Tomorrow is Forever
Directed by Irving PichelBaltimore, 1917. Elizabeth MacDonald bids farewell to her husband John as he ships out to fight in the First World War. When word arrives that he has been killed in action, Elizabeth – pregnant and alone – accepts the steady comfort of Lawrence Hamilton, her employer's son, and builds a new life in his name. Twenty years pass. She is now the settled, contented wife of a prosperous businessman, mother to two children, and the war is a wound long since closed.
The wound reopens when Lawrence hires a European refugee chemist named John Andrew MacDonald, a bearded, crippled man who arrives with a young Austrian ward named Margaret. Elizabeth recognizes something in him that she cannot name and then cannot deny: this is her first husband, alive, transformed beyond recognition but unmistakable to her. MacDonald, for his own reasons, refuses to acknowledge their shared history, and Elizabeth is left suspended between two identities – the widow who remarried in good faith and the wife who never legally ceased to be one. The arrival of her eldest son Drew, eager to enlist in the Second World War, forces the repressed crisis into the open.
Tomorrow is Forever occupies an uneasy border between melodrama and the noir sensibility that pervades mid-1940s Hollywood. Its central premise – identity concealed, the past refusing burial, a domestic order built on a foundation of unknowing deception – belongs to the same psychological territory as the era's darker crime films. The film does not traffic in violence or criminality, but the dread it cultivates is genuine: the dread of a life that may not be what it has always appeared to be.
