After finally seeing Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow, I kept starting and re-starting this article to no avail. I wanted to have something in place last week, either in advance of or shortly after its release, but it just didn't happen. Nearly two weeks after I popped it into my DVD player, the movie is still at the front of my mind.
The next frame is "Honor thy father and mother"
My wife and I moved just after it arrived. As moves go, it was relatively easy and smooth. We're paying overlapping rent for a month due to the vampiric management company that knows we're paying more than the next tenants will. Regardless, while moving boxes and furniture that I shouldn't be lifting by myself, I couldn't help but think back to Bark and Lucy, the septuagenarian couple at the center of Make Way for Tomorrow, and how everything could be so much worse for Ashley and I.
Leo McCarey, who paired up Laurel and Hardy and directed the much better-known The Awful Truth
After an extended period out of work, Bark and Lucy are forced out of their home by the bank, and none of their adult children will take both of them in at a time. Over half a century before cell phones and cheap long-distance, they save all their pennies just to talk to one another. After a long time apart, they happen into something of a second honeymoon. Watching this section tightens that thing in your throat that makes your eyes water just like the "Married Life" sequence in UP. At one point, they talk about how, looking back, they wouldn't change a thing.
It made me think that with all of the hassle and logistical complications of married life, I really couldn't be any happier than I am coexisting with my wife. We're interdependent, but not in a way so as to feel trapped. Rather, we facilitate each other's aspirations and invigorate one another at every step. I don't pay attention to that nearly as often as I should, just as many of us don't stop to enjoy the mundane, "boring" things in life. One man's boring is another's inspiring, arousing, and breathtaking.
Marriage isn't for everyone. There are even some who would say that we're moving to a point that makes the social technology of marriage obsolete. Some would even go so far as to say that a film like Make Way for Tomorrow makes a case for this: the old is always in the process of going by the wayside.
I would counter that MWFT is instead a defense of marriage in all its evolving forms. It is actually an intensely political narrative about exposing the need for Social Security, as critic Gary Giddins mentions in a 20-minute interview on Criterion's DVD. I would go the step further that someone desperately needs to make a spiritual sibling about healthcare here and now.
The interview on the disc with Peter Bogdanovich (also 20 minutes) is his standard-issue, meaty storytelling and includes a short Orson Welles anecdote where he recalls that Welles told him that MWFT "is the saddest movie ever made." I disagree on that point, and will only go so far as to say that the movie diverges form the source book's ending. If anything, I think McCarey went with the most optimistic ending possible considering the story to be told.
Make Way for Tomorrow remains as relevant 73 years later as it was upon initial (failed) commercial release. It's not nearly as well-known as McCarey's The Awful Truth, but I'd argue that it's more unique. Can anyone remember the last time they saw a love story featuring 70-year-olds? Amazon has the MWFT DVD listed at $22.99, and as Roger Ebert attests, it's one of the Great Movies and is certainly worth owning.