Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck played conniving lovers in Billy Wilder's 1944 film noir Double Indemnity. Eleven years later, their unusual screen chemistry—MacMurray as a corporate prince suddenly going rogue; Stanwyck playing a restless captive of her life choices, full of bottled-up, destructive passion—is on perfect display again in Douglas Sirk's 1955 There's Always Tomorrow. But typical of Sirk (Lured, Magnificent Obsession), there's an oddball element to the story. MacMurray plays a successful, Los Angeles-based toy maker—that's right, a toymaker—who buzzes around his office-factory like Santa Claus in nice suits. His elvish employees pop up from their off-camera workshops to show him new creations for his approval, and everywhere there are shelves full of wonderful playthings.
But when his character, Cliff, goes home, it's a different story. In a way, he becomes a toy, easily dismissed as an unexciting provider and not quite real. His wife, Marion (Joan Bennett), is too busy putting out brush fires with their three kids to have the energy or time for a date night with him. His teenage son and daughter take Cliff for granted and are too immersed in their social lives to spend time with him, while the youngest girl is a whiner who needs constant attention from her mother. Only the housekeeper silently sees Cliff's growing sense of isolation and despair. Enter Norma (Stanwyck), a one-time plain Jane employee of Cliff's, who has gone on to glitzy fame in New York as a fashion creator. Visibly carrying a torch for the clueless Cliff after two decades apart, she shows up at his door one night, sparking a fire for renewed living in him. They become inseparable, much to the alarm of his kids, who suspect betrayal.
From there the drama repeatedly cycles through and sharpens these developments, i.e., Cliff's and Norma's intensifying if still chaste relationship, the children worrying and retaliating through rudeness, and Norma exhausting herself with domesticity. But throughout, the two leads really convey the interesting, ungainly desire that marks their distinctive on-screen connection. What's special about MacMurray and Stanwyck together is that you can feel the hunger between their characters, yet they look like they're from different worlds, ill-fitting. The camera can't make sense of their romance, which perfectly suits the peril of Cliff and Norma potentially forgetting everything and letting go. Sirk doesn't push that idea, instead of letting it grow organically in scenes where we see a little bit of Big Apple, fashionista arrogance in Norma (in contrast to Cliff's L.A. warmth at the toy lab), and whenever she tries to assert a few small limits on Cliff's growing ardor.
This is a grownup story about grownups in mid-life crises of identity, which Sirk respectfully lets play out within his trademark, mesmerizing production design, breaking up shots with geometric, monochromatic complexity that reminds us just how involved daily and emotional reality truly is. This is a film that is more than the sum of its parts and deserves to be a higher-ranking classic in Sirk's canon. Strongly recommended.