The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, July 20-26
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
Directed by Leo McCarey
Along with Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Yust’s The Homebodies and the extraordinary The House of Smiles by Marco Ferreri, one of the indisputable masterpieces of the cinema of old age. With bitter humanism, McCarey exposes the ultimate hypocrisy of the consumer family whose veritable bond depends on productivity, not love. 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 Friedrich Engels of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State would have undoubtedly appreciated this film. Giovanni Vimercati (July 21, 7pm; July 24, 2pm at MoMA’s McCarey series)