Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Tomorrow Goodbye (1950) into a noir film. Both the novel and the film accentuate
violence and sadistic brutality. The film was actually forbidden in Ohio due to its “sordid,
sadistic presentation of brutality and an extreme presentation of crime with explicit steps in
commission” (Wilt 1991:37). Using a flashback device, the story is narrated by the amoral
and unsympathetic protagonist Ralph Cotter (James Cagney), a career criminal who breaks
out of prison and then murders his partner in crime. The film closely follows the opening
of the novel which starts like this:
This is how it is when you wake up in the morning of the morning you have waited
a lifetime for: there is no waking state. You are all at once wide awake, so wide
awake that it seems you have slipped all the opiatic degrees of waking, that you
have had none of the sense-impressions as your soul again returns to your body
from wherever it has been; you open your eyes and you are completely awake, as if
you had not been asleep at all. (McCoy 1996:3)
The narrator of the novel describes the prison environment with its “seventy-two
unwashed men chained to their bunks” rather vividly, and the feeling of hatred that
resonates between the narrator and the other prisoners is rendered quite directly:
There was coughing and grunting and hawking and much spitting, and the man in
the next bunk, Budlong, a skinny sickly sodomist, turned on his side facing me and
said in a ruttish voice: ‘I had another dream about you last night, sugar.’
It will be your last, you Caresser of Calves, I thought. ‘Was it as nice as the
others?’ I asked.’
‘Nicer….’ he said.
‘You’re sweet. I adore you,’ I said, feeling a fine fast exhilaration that today was
the day I was going to kill him – as soon as I got my hands on those pistols I was
going to kill him. I hope Holiday knows what the hell about those pistols, I
thought; I hope they’re where they’re supposed to be, I hope Cobbett doesn’t let us
down. (McCoy 1996:5-6)
The film actually traces the last months in the life of Cotter, who soon finds out
which police can be bribed and he even plans to blackmail a couple of dishonest cops,
Weber (Ward Bond) and Reece (Barton MacLane), while stealing money from the mob.
Along the way, his mistress, Holiday Caldwell (Barbara Payton), is threatened with
exposure for her part in his escape, but she is the one who kills rather than give him up to
someone else. Cagney is as ruthless as Cody Jarrett in White Heat, made one year earlier,
but his pathology here is under control so he can blackmail cops and slickly double-cross
his one-time betrayer (fig. 9).
57