Make way for tomorrow

Make Way for Tomorrow was a little-appreciated family drama in 1937, when it earned no Oscar nominations. Its director, Leo McCarey, did win the Best Director award the same year for a comedy feature (The Awful Truth, starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant); he told the Academy it had acknowledged the wrong movie. It was clear why: his non-winner was a filmed version of a Broadway play (itself an adaptation of a novel), it had no big stars, no happy ending and little credibility.

Seven decades later, following a Criterion DVD re-issue, its up-front-credit message might ring just as true in another troubled economic era comparable to that of the late Thirties: Honor Thy Parents. However, Criterion's marketing, including an admiring extra by Peter Bogdanovich (citing Orson Welles and Hitchcock), cannot make a silk purse out of a stagy melodrama.

An elderly couple (comedian Victor Moore and studio contract actress Beulah Bondi) suddenly advise their four grown-up East Coast children that the family home has been foreclosed by the bank. The old folks will be homeless in two days; none of the children has room to take in both parents. One son (Thomas Mitchell) takes in his mother, to share his daughter's bedroom, and a daughter can let her father sleep on a sofa, while everyone waits for the snooty eldest daughter to arrange accommodation for them both in her home.

Selfish attitudes rouse disputes in the family's three generations, and the production has the hard task of constructing an appealing bitter-sweet tale. It failed because the basic premise defied belief: the self-centred parents had kept their plight secret for six months and then thrown it in their surprised children's laps. Selfishness ran in the family genes; like molasses in the final cavalcade when the old pair treat themselves to complimentary drinks, dinner and a dance at their honeymoon hotel after happily taking a free auto ride to get there.

The cringe-worthy drama (adapted and opened out for the screen by the same writer who earned an Oscar nomination for The Awful Truth) also includes an eye-rolling elderly Yiddish shopkeeper who muses about wives and children with the father and, yes, an eye-rolling plump black maid who gets on nicely with the mother.

The B&W movie was definitely worth preserving, for its ensemble acting, effective use of back projections, and make-up expertise in adding 20 years to the face of Bondi. If only her role had been less of an unbelievable split personality as an overly ideal wife and incompetent mother.