Cinema: Of Human Freedom

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Tomorrow Is My Turn (Show Corporation), the work of France's André Cayatte (Justice Is Done, We Are All Murderers), illustrates in skillful melodrama some subtle reflections on apparent and actual freedom and bondage. The subject is discussed in terms of two Frenchmen, one an uneducated baker (Charles Aznavour), the other a sophisticated journalist (Georges Riviere), who go off to fight the Germans in 1939. The baker, lacking any desire to fight, goes because he is told to-his decision seems to be forced. The journalist, declining a deferment, goes because he chooses to ("I want to see how I'll behave when the heat's on")—his decision seems to be free.

Both men are captured by the Germans; both are sent to work for the same decent, kindly German farmer. Suddenly their motives are sorted by a crisis, as light is sorted by a prism, and each is shown in his true colors. The journalist, determined to escape at all costs, does not scruple to seduce the farmer's pretty teen-age daughter (Cordula Trantow), involve her in his getaway, and then leave her behind to face the anger of the authorities. He justifies his crime as an act of war. But the baker, who never wanted the war, refuses to beg the moral question it has raised, refuses to help himself if he has to harm the girl. "Better a dope," he says grimly, "than a louse."

Ironically, the journalist realizes a handsome profit from his immorality: fame and fortune as a hero of the Resistance. The baker collects the unglamorous rewards of virtue: hard work, self-respect, the love of the German family. When the farmer is drafted, the baker quietly becomes the man of the house, running the farm and protecting the wife and children as if they were his own. In the last reel, Cayatte adroitly points the moral: liberation makes the baker truly a free man, but it leaves the journalist still a slave to his own weakness.

Cayatte suffers some confusions in his script, but he is fortunate in his principals —Aznavour, Rivière and Trantow all play with clarity, sensitivity, restraint. As is customary in a conte moral, the film simplifies life to teach a lesson, but in this case the lesson is profound: True freedom is the freedom to do good.