Good story, Not enough for a whole film

best movie i've ever seen.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

I watched this movie yesterday for the second time and cried . What a great old movie. I told 2 people about and cried while I was telling them the story. Too bad they don't make more movies like this. My mother used to say a mother can take care of 10 children but when it comes time for one of them to take care of them no one will.

Something I thought about, and felt more deeply, near the end of Make Way for Tomorrow, is that people who are married and have had the immeasurable luck to have been married for many years and have been happy, will take more from this film than those who haven't. This doesn't mean that it's not for anyone - everyone, really - looking for a moving story of life in all of its simplicity and at the same time aching and bittersweet complexity, but the couple at the center of this story, Barkley and Lucy, are apart for two-thirds of this story and find one another again after months apart, and they couldn't be happier. It's something that lasts, despite everything. Actually, *because* of everything, that their happiness together can weather whatever comes, and they are, in their simple presence in the lives of others, something to behold.Maybe they both know things will never be the same again; the wife, and mother of their five children, knows that Barkley could never take it if he knew what she plans to do, to put herself into a retirement home, and as she notes to her son this will be the one secret in her life. But they have their day and evening together, walking around New York City (which, by design at times due to the rear-screen-projection, has an abstract quality reminding me a tiny bit of Murnau's Sunrise), and have what could be called 'adventures'; with a car dealer thinking, from afar, that this elderly couple are full of dough; they stop off at the hotel they spent their honeymoon; they have cocktails and talk tongue-twisters; they go into the ballroom and dance to the big band playing which, perhaps sensing organically how different the mood is, change from something fast to something slow (it was this point, I should add readers, that I started to tear up, I can't explain why).This makes up the last third of the movie, and it may be what people remember most about the film. I think Leo McCarey knows this and directs this in a way that everything is building up to this. The story is set in the depression-era, so the socio-economic context doesn't have to be said, it's simply there and people know what's up (or down), and the Coopers have not been able to make payments (Barkley tells the children this and they act indignant that they weren't told sooner - it's clear from the father and mothers' expressions that they were too embarrassed, the generation keeping things unsaid that should be coming back around).So the parents are split between the children since none of them can house them both, and the despair sets in that grows over time: Barkley gets sick, Lucy becomes something of a nuisance (unintentionally of course) to her daughter-in-law's bridge club, and there's lies forged between grandmother Lucy and granddaughter Rhoda, and a foreign shopkeeper trying to help Barkley a little bit is met with scorn by his daughter. It's been said that this inspired Ozu with Tokyo Story, and it's easy to see why because everything is laid out simply and no one is out to be really *bad* per-say, but things get misspoken, little lies form, personality and behavior build over time and the small pressures surrounding people who do care and love for one another becomes greater.I have to wonder if this story would work in today's world, and I think it could up to a point (there's probably better programs to assist the elderly, or perhaps more distractions in other ways like TV), but the time it was made makes it very much a product of the depression, not unlike The Grapes of Wrath though that was more starkly political. If there's any politics to this it's at the familial level and subliminal; McCarey and the actors are out to express things emotionally, and everything builds up to something whether we think it will or not. His compositions also are simple and direct enough, giving us editing that gets to a reaction from Lucy or Barkley just when needed, the time to see their emotions rise or fall, listening or not listening as case may be. In its small way it's monumental, if that makes sense. While Ozu shows his influence from here, I might slightly prefer this film's take on this subject matter.But despite it being about people who are beyond my years, I kept thinking about my wife and I and what is in store for us years from now. We're living in a completely uncertain and chaotic world, and yet by the end, for all the sadness that is likely to come in some form or another, but love is what holds up people just as much as it can break them down in the most horrible circumstances. Barkley and Lucy love another, and their strength is in that. I loved this movie so much.

First off "pingshaw" is an idiot! ... *news flash*, this is a MOVIE.. They aren't 'sponging on tax payers money" .. Even if these characters were real, they would have been well into their retirement years anyway! OK..movie review *spoilers*I thought the general storyline was well thought out and acted out .. the male actor seemed drunk all the time though (?).I hated how I didn't feel like anything had been resolved at the end though and plots were added in with no explanation whatsoever (Daughters dilemma for example), this could have been due to the year it was made though and not wanting to shock viewers of the movie from that time period .. Overall I liked it though.

"Make Way for Tomorrow," Leo McCarey's quiet tragedy about an elderly couple who are left with few choices when their adult children are reluctant to take care of them, is one of those films that grows in stature the more you think about it.On one hand, it's a bit heavy handed and simplistic in the way 1930s films frequently were and which makes them seem dated now -- the parents are a bit too saintly, the children a bit too awful. As a study of characters, the film would have been more interesting if it had provided some insight into why the children turned out the way they did and what role the parents played in shaping them into the selfish adults they become. The children would have been more interesting if they had been portrayed more humanely; Thomas Mitchell, as the oldest son, is the only one who comes across as something other than a selfish horror.But the film is more interested in examining a social topic than it is in exploring characters, and in that way it feels ahead of its time, even if its sophistication doesn't fully sink in until after you've had some time to think about the movie. For a 1937 film, it's extremely unsentimental when it might have been downright maudlin. The parents move about with a resigned air, and the film doesn't pander for sympathy. As one of the extra features on the DVD points out, audiences aren't interested in movies about old people even now, let alone then. And we haven't gotten much better at the way we view and treat the elderly in the 70+ years since "Make Way for Tomorrow" debuted. One of the things I liked best about the movie -- and that makes it still incredibly relevant -- is that it shows how dismissive younger generations are about older people, and how children seem to think their parents don't have lives outside of them. As portrayed brilliantly by Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore in the film, these two doddery folk have a rich history together; they had a life before children and they have a life after; they have things to teach, wisdom to impart, and they're very sharp and astute about what's going on around them. One of the biggest tragedies in the film is something that goes almost unspoken, and that's the disappointment they feel in their children but won't let their children see.The final sequence of the movie is downright magical, when Bondi and Moore blow off their children to revisit the haunts of their honeymoon. It's funny, sad and almost unbearably poignant without being schmaltzy, thanks partly to the low-key direction of Leo McCarey but mostly to the wonderful performances of the two actors.A lovely film.Grade: A