What an incredibly touching and sad film that really tears at you as a human being to care deeply for the people in your life. This is a film from the 1930’s that touches on social issues directly. It reaches out of the screen and grabs you as a viewer appealing to your empathetic emotional core begging you not to treat the elderly or anyone who is fragile or vulnerable in your life with such human neglect. This film is highly unique in the time period for doing so and being so candid and genuine about it. The only other comparison I can think of is Dodsworth.
The penultimate scene where the husband and wife say goodbye to each other at the train station is incredibly sad and heartbreaking and really tears at you as a human being to watch in such a subtle and small way too. There's no murder, no death yet, just the inevitable separation of these two longtime lovers due to the neglect and uncaring hearts of their children in trying to make an effort to keep them together. It's very sad because it's very preventable if only their children truly cared for them.
This film became the basis for Ozu’s later Tokyo Story, also about elder abandonment. The film is heartbreaking in it’s realism. What we see with this film is a shift outside the confines of American cinematic escapism and the pendulum swinging back towards realism and realistic films. This film is by the same director who did Awful Truth, so you see the beginnings of a shift in content in the 1930’s back towards realism and social issue films, although that pendulum won't swing fully until after WW2, when escapism no longer necessary to distract the population from the world's woes.