We're revisiting 1937 this month leading up to the next Supporting Actress Smackdown. As always Nick Taylor will suggest a few alternates to Oscar's ballot.
We begin 1937 with Fay Bainter, the third-ever winner of the Supporting Actress Oscar for Jezebel in 1938 (you may have heard about it last year!) in Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow. McCarey viewed the film as his greatest achievement, to the point that when he received his Best Director Oscar for The Awful Truth the same year Make Way for Tomorrow earned no nominations, he opened his acceptance speech by saying he won for the wrong movie. We can discuss the considerable merits of both films about couples splitting up and staying together, along with how brilliantly they showcase McCarey’s skills with tone, blocking, performance shaping, scene construction, as well as its enduring legacy in films like Tokyo Story and Love is Strange. Bainter distinguishing herself with the best supporting turn in either McCarey film, taking on what might have been the film's most unsympathetic role and turning her into a thoughtful, utterly human figure...
Make Way for Tomorrow centers its wide tapestry on elderly married couple Barkley and Lucy Cooper (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi, respectively), who have been happily married for 50 years, and enjoy a loving, tender relationship that resulted in five children who have grown up to be successful adults. Bark and Lucy recently learned their savings weren’t enough to keep up with the payments on their home, and have summoned four of their five children to announce that their house will be foreclosed upon (their fifth, unseen offspring lives in California, and never appears in the film). Bark and Lucy need a place to stay, and their children will have to put them up for a few months until something sorts itself out. The younger Coopers are understandably sandbagged by the news of their parent’s sudden misfortune, but their apprehension stems just as much from not wanting the imposition of caring for their parents.
It’s eventually decided that Bark will stay with housewife Cora (Elisabeth Risdon) and her husband, while Lucy will live hundreds of miles away with businessman George (Thomas Mitchell), his wife Anita (Fay Bainter), their 17-year-old daughter Rhoda (Barbara Read), and their maid Mamie (Louise Beavers). Lucy sleeps in Rhoda’s room and spends most of her time knitting and socializing with his family and friends while he’s at work. Or rather, she spends a lot of time with Anita (who affectionately refers to Lucy as Mother C), busying herself in the life of a woman who now has to look after her daughter, tend to her marriage, and instruct an evening bridge class under the watchful, well-meaning, occasionally agitating eye of her mother-in-law.
McCarey has directed his performers towards unfussily layered characterizations, in tune with Make Way for Tomorrow’s sober, controlled, emotionally rich sense of pacing and drama. His sympathies are unambiguously with Mr. and Mrs. Cooper, even as he holds their starchy, abrasive qualities firmly alongside their sympathetic ones. The role calls for much of the consummate watchfulness that defined her work in Jezebel, except Bainter’s character is actually able to influence the goings-on in her household. As written, Anita’s concerns about her daughter’s male friends and desire to teach her bridge class could have easily been played for flat, spiteful caricature of the self-centered daughter-in-law who drives her lonely old mama into a nursing home. Yet McCarey and Bainter give Anita’s household and familial priorities real complexity, rooting them in her affections and pleasures without denying her anxieties and superficialities. Rather than living on Make Way for Tomorrow’s margins like the other Cooper kids, Bainter’s Anita is endowed with as much depth and curiosity from McCarey as Bark and Lucy.
You see in her earliest scenes that Anita is sympathetic to Rhoda’s gripes about living with her grandmother. Mother and daughter discuss Lucy’s penchant for talking the ear off of any friends they bring over, to the point where they can no longer invite company. This is more of a problem for Anita, as it prevents her from screening Rhoda’s new male friends to give her approval, yet she instructs her daughter to keep a stiff upper lip about it. It’s only for three months after all, and they’re doing the right thing in accommodating Lucy. Bainter ensures that Anita’s concerns about Lucy not being happy weave deftly between sincere pity about not being able to better integrate her mother-in-law into the family’s established rhythms and honest disappointment about the sacrifices she’s already had to make. She wants her home to be a comfortable place for Lucy, but she also wants to run it the way she usually does, and that’s not possible anymore.
