Classic Movie Review: Make Way for Tomorrow
By Josh Spiegel
January 10, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

That dude is not HD friendly.
When I was a little kid, and I still got a chance to read the Sunday newspaper, I would always stumble my way upon a little feature that was usually buried somewhere in the classifieds. There would be a Sears-style portrait of an elderly couple, and a little caption honoring them for having hit 50, 55, 60 years of marriage. The caption would describe who they were, where they’d met, where they were from, and so on. Even as a kid, I’d be touched by the idea that there were couples that stayed with each other through thick and thin, and had survived through countless struggles and were still smiling. I come from a two-parent family; until middle school, I wasn’t really aware that a lot of my peers didn’t have the exact same background. It’d be crude and reductive to call myself lucky, but I had it differently, at least.

I’m also an only child, and for a long time, I only saw the positive in it. On Christmas, I’d get all the cool presents. All the attention could be lavished on me. Granted, unlike some of the kids at my school, I didn’t have the frivolous luxuries, like watching all the R-rated movies or more adult-oriented TV shows on the networks at later hours. But I saw the good in being the only child. But I remember going to visit my grandmother on my mother’s side when I was about 17, and feeling the same way I imagine others do when they enter a nursing home. On the one hand, a nursing home fills a necessary function, but the word “inviting” never comes to mind. I was put off by the sterility of the place, but also by the unnerving feeling that one day I’d be in my mother’s shoes.

Looking at my grandmother in bed, an old, lovely woman who’d led a full life, I wondered if one day, I’d have to put one or both of my parents into a nursing home. Would I be able to take them in myself and provide adequate care? (As I get older, I think about this a little more each year, and the answer still frustrates me, always being “I don’t know.”) Would I want to put either of my parents into what amounts to an offshoot of a hospital wing? Something I thought about less before, but will consider more now, is the following: would I want to separate my parents, if it came to that? They’ve been together for over 30 years, and if they’re both alive 20 or 25 years from now (when they’d be past 75 years old), wouldn’t they still be in love?

These kinds of questions are a metaphorical bucket of cold water, and they were brought into full view as I watched Make Way For Tomorrow, a profoundly moving and incredibly sad film from director Leo McCarey. McCarey won the Best Director Oscar three times in his career, but not for this film. The same year Make Way For Tomorrow came out, McCarey (who directed the best Marx Brothers comedy, Duck Soup) won for his direction of the screwball comedy The Awful Truth. He would later direct The Bells Of St. Mary’s. To say that he was versatile is a bit of an understatement. McCarey was supposedly proudest of his work in Make Way For Tomorrow, and who can blame him? Though the film is one of the great tearjerkers (if you do not even well up by the end of this film, I fear for your humanity), it’s not punishing.

Well, it’s not punishing in its storytelling, which is so deceptively simple, the final emotional gut-punch sneaks up on you. What is so punishing about Make Way For Tomorrow is its unflinching reality. While the film is certainly a product of its time, there are factors that resonate as strongly today as they did over 70 years ago. We open with Barkley and Lucy Cooper, an elderly married couple of over 50 years. They’ve assembled four of their five adult children to reveal that they can no longer afford the house they live in, due to money troubles brought on by the Great Depression. Their children, while being very friendly, don’t want to take on the responsibility (or are just unable to do so) of having both of their parents along with their own families, so Barkley goes to live with his daughter, Cora, and Lucy goes to live with her son, George.

The story progresses as Lucy, unintentionally, gets on the nerves of George’s wife and daughter, simply by not appreciating that her style of living (chatting up all of George’s bridge players, talking on the phone louder than normal, staying up late) is not the same as her son’s and his family’s. Barkley gets on his daughter’s nerves because of a cold he’s gotten. You can look at the actions of George and Cora and think they’re terrible people (in the penultimate scene, the adult children come to this conclusion by themselves), but who among us doesn’t get a bit frustrated by the quirks our parents have, products of a time before we were around? Some of what happens in the film is sad and awkward to watch, but never do the adult children’s actions seem false or contrived.

Make Way For Tomorrow is such an achingly sad movie because it refuses to seem like a Hollywoodized version of what happened to average people during the Great Depression. By populating the film with character actors - the most familiar of whom is probably Thomas Mitchell, who plays George here and played Uncle Billy in It’s A Wonderful Life - and veering away from a happy ending, McCarey and screenwriter Vina Delmar create a fully believable world that becomes even more realistic with the crushing finale. Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi, who play Barkley and Lucy, act like they’ve been married for as long as their characters. There’s plenty of intimacy in their relationship, even in a one-sided phone call Lucy has halfway through the film, nearly bringing tears to the eyes of the bridge players listening in.

I don’t want to make it sound like Make Way For Tomorrow is not an inherently watchable movie. It is. McCarey, even when not working in more inspirational or comedic fare, knows how to make a fast-paced, relatable film. Just make sure you have a box or ten of tissues handy when you watch the film. Though you may feel at various moments that some of the dialogue or story choices are almost heavy-handed in their emotion, I’d argue that there’s a strong through-line of emotional realism permeating every scene, especially the ones that seem most intent on tugging on your heartstrings. Make Way For Tomorrow is such a tough movie because it raises questions in every viewer. Now, I have to remind myself to be less selfish when I have to take care of my parents, and to just take care of them as best I can, no matter how annoyed I may get when one or both of them does something that strikes me as old-fashioned. I just have to remember that, and I’ll have won half of the battle.