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MovieMail's Review
Described by Orson Welles as “the saddest movie ever made”, Leo McCarey's film follows an elderly couple fallen on hard times. Mike Bartlett tries to hold back the tears.
The film that Orson Welles said “could make a stone cry” and the inspiration behind Ozu's Tokyo Story, Make Way For Tomorrow was also director Leo McCarey's favourite of his own films, a project he had to fight for, given its unusually grim ending and its unfashionable subject – old age.
The story concerns an elderly couple – Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi (playing someone 20 years her senior) – who fall on hard times. But their children can't, or won't, support more than one parent at a time, so the couple are forced to separate. But not before they grab one last chance to relive their honeymoon and declare a lifetime of devotion to each other.
What young lovers get to do as much? For, sad though Make Way For Tomorrow may be, it is simultaneously the most triumphant of love stories, a paean to old-fashioned sentiment, laced with McCarey's trademark humour. Comparable to Murnau's Sunrise, another tale of two people torn apart by circumstance, it's Hollywood's toughest – and warmest – masterpiece.
Newly restored 1080p HD encode in the film’s original aspect ratio
Peter Bogdanovich discussing McCarey and the film (20 mins)
Gary Giddins discussing the film’s social and political contexts (21 mins)
Lengthy booklet featuring a new essay on the film by writer and Library of America editor Geoffrey O'Brien, and an excerpt from Josephine Lawrence's source novel Years Are So Long.
Film Description
Of Make Way for Tomorrow, Orson Welles told Peter Bogdanovich: 'Oh my God that's the saddest movie ever made.' Long unavailable for home viewing, Leo McCarey's personal favourite among all his films (which included The Awful Truth and An Affair to Remember) is sad, yes, but it also stands as cathartic affirmation of the dignity of human feeling, and in the testament of such achieves a subtle complexity of characterization on par with Renoir, Ford, and Hawks.
Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi, two of the great Hollywood character actors, appear makeup-aged beyond their actual years to portray the couple whose house the bank has foreclosed upon (the film was set and produced in the midst of the Great Depression), and who are forced subsequently to move into their children's homes in the city. A near-musical restructuring of gratitude and debt ensues once the offspring deem the couple's lodging an imposition: the two are separated, then reunited weeks later... as they glide inexorably into an uncertain future.
Unrelentingly unsentimental, yet maintaining a balance of pathos and levity unseen in not only American studio pictures but most of the rest of world cinema, Make Way for Tomorrow exerted a powerful influence on Yasujirô Ozu's Tokyo Story and several other key entries in the Japanese master's body of work. It is a film profoundly concerned with questions of filial obligation and the way we treat one another as human beings; it is a film that, to give Welles the last word, 'could make a stone cry.'
