AND NOW TOMORROW (1944)

At her engagement party, socialite Emily Blair (Loretta Young) falls ill with meningitis; when she recovers, she has lost her hearing. The doctors don't know how long it will last, so she puts off marriage to Jeff Stoddard (Barry Sullivan). She spends months visiting doctors all over the world but gets nowhere (though she kicks ass at lip-reading). On her return train trip to her hometown, she is pulled out of the way of a runaway luggage cart by Dr. Merek Vance (Alan Ladd), who has a practice at a free clinic in Pittsburgh. He's a hometown boy visiting his mentor, Dr. Weeks (Cecil Kellaway), who has, coincidentally, asked him to work on Emily's case. At first, she assumes that this free clinic physician couldn't possibly help her, and on Merek's part, he resents her family because years ago, Emily's father laid off Merek's father just before Christmas. But she agrees to try his treatment and he agrees to stay in town for a few weeks to see if it works. Their relationship remains a bit prickly, but eventually they warm a bit to each other. Soon, Merek stumbles on an unpleasant fact: Emily's fiancé Jeff is having an affair with Emily's sister Janice (Susan Hayward).

This small town soap opera is, refreshingly, short on showy melodramatics, and allows the relationship between Emily and Merek to develop at a leisurely pace, perhaps a bit too leisurely as, at just 90 minutes, things bog down a bit in the final third. But if thwarted romances and medical dramas are in your wheelhouse, you'll like this. I like Young better in her 1930s movies where she seems bright and energetic. Here, she seems artificial at times, and she doesn’t really inhabit her character. But she's OK, and better are Ladd and Kellaway. Sullivan and Hayward are fine, even though, for the most part, they remain cardboard characters—though you can feel Hayward trying to make something meatier of her role. Grant Mitchell and Beulah Bondi provide solid support. Good line, early in the film: at a diner, Ladd asks for coffee, "hot, strong, and made this year." The cook replies, "You won’t like ours." Pictured are Ladd and Young. [DVD]