Director – Rene Clair, Screenplay – Rene Clair & Dudley Nichols, Based on Originals by Lord Dunsany, Howard Snyder & Hugh Wedlock and the Ideas of Lewis R. Foster, Additional Dialogue – Helene Fraenkel, Producer – Arnold Pressburger, Photography (b&w) – Archie Stout, Music – Robert Stolz, Art Direction – Erno Metzner. Production Company – Arnold Productions, Inc..
Cast
Dick Powell (Larry Stevens), Linda Darnell (Sylvia Smith), Jack Oakie (Oscar Cigolini), Edgar Kennedy (Inspector Mulrooney), John Philliber (Pop Benson), George Cleveland (Mr Gordon)
Plot
A couple are about to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary and tell an unbelievable tale. Back around the turn of the 20th Century, Larry Stevens was working as a reporter for The Evening News. After going to visit the stage mentalist The Great Cigolini, Larry became entranced with his assistant Sylvia and asked her out. At the same time, the paper’s aging archivist Pop Benson gave Larry a copy of what he realised was tomorrow’s newspaper. This gave Larry foreknowledge of a robbery at the opera before it happened. Larry was able to go the performance, witness the robbery and return to write an article about it – only to then be arrested as an accomplice by the police. To help Larry, Sylvia claimed that she saw the robbery in one of her clairvoyant trances. Receiving further copies of tomorrow’s newspapers, Larry led the police to the criminals, tried to win big at the track and marry Sylvia, all before the headlines predicted that he was going to be killed.
René Clair (1898–1981) was a French filmmaker who had a career that began in the 1920s experimental/avant garde film movement. Clair crossed over to work in English language with the British made The Ghost Goes West (1935) and the musical Break the News (1938). These had him brought to Hollywood to make Flame of New Orleans (1941) with Marlene Dietrich for Universal. Clair enjoyed success in Hollywood for a number of years, making a return to France after World War II because of the greater freedom found there. His films move between artistic experimentation and the droll comedies of manners he made during his Hollywood period. Clair also made a surprising number of genre films – see below for full listing of these.
The credits of It Happened Tomorrow claim that the film is based on the works of several writers, including Lord Dunsany, a British writer of fantasy and weird fiction, who has been adapted a handful of times most notedly with the film Dean Spanley (2008). (The other writers listed alongside are all screenwriters – it is an odd way of listing a credit, which normally would just be for ‘story’, ‘screen story’ and ‘based on stories by’). I am unable to identify any specific Dunsany story that the film is drawn from. Some sources claim the film is based on Dunsany’s one-act play The Jest of Hahalaba (1928), although a look at the play’s description about an aristocrat who asks an alchemist to summon the spirit of Laughter shows that the two share little in common.
The premise of the newspaper that predicts tomorrow’s headlines has become a regular trope in genre cinema where the protagonist usually spends the rest of the story trying to prevent events predicted from happening. The same premise appears in other works such as The Pang Brothers’ Who is Running? (1997), an episode of The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells (2001) and the tv series Early Edition (1996-2000), as well as the Japanese horror film Premonition (2004). However, the idea was done here first with It Happened Tomorrow. The only small noticeable difference is that these other works regard the predicted headlines as something that can be changed, whereas here the future is immutable and what the newspaper predicts happening is exactly what does happen.
(l to r front row) editor George Cleveland, Dick Powell with tomorrow’s newspaper, police inspector Edgar Kennedy and love interest Linda Darnell
The surprise about watching It Happened Tomorrow after viewing a number of these other works is also that it is played in the vein of a 1930s/40s screwball comedy. There is a great deal of snappy humour in the situations and complications that Dick Powell finds himself caught up in. In addition, the story is mixed up with busily madcap exploits involving Linda Darnell and Jack Oakie who run a fake mind-reading act. Not to mention Dick Powell meeting, falling for, wooing and then deciding to marry Linda Darnell all within the space of about 48 hours, along with armed robbers and police who are determined to arrest Powell as an accomplice after he predicts the robbery.
Rene Clair’s other genre films were:- the surrealist silent films Entr’acte (1924) and The Imaginary Voyage (1925); the silent sf film Paris Qui Dort (The Crazy Ray) (1925) about Paris frozen in time; the ghost comedy The Ghost Goes West (1936); I Married a Witch (1942) in which Frederic March falls for witch Veronica Lake; the Agatha Christie murder mystery And Then There Were None (1945); Beauty and the Devil (1950), a retelling of the Faust story; and Beauties of the Night (1952) a charming fantasy about a daydreamer.
