On Criterion, I watched It Happened Tomorrow, a 1944 fantasy film directed by René Clair, and co-written by Clair, Dudley Nichols, and Helene Fraenkel, based on the one-act play "The Jest of Haha Laba" by Lord Dunsany. The film has a fun, whimsical feeling to it, mixing a fantasy premise with romance, set in the 1890s, where Lawrence Stevens (Dick Powell) is a newspaper columnist who writes obituaries, and he is given tomorrow's evening newspaper by an elderly newspaper man named Pop Benson, though he doesn't read the newspaper at first. He and his friends go to see a mind-reading act featuring the "Great Siglioni" Oscar Smith (Jack Oakie) and his "clairvoyant" assistant, Sylvia (Linda Darnell) (they are actually uncle and niece). Lawrence later gets Sylvia to go out on a date with him, and he notices the future date on the newspaper, as well as the predictions, like snowfall the next day, a job opening for a waiter preceding the firing of one, and most, importantly, a robbery at the box office of the opera during a performance. Lawrence takes Sylvia to the opera so he can be present during the robbery and write the article for the paper, but it backfires when the police question him on knowing things if he was there and knew all the details ahead of time, thinking he was in on it.
The movie swirls in a series of adventures, with Lawrence taking advantage of the future editions of the newspaper, until the news isn't in his favor, and he tries to prevent fate from taking its course. I thought it was a fun movie with a quirky premise, adding in time travel via the future newspaper, the period setting of the 1890s (the film opens with a bookending sequence of the couple celebrating their 50th anniversary with their friends and family), and very charming. Clair also directed the equally charming I Married a Witch (1942), starring Veronica Lake as a witch who was burned at the stake in colonial Salem, puts a curse on the lineage of the man who burned her by causing his male descendants to marry the wrong woman, and she comes back to life in the 1940s to torture his latest male descendant, only to fall in love with him instead. I did prefer I Married a Witch more to It Happened Tomorrow, but they are fun, enjoyable fantasy comedies of the 1940s.
The plot of It Happened Tomorrow, where a man tries to change events based on a future newspaper, did make me think of the 1990s TV show Early Edition, where Kyle Chandler played an everyman who receives "tomorrow's newspaper today," and they are local stories and headlines about bad things that he has to work to figure out the cause of, and doing the detective work to prevent from happening. I watched it sometimes as an adolescent, and thought it was a decent TV show, though not too well-remembered today.
I would recommend this movie as an offbeat fantasy film with time travel elements, and something unique of the time in which it came out.
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