75 years old and still dancing - on Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow

In the 2003 film Baghban, there’s a scene where Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini – playing an aging couple mistreated by their children – find themselves outside a car showroom. An oily salesman (Gajendra Chauhan, who was Dharmaraj Yudhisthira in another lifetime) practically forces the protesting duo into test-driving a fancy car, and then gets abusive and even violent when it turns out they don’t have the money to buy it. This pat, emotionally manipulative scene provides a pretext for good son Salman Khan to show up and lay some of the old dhishum-dhishum across the sales guy’s noggin, as Damon Runyon might have put it – viewer catharsis is easily achieved.

Now flashback to six-and-a-half decades earlier, and a similar scene in Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow – also about an old couple on the verge of being abandoned, or at least separated. Barkley (Victor Moore) and Lucy (the magnificent Beulah Bondi) are still deeply in love, and spending what will likely be their last few hours together – the result of circumstances that make it difficult for any of their children to take them both in. A car salesman sees them through a window, figures they look the “type” to make an impulse purchase, and takes them on a joy-ride, listening with amusement to their reminiscences. But when he discovers that they aren’t potential customers, he tips his hat and puts them at ease – he just wanted to show off his new car, he says. Having dropped them at the hotel where they had spent their honeymoon 50 years earlier, he leaves.

Comparisons can be misleading, and you might argue that the Make Way for Tomorrow scene is idealistic in its own way. (A separate argument might be that the film’s superb final half-hour isn’t meant to be realistic anyway – it’s more like the realisation of a dream where two helpless, dependent people reclaim themselves and enter a kinder world.) However, the contrast in the two car scenes does clarify the very different methods of the films. Baghban wants to make it as easy as possible for the viewer, clearly delineating the people we should root against (evil children, evil salesman, etc). All that’s missing from many of its scenes is a subtitle telling us how we are supposed to respond. But the Make Way for Tomorrow worldview can’t accommodate clean divisions: it opens with the revelation that Barkley and Lucy (who can be lovable, vulnerable and exasperating all at once) are partly to blame for their predicament – they put their children in a tight spot by waiting until the last possible moment to drop the bombshell that their house has been taken over by the bank (this is the Depression Era).

What follows as the old couple try out various staying arrangements, occasionally making a nuisance of themselves, is a morally complex story about the generation gap – one that is more concerned with giving viewers (of all ages) shudders of recognition than in demanding judgement. As a pre-credit title puts it, “There is no magic that will draw together in perfect understanding the aged and the young. There is a canyon between us.” (I thought the use of “us” as opposed to “them” was significant; it’s as if the film is placing itself and its viewers right in the spectrum of human experience rather than watching from a safe distance.)

None of this should be surprising if you’re familiar with Leo McCarey’s work. He was one of a band of directors – among them Ernst Lubitsch, Yasujiro Ozu, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Satyajit Ray – whose films are remarkably free of villainous “types”; people whose wicked actions set a plot in motion, giving us emotional cues and allowing us to feel that unfathomable injustices could be explained and dealt with; that by surgically removing those who were responsible for bad things, we could make the world a better place. And Make Way for Tomorrow is one of his most mature works. Though made years before Hollywood began its full-fledged dalliance with gritty “psychological realism”, it contains scenes that anticipate the age of Method actors. It was rare, for instance, to see half-completed sentences and unexpected pauses in speech in 1930s Hollywood movies, but watch the early scene where the couple’s eldest son George (the always-wonderful Thomas Mitchell) enters the family home and says hello to his parents and siblings in turn. Addressing a sister whom he hasn’t seen in a long while, he tries to say the right thing – “I don’t know, we plan and plan...” but then trails off abruptly, almost as if realising how hollow his words are; everyone is leading their own lives, might as well fess up to it instead of pretending that tremendous efforts are being made.

Something similar is achieved in the exchange where George tries to build up the courage to tell his mother that he needs to send her to an old persons’ home, but she anticipates his discomfort and takes the responsibility on herself. On view here is a perfectly performed duet of little gestures and glances, where first we see that she knows, and then realise that he knows that she knows. There are other wonderful little moments, a few of which teeter on the brink of being too cute. But the final passage, with Bark and Lucy in the city together, is among the most graceful and uncompromising I’ve seen in any film – it manages somehow to have the texture of both a personal fantasy and a social documentary.

All this adds up to an emotionally demanding movie, and little wonder that McCarey (who directed the wonderful comedy The Awful Truth that same year) was under studio pressure to make it more upbeat. But he resisted and Make Way for Tomorrow was a commercial dud, with some reviewers of the time even warning viewers to stay away because it was so sad! (Of course, the promotional machinery chugged on unhindered: one gobsmacking theatrical poster shows a scene that isn’t even in the film – Bark dancing gaily with a young woman, presumably his granddaughter.)

When one thinks of Hollywood movies of the 30s, 40s and 50s that broke away from studio executives’ notions of what was good for the box-office, one usually thinks of dark, deeply cynical visions of human nature. (Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole comes to mind.) Make Way for Tomorrow can be seen as a pessimistic film too, but it arrives at its pessimism from an almost opposite direction – by taking a positive view of most people and suggesting that personal circumstances (along with unbridgeable gulfs in personalities and needs) are what cause much of the world’s misery.

At one point, Lucy’s granddaughter Rhoda tells her to stop dreaming and face facts. “When you’re 17 and the world is beautiful,” Lucy replies, “facing facts is just slick fun, like dancing or going to parties. But when you’re seventy... well, you don’t care about dancing, you don’t think about parties anymore, and about the only fun you have left is pretending that there ain’t any facts to face. So would you mind if I just went on pretending?” Well, McCarey's film itself turns 75 this month (it was released in May 1937) but there is little pretence in its treatment of the old and the young. And it only occasionally shows its age.