Make Way for Tomorrow (review)

Long unavailable on any home video format and seldom revived, Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) seems to be that rare example of a highly regarded film whose scarcity was due to its subject matter and lack of star power rather than copyright issues or any of the standard reasons for a film’s disappearance into obscurity. Though the problems of the elderly and the often tense dynamic between parents and their adult children remain universal subjects, they have never been an easy sell at the box office or in American culture as a whole. Criterion’s release of Leo McCarey’s meditation on family, marriage, and the fleeting glories and lasting indignities of old age provides a chance to evaluate both the film and its place within the director’s output. Studiously apolitical, and making no overtly direct claims to social relevancy, the film nonetheless argues subtly and, in the end, painfully for attention to be paid.

The film’s plot is simplicity itself. Married fifty years, Bark and Lucy Cooper (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi), unable to make their mortgage payment, are forced to leave their home. Dreading the idea of going to a so-called rest home, which would require them to permanently separate, they each move in with one of their children’s families. This, too, requires them to be several hundred miles apart, a state that they tell themselves will be temporary. As weeks go by, the tensions occasioned by generational friction, small spaces, and the accretion of assorted grievances, perceived and actual, mount. Eventually, it becomes clear that Bark and Lucy will never be able to live together again. Then, as now, few are willing to hire a man in his late sixties, and none of the children, for a variety of reasons, both selfish and practical, are willing to take them in. He will go off to a daughter in California, and she pretends to welcome the prospect of life in a home for the aged. After a last, poignant afternoon spent in New York revisiting the sites of their honeymoon, the film ends with the couple parting at the train station. With no independent income and at a time when long-distance travel was realistically available only to the well-off, we infer that they may not see each other again.

The film represented a gamble on the part of Paramount Studios. Having defined itself from the beginning as a place where directors held great sway, Paramount was predisposed to allow top filmmakers a calculated risk or two. Initially, their wager did not pay off. The combination of difficult subject matter, a cast composed entirely of character actors, and the decided lack of a happy outcome kept audiences away, and critical acclaim was by no means unanimous. McCarey apparently intended the film as a tribute to his father and was deeply pained by its reception. When accepting the Academy Award the following year for his direction of The Awful Truth (1937), his speech was gracious but brutally succinct: “Thank you very much, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.” Orson Welles said that Make Way for Tomorrow “could make a stone sob” and wondered decades later at “the fact that here was this marvelous film . . . and nobody went!” Fellow directors continued to champion the film long after McCarey died and understood his reputation to have been partially eclipsed for a perceived alliance with the most reactionary wing of anti-Communism in Hollywood near the end of his career.

Make Way for Tomorrow also inspired Tokyo Story (1954), and in its pacing and tone, the links to director Ozu Yasujiro’s examinations of human nature are evident in a willingness to observe a series of individually innocuous but collectively significant events unfold. Both directors share a humanistic outlook without excessive sentimentality. They are also similar in their ability to show us a wide range of simple, everyday people in whom we can, and indeed must, recognize ourselves. Watching this film, viewers are constantly led into a complicated response...