The New Pictures

Tomorrow Is Forever (International-RKO Radio) is a specious, stylishly dressed domestic drama starring Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles--as well as cinema's old friends Rip van Winkle and Enoch Arden. Derived from a lending library novel of the same title, the film concerns a young lady (Claudette) who believes that her husband (Welles) was killed in World War I. After a longish period of mourning, she reluctantly remarries. But husband No. 1, by no means dead, continues to live on in Europe. On the eve of World War II, he returns to the U.S. with a foster daughter and strong anti-Nazi sentiments.

Having put itself into this dilemma, Tomorrow Is Forever takes the obvious way out. In due course, Husband Welles suffers a convenient fit and falls permanently dead, though not before he has tearfully gazed upon his unsuspecting son, now grown, and solemnly informed his son's mother that the past is the past, the future the future.

Cinemactress Colbert, moving waxy and beautifully gowned through a series of handsome sets, manages to convey the idea that she cannot quite pierce the Wellesian disguise of beard, limp and heavy Teutonic accent. Welles himself, posing as an Austrian scientist, does a far more skillful job of characterization than the creaky plot and prevailing platitudes warrant.

Miss Susie Slagle's (Paramount) is a mild, nostalgic little comedy about budding medicos, based on a fictional bestseller by Augusta Tucker. Back about 1910, so the story goes, a maiden lady named Susie Slagle kept a boardinghouse for medical students. She fed them well, jollied them along, nursed their emotional ills, let them draw giant-sized cross sections of hearts, lungs and livers on her upstairs wall. She also gave them a wan goodbye kiss when they went out into the world with their brand-new medical degrees.

Oldtime Cinemactress Lillian Gish, rarely seen in films during recent years, is a lacy, frail, sweet Miss Susie. As an earnest but queasy would-be surgeon living in her house, hulking Sonny Tufts, Exeter-and-Yale-educated in real life, acts with unusual restraint. The inevitable local-professor's-pretty-daughter is talented, wide-eyed, blonde Newcomer Joan Caulfield. The plot complications are tried & true, but the medical-school atmosphere seems reasonably authentic--and the medical schoolboy humor is good-natured and not too grisly.

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