I may love Kino’s noir sets, but they sometimes stretch the definition of that genre until it almost breaks. Such is the case with 1955’s Hold Back Tomorrow. It may be in the black and white, it may take place almost entirely within a prison cell, but I would never describe it as noir.
This is really a one-room play that is just barely opened up for the screen. Surprisingly, it does not appear this was ever a play. If there had been a commentary track, I could have listened to it to likely find out for certain. I find it funny it has been some time since I have seen one of these Kino noir discs without a commentary track, and yet this turned out be such a title.
I would hope such a track, if it existed, could tell me why this film even exists. I really wonder what Universal was thinking when they footed the bill for a dry and talky affair that makes Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light look like an action film in comparison.
John Agar plays a prisoner in his cell on the day of his pending execution. Cleo Moore is a woman paid to keep him company on that day. His crime was strangling to death three people, yet the prison doesn’t see fit to monitor his cell while she’s in it. Then again, she’s suicidal, so she doesn’t seem to care if he does her in, and I guess the authorities can’t be bothered to intervene. Then again again, the police don’t even know about her failed attempt to off herself by jumping off a pier at the start of the film.
We’re going to spend a long time in this cell with two rather uninteresting and deeply depressed people. He’s never cried. She’s never smiled. Guess what? They’re perfect for each other. Oh, I almost forgot, she also reads him a poem and they eat soup that has onions in it. They have a brief, sad and slow dance together.
I won’t even suggest anything that happens in the final few minutes of the film. I wouldn’t even call it the third act, because that would suggest a narrative structure. For better or worse, the structure is too loose for me to describe it as such.
One aspect of the production I thought was cool is Moore is top-billed. It’s always nice to see a woman get top billing, especially in films of this vintage.
I’m not sure what to think of Hold Back Tomorrow, except I didn’t think much of it. I like to think I can appreciate serious, and seriously dry, cinema but there was nothing here I really felt a connection to.
Dir: Hugo Bass
Starring Cleo Moore, John Agar, a set of a prison cell
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s blu-ray set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XII