Search - Tomorrow - The World on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Suitable for Children Movie Release: 1944 DVD Release: 02/06/2001 Format: DVD - Black and White Audio Tracks: English SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 22 mins Studio: Image Entertainment Members Wishing: 0 Genres: Drama, Message Movie

14-year-old Skip Homeier repeats his stage role as an unreconstructed Hitler Jugend in the film version of the James Gow/Arnaud D'Usseau stage play -Tomorrow the World. A German orphan, Homeier is taken into the home of his American uncle (Fredric March), a gently liberal university professor. Though the son of an anti-Nazi, little robot-like Skip has become a parrot for the Third Reich, denouncing his late father as a traitor and being as nasty as possible to the professor's Jewish fiancee (Betty Field). Homeier accepts democracy only when the professor forgets his fuzzy-headedness and applies a little "physical culture." The moral really shouldn't be "Love America or We'll Break Every Bone in Your Body," but given the times in which it was made, Tomorrow the World can be forgiven its excesses. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Fredric March - Mike Frame
Betty Field - Leona Richards
Agnes Moorehead - Jessie
Skip Homeier - Emil Bruckner
Joan Carroll - Pat Frame

The original play Tomorrow the World was an award-winning and highly topical work on Broadway. The film adaptation, co-authored by Ring Lardner Jr. and Leopold Atlas, also had a great reputation for many years, and the central performance, by Skip Homeier as the 12-year-old dedicated Nazi living in a middle-class American home, was something not seen before in movies. The play and the film both attempted to address what was a terribly pressing problem of their era -- what do you do to make the German people, especially the young ones, give up their Nazi sympathies? The movie seems tame and compromised today, by virtue of its expansion from the play and the need to follow cinematic conventions of the period. This may have made it more accessible, but it also makes the film seem soft and predictable in most of its turns -- some scenes with Betty Field and Agnes Moorehead play very well, but a lot of the rest shows some of the same seams that start to pop on a lot of World War II home-front dramas. Image's DVD release is a fair transfer from a source with more than its share of problems: Scratches, stains in the film emulsion, and sound that is fuzzy on the loud passages (and there is a lot of shouting in various parts of this movie), plus a final scene that shows signs of having been cut awkwardly in the re-editing of the end credit. The movie was an independent production originally distributed by United Artists, and it has apparently passed through several distributors' hands over the decades, not to its advantage, though the worst part of the soundtrack is over the opening credits, and the source print has sufficient visual detail to yield a clean transfer. The digital image is clear of any major artifacts, and the 82-minute movie has been broken down into a dozen acceptable chapters. The film starts up automatically, with the menu -- reasonably clear and convenient -- popping up after the end credits. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide