There's Always Tomorrow is an old fashioned type story that is highly unlikely to be made today. This film stars Frank Morgan who had not yet gotten down the eternally befuddled character we all know from The Wizard Of Oz and other works from MGM.
Morgan is an eminently materially successful man with wife and five kids who seem to have included him out of all their plans. He's as one of his kids puts it just a checkbook, possibly a lift in a car to various places when one or any number of his kids need the car for their busy social lives.
Watching There's Always Tomorrow I try to remember that when theater audiences saw it was the middle of the Depression and Morgan and wife Lois Wilson and their kids are doing really as opposed to half any given theater audience. So when an old employee played by Binnie Barnes shows up and really treats him with dignity and respect, it's not hard to see why Morgan is susceptible.
Problem is the kids do find out and things get a little hairy around the Morgan/Wilson household. But everyone behaves so civilized as opposed to what would normally be happening in real life.
The most uncivilized of the group is Robert Taylor, playing Morgan's oldest son and a most callow youth. This was Taylor's second feature film and he's all self righteous about Dad's indiscretion.
The film also was Binnie Barnes's first American made film, she was imported over after the raves about her performance The Private Life of Henry VIII. She starts setting a standard for portraying witty sophisticates as she did on both sides of the pond.
There's Always Tomorrow was remade in 1956 and I'd be curious to see that one with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. This is such an old fashioned tale even for 1934.
