This important addition to Eureka's "Masters of Cinema" series stars Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore as an elderly, lower-middle-class couple who lose their home in the Great Depression, are shuffled around between their sons and daughters and are finally separated forever after a last unforgettable evening in New York.

It was a box-office failure for its director, Leo McCarey, who was best known for comedy and romance. But when he picked up his Oscar for the screwball classic The Awful Truth that year he said he'd been honoured for the wrong film.

Graham Greene (as movie critic for The Spectator) thought it "the most sentimental and yet the most moving of all" the year's social dramas: at the end, "a sense of misery and inhumanity is left vibrating in the nerves".

In one of two excellent essays on the Blu-ray disc, Peter Bogdanovich reports Orson Welles saying: "Oh my God, that's the saddest movie ever made."

Make Way for Tomorrow foreshadowed Tokyo Story and can hold its own with Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece.