Make Way for Tomorrow (1937 Leo McCarey)

There's another of McCarey's subversive kids here - the one in Maurice Moskovitch's store - he says to the kid "You'll be good to your mother when she gets old?" and he just stands there and says nothing. There's the same deft touches from McCarey at work here, such as the letter Beulah Bondi (49 playing seventies) notices has arrived from the old people's home - she then shuts her son up so she can pre-empt him having to tell her she's moving there in an act of beautiful selflessness (the like of which none of the kids display). PB observes that the old couple still display the same love for each other, towards the end, in the hotel sequence, in a youthful way, whilst none of the kids seem anywhere near as happily married themselves - it hasn't been passed down.

Is the Alfred Molina film Love Is Strange a sort of gay remake?

Victor Moore is the husband, Fay Bainter the bridge-teaching wife of Thomas Mitchell, Barbara Read their daughter. Minna Gombell is the horrible cow, married to Porter Hall. Ferike Boros is Maurice's uncredited wife (we just saw her in Love Affair as Irene Dunne's landlady).

McCarey would rewrite scenes on set with the actors to get these fresh scenes and performances. It's a very discreet film; none of the big emotional scenes of a Kings Row or Now Voyager, for example, but that doesn't dilute its power at all - as Peter says, it's more like a European film than a Hollywood one - cut to - Tokyo Story.

"Now they tell us!"

So neglected was the film it's not even featured in my old Time Out 1991 Film Guide. Made for Paramount - so McCarey was a wanderer, not tied to one studio, like Hawks...