Anniversary of the film that "would make a stone"
Soviet theater lovers, especially those with experience, probably know, remember and love the performance of the Moscow Mossovet Theatre "Further - silence ..." in 1978, in which Faina Georgievna Ranevskaya and Rostislav Yanovich Plyatt shone. And the role in this performance was the last for Faina Ranevskaya. But even not all of the inveterate theatergoers know that this performance is a rather rare case of transformation. When a film is based on a fairly successful performance, there are many such examples. But there are very few examples of reverse transformation, when a successful film becomes the basis of a successful performance. That's exactly what happened with Leo McCarey's "Make Way for Tomorrow".
But - about everything in order. In 1934, the novel by the American writer Josephine Lawrence "Years Are So Long" was published in the USA. The success of this novel prompted the married couple of playwrights Helen and Nolan Leary to transform it into a play. It's hard to say what fate would have awaited this play, but an almost accidental accident intervened. The 40-year-old film director Leo McCarey, who was well-known in those years, who had more than a dozen films on his account, silent, sound, short, full-length, his father died. And it had to happen, this sad event almost coincided with another, no less sad: McCarey was poisoned. Accidentally, not intentionally. Either milk, or something else... And the consequences were very severe: the director almost gave his soul to God. And he couldn't even attend the funeral of his beloved father. The coincidence in time of these two sad events literally pushed Leo McCarey into thinking about the film adaptation of the novel "Years Are So Long." The creation of the script was entrusted to Viña Delmar, who was simultaneously working on the creation of the script for another Leo McCarey film, "The Awful Truth". It was the name of Viña Delmar that was indicated as the name of the playwright, according to whose script the play "Further - silence ..." was staged.
Leo McCarey's "Make Way for Tomorrow" had a limited release in the United States on April 30, 1937. And it failed at the box office, collecting just over $6,000. It is difficult to say what was the cause and what was the result: limited rentals or distributors' flair. The film did not participate in international film festivals, was not nominated for an Oscar. Perhaps because in the same 1937, another film by Leo McCarey received 6 Oscar nominations - "The Awful Truth". And for directing of this "The Awful Truth" Leo McCarey received an Oscar as the Best director. And it is possible that the intrigues of the head of the Paramount film company Adolph Zukor, who lost his temper by insisting on a mandatory for American films happy ending, had an effect. But Leo McCarey resisted and kept the ending written in the literary source. He resisted - and his contract with the studio was terminated.
But Leo McCarey himself was absolutely convinced that it would be more correct to nominate and award the film "Make Way for Tomorrow", which, as Peter Bogdanovich later recalled, he openly stated at the awards ceremony: "You gave me an Oscar for the wrong picture ". Probably the same point of view was shared by the great Orson Welles, who said that this film by Leo McCarey "would make a stone cry". And this, as it turned out, is not a figure of speech. The wife of the famous French director Bertrand Tavernier - Colo (or Claudine) - once admitted that she once received the task of translating the film "Make Way for Tomorrow" into French and write subtitles. She could hardly complete this task. And the main obstacle was created by tears, literally flooding a piece of paper with text.
Bernard Shaw, Jean Renoir, John Ford, Frank Capra and many others expressed their admiration for the film. But the director's admiration for another director's work is worth a lot! Yes, and with film critics, the American Film Academy disagreed. So, the guru of American film criticism Roger Ebert in 2010 gave the film "Make Way for Tomorrow" 4 stars out of four possible and included it in his list of "Great Movies". In his review of the picture, he noted, that
"The movie is not a melodramatic tearjerker".. That "What's so powerful about the film is its level gaze. It calmly, almost dispassionately, regards the situation and how it plays out. No spin. ... The most powerful films often simply show you events without instructing you how to feel about them. It is remarkable that a film this true and unrelenting was made by Hollywood in 1937."
In other words, Ebert emphasized that the appearance of a true film has become the exception for Hollywood rather than the rule.
With the opinion of Leo McCarey and the aforementioned masters of cinematography, modern moviegoers around the world actually agreed. 72% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave "Make Way for Tomorrow" a score of 8 or more. According to FilmGourmand, "Make Way for Tomorrow" has a rating of 8,107 and is ranked 579 in the Golden Thousand.
