Beyond Tomorrow (1940)

Beyond Tomorrow (AKA “Beyond Christmas”)
Directed by A. Edward Sutherland
Written by Adele Comandini and Mildred Cram
1940/USA
Academy Productions
First viewing/Streaming on Amazon Instant Video

[box] Tagline: Is there a better time to fall in love?[/box]

Here’s a Christmas movie I never heard of.  It’s on the sentimental side but overall entertaining with some good performances by veteran character actors.

Kindly old industrialists (Harry Carey, C. Aubrey Smith, and Charles Winniger) live with faithful housekeeper Madam Tanya (Maria Ouspenskaya).  They had been planning to have Christmas Eve dinner with some people that cancelled at the last moment.  So the three men toss wallets containing $10 and their cards out in the street and wait and see what happens.  Sure enough, James (Richard Carlson) and Jean (Jean Parker) separately come up to return the wallets they have found and stay for dinner.  Naturally, they immediately fall in love.  It turns out James has a beautiful singing voice.

The three friends are later killed in a plane crash (toward the beginning of the movie). They leave the couple a lot of money to get married on.  But the bequest leads the newspapers to get interested in James and Jean and that leads James to a singing gig on the radio.  It looks like stardom is going to James’ head so the ghosts of the friends intervene to try to save the romance.

It was fun to watch the three older character actors do their stuff.  I think my favorite was Charles Winninger with his Irish brogue.  There’s a little bit too much philosophy for my taste and the ending is quite sappy, but overall it is an enjoyable film and one that people might want to seek out at Christmastime for something different than the usual movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj-I-SYBzMQ

Trailer