Critics reviews

When [husband and wife] are about to kiss, Bondi catches us watching. That's the playful McCarey recognizing our involvement. It's an earned moment. Despite the film's heartbreaking end, where we wonder whether these two lovebirds will ever meet again, the lesson of appreciating moments as they are carries us.

One of the indisputable masterpieces of the cinema of old age... Without resorting to facile sentimentalism, the director tells the heartwrenching story of an elderly couple forced to separate when they lose their house and none of their five children will take both of them together.

The film (a reference not only for Ozu, but also for Ira Sachs's 2014 film Love Is Strange) stands today as evidence of what is possible in socially conscious filmmaking by asking clearly and simply what can be done to take care of people who struggle to care for themselves.

[Bondi and Moore] give remarkable performances of a couple that live through and for each other. McCarey was a master of reaction shots since the slapstick days, from Charley Chase through Laurel & Hardy, and he could use the same technique for drama. Bondi and Moore's looks are not deadpan reactions at a world collapsing around them, like Chase, but ones that build a life, moment to moment.

The film ends as it must, with the pair bidding each other farewell, victims of an economic and moral catastrophe so big their decency cannot hope to push back against it. The nation's economic fortunes would reverse, of course, but not in time to save these two, and knowledge of that only makes this wrenching movie even sadder.

Everything's unusual about Make Way, a story of love and old age that's nearly unbearable in its willingness to push its harsh sentiments all the way. For anyone who has a heart, it's perhaps Hollywood's ultimate horror movie.

This brutal film about the elderly pulls no punches, and watching it, I started to feel a dawning sense of awe and respect, that it was really going to _go there_, it had the courage of its convictions. And up until the very final shot, it does not waver... Make Way For Tomorrow stays true to its theme, and does not betray itself. It is a devastating picture. One that puts many other "tragedies" to shame.

In Make Way for Tomorrow we are able to read psychology into these characters, and see the softness of affection translating, in the past, to a sloppy and permissive upbringing which probably has determined the parents' treatment by their own children. The film is all the harsher—and richer—for keeping to bumpy, claustrophobic interiors, making the parents heartfelt but ingratiating, and their children's indifference or cruelty a result of what we simultaneously find so touching.

...Crosscuts of this sort, 180 degrees, are extremely rare in films—with the singular exception of those of Yasujiro Ozu, who started doing them in the 1920s and never stopped, for reasons identical to McCarey's here. Perhaps we are caught up in the story, don't notice cuts and angles, and just accept that two people are talking. But once we do notice and feel, physically feel, their eyes thrusting their souls into our hearts, the movie's dynamics change from a drip to a torrent.

With "Make Way for Tomorrow" McCarey seriously contemplates for the first time the undoing of a couple, and the prospect brings out something new in him and rare in American movies: an acknowledgment that disappointment and failure are not only possible, but also make up the better part of human experience.

Director Leo McCarey ought to be applauded by us all for making a sensitive and honest film about issues confronting the elderly (and one that is likely even more relevant today than when it was made) when most of cinema seems to render them irrelevant or invisible. It is a great accomplishment.

Orson Welles reportedly said of the film, "It would make a stone cry," and, indeed, the tears that come are more than earned. Make Way for Tomorrow's opening visual aria leaves one unprepared for the subtle, insightful observation to follow. Scenes such as a melancholy Christmas get-together—where Bark and Lucy inform their grown children of their financial woes—show McCarey's intimate understanding of family dynamics.