I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955)

I’ll Cry Tomorrow
Directed by Daniel Mann
Written by Helen Deutsch and Jay Richard Kennedy from a book by Lillian Roth, Mike Connolly and Gerald Frank
1955/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Lillian Roth: What I’m doing now is ‘wrong’… and I’m *doing* it![/box]

Susan Hayward makes an excellent alcoholic in this inspiring biopic.

Lillian Roth (Hayward) starts life trying to fulfill the dreams of her stage mother (Jo Van Fleet).  She does pretty well as a child act on the vaudeville circuit and then moves on as a teenager to Broadway and even, briefly, to Hollywood.  There she is reunited with childhood sweetheart David.  They defy her mother to become engaged and are on the way to happiness when tragedy strikes.  Lillian goes into a tailspin from which she does not recover for many years.

She is so distraught she is unable to sleep yet insists on performing.  Her nurse gives her her first drink to help her sleep and it is downhill from there.  She breaks with her mother then continues a wild lifestyle until she marries a man she doesn’t love while on a bender.

After that marriage fails she gets even deeper into the sauce.  She thinks salvation may have come when she meets Tony Bardman (Richard Conte), a commanding businessman with a drinking problem of his own.  She marries him thinking that they can help each other break their habits but this marriage is a greater disaster than her first.

The rest of the movie tracks Lillian’s descent to her “bottom” and rebirth to life and love in AA.  With Eddie Albert as Lillian’s sponsor.

I liked this a lot.  It’s one of Hayward’s great roles and not too melodramatic or cliched.  It all rang pretty true to me.  Van Fleet is outstanding in a much more nuanced version of the typical stage mother.  Recommended.

I’ll Cry Tomorrow won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White.  It was nominated in the categories of Best Actress; Best Cinematography, Black-and-White; and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White.

Trailer