When Tomorrow Comes

Love Affair proved so popular a film that Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne were reteamed in When Tomorrow Comes at Universal Pictures.

Dunne who is usually chic and stylish plays a cafe waitress who gets to wait on Charles Boyer. No one there including Dunne realizes he's a world famous concert pianist.

Dunne goes on strike as the waitresses get organized. Boyer courts her when she's not on the picket line. They have a nice romantic interlude on Long Island when a hurricane hits.

Boyer is keeping secrets from her like the fact he's already married to Barbara O'Neil who has some mental issues.

There's a choice to be made by both of them that's obvious. What they do is for you to watch the film for.

Both keep up the same romantic standard set in Love Affair. When Tomorrow Comes won an Oscar for Sound Recording. Fans of the stars will approve

After Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne had been paired together in the fabulous Love Affair (1939), someone decided to pair them together again (that's the other film of theirs- Together Again (1944)), and this was the result.

It starts as a drama about women going on strike for unfair wages and there's a lot of time devoted to a working people's union, then Dunne meets Boyer and the next part of the film is devoted to their acquaintance, then there is a hurricane and they're forced to take refuge in a church, then there's drama involving Boyer, his unstable wife (gee, it's Barbara O'Neill! What a shocker! 😏) and his love with Dunne, but this being a Hollywood movie, the good couple wins- moralistically, of course. This was made under the production code, after all.

It's not that the film needed a couple of cuts- in fact, with all the plot changes, it should have been half an hour longer, or even two Dunne-Boyer films. It's that it jumps around too much and it's boring.

Dunne's working woman fair wages campaign is pretty much forgotten about after she falls in love with Boyer. Not enough time is given to Barbara O'Neill's character, other than to develop her as a crazy psycho b*tch, and remind us that O'Neill was so much more effective as Boyer's crazy psycho b*tch wife in All This, And Heaven Too (1940).

Dunne is no more or less annoying than usual- she sings a song while Boyer plays the piano, so her fans will like that. Me, I'm not overly fond of her singing, and so I just tuned out until she was done.

She and Boyer have chemistry that was just as good as what they had in Love Affair, and this film has a moralistic ending too, but what the ending of Love Affair is sweet and will bring a tear to your eye, the ending of this one is like "Well, now it's over and you can do something else now." The acting is pretty good, O'Neill is very over-the-top, but if you've seen AT,AHT, you know what to expect from her in a role like this.

Overall, not as good as Love Affair, but not quite as bad as Together Again. It won't kill you if yoy watch it, but it's disappointing.

I love Dunne and Boyer and think they are a good match. However, I am constantly amazed at how long Irene Dunne was able to get away with 20-something roles. She is 41 here, and looks it. She is playing a waitress with a roommate who is about to strike for better pay. Her character at most would be 25. Yet producers continued to give Dunne these types of roles even after this movie. I don't really get it. When Lana Turner was in her early 40s, she was playing mothers of teenagers in "Imitation of Life" and "Portrait in Black" and Mary Astor had moved to these roles by the time she was 38. I don't understand why they weren't moving Dunne to more motherly roles by this time; she certainly does not look or act like an ingenue.

Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne couldn't catch a break in 1939. First LOVE AFFAIR turns out badly for the body of the movie, then here we have Miss Dunne, a waitress, in love with Boyer, a concert pianist-prince with Barbara O'Neil as his mad wife. He loves her too, but Miss O'Neil has bouts of sanity, during which she comes to Miss Dunne's apartment.

This is one of the prestige dramas that John Stahl directed every year or so for Universal during the 1930s. As in the other movie, the chemistry between the leads is marvelous. This movie is the lesser, which I attribute to the utter lack of humor of Stahl, as opposed to Leo McCarey. Of course, the fact that a reported 21 writers worked on this picture may have given the film maker so much material that any humor had to be cut. Once you get past the meet cute, in which Boyer tries to order apple pie with cheese, hold the pie, it's all a romantic heartbreaker with their unfulfilled love. And that it is.

This is not one of Stahl's best works.The movie lacks a center of gravity. Melodrama interferes with social topics(unions,strikes,meetings)and even a deluge,complete with a night in a temple.Besides,the Madeleine character appears too late and is hardly credible.She suffers from mental illness since she lost her child.And the unfortunate heroine tells her so:"you win because you're helpless". Charles Boyer plays the usual Latin lover,and Irene Dunne,the impossible love ,as she did in Fannie Hurst's famous tear-jerker. The ending is ambiguous:in his 1957 remake,the by now usual Sirk remake has ,it seems -I haven't seen it yet- ,a more definitive conclusion. All in all,watchable,because of the cast ,but ,not a great Stahl.

NB:I saw Sirk's remake yesterday (7/12/09).Stick with Stahl.