Make Way for Tomorrow

I purchased the Criterion Collection DVD of this movie, intending to rip it out of its packaging and watch it straightaway. Instead, I let it reside on the shelf for several weeks, and only got around to watching it a few days ago.

"Make Way for Tomorrow" has joined my very personal list of the greatest American movies. Its direction is so transparent, one might think it wasn't directed at all, but spontaneously happened in front of the camera. The acting is so unforced and natural, you might think you are watching your neighbors. Of course, such acting and direction are really difficult to achieve, so I wonder why I had not come across this masterpiece before.

Orson Welles is reported to have said it could make a stone cry. He was right. When I watched this movie, I certainly cried for the first time in about five years, having been unable to do so before I saw this incredible film that validates cinema. (Why not cry before this? PTSD, father died, partner died, a car hit me resulting in major injuries.) Don't be put off by thoughts of downer subject matter; if you love life and love cinema, you owe it to yourself to see this great, great movie.

MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (Paramount, 1937), directed by Leo McCarey, ranks one of the very best and well scripted dramas from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and one worthy of recognition and/or rediscovery. No longer available on any local TV channel as it was in the 1970s, MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW had frequent revivals on American Movie Classics, from June 20, 1994 until its final air date, April 3, 1999, and a Turner Classic Movies premiere September 6, 2010. Thus far, it's never been distributed on video cassette but DVD distribution did finally come many years later.

Yes, MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW is sad, moving, but so very true to life dealing realistically about coping with old age. Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi (in possibly the best film role in her entire career) play an elderly couple who lose their home and find that their adult children are finding excuses NOT to take them in. A situation that even rings true even by today's society. Leo McCarey won an Academy Award as Best Director that year for the comedy THE AWFUL TRUTH (Columbia), starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. McCarey was reported to have said that he had won for the wrong movie, that it should should have won for this one. I agree. As much as THE AWFUL TRUTH is a fine movie in its own right, MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW is a far better production, dramatically anyway.

In support here are Fay Bainter (in a rare unsympathetic role); Thomas Mitchell (the only one of the children to know how selfish he has been while the others refuse to realize it themselves), Porter Hall, Barbara Read (as the adolescent granddaughter) and Elisabeth Risdon. While MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW lacks star names, it consists of character actors in leading parts, which is just as good. Victor Moore, usually in comedic supporting parts or leads in program productions (better known as "B" movies), is fine in a rare dramatic role, but is overshadowed by Beulah Bondi, whose performance is excellent as well as tear inducing. Although she plays a woman possibly in her late 70s, she was actually 45 when the film was made. Sadly, MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW did not receive a single Academy Award nomination. If a nomination was to be offered, it definitely would go to Bondi as Best Actress for such highlights as sitting sadly in her rocking chair as the radio plays the sentimental score of "I Adore You" as introduced in Paramount's own COLLEGE HOLIDAY (1936), along with her closing scene at the train station bidding husband Moore farewell to the underscoring of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart," scenes that remain in memory long after the movie is over.

The plot might sound trite in print, but to see it is to appreciate the kind of movie that can never be remade in the same manner as the original nor come anywhere close to great motion picture making such as this one. (***1/2)

I cannot believe that this movie did not receive any Academy Awards! I give it "All T's", for touching, tender, terrific, and tearfully timeless!!! Why it continues to be overlooked and not made into a video behooves any Beulah Bondi fan and people like me that have had the privilege of catching it tucked away between 2am infomercials on other stations. Get it on the shelf in the video stores! I've been looking for it for years! Can you say, "Bitter batter baby buggy bumpers" to your spouse as lovingly as these two lovebirds did in that 1937 classic? Romeo, Juliet, Scarlett and Rhett can't hold a light to 'Pa' and 'Ma' Cooper!

No big box office names grace Make Way For Tomorrow, but Leo McCarey put together a great ensemble cast in this story about old age and the consequences thereof in 1937 America. Though Social Security had just passed, no one would see any money from it until 1942 and health insurance was strictly for those who could afford it.

But Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore who are in relatively good health all things considered are not entering the twilight years of a happy life together without some big problems. The family homestead as did many family homesteads during the Depression has been taken by the bank, forcing Victor and Beulah to look to their children for help.

In those days that's exactly what used to happen. But none of their five children can take on both of them, they have no room. So Beulah goes to live with son Thomas Mitchell and his wife and daughter Fay Bainter and Barbara Read. Moore goes to live with daughter Elizabeth Risdon and husband Ralph Remley. In both households the parents are made to feel in the way and in some respects they were.

It was the cruelest kind of punishment to separate two people who spent half a century together. But that's what happens to both. Before the end of the film, the two spend a day in New York reminiscing of lost youth and the good times therein.

Moore and Bondi were around the same age as their 'children' and were made to look much older. Bondi made a specialty of playing much older than she was and in fact did live into her nineties. As for Moore though he was doing character roles now, he was a big comedy star on the Broadway stage going back to the ragtime era. His biggest role on Broadway was co-starring with Fay Templeton in George M. Cohan's 45 Minutes From Broadway.

Especially in the last half hour Moore and Bondi will pull all the emotional restraints from your soul. They really do become an idealized version of parents and grandparents. Make Way For Tomorrow is heartstring touching movie and hasn't dated one bit.

One of the few American movies to look seriously (and reasonably honestly) at old age, this 1937 melodrama won wonderful reviews, but apparently it was so sad that audiences couldn't bear to look at it. While McCarey was justly celebrated for his sensitive direction, let's start with the shrewd, shaded screenplay, where nobody's entirely good or bad: The children do mean well, but let selfishness intervene; the aged parents are victims, but they're also unavoidably inconvenient and occasionally annoying. It is, unfortunately, a timeless topic -- parents turning into dependent children, children turning into their parents' parents, and the government yammering ineffectually about the problem decade after decade.

McCarey spins the tale out with subtle humor -- just a wink from Victor Moore, a visual aside by Beulah Bondi, says more than several lines of dialogue would. Plus, this is a couple whose passion has survived the years; they can't keep their hands off each other. The notion's a bit hard to swallow, perhaps a contrivance to tilt the viewer's sympathies more in their direction and away from the thoughtless middle-aged kids. But it does work dramatically and makes the last 20 minutes or so almost unbearably poignant. And the last shot, of Bondi, is unforgettable; it's up there with Garbo in "Queen Christina."