writers_reign Review of Make Way for Tomorrow

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

Serpents Teeth Sharpened While You Wait

[8/10 · 19 January 2011]

In his wisdom - and/or cynicism - the Chief Programmer at the NFT elected to screen this stark tale of a couple marking fifty years of marriage by being evicted from first their own, secondly their children's home and doomed to spend the rest of their lives separated by 3,000 miles as a 'Seniors Matinée'. Nice one, Geoff. McCary is on record as citing this as his favorite of all his films and give that he shot The Awful Truth the same year that's quite a testament. In the land of 'there are only seven basic plots' this is McCarey's take on King Lear albeit a tad more subtle than, say, Broken Lance, which merely substituted a cattle baron for a King and three sons for three daughters. Here Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi have five children and far from dividing their kingdom between the kids they haven't got change of a match, indeed as the film opens they have, after fifty years together, just two days to leave their home before the bank forecloses. What we have, of course, is not one Lear but two and reluctantly two of their selfish kids, one son, one daughter, agree to take them in. It is, of course, only a matter of time, weeks rather than months, before the kids say enough already leaving Moore to be shipped to the fifth child, a third daughter, in California, and Bondi shunted into a Retirement Home. Okay, Shakespeare did it better but Vina Delmar (who also scripted The Awful Truth for McCary) is not all that far behind the Bard and is a dab hand at substituting visual poetry for the Shakespeare's exquisite blank verse. What makes it more memorable is the lack of high profile 'stars'. It's indisputable that Moore, Bondi, Thomas Mitchell, Fay Bainter and Porter Hall were in the first rank of 'character' and/or 'supporting' actors with faces if not names familiar to every film-goer in the 30s and 40s but the bulk of the 50 plus strong cast - Elisabeth Risdon, Minna Gombell, Louise Beavers, Louis Jean Heydt etc - registered as half-familiar faces rather than names yet all deliver fine performances. For 1937 this is exceptional 'rock the boat' filmmaking.