When Tomorrow Comes

After the movie came out, author James M. Cain sued Universal Pictures and director John M. Stahl for copyright violation. Although the movie was based on Cain's novel, "A Modern Cinderella," Cain claimed the filmmakers had stolen the scene where the two lovers take refuge in a church during a storm from his 1937 novel, "Serenade." Screenwriter Dwight Taylor admitted he'd taken the concept of the church scene from "Serenade," but had written an entirely new scene for the movie. The judge in the case ruled against Cain, saying there were significant differences between the book and movie scenes. The case established the legal principle of "scènes à faire" ("scenes to be written"), which states that certain concepts, settings, and devices (i.e. spy gadgets in spy novels) appear in multiple works of fiction and are therefore not subject to copyright laws. Today, the concept of "scènes à faire" is often used in software copyright cases, where certain types of programs, files, and variables appear in all software packages and cannot be copyrighted.

Remade as Der letzte Akkord (1957)