75 years old and still dancing - on Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow

In the 2003 film Baghban, there’s a scene where Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini – playing an aging couple mistreated by their children – find themselves outside a car showroom. An oily salesman (Gajendra Chauhan, who was Dharmaraj Yudhisthira in another lifetime) practically forces the protesting duo into test-driving a fancy car, and then gets abusive and even violent when it turns out they don’t have the money to buy it. This pat, emotionally manipulative scene provides a pretext for good son Salman Khan to show up and lay some of the old dhishum-dhishum across the sales guy’s noggin, as Damon Runyon might have put it – viewer catharsis is easily achieved.

Now flashback to six-and-a-half decades earlier, and a similar scene in Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow – also about an old couple on the verge of being abandoned, or at least separated. Barkley (Victor Moore) and Lucy (the magnificent Beulah Bondi) are still deeply in love, and spending what will likely be their last few hours together – the result of circumstances that make it difficult for any of their children to take them both in. A car salesman sees them through a window, figures they look the “type” to make an impulse purchase, and takes them on a joy-ride, listening with amusement to their reminiscences. But when he discovers that they aren’t potential customers, he tips his hat and puts them at ease – he just wanted to show off his new car, he says. Having dropped them at the hotel where they had spent their honeymoon 50 years earlier, he leaves.

Comparisons can be misleading, and you might argue that the Make Way for Tomorrow scene is idealistic in its own way. (A separate argument might be that the film’s superb final half-hour isn’t meant to be realistic anyway – it’s more like the realisation of a dream where two helpless, dependent people reclaim themselves and enter a kinder world.) However, the contrast in the two car scenes does clarify the very different methods of the films. Baghban wants to make it as easy as possible for the viewer, clearly delineating the people we should root against (evil children, evil salesman, etc). All that’s missing from many of its scenes is a subtitle telling us how we are supposed to respond. But the Make Way for Tomorrow worldview can’t accommodate clean divisions: it opens with the revelation that Barkley and Lucy (who can be lovable, vulnerable and exasperating all at once) are partly to blame for their predicament – they put their children in a tight spot by waiting until the last possible moment to drop the bombshell that their house has been taken over by the bank (this is the Depression Era).

What follows as the old couple try out various staying arrangements, occasionally making a nuisance of themselves, is a morally complex story about the generation gap – one that is more concerned with giving viewers (of all ages) shudders of recognition than in demanding judgement. As a pre-credit title puts it, “There is no magic that will draw together in perfect understanding the aged and the young. There is a canyon between us.” (I thought the use of “us” as opposed to “them” was significant; it’s as if the film is placing itself and its viewers right in the spectrum of human experience rather than watching from a safe distance.)

None of this should be surprising if you’re familiar with Leo McCarey’s work. He was one of a band of directors – among them Ernst Lubitsch, Yasujiro Ozu, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Satyajit Ray – whose films are remarkably free of villainous “types”; people whose wicked actions set a plot in motion, giving us emotional cues and allowing us to feel that unfathomable injustices could be explained and dealt with; that by surgically removing those who were responsible for bad things, we could make the world a better place. And Make Way for Tomorrow is one of his most mature works. Though made years before Hollywood began its full-fledged dalliance with gritty “psychological realism”, it contains scenes that anticipate the age of Method actors. It was rare, for instance, to see half-completed sentences and unexpected pauses in speech in 1930s Hollywood movies, but watch the early scene where the couple’s eldest son George (the always-wonderful Thomas Mitchell) enters the family home and says hello to his parents and siblings in turn. Addressing a sister whom he hasn’t seen in a long while, he tries to say the right thing – “I don’t know, we plan and plan...” but then trails off abruptly, almost as if realising how hollow his words are; everyone is leading their own lives, might as well fess up to it instead of pretending that tremendous efforts are being made.

Something similar is achieved in the exchange where George tries to build up the courage to tell his mother that he needs to send her to an old persons’ home, but she anticipates his discomfort and takes the responsibility on herself. On view here is a perfectly performed duet of little gestures and glances, where first we see that she knows, and then realise that he knows that she knows. There are other wonderful little moments, a few of which teeter on the brink of being too cute. But the final passage, with Bark and Lucy in the city together, is among the most graceful and uncompromising I’ve seen in any film – it manages somehow to have the texture of both a personal fantasy and a social documentary.

