Make Way for Tomorrow (Criterion Collection)

Make Way for Tomorrow, by Leo McCarey (An Affair to Remember), is one of the great unsung Hollywood masterpieces, an enormously moving Depression-era depiction of the frustrations of family, aging, and the generation gap. Beulah Bondi (It's a Wonderful Life) and Victor Moore (Swing Time) headline a cast of incomparable character actors, starring as an elderly couple who must move in with their grown children after the bank takes their home, yet end up separated and subject to their offspring's selfish whims. An inspiration for Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story, this is among American cinema's purest tearjerkers, all the way to it's unflinching ending, which McCarey refused to change despite studio pressure.