It Happened Tomorrow

1944

Action / Comedy / Fantasy / Romance

3
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 71% · 7 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 68% · 100 ratings
IMDb Rating 7.0/10 10 3189 3.2K

newspaper time warp headline morning

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Plot summary

A young turn-of-the-century newspaper man finds he can get hold of the next day's paper. This brings more problems than fortune, especially as his new girlfriend is part of a phony clairvoyant act.

Director

René Clair Photo
René Clair

Top cast

George Chandler Photo
George Chandler as Bob
Mary Field Photo
Mary Field as Lizzie - Waitress at Restaurant
William Forrest Photo
William Forrest as Sylvia's Father
Eilene Janssen Photo
Eilene Janssen as Sylvia - Great-Granddaughter
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
783.48 MB
988*720
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
1 hr 25 min
Seeds ...
1.42 GB
1472*1072
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
1 hr 25 min
Seeds 3

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by robert-temple-1 7 / 10

Who Wants to Know the Future?

There were many 'screwball comedies' in the 1930s and 1940s, and this film could probably be described as 'a comic screwball ghost film'. The French director Rene Clair evidently found it more convenient to be in America during the Nazi occupation of France, and this was a film which he shot there in English. I saw the DVD in a French issue, and the French subtitles did no justice at all to the racy colloquial English spoken in the film. Dick Powell, with his quirky laconic humour tinged with despondency (one imagines him going home after shooting to a lonely Scotch), is perfectly cast as a young journalist who wants to know tomorrow's news today. The old codger who kept the archives for the newspaper, eerily played by John Philliber, dies and comes back as a ghost to hand Powell the next day's paper in advance, and he does so several times. This leads to wildly incalculable results, including Powell being accused of murder and trying to escape his own murder of which he has read the report. Powell falls for the glamorous Linda Darnell, jealously protected by her uncle Jack Oakie, and there is a big tussle over her. It is all very lively and very jolly, and although it is not sophisticated, the implications are profound, as the nature of time is under serious consideration, however light-hearted the story may be. The film is adapted from a play by Lord Dunsany.
Reviewed by Lejink 6 / 10

Tomorrow's news today

I watched this film just after watching director Rene Clair's previous Hollywood outing "I Married A Witch" and enjoyed this one too. It's also a fantasy production, with Dick Powell the hungry news-hound who thanks to "Pop", the old caretaker of the newspaper who he's befriended, gets a copy of the next day's paper in advance, hence the title of the film.It won't take you long to ascertain the status of old "Pop" and why his sayings are so cryptic , but it's the prelude to a couple of days of impending headlines and deadlines which see Powell variously lose and recover, (with a raise!) his reporter job at the paper, witness a bank robbery as it happens and then be on the scene when the police catch said crooks the next day, save his new girlfriend from drowning, win and lose $60000 on the racetrack and lastly, inescapably it seems, be present at his own reported death.All that stuff is lovely and engaging but the film gets dragged down somehow by some poor editorial choices by the director. For one thing the movie is framed by a pointless 50-years-after sequence which effectively tells you Powell's fate well in advance and secondly, too much time and space is given to Jack Oakie the magician father of Linda Darnell, for whom she acts as his mind-reading assistant in the act and with whom Powell becomes smitten at one of their shows. His personality is as loud as his outfits and he brings too much vaudeville slapstick to bear on proceedings. I think the film would have played a lot better if done more in the style of say, "It's A Wonderful Life' than "Arsenic And Old Lace" to borrow two titles from the master of the fantasy feature, Frank Capra.I liked Powell and Darnell as the leads and especially John Philliber as the venerable, mysterious Pop, who himself ironically died within a year of the film's release but not Oakie or George Cleveland for the same reason, as the excitable newspaper editor, Mr Gordon. Director Clair has a pleasingly light touch which this material requires but just seems to have become confused as to the best approach to adopt to make for a fully satisfying outcome. The end result still pleases but with better oversight this could have been on a par with the best of this genre of movie, maybe even rivalling the charm of some of Capra's premier features.
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