Director: Leo McCarey
Year:  1937
Rating: 8.0

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Leo McCarey directed three of my very favorite comedies from the 1930s - Ruggles of Red Gap, Duck Soup and The Awful Truth. Three brilliant comedies that are as different from one another as night and day. The Awful Truth was released in 1937, the same year as Make Way for Tomorrow, and McCarey won the Academy Best Director for it. In his speech McCarey said "Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture." The right film as far as he was concerned was this one. It is not a comedy. It is now a nearly forgotten film - amazing in that Orson Welles said "It would make a stone cry," and Errol Morris wrote "The most depressing movie ever made, providing reassurance that everything will definitely end badly." And critic Roger Ebert added it to his list of Great Movies (all quotes gathered from Wikipedia).


On IMDB it is rated 8.2 which is not surprising once you see it but still astonishing since it doesn't have anyone in it who ever came close to being a star. Everyone including the two leads are character actors - sidekicks, the comedy relief, the aunt or grandmother, supporting actors who take this opportunity to lead and crush the hell out of it. It is also shocking that this came out of Hollywood in the 1930s - during the Depression when films were made to entertain, to uplift - when most of them like the Preston Sturges films had happy endings. Hollywood and happy endings go together like a massage and Robert Kraft. This one is about as sad as you can make it - tearjerker deluxe - but no one dies - no great tragedy - no broken hearts - but it will ravage your heart (the posters are more misleading than a Trump Press Conference).


So much has changed for the elderly since 1937. Social Security and Medicare have made the lives of the older population a little bit more secure (though I will happily take an increase!) - but one thing has remained the same - children still don't want to have to take care of their parents, to have them come live with them and interrupt their lives. Such a big difference from where I am living today in Thailand, where taking care of your old parents is common practice. That is basically the gist of this film but done in such a quiet reluctant slow moving manner that you can't quite believe it goes where it goes.


The Coopers (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) call their grown up children together to tell them that their home of many years has been repossessed for non-payment by the bank (ok, as an ex-banker this part bothered me - at 70 years old how long was their mortgage for and how much equity had they built up in it - but it was the Depression) and they had to be out in a week. Immediately the four children and their spouses (Thomas Mitchell and Fay Bainter being the two best known) begin to plan how to provide for their parents and who will take care of whom - but it turns out that none of them can take care of more than one and so after 50 years of marriage they are separated. And from there it just gets worse and as the slow realization dons that their children don't really want them in their lives, the two parents quietly accept their sad fate. It is a killer. Both Moore and Bondi aged a good 20 years for the film are simply amazing - very subtle performances often done simply with their eyes - and their last walk together around New York City where they had their honeymoon and meet kindness from strangers is a perfect performance of what is not said as their love for each other permeates every gesture, every look.