On Borrowed Time is a 1939 film about the role death plays in life, and how humanity cannot live without it.

The play, based on a novel by Lawrence Edward Watkin, has been revived twice on Broadway since its original run.

Set in small-town America, the film stars Lionel Barrymore, Beulah Bondi and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

Barrymore plays crotchety wheelchair-using Julian Northrup ("Gramps"), who smokes a smelly pipe, cherishes a smelly dog, prefers fishing to churchgoing, occasionally takes a nip of "tonic" and indulges in mild profanity.

Gramps and his wife, Nellie, played by Bondi, are raising their orphaned grandson, Pud, who adores his grandfather and mimics everything he does.

Her condoling drives the boy to tears and Gramps to a near-fatal heart attack.

He is inconsolable until their housekeeper, Marcia (Una Merkel), tells him Miss Nellie's last words: "Always see that Julian has his pipe."

Reinvigorated, Gramps sees a lawyer about picking a future guardian for Pud, only to learn that Demetria is going to court to adopt the boy now.

Demetria plots to have Gramps committed to a psychiatric hospital when he claims that Death, now invisible, is trapped in his apple tree.

Gramps proves his story by holding a gun on his friend, Dr. Evans (Henry Travers), and Grimes the orderly (Nat Pendleton), who has come to take him to the asylum.

Dr. Evans becomes a believer, but he tries to convince Gramps to let Death down so suffering people can find release.

Brink's protests, Gramps tricks Demetria and the Sheriff into believing they are scheduled to go with Mr.

The closing text reads: "And so they lived happily for all eternity—which, as Gramps would say, is a right smart piece of time."

In his July 7, 1939, review in The New York Times, Frank S. Nugent says that the film "isn't nearly so effective on the screen as it was on the stage", pointing out the "Hays code required the toning down of the salty dialogue that was at once the most comically shocking and endearing virtue" of Gramps and Pud.

According to Nugent:[4]The picture, like the play, is a tender thing and wistful, fantastic in its way, yet firmly rooted in human soil.

And it has, we are pleased to report, a company of players who have fallen admirably under the spell of their drama's mood.

Best among them, to our mind, are Beulah Bondi's Granny, young Bobs Watson's Pud, Sir Cedric Hardwicke's Mr.

This is a reference to an 1870 poem by Septimus Winner (under the pseudonym Apsley Street) euphemizing death, heaven, and the afterlife.