Synopsis
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) is an American drama directed by Leo McCarey that you can watch online on iFILM. Bark and Lucy Cooper lose their home — the bank takes the mortgage — and their five grown children hold a family meeting. The solution: split the parents up temporarily, mother with one son's family, father with a daughter's.
Temporarily, of course, keeps getting extended. Lucy disrupts her daughter-in-law's household without meaning to; Bark gets in the way at his daughter's place without quite knowing how. Nobody in this film is a villain. The children aren't cruel — they're just busy, and there was no room in the plan for two old people who don't fit the schedule.
Orson Welles called it the saddest film ever made out of Hollywood, and McCarey earned that tribute by refusing sentiment. He shoots the Coopers — played by Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi with remarkable restraint — as two people who have run out of options but not out of dignity. The final scene lands without a single melodramatic note. Stream Make Way for Tomorrow online on iFILM.
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