25 days of Christmas | Beyond Tomorrow, 1940

Beyond Tomorrow | 1940

Beyond Tomorrow, 1940 George Melton and Allan Chadwick are engineers working late on Christmas Eve until their partner Michael O’Brien arrives with gifts and reminds them that it’s Christmas and they better get home for they are to receive guests for dinner.

The old men live a mansion, kept by Madam Tanya, an elderly countess dispossessed by the Russian Revolution. When their guests bail, George, who’s a bit of a Scrooge, takes that as an opportunity to remind them that he was right, the dinner was pointless and the guests probably made up some excuse because of him. But O’Brien refuses to lose his spirits and comes up with a bet. The three of them will each throw a wallet out on the street. Each wallet contains ten dollars and a card and if someone brings one of the wallet’s back, they can invite that person for dinner.

“A stranger from the streets?”

“There are no strangers on Christmas!”

As it turns out, two young people bring the wallets back, James Houston, a cowboy from Texas, far from his family for the first time on the holidays and Jean Lawrence a kindergarten teacher. They stay for dinner and have a wonderful evening together. The two young people become enchanted by one another almost immediately to the delight of the three old men, and they make an appointment to meet again the next day. The young couple is more or less adopted by the elderly gentlemen and Miss Tanya, and they see each other often for the next few months, effectively becoming family.

Unfortunately, when the engineers had to travel to another city on business the plane crashes and they die. In time they come back as spirits to watch the developments in the lives of James and Jean, for whom O’Brien had left some bonds against George’s better judgement. George is also against James pursuing a career as a Brodway singer. He’s too young for that, he’ll meet the wrong kind of people and lose his way, George says, something similar to what happened to himself in his youth.

"A chance to get mixed up with a lot of cheap people. They'll turn his head and make a fool of him.  He'll drink too much and he'll laugh too much. He'll lose his way."

And as ghosts the three of them can do little but to watch what James and Jean do with their lives, powerless to interfere even when they see them making mistakes.

Beyond Tomorrow was made to be a B movie and instead of a leading man it features 4 experienced character actors, none of whom would receive billing above the title. The film was considered a “Christmas Carol” back in the day, but other than the fact that there are ghosts it’s not a similar story at all. James’ character is hard to empathize with after what happens in the second half of the movie.

The film opens with snow, Christmas trees and the toll of the bells, the Christmas setting doesn’t last for very long. Overall that makes the film a little disappointing. Even when it first came out it wasn’t very popular.  Reported Bosley Crowther of The New York Times (9/27/40):

“We’ve never had any particular grudge against ghosts, but we’re rapidly developing one…Take Beyond Tomorrow…For its first half it is a latter-day Christmas carol, told with a gamin tenderness and warming as a hot toddy. But when its three elderly good Samaritans return from a plane crash as celluloid chimeras, its mystical peregrinations are more preposterous than moving."

The three main actors are pretty great though. The way the three of them crave the counpany of the younger people is very endearing, as are Chad’s easygoing manners, O’Brien’s contagious joy and even George’s sullen ways – like when he refuses to get excited about the Christmas spirit and secretly gives James his overcoat seeing as the boy didn’t have any. It was an interesting film to watch, and the developments of the story were certainly unexpected, but overall this is not one of the best films on this year’s Christmas season.

Beyond Tomorrow | 1940 | Directed by A. Edward Sutherland | Written by Adele Comandini | Charles Winninger, Richard Carlson, Maria Ouspenskaya, Jean Parker, Helen Vinson, C. Aubrey Smith, Harry Carey