Released in 1937, at the height of the Great Depression, this film rejects any form of compromise. There are no demented millionaires or acrobatic gags. There is only the economic horror of old age in a world that no longer has room, nor time, for its elderly. It is the bravest, and perhaps the cruelest, film ever produced by a Hollywood studio system. It is the tragedy that even Frank Capra never dared to tell.

The premise is a Malthusian nightmare. Barkley (Victor Moore, a vaudeville comedian here torn from his comfort zone and cast into a Greek tragedy) and Lucy (the sublime Beulah Bondi, who defines the dignity of defeat) lose their house in foreclosure. They have five adult children. Five. Yet, in a family reunion that is a masterpiece of bourgeois awkwardness and selfish calculation, no one has "room" for either of them. They are the antithesis of King Lear: there is no kingdom to divide, only a nuisance to share. And so, the two elders, after fifty years of living together, are separated. "Bark" will go to live with his daughter Cora (far away); Lucy will go to New York with her son George and daughter-in-law Anita. McCarey is too smart to paint his children as monsters. They are worse: they are normal people. They are us. They are the generation that has internalized the logic of "progress" and has decided that parents are an obsolete piece of furniture, an inconvenience that ruins their daughter-in-law's bridge lesson or ties up the phone. Their fault is not hatred; it is superficiality.

If this film seems familiar, that's because it is. It is the source code, the genetic matrix from which Yasujirō Ozu would extract, sixteen years later, his Zen masterpiece, Tokyo Journey. Ozu himself admitted it. But where Ozu is elliptical, static, and his tragedy is mediated by the tatami and the mono no aware, McCarey is brutally direct, almost neorealist before his time. His direction is a masterpiece of proximity. The camera senses discomfort. When Lucy, confined to a rocking chair in the corner of the living room, disrupts Anita's bridge lesson, we feel her uselessness. McCarey isolates her in the frame, a ghost sitting in her own funeral. When Bark, a guest of his daughter Nellie, tries to tell his old stories to a younger, bored generation, we feel his obsolescence. The film is a symphony of closed doors, interrupted phone calls, and forbearing glances. There is no physical violence, only the emotional violence of those who make you feel like your very existence is a programming error.

The film culminates in one of the most devastating final acts in cinematic history. The children have made up their minds: the situation is unbearable. Lucy will go to a retirement home; Barkley... who knows, maybe to California, "where the sun is." The two meet in New York for their final farewell. And here, McCarey performs his cruelest miracle. For fifteen minutes, the film ceases to be a social tragedy and becomes the romantic comedy the director knew so well. The two "escape" from their children, going to the hotel where they honeymooned 50 years earlier. They have a drink. They reminisce. The orchestra plays their song ("Let Me Call You Sweetheart"). The hotel manager, in a rare gesture of human kindness in a film that lacks it, offers them champagne. For a brief, excruciating moment, they are young again, relevant again, a couple again. This interlude of newfound happiness isn't a relief; it's a turning point. It makes the impending separation, the one at the train station, an amputation we are forced to witness.

Make Way for Tomorrow was a box office disaster. Paramount hated it and buried it. Audiences, looking for Cary Grant, rejected it. McCarey, who had a profit-making deal, sacrificed a fortune to make it. Yet, it is his true, indisputable masterpiece. It's a film that offers no catharsis. The final image of Lucy on the train pulling away, and Barkley beckoning her from the platform—lying, telling her he'll catch up soon, both knowing he won't—is an image that sticks in the memory and never goes away. It's the unvarnished truth about old age, family, and economics. Orson Welles said it "would make a stone cry." He was right.