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Griffith once voiced the quandary, What Shall We Do with Our Old? Foreclosure of the postcard home, separation of the aged residents (Beulah Bondi, Victor Moore), no greater horror for a loving couple. "It'll be very nice living with the children for a while," famous last words. The matriarch stays with the elder son (Thomas Mitchell) and becomes an unwitting nuisance, from the painted portrait that's cumbersome in every room to the rocking chair that disrupts the bridge class of her daughter-in-law (Fay Bainter). Hundreds of miles away, her husband gets a chill from sleeping on the couch of their vexed daughter (Elisabeth Risdon), bites the whippersnapper doctor who's come to see him, and stubbornly looks for work. "Were you a bookkeeper?" "I am a bookkeeper," he proudly replies, siring Umberto D. A miraculous work, tenderly tragic and horribly comical, in which Leo McCarey proves himself the equal of Dreyer in spare intensity and gesture delineation. No heroes or villains, just people caught in remarkable blurs of empathy and irritation and an audience like a roomful of strangers listening in on a long-distance call between estranged lovers. (A private kiss is curtailed once the camera's gaze is detected.) The generation gap, "a canyon between us," everybody means well and yet there's mother pretending to make a decision in order to ease the conscience of the scion about to tell her she's being sent to a retirement home. From one of the most harrowing scenes in Thirties cinema to one of its most enchanted interludes, the elderly sweethearts ditching the family dinner in favor of recreating their honeymoon on their final day together. A poem, a waltz, "we mustn't even think about the time." As they struggle to cram five decades together into the last minute at the train station, the bleakness behind the title's vague uplift is thrown into shattering relief. "Into the future, we'll travel alone..." Bergman envisions a reunion (Saraband), Haneke grinds a caricature (Amour). With Barbara Reed, Minna Gombell, Maurice Moscovitch, Porter Hall, Ray Mayer, Ralph Remley, Louise Beavers, Louis Jean Heydt, and Ferike Boros. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |