I am probably the last person that you would think to have a favorite romantic film, but the golden age of Hollywood has brought many romantic comedies that have left more than an impact on filmmaking as a whole. Singin’ in the Rain is an immortal classic of the vaudevillian era, rifled with a charming cast and an absolutely amazing set design. Some Like it Hot is by and large the best picture starring Marilyn Monroe and is creatively Shakespearian in its situational narrative writing. Now, I love both of these films respectively, and there are certainly more films that have similarly left their mark in the same way, but the film I am choosing to discuss today does something exceptionally different from the typical formula, years before it might even be considered a formula. This isn’t necessarily why I consider Make Way for Tomorrow one of my all-time favorite films, but it certainly plays a large part. Because at it’s core, the 1937 black-and-white drama is a very modest film: it doesn’t attempt to break any holy rules or totally re-define the art of cinematography, but what it does do is provide a realistic, humanist affluence to its comedy and characters that are at once relatable, as well as sympathetic. The film centers on an elderly couple who lose their home to the bank during the great recession and are forced to live separately, until they can find a new place to live. They move in with their children, respectively, with Lucy living at her son’s place and Bark living with their daughter. It isn’t very long until the elderly couple begin to wear on their children’s patience with their… oldness. Bark comes down with a cold and has to be tended to by his daughter, which makes her husband act scornfully to Bark’s presence in the house, while Lucy tries to endlessly involve herself in her son’s life by giving her granddaughter life advice and trying to make friends with her daughter-in-law’s bridge game players. To the elderly parents’ credit, they aren’t asking their children to look after them and they aren’t expecting any handouts; they’re simply bored and they want to belong. A very human response to disassociation, especially when it comes to the elderly.

As we grow older, we tend to search for validation for our existence: we want to feel useful to everyone around us. In some sense, maybe this is a relative response; younger generations look towards the elderly as slow and without use and that knowledge follows them into the annals of their adulthood, where they now have become the very things they once despised. Nobody likes getting old. On the other hand, perhaps it is simply a reaction to our desire for appreciation. We want to be wanted and it is in this regard that Lucy feels a sense of despair: she sends her son’s nice shirt to the cleaners to be laundered, only to be told that he needed the shirt for an important get-together that night. She also offers to make sandwiches for her daughter-in-law, Anita’s, bridge group, to which Anita declines, stating that there are fancier sandwiches being made by the deli in town. “How much fancier can a sandwich be?” is Lucy’s response and in the moment, the exchange comes off as exceptionally funny, as well as critically insightful. Lucy adds that it would be cheaper if she made sandwiches, which gives us the impression that she is more concerned with helping her family than she is with finding something to do with her time. On the opposite end of the tale, Bark engages with an old Jewish shopkeeper, named Max, who empathizes with Bark’s position and acts as a foil to Bark’s character as a father. There’s a nice scene with the two of them spending a moment together; Bark asks Max to read a letter that Lucy had sent him—his glasses were being fixed—to which Max reacts rather emotionally. It’s worth mentioning at this point that while the cinematography isn’t unparalleled in any sense, it utilizes its space well by keeping the subjects of each shot limited. This isn’t always the case, obviously; there are plenty of scenes that take place in public settings with lots of people, but the emotion is strongest during the close-ups; single shots of Lucy talking directly into the camera are tender and feel confessional, while simple two-shot close-ups create a kind of intimacy that speaks volumes of the relationships between characters. Simple scenes like the one that Bark and Max share are felt on a deeply personal level as a result of this, because it is a scene that only the two of them share. In some sense, this offers a semi-voyeuristic experience for the audience and makes the friendship between the two of them feel stronger. On his way home from Max’s shop, Bark passes a classifieds board and asks the man beside the board if there are any openings for bookkeepers. The man says no and asks if he needs a bookkeeper, to which Bark responds, “no, I am one,” and walks away. Such a small scene carries with it so much connotation: the fact that the man asked Bark if he needed a bookkeeper shows that the man is conscious to Bark’s age and would not imagine a man of his caliber looking for a position. Furthermore, it shows Bark’s true intention as well. The prior scene involving the reading of the letter reminds him of his loneliness (not that he needed reminding) and the heartache of being miles away from the person he loves most. This drives him towards searching for work, for making enough money to afford a new home for the two of them, so that they can finally be out of their children’s hair. It all seems to backwards: no one should have to come out of retirement in their old age just to afford a home for themselves. Of course, we have to remember the time period and see it as a sign of the era, which would make such a scene insatiably clever, if not perverse.

Make Way for Tomorrow is—tonally—a unique film; it doesn’t have the brash and unapologetic darkness of a black comedy, but at the same time, it doesn’t go out of its way to get its jokes across either. There is zero slapstick throughout the movie, and most of the laughs that the film elicits are rather subtle: something as simple as the creaking sound of Lucy’s chair, distracting the bridge players in Anita’s group, continues to get a laugh out of me even after multiple viewings. The dialogue is masterful in its wit and realism, and each line hits its mark thanks to an absolutely stellar cast: Victor Moore as Bark has an aged, nasally voice and a slow, tired gait while Beulah Bondi as Lucy—an entire year younger than Elisabeth Risdon, who played Lucy’s daughter, Cora—is absolutely exceptional. Every line she speaks drips with sincerity and while some of the exchanges can be slightly romanticized, the dialogue is never flowery or purple in its genuflection; rather, it’s a real and tangible kind of speech that you can picture in everyday conversation. The scene where Lucy speaks to Bark on the phone and seems to shout every line of dialogue to get her voice through is one of the most heartbreaking moments in any film: I still tear up when she mentions how he could’ve bought a nice scarf for the amount it cost to call her and when she tells him to dress warmly if he goes out walking, “and if it’s raining, don’t go out at all.” You can hear the loneliness and the discontent in Bondi’s voice; the uncertainty as it trails off towards the end of the conversation and as she slowly drops the phone back into the receiver. I want to yell at the television to just let the two of them live happily, dammit! But truth be told, this is only the first in a series of truly emotional moments. After spending some time apart, Lucy discovers that her son and daughter-in-law are planning to move her to a retirement home. This is previously foreshadowed in Lucy’s letter to Bark, where she openly describes the establishment with great disdain and scorn. After discovering the letter from the retirement home in the mail, Lucy decides to volunteer going to the home without telling her son that she saw the letter; essentially sacrificing herself for the benefit of not having to deal with the pain and discomfort that her son has to carry in asking her to go. Here we see the love of a mother and the willingness to substitute one’s pain for another; an atonement brought upon by unfortunate circumstances. Coincidentally, Bark comes down with a serious cold and it is advised by his daughter and a doctor (whom Bark doesn’t seem to like, based on age alone) that perhaps it would be best if he were to visit their daughter, Addie, in California, which is literally across the country. Everyone agrees on this, and Bark is given one more day to spend with Lucy and to have dinner with his kids before getting on the train for California.

