Bill Cummings, a sergeant in the army, has just been discharged after serving in World War II, and is seeking a civilian job through the United States Employment Service. We learn little of his military service, but most of the film consists of flashbacks to Bill's pre-war life as a factory worker in New York. We see his marriage to his wife Susan, a shop assistant in a bookstore and a lengthy period of unemployment during the Great Depression. In one rather odd sequence he is
prosecuted and sent to jail for his part in publishing an indecent book. (He is a talented artist and has provided the illustrations for an erotic book published clandestinely by Susan's employer, without apparently being aware of the nature of the project he is working on. It struck me as implausible to suggest that a pornographer would commission perfectly innocent, non-erotic pictures to illustrate such a work).
The film has sometimes been characterised as having a "left-wing message". Its director John Berry and its screenwriter Hugo Butler certainly both held left-wing views, and both were later to be blacklisted during the heyday of McCarthyism in the fifties. As with many of their fellow Hollywood leftists, however, the control exercised by the studio system meant that they were unable to use their dramas as vehicles for propaganda. A classic example is "Blockade", a film about the Spanish Civil War with a script written by John Howard Lawson, one of the most hard-line Communists working in the film industry, and yet its plot is so ambiguous that it is impossible to tell whether its politics are pro-Republican or pro-Nationalist. The only exceptions were a few wartime films like "North Star" and "Mission to Moscow" which were made-with the full blessing of the American authorities- to highlight the Soviet war effort.
Similarly, there is little about "From This Day Forward" that could be regarded as critical of the capitalist system, or as likely to persuade audiences to vote Communist, or even Socialist. About the only scenes which could be seen as critical of the system are those where Bill is unemployed, and even here he and his family do not seem to be suffering any great hardship compared to that suffered by many real Americans during the Depression. Indeed, today some aspects of the film would strike us as odd, given that it was supposedly made from a "progressive" viewpoint. From the film one would get the impression that the Bronx was an exclusively white, predominantly Anglo-Saxon neighbourhood; in reality, even during the thirties and forties, it was becoming one of the most ethnically mixed quarters of New York City. Joan Fontaine as Susan is always too glamorous and well-dressed to be convincing as a working-class housewife; she never looks like anything other than a Hollywood goddess.
Another anomaly relates to the dating of the action. The film was based upon "All Brides are Beautiful", a novel published in 1936, but updates the action to the late thirties and forties. We learn that Bill and Susan were married in 1938, before he becomes unemployed, but the truth is that the Depression was at its worst in the early thirties and that (contrary to the impression given here) the economy was improving during the period 1938-41. This was probably done because the film-makers wanted to make the film, made in 1946, seem more contemporary, and to avoid any problems with "ageing" the characters. Had the film followed the lives of Bill and Susan from a marriage in the twenties, all through the thirties and into the forties, they would have been middle-aged by the time the film ended.
I didn't like the "flashback" structure; this is one of those films which might have been improved by a more traditional chronological narrative. Because the film starts in 1946, at the end of the story, we know in advance that Bill comes through the war unscathed, that his marriage to Susan will survive all the trials that life throws at them and that his jail term will not adversely affect his career, thus removing what could have been several sources of dramatic tension. As it is, there is not really much drama, or much of a coherent storyline. I would agree with the reviewer from the New York Times who called the film "a plotless succession of episodes," and said "there may be some purpose in all this but we couldn't quite make it out-unless it is simply to demonstrate that unemployment is a very bad thing". 4/10.
The film has sometimes been characterised as having a "left-wing message". Its director John Berry and its screenwriter Hugo Butler certainly both held left-wing views, and both were later to be blacklisted during the heyday of McCarthyism in the fifties. As with many of their fellow Hollywood leftists, however, the control exercised by the studio system meant that they were unable to use their dramas as vehicles for propaganda. A classic example is "Blockade", a film about the Spanish Civil War with a script written by John Howard Lawson, one of the most hard-line Communists working in the film industry, and yet its plot is so ambiguous that it is impossible to tell whether its politics are pro-Republican or pro-Nationalist. The only exceptions were a few wartime films like "North Star" and "Mission to Moscow" which were made-with the full blessing of the American authorities- to highlight the Soviet war effort.
Similarly, there is little about "From This Day Forward" that could be regarded as critical of the capitalist system, or as likely to persuade audiences to vote Communist, or even Socialist. About the only scenes which could be seen as critical of the system are those where Bill is unemployed, and even here he and his family do not seem to be suffering any great hardship compared to that suffered by many real Americans during the Depression. Indeed, today some aspects of the film would strike us as odd, given that it was supposedly made from a "progressive" viewpoint. From the film one would get the impression that the Bronx was an exclusively white, predominantly Anglo-Saxon neighbourhood; in reality, even during the thirties and forties, it was becoming one of the most ethnically mixed quarters of New York City. Joan Fontaine as Susan is always too glamorous and well-dressed to be convincing as a working-class housewife; she never looks like anything other than a Hollywood goddess.
Another anomaly relates to the dating of the action. The film was based upon "All Brides are Beautiful", a novel published in 1936, but updates the action to the late thirties and forties. We learn that Bill and Susan were married in 1938, before he becomes unemployed, but the truth is that the Depression was at its worst in the early thirties and that (contrary to the impression given here) the economy was improving during the period 1938-41. This was probably done because the film-makers wanted to make the film, made in 1946, seem more contemporary, and to avoid any problems with "ageing" the characters. Had the film followed the lives of Bill and Susan from a marriage in the twenties, all through the thirties and into the forties, they would have been middle-aged by the time the film ended.
I didn't like the "flashback" structure; this is one of those films which might have been improved by a more traditional chronological narrative. Because the film starts in 1946, at the end of the story, we know in advance that Bill comes through the war unscathed, that his marriage to Susan will survive all the trials that life throws at them and that his jail term will not adversely affect his career, thus removing what could have been several sources of dramatic tension. As it is, there is not really much drama, or much of a coherent storyline. I would agree with the reviewer from the New York Times who called the film "a plotless succession of episodes," and said "there may be some purpose in all this but we couldn't quite make it out-unless it is simply to demonstrate that unemployment is a very bad thing". 4/10.