Orson Welles called it the saddest movie ever made. John Ford and Jean Renoir were impressed. George Bernard Shaw wrote him a fan letter. Paramount chief Adolph Zukor fired him because the movie didn’t make any money. Then the Academy, in its wisdom, gave Leo McCarey his first Oscar for “the wrong movie”.

Not that there’s anything wrong with The Awful Truth, which remains the quintessential screwball comedy and one of the best films of all time in its own right. It’s just that, as McCarey rightly rebuked the Academy, Make Way for Tomorrow is the greater achievement and the hallmark of one of the screen’s greatest humanists.

McCarey made his reputation directing Laurel and Hardy comedies in the 1920s and hit his stride in the 1930s with comic masterpieces like Duck Soup and Ruggles of Red Gap, after which he could write his own ticket. Unfortunately that ticket came with a price. When McCarey first refused to put stars into Make Way for Tomorrow, and then refused to give it a happy ending, Zukor was livid, but he gave his ace director the benefit of the doubt. The film opened to rave reviews, but nobody came. Nobody wanted to see a movie about old people.

To this day films about old people are non-starters in Hollywood. On Golden Pond is the only successful film on the subject and that plays more to our affection for its stars than the characters they play. Make Way for Tomorrow offered no such easy out. Its often exasperating elderly couple is played by non-stars, Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi. Moore was an ex-vaudevillian, a light comedy actor and Bondi was an experienced character player noted for melding into the characters she played.

The film opens with Moore and Bondi telling their middle-aged children that their house has been foreclosed on and they have to get out in a couple of days. The children and their spouses are forced to deal with a situation they are unprepared for. One couple agrees to take in the mother and another agrees to take in the father until other arrangements can be made. The strength of the film is that none of the characters are painted as villains. They are all portrayed as real human beings with their own problems and character flaws.

The film, despite its risky subject matter, is never maudlin, nor is it overtly sentimental. As is the case with most of McCarey’s work, the film successfully balances comedy and drama, sometimes in the same scene.

The heart and soul of the film is seventy year old Lucy, played by then 48 year-old Bondi as though she lived every year of the life of the character she plays. When Orson Welles said of the film, “it would make a stone cry”, he’s referring primarily to Bondi’s three big scenes, the one in which she talks too loudly on the phone while daughter-in-law Fay Bainter and her friends are trying to play bridge; the one in which she and son Thomas Mitchell have a discussion about an old age home and her final scene with Moore. “It’s been lovely”, she says about her life, and the film’s legion of admirers have been saying the same thing about the film ever since.

Bondi, Moore, Bainter and Mitchell all give Oscar worthy performances, but like McCarey, their flirtations with the little golden man came for other works.

Moore was never nominated. Mitchell was nominated that year, albeit for his drunken doctor in John Ford’s The Hurricane, a role he would more or less reprise to an actual Oscar two years later in Ford’s Stagecoach.

Bondi had been nominated the year before for The Gorgeous Hussy and would be nominated again for Of Human Hearts the following year. She ironically lost that one to Bainter for Jezebel. Bainter had also been nominated in the lead category for White Banners.

Bondi might well have taken home the Oscar for The Grapes of Wrath, had John Ford not been over-ruled by Daryl F. Zanuck who cast Fox contract player Jane Darwell in the role of Ma Joad while Bondi was living with the Okies to get a feel for the part. Darwell, of course, went on to win the Oscar for one of the great screen characters of all time.

Bondi was subsequently cast by Jean Renoir as the cantankerous great-grandmother in 1945’s The Southerner for which he won his only Best Director nomination. Bondi, despite another great performance, was ignored.

McCarey, whose later works include such beloved films as Love Affair; Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s, fell out of favor with the critical establishment in the 1950s. Though apolitical, he was thought to be an arch conservative because of his 1952 film, My Son John, which was misinterpreted as virulent anti-Communist propaganda. Actually the film was, as is Make Way for Tomorrow, about the dissolution of family. Had he made his central character a drug addict or a thief instead, the film might not be as universally reviled as it is. Aside from the subject matter, however, it’s not a very good film and it took the remake of Love Affair, the even better An Affair to Remember,to restore his reputation. 

Make Way for Tomorrow is available on standard DVD only, in a digitally restored print from Criterion. Extras include on-screen interviews with director Peter Bogdanovich and critic Gary Giddens and a booklet with essays from among others, director Bertrand Tavernier.

Steven Soderbergh won an Oscar nomination for his screenplay to 1989’s sex, lies and videotape and dual Oscar nominations for directing Erin Brockovich and Traffic in 2000, winning for the latter. Since then his films have been mutually exclusive critical or box office successes. His best shot at returning to both was 2009’s The Informant! The film won the critical support it needed, but stalled at the box office with a total haul of $33 million, chump change in today’s market.

Matt Damon provides his most inspired performance since The Departed as Mark Whitaker, the real life whistleblower who went undercover for the FBI to inform on his company’s price fixing in the agri-business market. The trouble was that he was a compulsive liar who embellished the truth all the while hiding his own crimes. Scott Bakula and Joel McHale are also first-rate as his FBI handlers while most of the supporting cast is comprised of unfamiliar faces. Even Tom Smothers and Candy Clark are unrecognizable, the latter as Whitaker’s presumed dead mother.

The Informant! is available on both Blue-ray and standard DVD.

The remake of an Italian film with the same title in English, Kirk Jones’ Everybody’s Fine lacks the deft comic tough of Jones’ previous films, Waking Ned Devine and Nanny McPhee but is worth seeing for Robert De Niro’s best performance in years.

De Niro, playing the role Marcello Mastroianni had in the original, is a retired man whose wife passed away just a few months earlier. When his four scattered children are unable to make it home for Thanksgiving, he plays them a surprise visit one by one. None are happy to see him and he returns home, sadder but wiser.

Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore are three of the children and they’re all fine, but it’s De Niro’s quiet dignity that gives the film its strength. James Frain, Melissa Leo and Brendan Sexton III have minor roles.

Everybody’s Fine is available on standard DVD only.

The acting/writing team of Michael Sheen and Peter Morgan has come up with another winner in The Damned United.

Morgan won Oscar nods for his screenplays of The Queen and Frost/Nixon in which Sheen played, respectively, Tony Blair and David Frost. In their latest collaboration, this dynamic team takes on England’s greatest soccer manager, Brian Clough.

What makes this film stand out from the usual sports movie is that it doesn’t show its protagonist in his greatest light. The film concentrates on his disastrous 44 day stint as manager of the Leeds United team. Brash, arrogant and self-important, he makes all the wrong moves starting with breaking with his long time assistant coach, played by Timothy Spall. Both actors are excellent as are Colm Meaney, Maurice Roeves and Jim Broadbent in support.

The Damned United is available on both Blue-ray and standard DVD.

The now perennial British mystery series, Midsomer Murders has just released another splendid set of four whodunits in Set 14. Filled with the kind of complex cases we might expect of Law and Order, the bucolic English countryside atmosphere remains as deceptively congenial as any place we might have expected Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher to have found themselves in. This time, though, it’s the brilliant Chief Inspector Barnaby, played by John Nettles, who figures it all out.

Midsomer Murders: Set 14 is available on standard DVD only.