Facing facts

Make Way for Tomorrow 1937 Paramount (92 minutes) produced and directed by Leo McCarey, screenplay by Viña Delmar, based on the 1934 Josephine Lawrence novel The Years Are So Long, dramatized by Helen and Nolan Leary.

            Make Way for Tomorrow is a Hollywood romance unlike any other. Orson Welles reportedly said that it would make a stone cry. It did this stone.

The story at the center of four adult siblings and their spouses bickering over what to do with suddenly homeless Ma and Pa is this elderly couple’s fifty-year loving bond, conveyed poignantly and with humor by two veteran character actors.

It is the late part of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the worst seemed to be over. Flagging federal economic stimuli resulted in a deep recession, and the Social Security Act, signed into law in 1935, still was being challenged in the courts by Republicans.

Imagine that.

A bank forecloses on 70-year-old Barkley ‘Pa’ Cooper (Victor Moore), out of work for four years and as long delinquent with his mortgage payments. Pa and Lucy ‘Ma’ Cooper (Beulah Bondi) must leave the home where they have lived their entire adult lives and raised five children, now middle-aged adults with their own lives, families and homes.

No home, no work, no savings, no Social Security safety net: to whom are homeless and elderly Bark and Lucy Cooper to turn?

Their middle-aged children mouth the conventional pieties and twit each other’s guilt. A clever script and good character actors have fun playing up the siblings’ selfish sensitivities and hypocrisy, but the parents and their grown children know there is little chance that they can move back into each others’ lives in any practical way. 

The film takes on these freighted issues without punch-pulling sentimentality or miracle solutions. And, despite what they say or tell each other, everyone is clear-eyed enough to realize that the only options are compromises that please no one.

Son George Cooper (Thomas Mitchell) and his wife Anita (Fay Bainter) agree to let Ma stay with them for three months in their Manhattan apartment, sharing a bedroom with their 17-year-old daughter Rhoda (Barbara Read).

Daughter Cora (Elisabeth Risdon), who lives with her husband Bill Payne (Ralph M. Remley) in the same rural town as her folks, concedes to allow Pa to sleep on their parlor couch for three months. 

Thus Bark and Lucy, who have lived together since they were in their early 20s, must split up. Lucy hopes, like Mr. Micawber, that something will turn up; Bark lets Lucy pretend, but he knows that nothing can. Though Lucy is hardly delusional.

Rhoda, listening to her grandmother moon about Grandpa getting a job so they can live together alone again, tells Grandma to ‘face facts.’ Lucy replies:

‘When you’re seventeen and the world's beautiful, facing facts is just as slick fun as 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?’

The parents do not belong in the midst of their children’s lives and families, but their mutual incompatibilities only intensify when the younger generation grudgingly tolerates their aging parents rather than accepts them as adults.  

            The more the Coopers tiptoe around Lucy and treat her like a little old lady, the more she disrupts their busy Manhattan life just by being herself and trying to make the best of everyone’s difficult situation. In a remarkable, Chekhovian scene, Bark telephones Lucy one evening at the Cooper’s apartment while Anita is giving a bridge lesson to a room full of the socially ambitious. Lucy speaks to Bark in the same room as though no one were there, to which the guests, who cannot help but overhear, first listen with amusement, then embarrassment, then empathy for this lonely woman separated from her husband. 

Meanwhile, Bark, living like a fraternity boy on the front couch of a daughter who treats him more like a prison inmate than a family member, has the temerity to catch pneumonia from sleeping in the draughty parlor.

The children convince Pa to visit daughter Addie in California ‘for his health.’ Ma beats George to the punch when she tells him that she wants to go to the old age home where she knows they plan to send her anyway, but on the condition that they never tell Bark.

The last third of the film is the afternoon Bark and Lucy spend alone together in Manhattan before Bark has to catch his evening train west. They interact humorously with various people and each other as they reminisce about their life together, and return to the hotel where they honeymooned. They celebrate their friendship, love and spiritual independence, and end up drinking, dining and dancing—and skipping the send-off dinner their children prepare for them.