Tomorrow - The World, a movie that "portrays the personal effect of HItler's chilling declaration: 'Today Germany, TOMORROW THE WORLD,'" was recommended to me by a friend to whom I showed the first several minutes of Friedlander's The Raven. What the supposed connection was I'm not sure, though this isn't the first time I've been led to a curious film by an unusual route.
It would have made more sense if I'd been showing Mayo's Black Legion, '36, the Warner Bros film in which Humphrey Bogart discovers several compelling reasons to not be a violent racist. Like that film, Tomorrow investigates how 'normal' people were transformed into ambassadors of hate through the influence of community and the power of social pressure. Tomorrow is the more interesting movie because several fingers are pointed.
The premise is that an indoctrinated twelve year old Nazi, Emil, is sent to live with a suburban American family. Emil is a really horrible kid, even outside out of his Nazi spy aspirations*: he's a deceitful, mean kid who lies and mistreats people. His new aunt says he's a good example of why all Germans should be killed, and the German housekeeper, whom he corners and speaks to of 'corroboration,' considers him a megalomanic asshole. He's such a crappy person that his new family wavers between strangling him and sending him to prison. Point is, on the one hand he embodies hate, on the other hand so much hate is reflected back at him. And he's so young, he's just a kid. The movie's closing argument is basically that he's too young to be held culpable, and its final evidence is that he cries over his murder attempt.
The surrogate father is Frederic March, from Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde! Like Peck in The Omen, his journey leads to the attempted killing of an evil child. It's interesting to consider the film as a precursor to demonic children films. There are perhaps many Nazi in America films (The Stranger, Dr. Strangelove, Marathon Man, and Blues Brothers spring to mind). The amalgamation of demon child and Nazi spy is an inspired film idea, undoubtedly the cause of the film's longevity, more than its philosophical handling of the material. Like the grapefruit smashing in The Public Enemy, the sight of a young boy in a Nazi uniform continues to be unsettling; and even by contemporary standards the kid is a prick. It's easy to imagine wanting to strangle him.
This is copyright 1944, Lester Cowan Productions. Germany had not yet surrendered. I see it as a discussion about the twin problems of the perpetuance of Naziism after the war, and the veil of circumstance that both protected some genuine Nazis and condemned those morally and spiritually enfeebled by the Nazis. Tomorrow suggests a solution of tolerance and second-chances, but the situation is one of poisoned youth and corrupted innocence, of a twelve year old boy, and I see less complexity in this scenario than in others. It began as a play of ideals, and it retains this form in the film: its final point is obvious, its path contrived. It's sometimes outrageous, sometimes tedious.
* Simpsons reference: You remember when Bart was a foreign exchange student? He went to a miserable French country farm, and an I think Russian boy/spy came to live with the Simpsons family. This movie several times reminded me of that episode.
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