It Happened Tomorrow (1944)

When a couple has been married for fifty years, it’s only natural that they’d spend the night of their fiftieth anniversary reminiscing about the past.  But Larry Stevens (Dick Powell) has the most interesting story of all time to look back on: how he used to be able to get tomorrow’s news today.  When Larry was younger, he worked at The Evening News as an obituary writer and eventually worked his way up to regular reporter.  He’s so eager to make it as a reporter that he tells his friends that he’d gladly trade ten years of his own life just to be able to get tomorrow’s news today.  When Pop Benson hears him say this, he tells him how dangerous it could be to know the future.  Larry and his friends drop the conversation and head out of the offices.  As they’re walking along, they see a sign at a nightclub for Oscar Cigolini the fortune-teller and they decide to go inside and catch his act.  Oscar performs with his niece Sylvia (Linda Darnell), and when Larry sets eye on her, it’s love at first sight and he invites her to lunch.  After the guys leave the nightclub, Larry runs into Pop again and Pop gives Larry a copy of the newspaper.  Thinking nothing of it, Larry just puts it in his pocket and forgets all about it.  The next day, a friend of his sees the paper in his pocket and borrows it to look at the job listings.  But after a few minutes, Larry realizes that the paper Pop gave him the night before is full of news that hasn’t actually happened yet.

One of the stories in the paper is that the opera house box office is going to be robbed that afternoon.  When he gets to the office, Larry begs his editor Gordon to let him cover the concert being held there.  When Sylvia shows up for their date, he brings her along to the concert and sure enough, the box office is robbed while they’re there.  Before they left for the concert, Larry had copied down the article from the paper so he arrives back at the office a mere ten minutes after the robbery with the article ready to go.  Gordon is rightfully skeptical about this, but then Inspector Mulrooney confirms it.  But then Inspector Mulrooney is suspicious about how Larry knows so much about the robbery and Sylvia tells him that she predicted it.  And to prove it, she predicts that a woman will attempt suicide by jumping off a bridge.

When Larry gets another newspaper from the future from Pop, he tells the police where to find the robbers and gets to the bridge just after a woman has jumped in.  After he dives in after her, he realizes the woman was really Sylvia, who jumped in just to make her own prediction come true.  When Larry starts telling his fellow reporters that he can see the future, his friends tell him to put his money where his mouth is and tell them which horses are going to win at the racetrack tomorrow.  Larry gets another paper from Pop and, thinking he’s going to make a fortune at the racetrack, proposes to Sylvia.  But when Larry looks a little more closely at the paper, he finds out that he will be shot to death in a hotel tomorrow.  He still goes to the racetrack, wins a fortune, and marries Sylvia anyway, but one of his bookie’s minions isn’t too happy about Larry winning so much money and robs him.  When Larry gets to the hotel he’s supposed to die in, he runs into the guy who robbed him and chases him down.  The two get into a huge fight that ends with the bookie’s cohort being shot down by police.  But because he has Larry’s wallet on him, they mistakenly think they killed Larry.  Larry and Sylvia go on to live a long and happy life together and live to celebrate their golden anniversary.

By now, the idea of a movie about someone who can get tomorrow’s news today really doesn’t seem like a terribly unique idea.  In the time since it was released in 1944, the show Early Edition has used the same general concept and there was a similar episode of The Twilight Zone.  But even if it doesn’t feel terribly original to viewers nowadays, it’s still a pretty interesting movie.  Dick Powell and Linda Darnell were good in it, it’s well-directed, and the story is good.  I wouldn’t call it one of my favorites, but it is worth watching.

Dames (1934)

Busby Berkeley loved to taunt censors and uptight people, so I guess it’s no big surprised that he did a whole movie making fun of the morally self-righteous.  In Dames, Hugh Herbert plays Ezra Ounce, an eccentric millionaire with exceptionally high moral standards.  He’s looking for family members he can leave ten  million dollars to in his will and it looks like his cousin Matilda Hemingway (ZaSu Pitts) is one of his few options.  The catch is that he wants to leave his money only to the most upstanding family members, so nobody like his distant relative Jimmy Higgens (Dick Powell), who has his career in showbiz.  To make sure Matilda and her family meets his high standards, he goes to New York to live with them for a while and his stay is a disaster before he even arrives.  Matilda’s husband Horace (Guy Kibbee) accompanies him on the trip by train and returns to his cabin to find showgirl Mabel Anderson (Joan Blondell) sleeping in his bed.  She needed a way to get out-of-town after her show closed so she snuck into his cabin.  Trying to avoid a scandal, Horace gives her $200 and tells her not to mention it to anybody.

Meanwhile, Horace’s daughter Barbara (Ruby Keeler) has been having an affair with Jimmy (they’re 13th cousins) and wants to star in one of his shows someday.  With Uncle Ezra in town, it’s a challenge to keep all these juicy details from costing them their inheritance.  Especially when Mabel comes back and blackmails Horace into giving her the money Jimmy needs to put on his new show so that she can star in it.  When the press writes about the new show, they say it’s positively scandalous and that it’s being backed by a mysterious millionaire.  On opening night, Horace, Ezra, and Matilda show up just to see how bad it is.  The first musical number doesn’t shock them too much, but then Barbara does her first number and they’re pleased with how harmless it was.  By the end of the show, they think it’s great!  But their change in mood also had something to do with the fact that they spent the entire show drinking a health tonic that happens to be 23% alcohol.  But at long last, Uncle Ezra realizes that being high and mighty is awfully overrated!

1933 was a truly spectacular year for Busby Berkeley.  He added his signature touch to three of the most iconic musicals of all time, 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade, all in the same year.  With a year like that, it should come as no surprise that by 1934, he’d be slowing down just a little bit.  Dames most definitely doesn’t live up to the standards of Footlight Parade, but in all fairness, it would have been extremely difficult for him to live up to anything he had done the previous year.  The story and the musical numbers simply aren’t as solid or memorable as some of his previous efforts.  I’ll walk around with The Shadow Waltz stuck in my head all day, but Girl at the Ironing Board doesn’t have the same effect on me.  Even though we get to see a lot of the classic stars of Busby Berkeley movies like Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, and Ruby Keeler, they just don’t shine as brightly as they had before.  But with all that being said, I did enjoy Dames.  I loved the Dames number and I Only Have Eyes For You.  It was also very funny.  Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade definitely had comedy in them, but Dames was a lot sillier than either of those.  And just because the stars didn’t have quite the same spark as they had before, they certainly weren’t bad by any stretch of the imagination.  It’s a fun three-star follow-up to an unbeatable four-star streak of movies.

Gold Diggers of 1933

Right now, I’m kind of obsessed with Busby Berkeley musicals.  42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Dames, I love them all.  I can’t watch one of his musical numbers without wondering what on Earth was going through Berkeley’s mind when he came up with these kaleidoscopic extravaganzas.  As much as I love 42nd Street and Footlight Parade, if I had to take one Busby Berkeley musical with me to that deserted island, I think I’d go with Gold Diggers of 1933.