Make Way For Tomorrow (EOTWS)

End Of The Week Shorts #37 extract: Make Way For Tomorrow (1937)

Rarely is heartbreak so tragically poignant and beautifully voiced. Make Way For Tomorrow is, in some respects, a film about an old couple facing a young couple's problems: money is seemingly impossible to come by, being together is a struggle against those who run your home and the future seems dim: a force that wants to pull you apart. With old age being a return to infancy as such, Make Way For Tomorrow portrays a world that, whilst the young are cared for as they need, the old are often not allowed the dignity they deserve. Misunderstanding and an ignorance of ones own future and responsibility swirl in the undertow here and so reach out of the screen and knock into us some truth that is worth remembering. 

Emotional poetry from a place and time deeply entrenched in the industrialised new age, Make Way For Tomorrow is an undeniable Hollywood masterpiece.