he was on a hiding to nothing, although it's an important landmark case in US legal history in that it set a precedent for future copyright disputes.

Posted: **Tue Sep 17, 2024 6:38 pm**

That sounds fascinating Michael, and I think Cain is very underrated as a writer - has it been re-published more recently?

Posted: **Tue Sep 17, 2024 7:55 pm**

He never managed to publish A Modern Cinderella at the time - he offered it to ten magazines, and they all rejected it; Cain's wife suspected the union stuff was a bit too much for them, and then Universal bought the film rights for a decent amount of money so he lost interest in selling it to anyone else. But he finally published it in 1951 as the novella The Root of His Evil, which was easy enough to track down (it's on Kindle, and I don't remember it being that expensive).

Posted: **Sun Oct 06, 2024 4:16 pm**

When Beaver Comes.

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