The plot concerns an elderly couple (played by Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) who are forced to separate when they lose their house and none of their five children will take both parents.

The film was written by Viña Delmar, from a play by Helen and Noah Leary, which was in turn based on the novel The Years Are So Long by advice columnist Josephine Lawrence.

When Lucy continues to speak optimistically of the day that he will find work, her teenage granddaughter bluntly advises her to "face facts" that it will never happen because of his age.

Meanwhile, son George (Thomas Mitchell) and his wife Anita (Fay Bainter) begin planning to move Lucy into a retirement home.

Their day is made so pleasant partly because of the kindness of people they encounter, who, although strangers, find them to be a charming couple, enjoy their company, and treat them with deference and respect—in stark contrast to the treatment they are receiving from their children.

Son Robert (Ray Meyer) suggests each of the children has always known that collectively they are "probably the most good-for-nothing bunch of kids that were ever raised, but it didn't bother us much until we found out that Pop knew it too."

Greene noted that the overall effect the audience receives is "a sense of misery and inhumanity ... left vibrating in the nerves", and commented that the description from Paramount gave a distinctly different expectation of the actual film.

In Newsweek magazine, famed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris named it his #1 film, stating "The most depressing movie ever made, providing reassurance that everything will definitely end badly.

[11] Also in February 2010, the film was released by the Criterion Collection, whose website describes it asone of the great unsung Hollywood masterpieces, an enormously moving Depression-era depiction of the frustrations of family, aging, and the generation gap ... Make Way for Tomorrow is among American cinema's purest tearjerkers, all the way to its unflinching ending, which McCarey refused to change despite studio pressure.

[13]: 45  Both Giddins and Bogdanovich argue that the film avoided derogatory ethnic stereotypes by humanizing the supporting characters of the Black maid and the Jewish merchant.

[14] It has been adapted five times including in Marathi as Oon Paus (1954), in Tamil as Varavu Nalla Uravu (1990), in Telugu as Dabbu Bhale Jabbu (1992), in Malayalam as Achan Kombathu Amma Varampathu (1995) and in Hindi as Zindagi (1976) and Baghban (2003).