
Charles Farrell certainly lost out when sound came in. Not that he had a terrible voice, but he had a voice that took away from rather than added to his persona. His sensitivity as an actor was unaffected, but his strapping manliness was diminished by the lightness of his speech. He might have made a good Clark Kent but the characters he was given neglected the Superman side. Contrast AFTER TOMORROW with CITY GIRL, where he’s a bit of a father-dominated weakling but his boyish charm and muscular physique carry him through. Mother-dominated in the ’32 Borzage, he just seems sappy.




Borzage certainly had an uneven pre-code era. Some of his films from this period are terrific. AFTER TOMORROW has a lot in common with BAD GIRL, made the same year, but that one’s really good, for all its oddity. The artificial studio New York — the Empire State Building, and a detailed brownstone — are the main merits of AT. Jokes about suicide and domestic violence, tossed off casually, hint at the kind of pre-code this could have been, but it never gets there, despite Minna Gombell. What we want for the full Warner effect is hardboiled tragedy played at farce speed — this one’s at least 30% too slow. The main advantage of it being a sound film is you can hear the jokes plummet to earth.