There's Always Tomorrow

Clifford Groves owns a toy factory and lives an orderly life with his wife and three children. The trouble is that nobody at home notices him. His wife is busy with the children's schedules and the children with their own concerns. One evening Norma, who worked at his company twenty years earlier, rings the bell. She has become a fashion designer, never married, and is alone. The subject is not adultery but being invisible. What passes between Clifford and Norma is almost nothing; the real rupture is the children following their father, accusing him, and the man being unable to defend himself. The form is Sirk's familiar arrangement, this time in black and white: curtains used like bars, rain, faces caught in mirrors. A toy robot recurs through the film; wound up, it walks, hits a wall and turns. Douglas Sirk directs. Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck had appeared together twenty years earlier in Double Indemnity; here the same pair are middle-aged and in a relationship entirely reversed. Joan Bennett plays his wife. Who it is for: viewers who like melodrama and Sirk's cold family portraits. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a happy ending; the film rescues nobody and leaves the arrangement exactly as it was.