Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow; Ruth Rendell's The Girl Next Door

Here was another trap he was falling into, that of the spouse who thinks to compensate for his unfaithfulness by performing small selfless services for the betrayed one.
Ruth Rendell, The Girl Next Door (Scribner, 2014)

"I knew a couple of jokes that made you laugh."
Barkley Cooper to his wife of 50 years in Make Way for Tomorrow (Paramount,1937)

The difference between Rendell's book and McCarey's film -- both about marriage -- is the difference between the today of common divorce and the time when divorce was rare.  Make Way for Tomorrow, however, is very much relevant today, as the Coopers lose their house to the bank (Social Security had not yet been fully implemented) and are shuttled around among their five children, none of whom quite want to be bothered with them.  Mr. Cooper finally leaves NY for California for health reasons, but since their daughter there does not have room for them both Mrs. Cooper ends up in a nursing home.  They relive their honeymoon in NY and say good-bye -- perhaps for good -- at the train station. McCarey has demonstrated his feeling for the importance of marriage in a number of other films, particularly An Affair to Remember (where an older couple gets their last chance to marry and have children) and The Awful Truth (where a couple comes to their senses just before their divorce becomes final).  McCarey has a straightforward style -- the camera hardly ever moves except to follow action - that allows behavioral nuances, both funny and moving, to come through with emotional intensity.

McCarey was only in his forties when he made Make Way for Tomorrow, though being younger in no way limited his feeling for those who were older.  Ruth Rendell was 84 this year, when The Girl Next Door was published, a finely observed portrait of the different ways people can deal with growing old, some fighting in various ways, some submitting.   Her Inspector Wexford has retired and is spending the time reading Gibbon (No Man's Nightingale, 2013), while the characters in her latest book were all very young children in WW II and are now wondering about two severed hands that were recently found in some tunnels they played in when the war was going on.  Rendell's stories are less mysteries -- we know from the very beginning who the murderer is -- than finely tuned psychological portraits of those caught in or near violence.  The man and woman to whom the hands belonged were killed by the woman's husband, at a time when divorce was unusual and expensive and "living in sin" was highly frowned on.  The adults, now in their seventies, who played as children in the tunnels where the hands are found, react in a variety of ways, causing them to question many of their previously cherished beliefs.