Cine Outsider header
Left bar Home button Disc reviews button Film review button Articles button Blogs button Interviews button Right bar
news archive
Older news stories have been archived by year and month, most recent first. They can be accessed by clicking on the links below.
2024 2023 2022
2021 2020 2019
2018 2017 2016
2015 2014 2013
2012 2011 2010
2009 2008 2007
2006 2005 2004
 
Make Way for Tomorrow on Blu-ray in October

1 October 2010

Masters of Cinema are set to champion restored films from years past on Blu-ray only later this month when they release Leo McCarey's 1937 Make Way for Tomorrow on Blu-ray only for the first time anywhere. The full press release is as follows:

Of Make Way for Tomorrow, Orson Welles told Peter Bogdanovich: "Oh my God that's the saddest movie ever made." Long unavailable for home viewing, Leo McCarey's personal favourite among all his films (which included The Awful Truth and An Affair to Remember) is sad, yes, but it also stands as cathartic affirmation of the dignity of human feeling, and in the testament of such achieves a subtle complexity of characterization on par with Renoir, Ford, and Hawks.

Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi, two of the great Hollywood character actors, appear makeup-aged beyond their actual years to portray the couple whose house the bank has foreclosed upon (the film was set and produced in the midst of the Great Depression), and who are forced subsequently to move into their children's homes in the city. A near-musical restructuring of gratitude and debt ensues once the offspring deem the couple's lodging an imposition: the two are separated, then reunited weeks later... as they glide inexorably into an uncertain future.

Unrelentingly unsentimental, yet maintaining a balance of pathos and levity unseen in not only American studio pictures but most of the rest of world cinema, Make Way for Tomorrow exerted a powerful influence on Yasujirô Ozu's Tokyo Story and several other key entries in the Japanese master's body of work. It is a film profoundly concerned with questions of filial obligation and the way we treat one another as human beings; it is a film that, to give Welles the last word, "could make a stone cry." The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Leo McCarey's truly great Make Way for Tomorrow for the first time on Blu-ray anywhere in the world.

Make Way for Tomorrow will be released on UK Blu-ray only by Eureka as part of the Masters of Cinema series on 25th October 2010 at the RRP of £22.99. A new high-definition transfer of the film in its original 1.37:1 aspect ratio and optional English SDH subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired will be joined by the following extra features:

  • A 20-minute video piece with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich discussing the film and Leo McCarey's career;
  • A 21-minute video piece with writer Gary Giddins discussing McCarey's work and the social and political contexts of the film;
  • Lengthy booklet featuring a new essay on the film by writer and Library of America editor Geoffrey O'Brien, and an excerpt from Josephine Lawrence's source novel Years Are So Long.