Re: "The HTF 100 Great Films of the 1930's Challenge"
Make Way for Tomorrow - 10 of 10A stunning and wrenching film about love, aging and the modernized disintegration of extended family. This is Leo McCarey's finest film, by far.
Barkley and Lucy Cooper are in their seventies, it's harder for them to get by and "Pa" has been retired for four years now. But he never had finished paying off the mortgage on the house, and now the bank is repossessing it. Their five well off children simply cannot be burdened with supporting both mom and dad, so the children decide to split mom and dad up, and then shuffle them around every three months to another one of their brothers or sisters. The old couple stoically agrees, though they are not pleased with the arrangement, they have no other option. But the family members are miserable. They have lives, you see, lives that cannot possibly accommodate the elderly or additional members of their own family. they are busy with important things--like going out to dinner. Caring for Mom and Dad is such an insufferable burden and the old fools keep being embarrassing and interfering. What makes it worse is that the children and grandchildren are utterly oblivious to just how wretched they are, while the parents grow more despondent as they realize what sort of adults their children have become.
I actually thought for a while that the film was going to end with a double suicide, the film is that dark. But the ending the film took, with Lucy and Barkley reminiscing and retracing their honeymoon in New York fifty years before was much honest, more powerful and better storytelling.
Elegant and overlooked, this is definitely a film that deserves to be on this list.
The lead performances, but especially Beulah Bondi, are absolutely outstanding, Bondi gives one of the best leading performances of the 30s, in my opinion.
I finally tracked down a copy of this film, from Eddie brandt's. Long ago taped off of AMC and now I've transferred it to DVD.
