Masters Of Cinema To Release Leo McCarey’s Make Way For Tomorrow Blu-ray On October 25th In The UK

Later this month, our friends at the Masters Of Cinema will be releasing Leo McCarey’s 1937 film, Make Way For Tomorrow on Blu-ray.

It was only this past February, that the Criterion Collection released their edition of Make Way For Tomorrow on DVD, with an incredible cover from the comic artist, Seth. The Criterion version was only available on DVD, and the Masters Of Cinema release will only be available on Blu-ray.

Assuming the press release lists all of the supplements on the MoC release, they will be duplicating all of the material from the Criterion disc. You’ll get a video piece from Peter Bogdanovich discussing the life and career of McCarey, and another video interview with Gary Giddins, discussing Leo McCarey’s filmography.

While it will be nice to see this film in high definition, it doesn’t seem like this is a title that you’ll need to double dip on, especially since you’ll likely need a region-free player for this title (let me know if I’m wrong on that one, I don’t see any info regarding region-locking these discs).

Make Way for Tomorrow will be released on 25 October 2010, in the United Kingdom.

Below you’ll find some still from the film, generously provided by the folks at Eureka, and the Masters of Cinema. (click on the images to see their high-resolution counterparts)

Of Make Way for Tomorrow, Orson Welles told Peter Bogdanovich: ‘Oh my God that’s the saddest movie ever made.’ Long unavailable for home viewing, Leo McCarey’s personal favourite among all his films (which included The Awful Truth and An Affair to Remember) is sad, yes, but it also stands as cathartic affirmation of the dignity of human feeling, and in the testament of such achieves a subtle complexity of characterization on par with Renoir, Ford, and Hawks.

Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi, two of the great Hollywood character actors, appear makeup-aged beyond their actual years to portray the couple whose house the bank has foreclosed upon (the film was set and produced in the midst of the Great Depression), and who are forced subsequently to move into their children’s homes in the city. A near-musical restructuring of gratitude and debt ensues once the offspring deem the couple’s lodging an imposition: the two are separated, then reunited weeks later’¦ as they glide inexorably into an uncertain future.

Unrelentingly unsentimental, yet maintaining a balance of pathos and levity unseen in not only American studio pictures but most of the rest of world cinema, Make Way for Tomorrow exerted a powerful influence on YasujirÃ´ Ozu’s Tokyo Story and several other key entries in the Japanese master’s body of work. It is a film profoundly concerned with questions of filial obligation and the way we treat one another as human beings; it is a film that, to give Welles the last word, ‘could make a stone cry.’ The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Leo McCarey’s truly great Make Way for Tomorrow for the first time on Blu-ray anywhere in the world.

Gorgeous high-definition transfer of the film in its original 1.37:1 aspect ratio
20-minute video piece with filmmaker and writer Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show; The Cat’s Meow) discussing the film and Leo McCarey’s career
21-minute video piece with writer Gary Giddins discussing McCarey’s work and the social and political contexts of the film
Optional English SDH subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired
Lengthy booklet featuring a new essay on the film by writer and Library of America editor Geoffrey O’Brien, and an excerpt from Josephine Lawrence’s source novel Years Are So Long