The 2003 film Baghban has a scene where Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini — playing an aging couple mistreated by their children — find themselves outside a car showroom. An oily salesman coerces the duo into test-driving a fancy car, and then gets abusive and violent when it turns out they don’t have the money to buy it. Of course, this pat, emotionally manipulative set-up provides a pretext for good adoptive son Salman Khan to show up and lay some of the old dhishum-dhishum across the sales guy’s noggin; viewer catharsis is easily achieved, and all is — at least temporarily — right with the world.
Baghban is just one of the more recent entries in a long tradition of movies about neglected elderly people. The most famous one in Hindi cinema is probably the 1983 Avtaar (wherein Rajesh Khanna hammed so spectacularly that he could have repopulated the country’s pig-pens in case an epidemic struck) and the best-known one internationally is the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, which continues to be a regular fixture on best-film lists 60 years after it was made. One can see the cautionary appeal of such a story in traditional societies like India and Japan, where the threat of modernity and urbanism trampling on old-world family values is a major social concern.
And yet, the template for this sort of film was laid down — magnificently — in, of all places, 1930s Hollywood. Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow — about an old couple on the verge of being abandoned, or at least separated — turns 75 years old this month, something that is hard to believe if you watch it. This is, in so many ways that matter, a startlingly fresh film, with moments that transcend the place and time it was set in. It was also an anomaly for the American studio system of the time, and a commercial dud.
Incidentally, MWFT contains a car-salesman scene too (one that no doubt “inspired” Baghban) but the scene ends on a warmer, less dramatic note. Comparisons can be misleading, but the contrast clarifies the very different methods of the films. Baghban makes it easy for the viewer, clearly delineating the people we should root against (evil children, evil salesman, etc). All that’s missing is a subtitle expressly telling us how we are supposed to respond. But the Make Way for Tomorrow worldview can’t accommodate such clean divisions: this is a film that opens with the revelation that Barkley and Lucy are largely to blame for their predicament — they put their children in a tight spot by waiting until the last possible moment to drop the bombshell that their house has been taken over by the bank (this is the Depression Era).
What follows as the old couple try out various staying arrangements, occasionally making a nuisance of themselves, is a morally complex story about the generation gap — one that is more concerned with giving viewers shudders of recognition than in demanding judgement. As a pre-credit title puts it, “There is no magic that will draw together in perfect understanding the aged and the young. There is a canyon between us.” I thought the use of “us” as opposed to “them” was significant; it’s as if the film is placing itself and its viewers right in the spectrum of human experience rather than watching from a safe distance.
None of this should be surprising if you’re familiar with McCarey’s work. He was among a band of directors (Satyajit Ray is one of the others) whose films are remarkably free of villainous “types”: people whose wicked actions set a plot in motion, allowing us to feel that unfathomable injustices could be explained and neatly dealt with. Make Way for Tomorrow is one of his most moving and disturbing works, a septuagenarian that rarely shows its age.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer