We are grateful that Bark and Lucy and what they represent are able to exist. That such people have gone before, even if it meant going before in a work of art that was the finest its director ever created. But what is real? Or, put another way: Who is more real than Bark and Lucy? Watch the film and ask yourself if anyone you know is more real than these people. Ask yourself if you are.
* * *
Director Leo McCarey had two films released in 1937. He was approaching forty years old, having come to the movie business via a circuitous route. After graduating from law school at USC, McCarey did as no one else would have: he tried his hand at mining, songwriting, and as a pugilist, some of which overlapped and some of which did not. His looks were pleasing, and as we can already see, he possessed the adventurer’s spirit, a combination at the time that all but demanded an attempt at a career in Tinsel Town.
McCarey had a friend from childhood by the name of David Butler, who knew Tod Browning, the early pioneer of big-screen grotesqueries who worked often with Lon Chaney Sr., the “Man of a Thousand Faces” and later helmed Dracula starring Bela Lugosi. Browning had some advice for McCarey: get in on the creative side, not the acting one. That’s where you really reach people.
With Browning’s counsel in mind, McCarey secured a job with Hal Roach, whose name signified comedy in America perhaps even more than the term comedy itself did. Roach made his countrymen laugh in broad waves. Buster Keaton was ramping up his subtly psychological art of mirth, and Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp trafficked as much in pathos as guffaws. They purveyed incisive humor, whereas Roach’s brand was wide. A lot of pants got split at the seams. McCarey was hired as a Roach gagman, working on the Our Gang series, which stuck around for generations in future TV repeats.
McCarey’s more important earliest association was with Charley Chase, a comedian mostly forgotten today, but if Keaton represented the top of the artful comedy pile, and Chaplin was the level below, with Harold Lloyd coming next, then Chase was a more than respectful fourth-tier presence. He also knew his stuff in terms of how the comedic world – in the worldly sense – worked, and became McCarey’s mentor. Nor did it hurt that Chase also fancied himself a songwriter, and the two men enjoyed comparing their latest musical wares.
Leo McCarey began as a humor man, which is important to note for everything that Leo McCarey would become. Humor does not exist without tragedy, and vice versa. They are partners, reliant on the contrast from one to the other, to stand out, paradoxically, in what is also their autonomy.
Leo McCarey in the 1930s. Public domain photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Humor and tragedy are strange that way, as life is itself strange. Laughter is better savored when one is cognizant of what might have been, or what has been, because that’s when we most need laughter. Tragedy, meanwhile, is unlikely to be endured without finding levity somewhere, even if it’s grim levity. Good luck otherwise. Those who laugh best know what pain is; those who endure when it seems that no one could are sages of laughter.
Hollywood men of this era told tall tales. Just as the early Old West produced its legends and encouraged credit-grabbing and self-aggrandizement, so too did this New West of Hollywood. Going by his surviving interviews, McCarey mostly played it straight, though, so we have no real reason to disbelieve him when he says that it was he who originally paired Stan Laurel with Oliver Hardy, thus bringing together our finest duo of clowns. McCarey shaped their now familiar personas, though his judgment wasn’t perfect. Several decades hence, he’d tell director/critic Peter Bogdanovich that sound ruined Laurel and Hardy, because they couldn’t talk, despite the plethora of Laurel and Hardy masterpieces throughout the 1930s with Stan nattering away and Ollie carping about the fine mess in which he was then embroiled.
McCarey was also directing now. He only directed three silent films by “the boys,” but he had fingers stuck in the airborne pies of many of their others from the late 1920s. He also worked with Harold Lloyd, later saying how hard it was to do so, describing Lloyd as a comedian who couldn’t act, but when you still somehow got the good stuff, boy was that stuff good.
In the early sound era, McCarey directed W. C. Fields in Six of a Kind, and called the shots for exactly one Marx Brothers picture: 1933’s Duck Soup, which just happens to be their best, though McCarey couldn’t stand the brothers (of whom he thought Chico was the most talented), remarking that it bordered on the impossible to get them all together in one place, and then when you did, it didn’t get much easier, which is also the most fitting description of the ethos of a Marx Brothers film itself.
Public domain publicity still from Duck Soup. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
For the bulk of the 1930s, McCarey, who had gone from gag guy to stylized auteur – arguably the first American director for whom the term may be properly applied – was a Midas man. Most of what he touched became gold, even if Duck Soup represented a dip in the commercial fortunes of the Marx Brothers, one that would be reversed by producer Irving Thalberg, who served as the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon, though Leo McCarey may have been the better option.
Such was Leo McCarey’s life in Hollywood up until 1937, when The Awful Truth was released, McCarey’s first undertaking for Columbia, and one of his two pictures from that year as the United States lurched through another campaign of the Great Depression. Alleviation took the form of entertainment. Swing was becoming the thing, Joltin’ Joe and the Iron Horse both starred for the New York Yankees, and the nascent genre of the screwball comedy represented joyous, harmless anarchy for many people now long accustomed to feeling boxed in and lacking hope.
The movie set the screwball template. McCarey did a lot of template-setting in his career. He went first or close to it, then others followed. The Awful Truth starred Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. The latter and McCarey had taken to each other, partially on account of their similar names. McCarey, who would play piano on the set, waiting for ideas to come to him, took Grant aside the way that Tod Browning had once taken McCarey aside, and told him that it was time for a change from what Grant had been doing.
The two decided to keep it loose and improvise, which required suavity and confidence. Sound like anyone you’ve watched a time or two? If you say the phrase, “the Cary Grant persona” to any fan of old movies, they know exactly what you mean. But it started with this one film, which helped beget many future and disparate films, save that the Grant persona unified them all. To watch Grant in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) is to partake of The Awful Truth without knowing it.
Public domain publicity still from The Awful Truth, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
People loved The Awful Truth. They fairly rejoiced. They couldn’t get enough. The Academy loved it as well. Despite what everyone does come Oscar time each year – that is to say, put stake in the Oscars – it is itself an awful truth that the best directors and the best movies, by and large, do not win these awards. The movies that last by artists of vision aren’t copping golden statuettes. A mid-level sort of forgettable drama is apt to be the prize-taker, and after only a few years, its absence of staying power has already been revealed. Horror films don’t win and comedies rarely do, but The Awful Truth did net McCarey the Best Director award for the year of 1937.
As we’ve noted, though, it wasn’t McCarey’s only movie to have come out within those twelve months. That other film was very different, but then again, it also revealed an understanding – a deep, sobering wisdom – of what humor truly is, even as that work has been called the most depressing movie ever made, and one that, for a time, tanked Leo McCarey’s career.
Taking to the stage to collect his award for The Awful Truth, McCarey said something that shocked everyone in attendance at the ceremony: “You gave it to me for the wrong picture,” he said, and for an awkward moment, people just stared at Leo McCarey.
But McCarey was correct, and, if it is possible to be so, he was more than correct. Here had been sounded the voice of pure truth, because that other film of his from 1937 – the alleged epic depressant – was a movie called Make Way for Tomorrow, and it is one of the most remarkable things anyone has ever achieved working with a camera and the subject of human life.
* * *
There’s a reason why The Awful Truth – which was released October 21, 1937 – was McCarey’s first film for Columbia, and that’s because Make Way for Tomorrow – which had been released in May – had been the last that Paramount wanted from the director, after he had made five others previously. The film performed poorly at the box office, but one suspects there was more than diminished returns at play; something about the movie itself that created pushback, a desire to create distance from what it was, as if it were too affecting.
Make Way for Tomorrow is a story of overlapping families – families within families, we might say – and one relationship above the others. This last would be the relationship of Barkley (Bark) and Lucy Cooper, an elderly married couple played by Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi. Bondi was fifty-six and Moore sixty-one in 1937 and both were made up to look like they were in their seventies, which, we must remember, meant something different then, and often looked different, too, compared to now.
We’re meant to think that they are nearing the end, having reached the stage of life where they’re not infirm but cannot fend for themselves. Physical labor is out of the question. They have four proximate children and a fifth who lives on the other side of the country, in California. The couple lose their home to foreclosure, and Bark can’t find work. He’s as willing as a man can be, and we have the sense that if working involved courting death, he’d be okay with that if it meant providing for a time for his beloved Lucy and being with her in their home, but he’s deemed too old. The parents aren’t going to have anywhere to go.
The narrative premise – for there is also an emotional premise, which is the “real” plot – of Make Way for Tomorrow comes from a novel called The Years Are So Long – a statement that manages to be both true and false in equal measure – by Josephine Lawrence, who was an advice columnist. Her novel was adapted into a play by Helen and Noah Leary, which became screenwriter Viña Delmar’s primary source material for the script of the picture that McCarey wanted to make on account of having recently lost his father.
That sounds like we might be getting something diluted. We are not. Rather, the converse, and yet the movie achieves its unique emotional intensity without aggression. We tend to think of the worst blows as being dramatic and heated in nature, violent. The cup is dashed to the ground, the storm clouds reverberate with thunder, the match gets put to the fuse. Crash, crack, boom.
But when we ponder the times that our lives have been the most trying, we recall that the blows delivered within those pockets of pain had an element of politesse, of someone not being straight with us, or of us failing to be straight with ourselves. Harm has a special knack for advancing through smiling lips and signifying shrugs indicative of deflections, as well as promises delivered without any intention of fulfillment.
In short, the way people commonly handle other people, with all of the hurt that brings, because the world has never lacked for cowardice like it lacks for an active, thought-out devotion to doing the right thing. The countervailing effects of conscience typically come too late when they come at all, and that’s one particular cavalry that often fails to make it out of the fort so that harm may be undone, because the person who would need to open the door is able to find a way not to listen.
The four local children are summoned and the news about the foreclosure is broken. Life patterns will change, because the parents need to be taken in. Everyone knows what isn’t explicitly said – that Bark won’t be working again. He’s going to keep trying, but a time has come when things are going to be what they’re going to be. And herein begin the problems that are much worse – in that they reveal more – than the considerable problem of a foreclosure.
The adult children, with their own families, begin to prevaricate and manipulate. There’s a sort of emotional dodgeball at play, with attempts to avoid having to act and accommodate. No one is able to say, “We don’t want you in our home and the disruption that brings,” but that message is in every gesture, cadence, look.
Cinematographer William C. Mellor shoots these people as if we, the viewers, are in attendance at a family reunion. There’s no hard-cutting, no swish-pans. We look from person to person that we haven’t seen in a while. We witness their faces, how they’ve changed since we last saw them. Family reunions take all forms. Sometimes they occur without choice or desire; for a funeral, for instance. We wish to clear the throat and speak up ourselves, offer space for Bark and Lucy if we have it, or say some words in the direction of a possible solution so that someone else can then add words of their own. Get some positive momentum going. We can get through this. We’ll figure it out.
But we’re not really there. What we hope is that we wouldn’t behave like these children do. Nell (Minna Gombell) is the only child who has room for both Bark and Lucy, but she pulls a classic stall tactic. She has to talk to her husband, she says. Next, the stall tactic gets super-sized when she adds that she’ll require three months of attempting to persuade him.
The number is arbitrary. Three hours, three days, three months, three years. It’s all the same. Her intention is to look as if she’s trying without trying at all. The lack of respect is crippling. What can one even say to one’s child? Where did it all go wrong? Where did we? Is this how you were raised? And then the kicker of kickers, which is thought but not said by the likes of a Bark and Lucy: I would always take you in, because I love you more than life itself, even if it meant giving you my home.
The cruel wheel of the plot is now in motion. McCarey films are progressions. One doesn’t know how lives are going to look in the aggregate – that is, from the start of what we see until what will be what we’re left seeing – but no director has ever made better use of cause and effect and the processes of life.
When we experience extreme pain or loss – or believe that we have – we’re apt to bemoan a strain of ignorance. We express shock and profess a lack of understanding. One reason we do so is to underscore how unfair it is that we’ve been made to suffer in this fashion; proverbial rhyme and reason absconded in the night, and with the silverware to boot.
But we can know. There were factors, however much beyond the pale and atypical, a chain of events and often a chain of choices. We’re free to be aware by working to be aware, if we wish. McCarey has us know. But you have to try to know, generally speaking, and most of us opt out on doing that work or preemptively intuit that we wouldn’t be able to handle the receivable knowledge.
Cowardice plays a sizable role in keeping people and the truth far apart (with saying the truth – or even just acknowledging that someone else has – being another matter entirely). In our fractured, disconnected, cognitively dissonant news cycle-vortex/social media world, no shortage of blame for those prevailing themes and characteristics rests with anger, self-loathing, rabid and blind partisanship. But even more of the blame may be laid on the rounded, defeated shoulders of cowardice, for it is cowardice that denies even the prospect of a better way and an instigated solution.
“I never really have intrigues,” McCarey said, instead terming his approach “the ineluctability of incidents.” An event happens and “some other thing inevitably flows from it.” What McCarey understood is that this is exactly how life is, but rare is the person who tries to map the progression so as to improve at traveling onward. We’re not inclined to look as hard as we’d need to in order to understand and then use that knowledge to adapt accordingly in who we are, what we stand for, how we behave.
Sometimes it’s better to change; other times, it’s best to realize that one did the right thing and it’d be a mistake to make an alteration to who one is because of someone else’s poor behavior. But life, like the best movies – of which Make Way for Tomorrow is one – light us up so that we may better see what’s on the inside in order to make a wiser determination of what should gain egress in order to help people and help ourselves. In this manner, the world is improved.
Make Way for Tomorrow does that looking with us so that we can’t look away. “Rise up and behold, you brave witnesses of truth,” the film seems to say, like it believes in what we can handle and what we have to be able to handle if any of us are going to get anywhere, either individually or as part of the human whole. We don’t see what is coming before it comes; but when it does, we know why. Just as we probably now do elsewhere in our lives, too, in the spots and intervals where we’ve otherwise been singing a pale ballad on the death of causality that admits of scant culpability – “I had a lot on my plate” – and not nearly enough courage: “I must do better. It begins now.”
* * *
Until Nell can get that answer that she has little to no intention of getting, Bark and Lucy split up, with each going to live with another child. Bark sticks to the job search. The families resent the presence of what they deem as interlopers. Bark and Lucy do nothing wrong. They are valuable people with much to offer. Wisdom, time, energy, love. Nor are they going to be around forever, as the saying goes, but what an opportunity it is – seen from a different point of view – to have that time with one’s cherished grandparents or parents. You may look back on that living situation thirty years later and count it as one of the best things ever to happen to you. Not a lot has more utility than the fair counsel of someone who loves us.
With kids, grandparents have special value and functionality. Sometimes mom and dad don’t have the best perspective. They’re too caught up in the grind of life. Make no mistake: life has been grinding at Bark and Lucy, but they are also people who have stepped back and see what is to be seen with a better, calmer view. Both are revitalizing assets to any home, allowing that those within those homes are willing to be open and take a couple steps back themselves.
Lucy tries to remain sanguine, to show faith in Bark, whom she never doubts as a person or in his intentions, but she’s not dumb; she knows the deal, and if she somehow didn’t, she has her seventeen-year-old granddaughter Rhoda (Barbara Read), who glibly tells Lucy to “face facts.”
It’s the 1930s version of “get real,” spoken from the lethal, candid mouth of babes. The viewer feels the full force of this hit. The line is funny in theory – “I always get comedy in, even when there’s tragedy,” McCarey noted – but in actuality it’s a dagger. Lucy regathers. She loves this kid. She gently points out that it’s easier to face facts when you’re seventeen, and asks her granddaughter’s permission to go on pretending – by which she means, employing a brave face – because facts are quite challenging just now for someone her age. Besides, she’s really saying the words for Bark, so that he knows he’s believed in. There are times when that’s all that remains of what was; but without it, it’s unlikely anything else can start.
We must remember that this is the Great Depression. Downsizing was a theme of the day. Families who lived apart came to live with each other to save on the rent. Closer quarters were almost a given. McCarey never gives us the impression that Bark and Lucy are really changing all that much in anyone’s lives. They’re not gobbling up the food budget. They live quietly. Bark isn’t some embittered presence. Lucy isn’t a meddlesome busybody. They take up little space. And again, they are coming near the end. Were their offspring living in rambling homes with wings of extra rooms, you get the impression that the song and dance of avoidance and excuse-making would be much the same.
