Tomorrow, the World!

...based on a Pulitzer-prize winning (!!!) play, from United Artists and director Leslie Fenton. Fredric March stars as Mike Frame, a small-town American who is taking charge of an orphaned relative, 13-year-old German boy Emil (Skip Homeier). Mike, his sister Jessie (Agnes Moorehead), young cousin Pat (Joan Carroll), and Mike's fiancee Leona (Betty Field) welcome the boy into their home but are shocked and appalled by his Hitler Youth sensibilities, including vocal antisemitism, anti-American sentiments and a desire to continue the German cause in any way possible. Emil's attitude naturally leads to trouble both at home and in school, with things coming to a violent conclusion. Also featuring Edit Angold, and Rudy Wissler.

I called this hysterical and it is, in both senses of the word. Emil is depicted as such an extreme exaggerated caricature that he becomes an object of unintended hilarity. Homeier, who had originated the role on Broadway and was making his film debut here, overplays it to the hilt. The situations are often absurd, the character decisions ludicrous, and the last half hour is just one bizarre moment after another, including attempted murders, brutal fist-fights among children, and one of the more unconvincing sappy endings in some time. There's no way that I'd call this a good movie in the conventional sense, but as a bad movie I found it very amusing.

An obviously cheaply-made film version of the long-running Broadway hit that that was one of several films made during the War addressing the vexed question of just what was to be done with the Germans once the War was over.

It preserves for posterity the young 'Skippy' Homeier's extraordinary performance as Emil Bruckner, a feral eleven year-old Hitler Youth who just turns up in a small town in wartime America without attracting any attention on the part of the authorities. There is also a memorable performance by Joan Carroll as the host family's perky young daughter, but it's strange to see an actor of Fredric March's stature taking such a back seat to the proceedings as her father. Although we're told that the still young and glamorous Betty Field - who is both a teacher at the local school and March's fiancée - is Jewish, this element isn't developed and the fact that she's supposed to be Jewish is seldom referred to - even by Emil.

Recalling Frank Borzage's 'No Greater Glory' (1934) and anticipating 'Frieda' (1947) and 'The Bad Seed' (1956), parts are quite amusing - possibly intentionally - others extremely shocking; and the writers plainly didn't know how to end the thing. (An interesting version could be made today with the young kid a Middle Eastern refugee...)

A Nazi youth is taken in by his American uncle and his family.

As a kid, the movie scared the wits out of me. I was about the same age as Homeier, but he was so unlike any kid I'd ever seen, it was like an alien intrusion into familiar surroundings. It's certainly an electrifying performance. His authoritarian side is absolutely convincing, with the best heel-clicking this side of Konrad Veidt.

I suspect there's something of a post-war subtext to the film even though it was made in the war year of 1944. The big question posed by post-war planning and the movie is whether Nazis are reformable. That is, can a democracy succeed in a German nation where the Third Reich has sunk its roots. This was an important political question once it became apparent the Allies would win the war. In the movie, it's a question of whether the thoroughly indoctrinated Emil (Homeier) can be Americanized by the all-American Frame family. If he can't, then symbolically there will be great difficulty in de-Nazifying a post-war Germany. Anyway, I suggest this as something of a subtext to the movie as a whole.

It's a fine cast that creates a lively household, especially little Joan Carroll as Pat. Her energetic, forgiving spirit amounts to a persuasive contrast to the robotic Emil. For this now geezer, it was nostalgic revisiting the youth and fashions of the period (minus Emil, of course). Too bad Homeier never got the credit as an actor that he deserved. That's probably because he was so good at playing dislikable characters, as a succession of Westerns and crime films of the 1950's demonstrate. Here, he's practically the whole show, in a part that's unforgettable once you've seen it. I know it's been so for me.

Tomorrow the World was the screen adaption of a Broadway play that ran a season or two previously. It's the story of an American family who adopts a kid over from Nazi Germany. Of course the kid comes over with all the attitudes instilled there from his time in the Hitler Youth. It's going to take a lot of deprogramming to straighten him out.

Skip Homeier repeated his role from the Broadway stage and made an electrifying debut. So much so that he overshadowed grownup stars Fredric March and Betty Field. March is his widower uncle and Betty Field is his fiancé who also is Homeier's teacher in public school.

Of course Homeier doesn't exactly make too many friends spouting all the party line he learned in the Hitler Youth. He's positively horrified to find out that he's going to be mixing with kids of all backgrounds that he's been taught are inferior.

Pretty much everyone gives up on Homeier save Joan Carroll who is March's daughter. Her scenes with Homeier are the best in the film.

Skip Homeier could never escape the typecasting after this movie. Even when he occasionally played good guys there was always an edge to them. No one would ever cast him as a hero. But he did well as a teenager and later as an adult. Fans today probably know him best as the mad leader of a futuristic hippie cult from an original Star Trek episode.

Fredric March might have been a bit miffed at being upstaged by a kid. But he had a second Oscar in his future in his very next film, The Best Years of Our Lives.

I think Father Flanagan in Boys Town would have had a handful dealing with Homeier, might have given his philosophy a quick review or he may have seen his thesis proved about they're being no such thing as a bad boy. It's all in how soon you get to them and whether the life programming patterns have taken root.

This is an entertaining and interesting film, as much for what it doesn't say as for what it does.

Our depiction of small town middle American life circa 1944 is wildly inaccurate and glorified, but this is not at all unusual in films of the era. World War II era audiences would have considered themselves morally superior to the Germans and had no argument with life as seen in "Tomorrow, the World!". In reality, however, it is unlikely that a Jewish woman would have been a teacher in a largely protestant public school, and even less likely that she would have entered into an interfaith marriage with the only protest being raised by a small foreign boy. And if one considers how the story would have played out had the character of Leona been black, she not only would have never been teaching in a white public school, but had she and Mike Frame sought to be married, there likely would have been a response from the community that involved a lynching and thus our moral superiority over the Germans is exposed as being more imagined than real.

None of which particularly ruins the film. It requires no greater suspended-disbelief than Superman or Dracula, and on its own merits this film is an enjoyable experience. However sanitized, small town 1940's America is a place one almost cannot help but to long for. And into this idealized world enters Emil, a character that at first comes on ludicrously overplayed, and yet pulls you in just the same. The audience quickly becomes concerned for what will happened to the Frame family, and the guilty pleasure of watching this pre-"Bad Seed" demon will keep you on the edge of your seat.. After what Emil does to Pat, the vigilante justice meted out by Pat's school-mates is shamelessly gratifying to see. Throughout the story one keeps secretly hoping for Emil's redemption, and it is the film's greatest drawback that it attempts to grant this wish in a quick and unrealistic throwaway end. This inadequately explored issue as well as the intriguing and thoroughly under-utilized subplot of Emil's manipulation of Jessie leave the distinct impression that someone demanded a great deal of running time be shaved off of this film.

"Tomorrow, the World!" still gets major points for at least attempting a subject matter few films of its era, outside of propaganda newsreels, would dare touch, and it's worth a watch.