Demain viendra toujours

This excellent 1946 vehicle provides Orson Welles with a role that he is most sympathetic with. Married to Claudette Colbert in this film, he is soon declared missing and dead. Colbert quickly remarries a wealthy gentleman who is most sympathetic when this apparent tragedy strikes.

Fast forward 20 years. By chance, Colbert comes across Welles in a new disguise. This is all coming about as World War 11 will envelop Europe. It appears that Welles was not killed off during World War 1, but merely was missing and apparently suffering from amnesia.

The film becomes a heartbreak after this. Both Colbert and Welles really are conflicted here. She suspects that he realizes his true identity now and he realizes that the son she bore is his.

Both Colbert and Welles put on some very fine acting here in this film where you had better have plenty of handkerchiers available.

I tried to see this film before because I remember the very beginning, but I guess I was interrupted. This time I saw it through and realized I was watching greatness. This film has outstanding dialog and a very nuanced script. Oh if people today could only write like that....it is no wonder I watch old movies. This film is a clinic on dialog.

The acting was great across the board but the direction, story, script and casting were especially good. It was a tightly woven story and an unusual one at that.

Wells put in his best performance. Could it have been better, maybe but the way he delivered those heart rending lines...........well maybe it couldn't have been much better. His deep rich voice together with the tenderness, wisdom, and compassion. Well it doesn't get much better. People who didn't appreciate that have not actually experienced life yet. Do not miss this when it comes around again, I know I won't.

How good was it? Well this is the first time I felt compelled to comment on any films here.

Touching weeper about a man (Orson Welles) who goes off to fight in WWI, leaving his wife (Claudette Colbert) behind. Colbert is told he was killed in action but, in fact, he survived but was badly disfigured. He allows his wife to believe he is dead so that she can move on with her life. Decades later, Colbert is married to another man (George Brent). The son she was carrying when she believed Welles had died is now grown and believes Brent to be his natural father. Welles arrives in America to work with Brent, not knowing he is married to Colbert. Welles also brings along his adopted daughter (a very adorable Natalie Wood). It's a good movie of its kind with a trio of great leads and some impressive support from Wood in her first sizable role. It's also directed by Irving Pichel, an actor-turned-director who was quite underrated as both.

Take a journey back to the mid-40s and enjoy this weepie about lost love and balancing pleasant memories against present endowments.

Colbert's character must wrestle with what she "lost" twenty years ago and what treasures she now has. Welles' character is there to assist in her deliberations, while Brent offers a conciliatory bridge between what was and is now.

The casting couldn't be bettered: what a treat to see Colbert and Welles working together. This provided Orson with one of his most sensitive roles, and he plays it with great compassion. Colbert and Brent are both excellent, and young Natalie Wood offers a most impressive performance as a war refugee. Richard Long is likewise fine as an idealistic young man wanting to do his part to make this a better world.

Max Steiner's score is unusually rich, complete with high voices mixed with strings, and a romantic main theme highlighting the essence of this sentimental script.

Irving Pitchel's direction is on target for this emotional material. Very beautifully rendered.

My brother, Joe, joined the Marines right after Pearl Harbor, as an underage boy with false papers. So did his cousin. Now it's over seventy years later and for the first time I realize the anguish of my mother and all mothers when their sons went to war. Claudette Colbert stole my heart as she made me understand what my mother, and all mothers then and today, must have been going through when their sons (and now their daughters go to war).

I was 3 1/2 years old in 1942, and so during the war, while he was in the South Pacific, I heard my mother's stories about 'Brother Joe,' that she told so that I would understand that I had a brother and he would eventually come home and live with us.

Natalie Wood is a wonderful surprise as a tiny war orphan, perhaps eight years old; Orson Welles was at the top of his form, but Claudette Colbert was the brightest star of this film.

This is not an anti-war film, it's much more a 'why we must go to war film.' There's a lot of philosophy buried in the script, but it never slows the film.

Warning, bring at least two handkerchiefs to "Tomorrow is Forever".