All this adds up to an emotionally demanding movie, and little wonder that McCarey (who directed the wonderful comedy The Awful Truth that same year) was under studio pressure to make it more upbeat. But he resisted and Make Way for Tomorrow was a commercial dud, with some reviewers of the time even warning viewers to stay away because it was so sad! (Of course, the promotional machinery chugged on unhindered: one gobsmacking theatrical poster shows a scene that isn’t even in the film – Bark dancing gaily with a young woman, presumably his granddaughter.)

When one thinks of Hollywood movies of the 30s, 40s and 50s that broke away from studio executives’ notions of what was good for the box-office, one usually thinks of dark, deeply cynical visions of human nature. (Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole comes to mind.) Make Way for Tomorrow can be seen as a pessimistic film too, but it arrives at its pessimism from an almost opposite direction – by taking a positive view of most people and suggesting that personal circumstances (along with unbridgeable gulfs in personalities and needs) are what cause much of the world’s misery.

At one point, Lucy’s granddaughter Rhoda tells her to stop dreaming and face facts. “When you’re 17 and the world is beautiful,” Lucy replies, “facing facts is just slick fun, like dancing or going to parties. But when you’re seventy... well, you don’t care about dancing, you don’t think about parties anymore, and about the only fun you have left is pretending that there ain’t any facts to face. So would you mind if I just went on pretending?” Well, McCarey's film itself turns 75 this month (it was released in May 1937) but there is little pretence in its treatment of the old and the young. And it only occasionally shows its age.

Fizz in film: how Coca Colonised cinema

In-film advertising is a common thing these days – much too common (I sometimes fall asleep in a hall even before a movie begins, in the time it takes for the list of sponsors and media partners to display). But what happens when a brand is so big and so representative of a way of life that its very appearance in a film – however fleeting – can add layers to the narrative? Take the case of Coca-colonization, a term that links the world’s most famous soft drink with American cultural imperialism (and with enterprise, vitality, crassness and all the other supposedly American qualities that infuriate and fascinate people around the world).

Coca-Cola and cinema are roughly the same age (the drink was first bottled in 1894, a year that also saw the first copyrighted American film, Fred Ott’s Sneeze) and they have had many pleasing meetings over the past century. Once in a while, Coke has been central to a film’s plot – Billy Wilder’s One Two Three has an executive trying to get the drink into the Russian market during the Cold War years – but more often it has made humorous cameo appearances, as in Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! where a bed-ridden German woman, unaware of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is startled by an enormous Coca-Cola banner outside her window.

In movies by directors as different as Jean-Luc Godard and Frank Capra, Coke has been used to denounce or celebrate aspects of Americana. Sometimes both things have been done in the same sequence: in I am Cuba (which I wrote about here), a distraught farmer sets fire to his crop when he learns that his land is being sold to capitalists; but simultaneously, in a joyous scene set at a nearby bar, we see his children drinking Coca-Cola and dancing at a jukebox playing rock music.

A lovely early sequence in the 1946 British film A Matter of Life and Death takes place in a black-and-white Heaven where deceased soldiers from battlefields everywhere (rugged Sikhs and excitable Frenchmen among them) are just arriving. When a group of Americans burst in, the background music becomes loud and strident, almost as in a radio commercial. The soldiers survey this strange new place, then point excitedly at something; the camera draws back to reveal a Coke machine, and the Yanks are feeling right at home again.



In a film that is largely about the differences between the English and the Americans (and the need to come together for a common cause during WWII), this good-natured but wary scene suggests the ambivalent attitude of the former Empire to the brash young country that was about to become the next superpower. ("Officer's quarters, of course," says one of the armymen, Coke bottle still in hand, to Heaven's receptionist. "We're all the same up here, Captain," she replies stiffly.)

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I confess to not having seen the 1950s Hindi film Miss Coca Cola, but the oldest instance I know of the use of Coke branding in a non-English-language movie is in the Ozu classic Late Spring (made in 1949, which was coincidentally the year Coca-Cola came to India for the first time). It’s just a two-second shot – as the heroine Noriko cycles with a male friend, we see a Coke ad in the foreground – but a notable one in a movie made just a few years after the war, and by a director who was known for calmly observing his society’s gradual shifts toward a more westernised way of life. (Here is a post about another later Ozu film Good Morning, in which television comes to Japan in the 1950s.)


