Make Way for Tomorrow

A film set in America. Barkley and Lucy have been married fifty years. Both are in their seventies. They call their children home. Five of them come. They give them news. The house is going to the bank; the mortgage was not paid and they will be put out in four days. Nobody can ask why they did not say so earlier. The children look for a solution. Nobody's home is large enough for both of them. From there the film is a story of separation. The mother goes to one son, the father to a daughter. It will be temporary. Three months, they say. Lucy is at George's. The flat is small; her daughter-in-law Anita gives bridge lessons at home and her mother-in-law sits in the room. She talks. Her rocking chair creaks. She uses the telephone a long time. Nobody says anything to her and everyone is uncomfortable. Her granddaughter Rhoda avoids her. Barkley is at Cora's. He is cold, he falls ill, and he passes the time sitting in a shop. He finds a friend there. An immigrant shopkeeper, his only one. What the narrative is interested in is not old age but courtesy: its idea is that nobody is bad; all the children are trying to do something and none of it is enough. A decision is made. Lucy will go to a home, Barkley to California. They have one day before they part. From there the film follows that day. They meet in New York. They go to the hotel where they honeymooned fifty years ago. Nobody is expecting them. They eat, they dance, they talk. They do not go to their children. The family waiting for them at dinner waits in vain. The last scene is at a railway station. The narrative repairs nothing. The film failed commercially when it opened. The studio wanted the ending changed and Leo McCarey refused. McCarey won an Oscar that same year for another film and said in his speech that they had given it to him for the wrong one. The source is Josephine Lawrence's novel. Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi, Fay Bainter and Thomas Mitchell are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes the hard vein of classic Hollywood and family drama. Who it is not for: anyone looking for consolation; the narrative gives hope nowhere and its last section is directly painful.