It Happened Tomorrow (1944)
January 26, 2025 10:47 AM - Subscribe
A 1944 American fantasy film, starring Dick Powell, partially based on a play by Lord Dunsany. Currently available to watch for free in the US via Tubi. In 1898, a young newspaper reporter happens upon what you might call an extremely early edition of the next day's paper; this turns out to be less of a boon than he initially thinks. In a slightly different alternate universe this was going to be a Frank Capra movie.
Tagging "timetravel" since the physical newspaper does seem to travel backwards in time, even if no character ever quite does.
This movie made it to the ballot for the Retro Hugo Awards but did not win.
Tagging "timetravel" since the physical newspaper does seem to travel backwards in time, even if no character ever quite does.
This movie made it to the ballot for the Retro Hugo Awards but did not win.
Oh hey, based on Dunsany? I'm in, no matter how bad it is.
posted by humbug at 2:46 PM on January 27 [1 favorite]
posted by humbug at 2:46 PM on January 27 [1 favorite]
humbug, I'll be curious to know what you think!
posted by brainwane at 3:52 AM on January 29 [1 favorite]
posted by brainwane at 3:52 AM on January 29 [1 favorite]
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I found this a fun way to pass 90 minutes, and it was fun to watch Dick Powell react to stuff. And it was cool to get to see what 1944's imagined/remembered 1898 was like (gaslamps, William Jennings Bryan, muttonchops, etc.). But the plot drags, the explanations and the police stuff get repetitive, and overall it's just uneven.
But. This is a fascinating artifact because it's a fantasy movie about time shenanigans made for audiences who aren't yet savvy to this now-common plot device. It's before the subgenre has gelled, so the film needs to give the audience way more exposition than you'd need a few decades later. And this protagonist has probably never read/heard/watched a time travel-type story before (in fact, he acts like someone who's never even read myths about prophecy before), so he's REALLY not genre-savvy, and acts accordingly.
(Lest Darkness Fall, a classic time travel novel, had been published a few years earlier, but (a) that was in an era where, as I understand it, reading scifi/fantasy was not something one would expect of mainstream film audiences, and (b) there's often a lag time for premises and ideas trickling from written SF/F into filmed - according to J. Michael Straczynski back in the 90s, the rule of thumb was "TV-SF is generally 20-30 years behind print SF".)
There are some cool touches. Like: all the stuff with Pop successfully gets eerie. And the opera box office's takings coming out to $5 under what Lawrence predicts, because he hasn't paid for his & Sylvia's tickets yet, subtly clues us into the predestination in the way this film is doing time stuff.
So, if you're interested in the history of scifi/fantasy, in tracing the changes in the genre, give it a watch; otherwise, most of this movie's pleasures are surely easier to find in many other films of the era.
posted by brainwane at 11:06 AM on January 26 [3 favorites]