Hold Back Tomorrow (1955)

Hold Back Tomorrow was produced, directed and written in 1955 by Hugo Haas, a filmmaker who is arguably unfairly overlooked. It’s one of several Haas movies which starred Cleo Moore.

It’s a movie that had to tread fairly carefully to avoid the ire of the Production Code Authority.

A killer named Joe Cardos (John Agar) is to be hanged the following morning. The warden tells him he can have a last request. No matter what it is it will be granted. Joe asks for a woman for the night.

The warden is horrified but feels that he has no choice. The cops are given the job of finding Joe a woman.

That proves to be rather difficult. Most girls are not keen on the idea of spending the night with a guy who is about to be hanged for strangling three women. Even ladies known to have flexible moral standards are not interested.

Finally they get a lead on a girl who might be a possibility. The proprietress of an escort service suggests that Dora (Cleo Moore). Dora is down so low and is so desperate she would do anything for money, and since there will be two hundred bucks in it for her she might say yes.

We have already been introduced to Dora, in the movie’s effectively moody doom-laden opening sequence. She was trying to drown herself. She really is at rock bottom. Not surprisingly she says yes. She hates the idea but she hates life and she hates herself and she hates everything and she figures she’s got nothing left to lose.

Dora and Joe don’t exactly hit it off at first. Eventually they begin to talk. About their pasts. About why their lives have been so disastrous. I can’t say too much more without risking spoilers.

Almost the entire movie is shot on a single set, Joe’s cell. By its nature it’s a very talky movie. It also inevitably has a slightly artificial feel but that works to the film’s advantage - it’s as if for one night these two people are locked in their own private world.

And it is totally focused on Joe and Dora. That puts a lot of pressure on the lead actors. They carry it off pretty well. John Agar plays Joe as a man filled with seething resentment and he does a decent job.

Cleo Moore never quite made it to the top as an actress. She didn’t quite have that extra something that transforms a promising actress into a genuine A-list star. I’ve seen a few of her movies and she was always quite competent. This is by far the best performance I’ve seen from her. She’s very very impressive and never makes the mistake of pushing things too far. Dora is not a woman likely to have an emotional meltdown or burst into tears. For her it’s much too late for that. Moore captures her mix of resignation and despair exceptionally well.

Now back to my earlier point about this movie’s fascinating attempts to sidestep the Production Code. First off, what would a guy in Joe’s position want to do with a dame on his last night on earth? Maybe he’d like to play gin rummy, or talk about literature, but even in 1955 no audience was going to buy that. But of course there was no way the movie could suggest that he might want to have sex with her. Perish the thought. Joe just wants a woman to talk to. It kind of works but it is obviously a bit unlikely, especially given that Dora is a stunning blonde and is wearing a slinky dress.

When the cops talk to the woman who runs the escort service Haas is careful to make sure we see a prominently displayed sign which explains that the agency provides girls as dancing partners only, but at the same time we get the very strong impression that these young ladies are call girls.

Of course when the cops had trouble finding a girl to agree to share Joe’s cell on his last night the obvious thing would have been to look for a prostitute. Even if it was going to be made clear that no hanky-panky was going to happen it would be fairly obvious that a prostitute would be more likely go for such an idea than a respectable girl.

And at this point it would seem that Haas decided to take a risk. He threw in a line that tells us that Dora is in fact a call girl. It’s just one line and presumably he hoped that somehow the Production Code Authority (PCA) would miss it. And apparently they did. So Dora is indeed a prostitute, and we also learn (in that same single line of dialogue), that like most such girls she’s been persecuted by the criminal justice system and that might well explain why she’s been reduced to poverty and despair. All of which means that her character makes more sense, and her actions make more sense.

Haas was clearly trying to make a grown-up movie and to a surprising extent he succeeds. He knew that the really grown-up stuff would have to be limited to one or two crucial lines of dialogue that the PCA might not notice. My interpretation of this movie is to a large extent based on these throwaway lines, but given that Haas had by this time been writing and directing movies for 30 years I figure that if he included a line of dialogue he did so for a reason. There’s that one line that suggests that Dora is probably a call girl. There’s another line that indicates that Dora assumes that Joe’s murders were sexually motivated, that he strangled women because that was the only way he could get sexual pleasure.

What’s really interesting is that Dora simply doesn’t care if Joe kills her for his sexual pleasure. To her that would be a fitting end to her life.

The prison authorities leave Dora completely alone in the cell with Joe. There’s not even a guard posted outside. He could do anything he wanted to her. That’s obviously a bit of dramatic licence, no prison warden would allow such a thing, but it’s dramatically necessary. We have to believe that Dora’s life is in Joe’s hands.

This is a story of a man in need of redemption, but he doesn’t know it. And a woman in need of a meaning to her life, but she doesn’t know it. You’ll have to watch the movie to find out whether either achieves those goals.

This is a slightly odd movie but it’s engrossing. Highly recommended.

It’s included in Kino Lorber’s Film Noir: Dark Side of Cinema XVII boxed set although of course it isn’t film noir.

I’ve reviewed a couple of Cleo Moore’s other movies - One Girl’s Confession (1953) and Over-Exposed (1956).