When Lucy tries to help around the house or does something unintentionally disruptive, Anita responds to her by trying to kid-glove those impulses as best she can without showing her own displeasure. Anita communicates a profound sympathy with Lucy (albeit not a limitless one) that often tilts between outright pity and genuine self-recognition. Bainter gets a lovely, sustained reaction shot in response to Lucy’s end of a phone call between her and Bark in the middle of a bridge class, sliding from amusement at the old woman talking so loudly into the receiver into an almost uncomfortable sadness at the couple’s aching separation as the call continues. Is she imagining what it’s like in Lucy’s shoes, or does she consider it impolite to listen in on this intimate call? I’m also struck by the sheer recognition Bainter projects when Lucy asks for a bicarbonate of soda, saying she’s feeling dispeptic and needs something to soothe her. Anita makes a nearly identical gesture holding her stomach as Mother C does, and the look in her fluttering eyes and round, radiant face is surprisingly tender.
Yet in this tale of familial obligation and human morality, I honestly can’t say how much Anita loves or even likes Mother C, relative to any other feeling she might have for her. I know she likes her bridge classes and her students. She loves her husband and her daughter, and her life in general. But when it comes to her most central partner in the context of Make Way for Tomorrow, Bainter doesn’t sentimentalize Anita’s ideas about Lucy or reveal a hidden core motivating her emotions towards her mother-in-law. Instead, Bainter communicates a trickier way of viewing Anita’s relationship to Lucy, built equally around emotional attachment, personal projections, and how much the woman has upended the goings-on in her home. It's not as much about Lucy as how Anita views her relative to her own identity, and she won't tolerate it if she thinks Lucy is shaking the foundations of who she is.
This comes to a head when Rhoda makes a rash decision involving a delinquent boy, one that catches her mother completely off-guard. Lucy reveals she knew about this romance for some time but promised not to share it, and Anita’s patience is completely broken. She sees this breach of trust as endemic of every judgement, slight, and interrogation Lucy has expressed since she arrived. Or more accurately, every judgement, slight, and interrogation Anita has perceived about her mothering skills and her having a job, which doesn’t categorically exclude anything from the former category but muddies it enough. Her self-righteousness spills out into all the bottled resentments and insecurities she’s buried under her niceties, and it takes Lucy gentle, firm offering of apology and forgiveness to stop her in her tracks. Is her frozen stare more shock at Lucy's attitude, or is she stunned and ashamed at herself for yelling at her?
Bainter's performance throughout the film suggests the latter option, and this is a standout element of her work. More than any of the Cooper’s children, Anita displays a profound grasp that the shuttering and sidelining of Bark and Lucy by their descendants is, at some base level, wrong, even if no one has room for them or can stand them completely. This shame colors her reactions with more consistency and potency than it does her husband’s, yet it’s never overwhelming. It’s only buried when Anita believes that Lucy has put Rhoda’s future in jeopardy, and I do mean only then. After George and Lucy finally settle on new living arrangements, he goes back to his wife to relay the news that their home will be theirs again. But Bainter’s face is a mask of sorrow, frozen in contemplation when, by all rights, she should be celebrating. She's not proud of this decision, even if it means restoring order in her home.
What parts of herself does Anita see in Lucy Cooper? Someone who’s lived a full life with similar and unique experiences she could ask about? Is she just an old woman, a relative to be taken care of because that’s what good people do, and one who will shortly be sent off to someone else’s house anyways? Does she see Lucy as a fellow mother, and if so, does she see this as a companionship or a threat onto a home that’s already on the precipice of changing irrevocably once Rhoda becomes an adult and starts a life of her own? Does she see her relationship to Rhoda differently, now that she’s seen a side of her daughter unencumbered by maternal supervision? Does she expect Rhoda to treat her in old age like she’s treating Mother C? Or does she think she can avoid it? Bainter’s performance inspires all of these questions at different moments, adding new ideas to the already vital conversations Make Way for Tomorrow is having, and it’s to her credit that she’s able to crystallize these ideas through such a full, engrossing characterization.