At the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956, Duke Ellington (with whom McCarey, a huge fan, worked for 1934’s Belle of the Nineties) sat at his piano comping along as one of his tenor players, Paul Gonsalves, began a solo on the number “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” that came to define Gonsalves’ career and helped remake Duke Ellington’s.
The solo extended longer than anything most had ever experienced in jazz, and longer than anyone expected, including Ellington himself. Gonsalves pushed on, and Ellington continued to watch and listen. He wanted to see what happened. How it all worked out. For Duke Ellington, this was life. It wasn’t just that he let it happen – most bandleaders would have cut Gonsalves off; it was that he was open to it playing out.
That’s a crucial trait for an artist to have, and one found in evidence in every work of timeless art. Leo McCarey lets the story of Bark and Lucy play out in Make Way for Tomorrow, and that story is also the story of us, because we go into the lives of all of these people as if we were them, which means we likely go back to times in our past, just as we imagine how we will be in times yet to come – and how we really are right now, when we get down to it.
Make Way for Tomorrow is a film that encourages us to get down to it. To view. And face. To be open to how life is unfolding, which is also an openness of adjusting and acting in the best manner possible. It’s often not that we don’t know the best manner, or a better one, anyway – it’s that we’re doing something else regardless.
Novelist Graham Greene – who also had a stint as a film critic in the second half of the 1930s – loathed Make Way for Tomorrow, and thought that he had been misled by the description from Paramount that went out in advance of the movie. To be fair, what was Paramount going to say? “Come and confront the person you really might be, ingrates!” That wouldn’t work. The poster art for the movie makes it look as if it were some sentimental charmer, with romance for the younger crowd and some twinkly-eyed older people, too, though that poster art didn’t emphasize Bark and Lucy as though it were trying to preempt any talk of depressing elderly types. Better to envision them popping in from the margins with a wry, crusty nugget of wisdom, than as the front-and-center stars of the thing.
Greene was flippant and even ageist, dismissing the movie as “a depressing picture about an old couple,” adding that it gave people “a sense of misery and inhumanity,” which is to completely miss what this movie actually is.
Our humanity does not exist within a vacuum. That doesn’t mean it’s a relative conceit, measured against our surroundings and the humanity of others. What it means is that our humanity is challenged frequently, and it would be easy to allow this humanity to lessen.
That’s how it works with most people. The quantity is reduced over time. The greatest sense of humanity – and the greatest actual outflow of it – can be a matter of refusing to let that humanity be diminished or vitiated despite what is happening or what is being done to you. There is nothing that may be more human, if we’re talking the full extent of the human drive, human self-respect, and human strength. The self is sacrosanct. One finds a way to say, “You will not take that self from me. Further, you will not impel me to take any portion thereof from myself.”
Graham Greene, 1975. Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Graham Greene didn’t know what he was talking about when he summarized Make Way for Tomorrow. He sounds like one of the children of Bark and Lucy, whereas McCarey is quite plain in his message for us: Be a Bark. Be a Lucy. Be them, as they are individually and as they are in regard to each other together. No matter your age and your circumstances. Never turn away from that humanity. It’s all that keeps you from being a wolf outside the door, minus the brute strength. But it is additionally what elevates us to a level that’s otherwise impossible to get to, where we may approach completeness as perhaps nothing else does.
It doesn’t matter that Bark and Lucy aren’t absolutes, established in full on that rarefied level. What matters is that they’re still going, still trying. They’re adding. Age is of no consequence. It’s their humanity – and ours – that is the picture itself.
Further, if we’re talking old people and leaving calendar years out of it – because what do they really measure anyway? – then Bark and Lucy are the youngest people in this movie. They’re not calcified. Today is going to make way for tomorrow and tomorrow is going to bring what it brings. But the human spirit is ageless and protean. It is potentially reborn every day in each of us, and younger than a baby who has just said its first hello to the world.
The families “burdened” with Bark and Lucy try to get out from under them. Any excuse will be seized upon if it facilitates a jettisoning. Bark catches a cold, so his daughter Cora (Elisabeth Risdon) says that he needs to live in a warmer climate. What that means is with the fifth child, way out in California, and far from Lucy, who has new issues of her own.