My favourite cinematic Coke moments though are the ones that align comedy to subtle social observation. In the uproarious The Gods Must be Crazy, Kalahari bushmen discover an empty Coca-Cola bottle that introduces them to the concept of personal property; when this ferments feelings of envy and possessiveness, they decide that the ghastly object must be chucked off the edge of the world. But an equally funny – and more caustic – reference to Coke as a symbol of the Capitalist Way came in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. With the nuclear destruction of the world looming, a British group captain named Mandrake must get a crucial code across to the US president. He needs loose change for the phone booth, so he asks an American colonel, Guano, to destroy a nearby Coca-Cola machine and get a few coins out.

“That’s private property,” Guano bristles, “You’ll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company!”

The words are said with such reverence that there’s no missing the point: even at a time like this, corporate profit gets right of way. And when the Coke machine is eventually shot open, it’s almost like an apocalyptic prefiguring – because not long after this, the film ends with the planet blowing up. What we thought was just a fizzy drink turned out to be a cornerstone of our civilisation.

[If you remember any other notable Coke scenes in movies, please share them here]

Ozu's children, Ishiguro's butler and the merits of idle talk

In the comments section of this post (starting here), there was a short discussion about Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day, including the passage where the butler Stevens, nearing the autumn of his life, considers trying his hand at light banter (something he has never before done). The justification of banter or idle talk as a way of coping with the daily grind of life happens to be a theme in Yasujiro Ozu’s 1959 film Good Morning, which I saw recently, and it made me wonder: Ishiguro, who has admitted to being influenced by Ozu's work, was born in Japan in 1954 and moved with his parents to England when he was five, around the time that Good Morning was released. Perhaps he carried to the new country a fragmented memory of seeing this film?

At any rate, little Kazuo would definitely not have seen Good Morning in Britain. Ozu is often described as the “most Japanese” of the major filmmakers from his country, and his restrained stories about contemporary family life were seen as being too provincial and unfashionable for Western audiences, especially when set beside Kurosawa’s action movies or the anti-war epics of Ichikawa and Kobayashi. In this light, it’s amusing to come across an Ozu movie that lightheartedly comments on the growing influence of Western culture in late-1950s Japan.

The plot synopsis gave me the impression that Good Morning was about two children protesting their parents’ refusal to buy a television set, but I should have known better – Ozu’s films are less about plot than observation. (Sidenote: on the DVD commentary for Tokyo Story, film scholar David Desser suggests that one reason why the film is Ozu’s best-known work internationally is that it’s more driven by a conventional narrative arc – complete with a climactic act involving the death of a neglected old mother – than most of his other movies.) The story of young Minoru and his little brother Isamu throwing temper tantrums because they don’t have a TV to watch sumo matches on is really just one thread in the bright tapestry that makes up Good Morning. The others involve the complex personal equations between the neighbours who make up the film’s cast of characters: their gossip with and about each other, a minor controversy about society funds that have gone missing, a fractious relationship between a woman and her near-senile old mother, the possibility of budding romance between two eligible young people.

However, the children do play a crucial part in this film – their behaviour, shorn of social niceties and excessive displays of etiquette, is used as a counterpoint to that of the grown-ups. Actually, many of Ozu’s movies have kids who raise their voices and talk back to parents and grandparents (and these scenes introduce rare moments of discord in the overall quietness of his work), but Good Morning is probably his most extended look at the child’s point of view. This allows him to show the natural childlike propensity for bluntness and scatological humour (they enjoy playing “fart games”), which contrasts in interesting ways with the reticent, mannered (and sometimes hypocritical) ways of the adults. At one point Minoru has an outburst where he tells his parents that he’s fed up with their polite, vacuous conversation – their repeated “good mornings” and “how are yous” and so forth, which don’t add up to anything very much.

“But such talk is essential,” one of the grown-ups says to another later, “it's a lubricant for the world.” The implication here is that exchanging “meaningless” small talk with someone you aren’t especially fond of, or gossiping emptily behind a neighbour’s back, is a vital part of being human - though as is usual with Ozu, he doesn't endorse a particular viewpoint but simply presents it for our scrutiny.