The afternoon that Lucy and Bark spend together is a definitive turning point for the film’s tone. At first, it doesn’t feel too dramatic in its shift; the two of them walk quietly to the park and somberly discuss how disappointed they are in themselves for not being able to make things work out, making for a very terse and depressing conversation, riddled with mildly humorous bits of dialogue. There’s even a shot of Bark going into a clothing store with a Help Wanted sign in the window, as if to make a last-ditch effort to salvage the situation by getting a retail job. At one point, the two of them stop and regard a new line of cars through a store window, reminiscing about how Bark had always wanted to get a new car but couldn’t afford it. We then switch perspectives, as one of the salesman, inside the store, mistakes the old couple for being filthy rich and offers to give them a test-drive of the car itself. At first, the two of them say no, that they have to be preparing for a dinner with their children and that they don’t want to inconvenience the man. The salesman pries a bit further until Bark gets a seemingly wild look in his eyes, looks at his wife and says, “why not?” It’s not a passive, shrugging kind of why not, either. Instead, it’s a confident one that considers everything that has happened to them up to this point, and tells itself that this is the first time something good has happened to them in this entire mess of a situation. From then on, everything starts to go well for the two: they go along with the free ride and quarrel over minor details of stories from the past (like old couples like to do), before stopping by the hotel where they had spent their honeymoon. They tell the car salesman that they couldn’t possibly afford the car and that they’re sorry to inconvenience him, only for him to respond favorably. They go to the bar inside the hotel and have the first drink that they’ve had in years before calling their kids and cancelling dinner plans with them. The owner of the hotel visits them and listens to the story of their honeymoon before paying for their drinks. They then go to the ballroom for dinner and decide to go out and dance right when the song turns into something energetic; the composer sees the two of them feeling uncomfortable with the pace of the song, and switches the fast song for a waltz so the two of them can dance. Finally, they sing to each other lovingly in the cab on the way to the train station. This is exactly what the audience has been wanting to see since the beginning of the film: after all of the heartache, after all of the disassociation on behalf of their unfeeling children and after their constant misfortune, finally things seem to go well for them; the world is no longer against them and we are reconciled of all of the left turns this film is capable of inventing.

Now, there’s still the matter of the film’s ending scene, which is relatively popular for its somber tone: Bark and Lucy say goodbye to one another on the train platform, embracing and telling each other how much they’ve appreciated their lives together. The dialogue is certainly fatalistic; Bark wants to tell Lucy everything he needs to tell her in case this is the last time he sees her because, “anything can happen,” yet he still maintains that he’ll get a job in California and send for her as soon as possible to which Lucy responds by saying she doesn’t doubt it for a second. The train takes off and Lucy is left alone, the weight of her solitude fresh on her shoulders as she turns to leave the platform. Will Bark and Lucy ever see each other again? I’d like to think so. Many viewers would like to consider the ending negatively and at first, the studio had asked the director, Leo McCarey, to change the ending so that it had a more positive tone. Obviously, he rejected that notion and went for the more realistic conclusion. But I don’t see the story as necessarily finished on that platform. People have compared the ending to an earlier scene where Lucy and her granddaughter have a conversation about whether Bark was really capable of getting any kind of job and if Lucy was only fooling herself. Lucy’s response is that as we get older, the only true joy that we have left is to pretend that things are going well enough; to instill hope in place of reality during troubled times. Thus, the argument is: when she tells Bark that she believes in him, when he says that he’s going to get a job in California, she’s only fooling herself; she’s simply pretending that she has faith in Bark because it keeps her sane. But are we really fooling ourselves if we truly believe in the possibility of a better life? Is faith a sign of our inability to imagine the truth before us? I can’t believe that after such a splendid evening spent with the love of her life, that Lucy would ever lie to herself: if it’s enough to renew optimism within the viewer, it’s enough for the character to feel that same renewal within themselves.

Lucy doesn’t feel that optimism now, nor should she; after finally getting back together with her significant other, I’m sure the last thing she wanted to do was put him on a train and transport him thousands of miles from her. But the revitalized sense of purpose and the natural longing for a greater future is the true romance of the film: that when times grow dark, there is always the possibility that things will work with us and not against us—even if that moment only lasts an entire evening. Meanwhile, we get to watch the unreciprocated devotion that a mother has for her son; we get to watch two old-fashioned people return to the place that helped their marriage blossom; we get to feel the replenished sense of longing and happiness hidden within an endless turmoil of separation; and we get to laugh at some intelligent humor along the way. In short, Make Way for Tomorrow helps us to fall back in love with hope, in all of its different forms. If that’s not the most beautiful thing in the world, then I don’t know what is.