As Graham Greene reported in his review of [Make Way for Tomorrow] in Night and Day in the summer of 1937, “a sense of misery and inhumanity is left vibrating in the nerves.” The film is a withering criticism of a terrible wrong — and an eloquent vindication of the justice of the New Deal that had recently been devised by liberal gerontocrats in Washington. (The first Social Security payments were sent out only a few months before the movie’s premiere.) The film is also a devastating repudiation of the spirit of [Samuel] Moyn’s book and its insolent generational partisanship. Watch Make Way for Tomorrow and you will throw the book across the room, and not only for sentimental reasons. The film represents an entirely different and more sympathetic approach to the problem that the French call un pere qui vit trop, the father who lives too long. I have always detected a tincture of sublimity in filial devotion. Indeed, filial devotion should be enlarged and elevated into a standard for humaneness and a basis for social policy. We would inhabit a less indecent society if somehow we could find in ourselves a measure of filial devotion for other people’s fathers and mothers, too. Biology is only biology. We will be known by our choices.
I wonder if Wieseltier happens to have read my commendation of Make Way for Tomorrow in the first issue of Portico.