Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

In one of the two bonus features on the Criterion edition of Leo McCarey’s (1937) dramedy about aged parents and children not willing to care for them, “Make Way for Tomorrow,” Peter Bogdanovich reports that Orson Welles told him that “Make Way for Tomorrow” was the saddest of movies and could make a stone cry. It has not gone onto my list of movies that made me cry, but it definitely made me wince often, both for the pained favorite son George (Thomas Mitchell) who mostly keenly regrets putting his mother in a nursing home and the brave but sometimes passive aggressive mother played by Beulah Bondi.

As much as I sympathize with Ma, she would definitely drive me crazy if she came to live with me, and it’s easier to sympathize with other people’s parents than one’s own, I well know. What is saddest about the movie is that after 50 years of mutual adoration, the parents are split up after their house is foreclosed by the bank. None of their five offspring is willing to take both of them. Almost as sad is that the considerable efforts and patience of daughter-in-law Anita (Fay Bainter), George’s wife, are insufficient and that she does have good reason to find her mother-in-law's interference (in the guise of helping) insufferable.

Both Bogdanovich and  film historian Gary Giddins stress that McCary does not judge the characters. I’m pretty sure he was more sentimental about the foibles of this Irish family than I am and the daughter who takes in the irascible father (Victor Moore) is close to being devoid of sympathetic traits, as is a brother-in-law (Porter Hall) who will not take Ma in even for one evening during Anita’s bridge class.

The oldsters have a final day of bliss together before Pa is going to take the train to California (to a daughter unseen within the movie). It shows New Yorkers of remarkable kindliness, the way things should be rather than the way they are. But, particularly at the time that Social Security was being enacted by Democrats and fiercely opposed by Republicans, and before payouts began in 1940, the dilemma of the old couple losing their home and having to depend on the kindness (and/or guilt) of their offspring was very real.


Victor Moore (1876-1962), a comedian who had been making movies since 1915 (including “ /content_495391510148” and  “Swing Time”) is annoying and delusional, though I can appreciate his struggle for dignity and independence. Although she specialized in playing old women (“content_108783701636 ” from the next year is my favorite, one of the many in which she played the mother of James Stewart) Beulah Bondi (1888-1961) was less than 50 when the movie was made. She received two best supporting actress Oscar nominations (The Gorgeous Hussy in 1936, Of Human Hearts in 1938) but was never more compellingly loving and maladroit than herein. (In 1940, she played a more comic variation of a devoted couple being separated opposite Charles Coburn, “The Captain Is a Lady.”)

Bainter would win an Oscar the next year (in Jezebel), and Thomas Mitchell the year after (Stagecoach; he also appeared that year in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Only Angels Have Wings; later in It's a Wonderful Life and many other movies, often playing an alcohol abuser, but not here.

The movie had no marquee stars and was a downer in an era (the Great Depression) where happy endings were ubiquitous. And was about old people’s plight. The movie lost money and was out of circulation, though admired by other directors (John Ford and Frank Capra, as well as Orson Welles). McCarey won the Oscar for direction that year (for the great screwball comedy “The Awful Truth”; he’d win again in 1944 for “Going My Way” with Bing Crosby as an engaging Irish American priest). In accepting the Oscar, McCarey said the Academy gave it to him for the wrong movie, and continued to regard “Make Way for Tomorrow” as his greatest achievement (and this was the man who put Laurel and Hardy together, directed the best Marx Brothers Movie (Duck Soup), and the prototype “chick flick,” “An Affair to Remember” (1957), a revision of his 1939 “Love Affair”).

The movie came in #2 in a recent poll “The Obscure, the Forgotten and the Unloved” (behind Budd Boetticher's “Ride Lonesome”); a criterion was that the movie had fewer than a thousand ratings (at the time) on IMDB. Claims have been made that it inspired Ozu’s “Tokyo Story.” More plausible ones have been made that Cary Grant’s screen persona was based on McCarey. (I don’t know if “The Awful Truth” was filmed before “Topper,” but “Topper” was released three months earlier.)

In discussing the movie and McCarey’s career and politics, Gary Giddins’s bonus feature is more engaging than Bogdanovich’s, though Bogdanovich provides plenty of insight and information, too, but is listless in contrast to Giidin’s passionate advocacy.

©2010, Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD