明日之歌

Leo McCarey’s no-holds-barred tearjerker strips away the contentment of an elderly couple’s twilight years, lost their dwelling to foreclosure, New York residents Barkley and Lucy Cooper (Moore and Bondi), summon their four children (a fifth is absent for living far-off in California) to seek out a stopgap, yet none of them can host them both at short notice, so temporarily Barkley couch-surfs in the cramped apartment of their daughter Cora (Risdon) while Lucy stays with their son George (Mitchell), shared the bedroom with her 17-year-old granddaughter Rhoda (Read).

Filial piety is put through the wringer when an additional family member moves in, of course, it will disrupt the status quo, but in George’s household, no one seems to anticipate that, crimped by limited space, Lucy cannot simply have a place of her own to rock in her armchair when George’s wife Anita (Bainter) is hosting a bridge class at home, also inconveniently embroiled in Rhoda’s seeming white lie, Lucy will later be taken to task by Anita, who accuses her of stepping in her toes apropos of parenting, and simply impute Rhoda’s disgrace to Lucy’s unwanted presence.

Barkley’s situation doesn’t go any better, the only leisurely time he can get is to natter with Max Rubens (Moscovitch), a shopkeeper he newly befriends and expresses how he misses Lucy and envisions a way to get out of their predicament (but reality soon kicks in). When Barkley is afflicted by a cold, a grudging Cora not only gives a harsh brush-off to Max’s visit, but also connives to get rid of her father by making heavy weather of the doctor’s advice. Meanwhile, when another daughter Nellie (Gombell), backpedals her promise (due to both her and her husband’s selfishness, birds of a feather!) of taking in both parents after a three-month interval, George and Anita consider to send Lucy to an elderly home, an awkward tête-à-tête is sagaciously if sadly pre-empted by Lucy takes the decision on her own volition, only to alleviate George’s filial guilt.

Whereas Barkley is scheduled to stay with their daughter in California (warm weather is beneficial for his health, apparently), Lucy keeps a lid on her forthcoming relocation when they have one last afternoon to spend before he embarks on his westering journey. Together, they amble along the streets, reminisce their sweet old days and are gladsome to be welcomed by strangers, eventually they stiff the farewell dinner with their good-for-nothing offspring, and dine in the hotel where they visited during their honeymoon, sipping cocktails and dancing waltz. The question McCarey brings home to audience is clear as day, if a total stranger can ladle out their kindness to this senior couple who have been much in love for more than half a century, one may wonder why their own brood cannot divvy up some money to at least rent a little apartment for them to stay together? Their train station farewell plays up their heartrending mutual understanding but as life still goes on, they also must pretend that their separation is just au revoir, everything will be fine, a hard-earned gesture of wisdom at the mercy of becoming old.

Meritoriously, in the leading roles, Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore (both playing roles much older than their real ages) hold courts with their well-round delivery, heartfelt affection and spontaneous finesse that collectively and compassionately imparts a layer of naturalism that can transubstantiate even the most prosaic words into the button that turns on one’s waterworks. In comparison, Bondi has meatier fodder to play with, which she registers with an additional sense of unsentimental self-knowledge.

By the same token, Fay Bainter convincingly fleshes out a taxing role as Anita, who is assailed by the delicate balancing art of comporting herself between a caring daughter-in-law and a supportive mother, whenever those two clash, predominantly, people opt for the benefit of the latter, like the title says: make way for tomorrow, but she is certainly not the worst among the bunch of ingrates. Thomas Mitchell also has a daunting task to perform, as his George is explicitly Lucy’s favorite, his guilt-ridden inner struggle is eked out from the sidelines.

No one wants to be bothersome to their closest kin, leastwise, making allowance for the person who gives you life, this is a line in the sand for any human who is compos mantis, and McCarey’s admonitory masterpiece is a trail-blazing paradigm in projecting a realistic eye on geriatric problems, lachrymose is our default response, so leave nothing in check.

referential entries: Yasujirô Ozu’s TOKYO STORY (1953, 9.1/10); McCarey’s AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER (1957, 8.4/10); Ira Sachs’ LOVE IS STRANGE (2014, 7.8/10).

【本文首发于《虹膜》公众号】

作者：贝特朗·塔维涅

译者：覃天

校对：易二三

来源：Criterion（2010年2月23日）

Like many other French cinephiles, I discoveredMake Way for Tomorrowrelatively late, although we had been interested in Leo McCarey for years. We had hunted down his Laurel and Hardy pictures, adoredDuck Soup,the best of the Marx Brothers films, consideredThe Awful Trutha classic, and stood up forAnAffair to Rememberin the face of the critical establishment. (I do wonder if we were right to defendRally ’Round the Flag, Boys!,in which Joan Collins whispers, I believe, “Pink peignoir, pink boudoir, pink me.” It’s a film I saw five times in a row and haven’t dared to look at again in three decades.)

和其他许多法国影迷一样，我发现《明日之歌》这部电影的时间相对较晚，尽管我们多年来一直对莱奥·麦卡雷感兴趣。我们喜爱他执导的、劳莱与哈台兄弟主演的一系列影片；欣赏他拍的《鸭羹》，人们通常认为它是马克思兄弟最好的一部电影；或将《春闺风月》奉为圭臬，并反对那些针对《金玉盟》的批评声。（但我确实在想，我们为《集合到国旗下的男儿们》这部电影辩护是否是正确的，在电影里，集会上的琼·柯琳斯低声说，我相信，「粉色的床垫，粉色的闺房，粉色的我。」这是一部我连续看了五次，但三十年来都不敢再看的电影。）

Delmar Daves was the first person I knew of to warmly praiseMake Way for Tomorrow,in the early sixties, leading us to the discovery of a film that had not yet been released in France. Daves had served as McCarey’s cowriter onLove Affairand its remake,An Affair to Remember,which included those sequences from the first version that had been cut or never filmed. Daves consideredMake Way for Tomorrowone of McCarey’s masterpieces, one of the greatest American films ever made, and one of the most egregiously overlooked. He had no end of praise for it, passionately telling us about the film’s emotional intensity and, particularly, its last thirty minutes. He compared its emotional impact to that of the silent films of Frank Borzage.

导演德尔默·戴夫斯是我最先知道在上世纪60年代初，公开称赞《明日之歌》这部电影的人，他让我们发现了这部还没有在法国上映的电影。戴夫斯曾在莱奥·麦卡雷的《爱情事件》及其翻拍片《金玉盟》担任联合编剧，《金玉盟》收录了《爱情事件》中那些被删减或从未拍摄过的片段。戴夫斯认为《明日之歌》不仅是麦卡雷的杰作之一，也是有史以来最伟大、最被忽视的美国电影之一。他对这部电影赞不绝口，兴奋地告诉我们这部电影，特别是它的最后30分钟中饱含的情感强度。他将《明日之歌》中的这种情感强度与弗兰克·鲍沙其的一系列无声电影相提并论。

A few years later, producer and screenwriter Sidney Buchman told meMake Way for Tomorrowwas McCarey’s favorite of his films—and the one that led him to take his revenge on Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn. Whenever McCarey went over budget or fell behind schedule while shootingTheAwful Truth,Cohn relentlessly reminded him ofMake Way’s commercial failure. AfterThe Awful Truth’s triumphant release, McCarey led Cohn to believe he would renew his contract with Columbia. But the day before they had agreed to sign, McCarey published an ad in Variety announcing he had just signed with RKO forGoing My Way.

几年后，制片人兼编剧西德尼·巴克曼告诉我，《明日之歌》是麦卡雷本人最喜欢的电影——它也是麦卡雷对哥伦比亚电影公司总裁哈里·考恩进行的报复。每当麦卡雷在拍摄《春闺风月》的过程中超出预算或落后于拍摄计划时，哈里·考恩都会无情地提醒他《明日之歌》在商业上的失败。《春闺风月》的成功上映，让考恩相信麦卡雷会和哥伦比亚续签合同。但就在他们同意签约的前一天，麦卡雷在《综艺》杂志上刊登了一则广告，宣布他刚刚和雷电华公司签署了《与我同行》的拍摄合同。

John Ford and Jean Renoir were equally fervent in their admiration forMake Way for Tomorrow.When Pierre Rissient finally distributed it in France in the midsixties (along withRuggles of Red Gap,which was just as hard to find and equally overlooked), and I worked with him on the release, Renoir wrote a few enthusiastic lines to be added to earlier praise from Ford, Ernst Lubitsch, and Daves.

除了德尔默·戴夫斯，约翰·福特和让·雷诺阿也很喜欢《明日之歌》。制片人皮埃尔·里斯安在60年代中期最终在法国发行了这部电影（以及同样很难找到、麦卡雷同样被忽视的另外一部电影《红谷英仆》），我与他合作发行了这部电影，让·雷诺阿为《明日之歌》写了几句热情洋溢的祝词，补充了约翰·福特、恩斯特·刘别谦和戴维斯早先的赞扬。

My former wife, Colo O’Hagan, prepared the subtitles with historian Bernard Eisenschitz. I remember that she was in tears as she typed them up. She was still overwhelmed by the profound emotion the film had stirred up in her.

我的前妻科洛·塔维涅和历史学家伯纳德·艾森斯基兹一起给《明日之歌》配上了法语字幕。我记得她打字时泪流满面。她被这部电影在她身上激起的深刻情感所淹没。

Despite a warm critical reception, the film did not do well at the box office. We had implored the critics not to summarize its plot, to find a literary way of describing the film’s emotional tone without revealing it was about a couple of old people sent off to separate retirement homes by their children, but our pleas often fell on deaf ears. And once the film’s plotline was disclosed, the positive effect of the critics’ praise was wiped out.

尽管《明日之歌》受到了评论界的热烈好评，但它的票房表现并不理想。我们希望影评人不要总结电影的故事情节，而是可以用文学的语言来描述它的情感基调，同时又不透露它讲述的是一对老人被他们的孩子送到不同的养老院的故事，但我们的恳求经常被置若罔闻。一旦这部电影的情节被披露，评论家们的称赞所产生的的积极作用就消失了。

I will never forget my amazement when I saw the print Rissient received from the United States, which he showed me right away. That screening remains one of the most powerful moments of the decade for me. The nearly miraculous way in which McCarey manages to avoid the bathos inherent in such a subject, steering clear of sticky pity, of condescension and moralizing sermons—it all transfixed me. It was as though an arrow had struck me and stayed vibrating in my heart.

我永远不会忘记，当我看到皮埃尔·里斯安从美国寄来胶片时的情景，我感到非常惊讶，他立即给我看了这部影片。对我来说，那次放映仍然是我近十年中最令人印象深刻的时刻之一。麦卡雷几乎奇迹般地设法避免了这样一个话题固有的矫揉造作感，避开了矫情的怜悯、居高临下的态度和说教的意味——这一切都让我目瞪口呆。《明日之歌》就像一支射中了我的箭，在我的心里不停地颤动。

I’ve experienced the same feeling every time I’ve seen the film in the forty years since. It’s the same feeling I get when I see Borzage’s7th Heavenor Yasujiro Ozu’sTokyo Story.As in both those films, McCarey immediately finds the exact distance he must be from his characters. We’re always in among them, in their places, feeling everything they experience—yet at the same time, McCarey keeps us just far enough away that we can be witness to their flaws and blunders, both comical and poignant. Like Borzage, he uses humor, the comedy of certain unexpected reactions, to defuse the traps of melodrama. He is assisted in his achievement by the magnificent performancesof Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi, probably in the best roles of their careers.

从那以后的四十年里，我每次看这部电影都有同样的感觉。它带给我一种与弗兰克·鲍沙其的《第七天堂》和小津安二郎的《东京物语》相近的感觉。就像在这两部电影中一样，麦卡雷立刻找到了他与角色之间的确切距离。我们作为观众被置放于他们中间，从他们的视角来感受他们所经历的一切——但与此同时，麦卡雷也让我们和他们保持了一定的距离，使我们可以见证这些角色的缺点和错误，这既滑稽又令人心酸。像鲍沙其一样，麦卡雷用幽默——这种带有意想不到的反应的喜剧方式化解了情节剧的窠臼和陷阱。维克多·摩尔和比尤拉·邦蒂的精彩表演促成了这部电影的成功，这可能也是他们职业生涯中扮演的最好的角色。

And our laughter—for we often laugh duringMake Way for Tomorrow—increases the emotional impact tenfold. We laugh, and our hearts ache . . . McCarey remains the great specialist of these shifts in tone and mood, as seen in certain sequences ofLove Affairand, of course, in the Gettysburg Address scene inRuggles of Red Gap.This is a laughter that grips your heart and “rattles the cage,” as they say in Quebec. Like certain scenes in Chekhov, where we move from laughter to tears without warning, with a sudden, painfully smooth fluidity. Like life, when we know how to observe it and faithfully put it on the screen.

而我们的笑声——因为我们经常在看《明日之歌》的过程中大笑——将电影的情感力量增加了十倍。我们既会欢笑，我们也会心碎。如同我们在《爱情事件》的某些镜头以及《红谷英仆》的葛底斯堡演讲场景中可以看到的那样，麦卡雷仍然是转变观众情绪的能工巧匠。正如魁北克谚语经常说到的那样，这样的笑声扣人心弦，也「让人感到痛苦」。它也令人想起了契诃夫戏剧中的某些场景，我们的笑声毫无征兆地变成了泪水，突然间痛苦的感受滑入了我们的思绪。就像生活本身这件事一样，当我们知道如何观察它，并忠实地把它展现在屏幕上时，它带给我们的感受和它本身一样欢乐而痛苦。