I figure that everyone is entitled to just so much happiness in life. Some get it in the beginning, and some in the middle, and others at the end. And then there are those that have it spread thin all through the years.

Accepting the Oscar for the 1937 screwball divorce picture The Awful Truth, Leo McCarey thanked the Academy, but said they awarded him for the wrong movie. The right movie, released within the same year, was Make Way for Tomorrow. Whereas The Awful Truth covers the events of a couple who cannot live with or without each other and get into a custody battle over their dog, Make Way for Tomorrow is about an older couple who can only live with each other and due to the tragedy of progress and generations being left behind, are forced to live apart.

Quoted by Peter Bogdanovich, Orson Welles once said, Make Way for Tomorrow is the saddest movie ever made and one that could “make a stone cry.” This encapsulates the heart-wrenching nature of Leo McCarey’s film, which retains all of its original power some 88 years after it was released.

A somber movie releasing within the grips of The Great Depression, Make Way for Tomorrow, though a deeply emblematic movie for its time, failed to attract much of an audience. What is celebrated in its day, movies like the crowd-pleasing Carry Grant-starring The Awful Truth, for example, are rarely the movies that we come to understand as definitional of their time. The gulf between the movies is wide and Leo McCarey’s self-assessment feels true over the course of time.

What happens after a movie is released so often shapes its legacy. We are not always ready, in the moment a movie is perfectly designed for, to digest the themes and motifs of a movie. Perhaps this is because the movie must so directly parallel the themes and motifs of our lives. We do not so much need it in a movie when we experience it already. It becomes, instead, an invaluable time capsule by which we can now look back and understand this phase of American life and moviemaking.

Such a profoundly somber drama is a rare breed in the 1930s, too, when audience-engaging pictures with sharp initial movie stars and so a devastating story about a married couple forced to part didn’t receive quite the requisite fan fare, relative to its masterful storytelling control and sense for characters, displayed in the movie. It’s also about what happens after.

In 1953, Yasujiro Ozu, alongside screenwriter Kogo Noda, acknowledged their debt to Make Way for Tomorrow, as they lifted its core central premise for the all-time classic Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari), which brought attention back to this would-be American classic through iteration. In Tokyo Story, some aging parents become a burden to their children and when the mother dies, it’s the father who is left in somber reflection about what all of it means, left behind not just by his life partner, but also his children.

By the 1950s, this more somber mode of storytelling was internationally accepted as the way of making movies — the way of Tomorrow, so to speak. But in 1937, it was an uncommon breed. What happens in Make Way for Tomorrow is that an elderly couple, Barkley (Victor Moore) and Lucy Cooper (Beulah Bondi) lose their home and must stay with their children, who find them to be a burden, and then, finally and fatefully, they may just have to part from each other forever in the end. Their promise to each other throughout life becomes the saddest thing of all, an intended forever love dashed by the realities of changing times, and generational apathy.

It’s rare enough for a movie of the time to take this material on but to center the elderly couple as the story is why it fundamentally works. Rather than centering star power, the film centers its themes with the couple. Its successful in every way because Leo McCarey builds each scenario with patience and doesn’t try to rescue the audience. McCarey, likewise, never drifts into sentimentality.

The messages of the movie, then, remain honest, heartfelt, and true. They resound beyond the screen, and beyond this left-behind generation, as the brilliant Ozu film so readily accounts for. It’s not quite a lost classic — the film is widely known — but it still seems under recognized for the significant achievement it stands for in its time. While making way for progress, let us never forget to take care of who and what came before us. Wouldn’t you want the same done for yourself?

As we seem primed to enter another kind of Depression, and suddenly the younger generations are doing worse than any of the older ones before them, the film’s messaging seems ready-made for our forthcoming days, when cuts to social security and services have been made and there’s little remaining welfare for the aging folks in society, what will we do as the younger generation, who has seen harder times than the generations before us? One thing we can do, to begin with, is to watch Make Way for Tomorrow, and consider what’s ahead of us.

9/10