She overhears her son and daughter-in-law (Thomas Mitchell, Fay Bainter) making plans to put her in a nursing home, never mind that it’s before her time. She is – and remains – a woman of grace, which is why she spares her son of having to tell her himself, acting as if she has decided on her own that a nursing home is best for her. The son knows what’s going on – you couldn’t not know – but he passes up the opportunity for filial redemption.
This brings us to some of the most moving, transcendent reels in the history of cinema, which document the day that Bark will be getting his train to leave for California. The couple never say that this is their final day together, but they both know that it likely is, and we do, too. At the end of this afternoon, there is to be a form of last supper, with Lucy and Bark and the families gathering for a meal, but first Bark and Lucy will venture out into the city as husband and wife.
Leo McCarey must have been a loving man, for having shown us so much coldness and cruelty, it’s as if he opens up the heart of the world itself, and it does us good to be reminded – because we need that reminder when we can get it – that this oft-cold and cruel world has a heart and that being recognized for who you are is itself heartening. Jean Renoir said that Leo McCarey understood people, which sounds like a pithy statement until one realizes that it is harder to envision a grander one. Make Way for Tomorrow might as well have been what Renoir meant.
The pair stroll, take in the sights, reminisce about what was, and in doing so speak to the love that is as strong as ever – stronger, let us say, because it would have to be. The people they encounter treat them with warmth and affection, charmed and stirred by their obvious bond. They are the recipients of small acts of decency, and those acts mean everything to them and to us. The communal, welcoming bosom is at the disposal of these virtual strangers, and those strangers give Lucy and Bark what their family does not.
Orson Welles wasn’t an especially religious person, but he would remind people to try and be gentle with other people, no matter how frustrating they were, saying that your heart is God’s little garden. It’s as if the people that Bark and Lucy encounter embody that particular dictate, which is also a virtue.
Of Make Way for Tomorrow, Welles remarked that it could make a stone cry, which he meant as the highest of compliments. Not because it’s lachrymose but because it shows us what it has to show – and what it is capable of showing us – without thinking we can’t handle it. We can. But not with dry eyes, and not sans gratitude.
We are grateful that Bark and Lucy and what they represent are able to exist. That such people have gone before, even if it meant going before in a work of art that was the finest its director ever created. But what is real? Or, put another way: Who is more real than Bark and Lucy? Watch the film and ask yourself if anyone you know is more real than these people. Ask yourself if you are.
Make Way for Tomorrow is a celebration of love, which mitigates against the charge that it’s the most depressing film ever made, as if that were a bad thing. Sometimes, the soul seems to smile when the mouth can’t manage, and that’s of larger consequence anyway.
Realizing that it’s getting late, Bark and Lucy ditch dinner with their kids, so as to extend their outing a little longer. We think, “Good for you” and “Thank you,” with both relief and gladness, though that last parting is coming.
McCarey cuts to those kids assembled together, having learned that their parents are skipping out on the final meal. They know what they’ve done, and now, at last, there is tacit acknowledgment, which is like the resolution of a chord from the musically inclined McCarey. The picture is balanced. We feel like we’ve been given a just treatment of reality. Agenda ruled no day here.
Depressing doesn’t really mean depressing with Make Way for Tomorrow; it means that this film goes further in its unflinching humanity than other films you have seen. Is that depressing? Or is the journey in the opposite direction that which is truly depressing?
Lucy and Bark part at the train station, with Bark saying that he will find a job in California and send for Lucy to come to him. We’re aware that he’s going to try. Just as we’re aware that he won’t find work and Lucy won’t be heading West. They’re aware, too. That is why they say a final goodbye with the qualifier of “just in case,” which is a brave and thoughtful way to live one’s life and to show the love one has for another.
Tomorrow, in essence, has arrived. As Lucy walks away from the platform, we want to reach out and comfort her. We have witnessed something close to divine, and she has lived it. But have we in our own lives? If not, what’s to stop us? What tomorrow may bring?
That didn’t stop Bark and Lucy, Leo McCarey seems to be reminding us. After all, he was right, you know. They did give it to him for the wrong picture.
* * *
Unless otherwise indicated, all images are screenshots from the film.
