Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey, 1937): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 3.50pm
If there is one film I am looking forward to seeing this month more than
any other this is it. Part of the excellent Ozu season at BFI Southbank, this
Leo McCarey-directed 1937 melodrama is apparently a Hollywood one-off
and not to be missed. Make Way For Tomorrow
concerns the travails of an elderly couple whose five children won’t
take them in when they hit hard times during America’s depression.
Orson Welles said the film “would make a stone cry” and the influential
critic Robin Wood, who wrote so movingly of the movie in his book Sexual Politics and Narrative Film, put in his all-time top ten.
This screening is introduced by Ozu season curator Ian Haydn Smith.
Chicago Reader review:
With the possible exception of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, this
1937 drama by Leo McCarey is the greatest movie ever made about the
plight of the elderly. (It flopped at the box office, but when McCarey
accepted an Oscar for The Awful Truth, released the same year, he
rightly pointed out that he was getting it for the wrong picture.)
Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi play a devoted old couple who find they
can’t stay together because of financial difficulties; their
interactions with their grown children are only part of what makes this
movie so subtle and well observed. Adapted by Vina Delmar from Josephine
Lawrence’s novel Years Are So Long, it’s a profoundly moving
love story and a devastating portrait of how society works, and you’re
likely to be deeply marked by it. Hollywood movies don’t get much better
than this.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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