Make Way for Tomorrow. 1937. USA. Directed by Leo McCarey. Screenplay by Vina Delmar. With Beulah Bondi, Victor Moore, Thomas Mitchell. 91 min.
One of the few American films to take an unstintingly unsentimental view of old age. Bondi and Moore play an elderly couple whose lifetime of sacrifice for their children results in their final, brutal separation. Today regarded as one of McCarey’s greatest achievements, at the time it failed so resoundingly at the box office that Paramount declined to renew his contract. And yet that same year, 1937, it became one of the first films acquired for the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.