Always Tomorrow: The Portrait of an American Business (1941) User Reviews

strange in-house Coca-Cola dramatized documentary, plays like a Monogram or PRC feature

[django-1 · 7/10 · 17 March 2006]

ALWAYS TOMORROW, made in 1941 for the Coca-Cola company and presumably aimed at bottlers and potential investors in bottling plants and distributor-ships, belongs to that curious genre of film, the Corporate Feature. This is not a documentary or a training film, but a Hollywood-made narrative drama featuring a cast full of familiar B-movie faces (led by comedian Johnny Arthur as a fussy, worrywart accountant for a local Coca-Cola bottling plant), and it plays like a typical Monogram or PRC feature, except for the lectures to the audience (in the style of an exploitation film) about business philosophy. The film's structure is strange in that it begins in 1941 with the story of Coca-Cola distributor Jim Westlake, and then works backward step-by-step until we reach the beginning of his career! You've probably never seen a film like this before, and you'll learn a lot about the history of the soda business while being entertained.

Can I face tomorrow with confidence?

[mark.waltz · 6/10 · 2 December 2023]

Don't play a drinking game every time they say "Coca Cola" in the longest commercial ever made, pre-television. The film is only 52 minutes, and yet, you'll have alcohol poisoning by the time it's done. It's a professional looking industrial film that does have a plot and purpose, so it's certainly entertaining, showing issues of one of their many factories and how they survived the depression into the early 40's, pondering the possibility of war.

The cast is led by John Archer, an optimist on all levels, dealing with the pessimistic Johnny Arthur, a nervous fussbudget (think Franklin Pangborn with a thicker mustache) who challenges every change he wants to make. Arthur's also a chauvinist, treating executive Virginia Carroll with contempt a lot of times but unable to deny what an asset she has been to the company. Archer has a strange scene where he fires a truck driver, actually promoting him to manager of sales. But overall, I found this quite well written, even as an epic advertisement.