I thought the contrast between adults and children was particularly notable because Japanese society tends to frown upon strong displays of emotion or raised voices. It might be said that the role of the disruptive children in this film is similar to the role of television, which is seen as an undesirable Western product that will bring the crassness of American popular culture into Japanese houses. Good Morning depicts the fears of people encountering change with gentle, perceptive wit. At one point the boys’ father explicitly voices his concern that TV will turn millions of Japanese people into idiots, but there are other cues to globalisation, to a society cautiously letting the world in through its doors: in the many references to English lessons for the boys (and Isamu's mechanical “I love you!”, his parting exclamation every time he leaves a room); the language translation being done by a young bachelor for a schoolteacher; and a sub-plot about a bohemian couple who have a TV set in their house (and a poster of Stanley Kramer’s film The Defiant Ones on their wall).

Incidentally some of the outdoor shots in Good Morning reminded me of scenes from Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (which I briefly wrote about in this post), with its joyous sights of the “old” Paris in danger of being swamped by modern architecture (much as the old-world Japanese suburb in Good Morning is now increasingly being dotted by TV towers and cables). The background score is similarly lilting and lyrical, and the school-going children seen from a distance through the gaps between the buildings – skipping about, playing their little games – are nearly as uninhibited as Tati’s awesome dogs.

P.S. 1959 was quite the annus mirabilis for world cinema; a non-exhaustive list of great films made or released that year would include Godard’s Breathless, Hawks’ Rio Bravo, Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Wilder’s Some Like it Hot, Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain, Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder and Bresson’s Pickpocket (honorary mention to a few others like Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, which I’m not a fan of personally but which had quite an impact on filmmakers and on the art-circuit generally). Compared to most of these films, Good Morning is modest in scope and apparent ambition, but it’s a warm, absorbing slice-of-life tale that deserves to be better known.

Donald Richie lecture (preceded by another brief rant)

Yesterday I raged about the Siri Fort Auditorium; today let me cast my wrathful gaze on some of the people within – boors, louts who have neither the sense to stay away from events that are of no interest to them nor the sensitivity to show some respect when an 81-year-old film scholar is addressing an audience that might actually want to hear what he’s saying. Donald Richie, one of the world’s great authorities on Japanese cinema (and a Westerner who has lived in Japan for nearly 60 years), spoke on "notions of ‘Japaneseness’ in film" for around 25 minutes, in one of Siri Fort’s smallest auditoria. For at least 15 of those 25 minutes, his voice (firm, given his age, but occasionally strained) had to compete with the sounds of journalists barking instructions at photographers - who in turn shuffled in and out at whim, setting up their equipment as noisily as possible, zipping and unzipping bags and muttering phrases like "budha bhenchod" loudly to each other at intervals.

Other things were happening simultaneously. Inevitably, there were a large number of people who had no clue why they were sitting in this auditorium, listening to this old man ramble on, and who chose the most interesting points in Richie’s lecture to stand up, yawn and stretch noisily (one of them made a freakish ululating sound) and exit, after tripping over three or four of the seated attendees.

Given all this, I consider it one of the minor triumphs of my life that I heard as much of Richie’s talk as I did. It was very general, which was just as well, but he said some interesting things about the origins of Japanese film (theatre being the life-force of early cinema; the important role played in the early days by a character known as the "benshi" - a Japanese approximation of the sutradhar/Greek chorus, who would stand near the screen and comment on the action while silent movies played). He spoke about how Japanese cinema’s idea of "realism" is very different from that in the West, giving the example of the scene halfway through Kurosawa’s Ikuru, where the hitherto realistic structure of the film is ruptured by the introduction of an anonymous narrator who informs us about the death of the protagonist ("Western audiences," said Richie, "still can’t quite come to terms with this break in the narrative. But the Japanese easily absorb such shifts from conventional notions of realism"). He also discussed Anime, the Japanese "manga" comics and made gently deprecating remarks about the excesses of violence in the modern direct-to-video films.

Unfortunately, he didn't speak much about Yasujiro Ozu. The previous night, while introducing the Taiwanese director's Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Cafe Lumiere, a tribute to Ozu, Richie had commented on some of the trademarks of Ozu's work: his disapproval of plots ("they entail the misuse of characters") and his reluctance to use devices like fades and dissolves in his films, which he thought of as camera-gimmickry. I had been hoping to hear a little more.

P.S. I’m a fan of Richie’s work; his The Films of Akira Kurosawa is one of my prized books on film, and I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in Kurosawa in particular (especially the influence of the dramatic form ‘Noh’ on his work), and in 20th-century Japanese art and culture in general. And here’s an online interview.