The Great Depression in the United States

The Great Depression in the United States is the historical setting for the family’s economic collapse in Make Way for Tomorrow, the film the narrator and her friend encounter in the owners’ DVD collection. The period makes the couple’s dependence on their children a material necessity, while the film’s account of their separation turns that crisis into a measure of how little room their children leave for the parents’ needs and attachment to one another.

The Depression in Make Way for Tomorrow

The narrator introduces the film through its premise: after losing their house and all their savings during the Depression, an elderly married couple must ask their children for help. Pa tries to preserve his former role as breadwinner, but employers will not hire him at his age. Economic loss thus strips away not only the couple’s home and resources but also the practical independence Pa has spent his working life maintaining.

The children regard the care of their parents in old age as a burden and make little effort to conceal their resentment. Their response gives the Depression setting a domestic consequence: the couple’s financial hardship places them at the mercy of relatives who understand assistance chiefly as an imposition.

Separation and its consequences

The couple have been happily married for more than fifty years and cannot bear the thought of being separated. Their children nevertheless decide that separation is the fairest workable arrangement. What is presented as temporary is on the verge of becoming permanent: Ma is placed with a son and his wife, while Pa must move to a daughter’s home many miles away in California.

The children arrange a farewell dinner, but the parents, devastated by what they see as betrayal and intent on spending their last day together, skip it. Instead, they dine at the hotel where they spent their honeymoon. At the station, Pa must catch his train. The pair behave as though he will find work in California, send for Ma, and reunite with her; the narrator emphasizes that the ending is already clear to them as well as to the audience.

Narrative significance

The film supplies a story of old age, dependence, and family separation within the narrator’s own account of caring for a dying friend. Its Depression-era couple face a different crisis, but their fear of becoming a burden and the threat of being parted make their story an especially stark encounter with the vulnerability of the old and needy. The narrator calls it the saddest picture ever made, recalling Orson Welles’s description, and its final station scene leaves the promised reunion in painful contrast with the separation the children have arranged.