Tomorrow is Forever

Tonight kicks off the first night for TCM's June Star of the Month, Natalie Wood. Wood is one of the rare child stars who also had quite a bit of success as an adult actress. This first Monday in June sees several of her younger roles, kicking off with Tomorrow is Forever at 8:00 PM ET.

Wood is by no means the star; that honor goes to Claudette Colbert. She plays a woman in World War I whose husband (Orson Welles) goes off to fight. Unfortunately, Welles doesn't return, and Colbert gets word that he's been killed in the war. End of story.

Er, maybe not. Welles knocked up Colbert before going off to fight, leaving Colbert either to raise the son alone, or else get married to a nice man like George Brent who will help raise a stepson. And that's not all. Fast forward to 1939. Coming over from Nazi Germany to escape is the mysterious Mr. Kessler with adopted daughter Margaret (Natalie Wood); a man who looks somewhat like Colbert's first husband. But he's dead of course. Or is he?

To be honest, I find this sort of movie to be the typical horribly melodramatic stuff that constituted a lot of the "women's pictures" of the day. There are good love stories out there from that time period, even good stories that have Natalie Wood playing the precocious kid. (See The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.) Tomorrow is Forever, hoewver, isn't to my taste.

That isn't to say that it won't be to anybody's taste. There are a lot of people out there who like those "women's pictures". And, there are also a lot of people out there who enjoy Orson Welles more than I do. There might even be some people who like George Brent. There's nothing in Tomorrow is Forever to say that the acting is bad, so if you like those actors, there might well be no reason why you wouldn't like the movie.

Tomorrow is Forever doesn't seem to have been released to DVD, though, so if you want to watch it, you'll have to catch the rare TCM showing.