When Tomorrow Dies

Gwen (Patricia Gage) is unhappy. Her husband is inattentive and obsessed with work. Her two children don’t appreciate all that she does for them. Worse yet, when she opens herself up and allows herself to be vulnerable, to tell them why she’s unhappy, her cries fall on deaf ears. Her husband, in particular, seems baffled. It’s her job, he tells her, to take care of this family. And if they seem unappreciated from time to time, that’s just her lot in life. Being a stay-at-home mom and homemaker is a thankless job. That’s just the way things are.

When Tomorrow Dies, part three in the Vancouver Trilogy directed and co-written by Larry Kent, dissects this dynamic with surprising results. While the film flirts with melodrama, the events of the plot never reach those kinds of overclimactic crescendos and dramatic highs. Instead, it’s a quiet little slice of life where we follow Gwen through her role as mother and wife, and see how hard she tries, and how often she fails.

She decides to go back to school to help reclaim a little bit of her agency. Her husband doesn’t understand. Why would she do that for? While at school, she struggles. She used to be a good student, but it’s been a long time. She meets with the professor to talk about her essay and he assures her that she’s off to a good start, she just needs to get back into the swing of things.

Professor Trevelyan is kind, caring and attentive—everything her husband isn’t. When Tomorrow Dies isn’t interested in the lurid fascination of Gwen cheating on her husband with Trevelyan. He exists to show her that happiness isn’t in running away with someone else and potentially repeating the cycle. Happiness isn’t going to be found in another man, or even with men in general. “Happiness” instead, as a construct, seems to be beyond her reach. When Tomorrow Dies is about what society does to people and how it squashes their dreams. In a prolonged fantasy sequence, Gwen pleasures herself, and in her thoughts, we see not images of graphic sex, but her being treated with respect, as an object of desire. All that Gwen wants is to be wanted. Instead, so much of her life is spent in justifying her existence.

After I had a chance to review Larry Kent’s Sweet Substitute, I was excited to see When Tomorrow Dies. If I hadn’t known ahead of time that the two films were directed by the same person, I never would have known. While there are passing similarities between the two, When Tomorrow Dies feels like a much more studious work. The filmmaking techniques are much more refined. The performances are much more nuanced. The dialogue and all that it conveys are relayed more naturalistically. While I was a big fan of Sweet Substitute, When Tomorrow Dies is the better film—a reaction I wasn’t expecting to have.

In the introduction on the Blu-ray, Larry Kent says that at the time, the film opened to poor reviews and lackluster performance, and that reaction had him convinced that it was a lesser work. For years he believed this. He revisited the film decades later and had a reversal of opinion on it. It became his favorite of his own work. I’m glad he was able to revisit it, but I agree. I think that When Tomorrow Dies is his masterpiece.

Both Sweet Substitute and When Tomorrow Dies end with a downbeat ending, but where Sweet Substitute felt like the kind of punishment that harkened back to pre-code cinema and the vengeance it had for women who dared to rebel against societal conventions When Tomorrow Dies represents a growth not just for the director, but for filmmaking in general. Here, a woman makes a decision and whether or not we agree with it, she owns it. She owns what she’s done and she’s going to live with it. However her life shakes out after that is up to her, and we can interpret it however we want to.

I’ve decided to interpret it with hope.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
When Tomorrow Dies is presented on Blu-ray in a single disc, housed in a standard case with a reversible insert, featuring alternate cover artwork on either side. One side features fiery artwork of Gwen, painted in reds and oranges. The other side is black and white, an extreme close-up on Gwen, taken from a scene in the film simulating her internal turmoil and feelings of madness. Inside the case is a 10-page booklet with an essay from Tom McSorley, Executive Director of the Canadian Film Institute in Ottawa.

Like Sweet Substitute, When Tomorrow Dies is assembled from a newly scanned and restored 4K transfer from the original 16mm A/B negatives by Canadian International Pictures, presented in 1080p high-definition video for the Blu-ray. And, like Sweet Substitute, the results couldn’t be better. The whites of the black and white cinematography are crisp and bright. The blacks, particularly in sequences simulating Gwen’s descent into madness with talking heads shrouded in cloaks of shadows, are pitch, inky black.

There are minor technical imperfections visible throughout, and in one scene the film looked scratchy and littered with dirt marks. This happened exactly once and last maybe about 3-5 seconds. I assume, based on the excellence of the rest of transfer throughout, this was due to an issue with the negative itself and what I saw was as good as that segment is ever going to look. I mention these “issues” only to highlight that When Tomorrow Dies was shot on film over half a century ago. The restoration process had to fight decades of film decay and came out looking astonishing. Canadian International Pictures deserves a ton of praise for their work here.

When Tomorrow Dies features a DTS-HD MA 2.0 monoaural soundtrack transferred from the original 16mm magnetic final mix. It, unfortunately, is not as pristine as its visual counterpart. And while I feel that the restoration process did the best possible job it could with what it had available, there are some issues with dialogue clarity. While Sweet Substitute was crystal clear and razor sharp, When Tomorrow Dies can often be a bit muddy and muffled when characters are speaking. The musical score, however, is fantastic. It sounds just about perfect. This leads me to believe that, due to budgetary constraints, there were likely sound-recording issues at the time of production.

Sound purists will likely cringe at my suggestions here, but you can either turn on your TV/soundbar’s dialogue enhancer or use the “dynamic range control level” feature, which basically makes every single effect more or less at the same audible level—both of which effectively eliminated any issues I had. Or, you can turn on the available subtitles. Either way, the dialogue is certainly audible, it just might require some tweaking if you want to make sure you’re clearly hearing everything that’s been said, and considering that this is an extremely dialogue-heavy feature, you might want to consider one of the three options listed.

Like the other two films in Larry Kent’s Vancouver trilogy, When Tomorrow Dies is loaded with special features, including an audio commentary recorded specifically for this release by Samm Deighan, who goes into depth on the film, its themes and an overall history of the era in which it was released.

One of the more surprising features here is a whole other film made by Kent in 1993, along with an introduction by Peter Rist.

• New Audio Commentary featuring film historian and author Samm Deighan
• Archival Audio Commentary featuring film professor Peter Rist
• New Introduction to When Tomorrow Dies by Larry Kent (HD 1:37)
• Tomorrow Lives – New interview with Kent (HD 8:33)
• Independent Evolution – New interview with film professor David Douglas (HD 17:32)
• New Audio Interview with Heather Whitehead, daughter of star Patricia Gage (HD 8:34)
• Talking to Larry Kent – Archival conversation featuring Kent and Rist (SD 19:09)
• Kent on Kent – Archival audio interviews with Kent (HD 19:47)
• Mothers and Daughters – Little-seen Kent feature exploring some of the same themes as When Tomorrow Dies (SD, 1:25:01)
• New Introduction to Mothers and Daughters by Douglas (HD 4:46)
• Booklet featuring a new essay by film critic and professor Tom McSorley

When Tomorrow Dies is a somber endcap to a landmark trilogy of films. While the two films that came before it were known for their controversial, frank depiction of sexuality, When Tomorrow Dies was controversial for its frank depiction of a woman at odds with a society that undervalues her. Even though there are audio issues, the video transfer is excellent, and do justice to a fantastic film, with enough special features here to keep fans entertained for hours. Canadian International Pictures and OCN Distribution have put in tremendous work on this Blu-ray release and it comes Highly Recommended.