For the sensitive, this high-toned tale of Death trapped in a tree can be an emotional sledgehammer, with enough weeping and wailing for ten sad stories. To avoid being transported to the great beyond, Lionel Barrymore uses a magic tree to neutralize Mr. Brink — Death Himself. But that means that nobody dies anywhere, leaving thousands in a state of agony. Sir Cedric Hardwick is a cultured bringer of Doom; Beulah Bondi and Henry Travers co-star. The little boy in the story is Bobs ‘Waterworks’ Watson, a child prodigy who can cry gallons of tears and not perish from dehydration. Mr. Brink is no friend to you and me — watch out for that tree!

On Borrowed Time
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1939 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 99 min. / Street Date December 16, 2025 / Available at MovieZyng / 21.99
Starring: Lionel Barrymore, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Beulah Bondi, Una Merkel, Bobs Watson, Nat Pendleton, Henry Travers, Grant Mitchell, Eily Malyon, James Burke, Charles Waldron, Ian Wolfe, Phillip Terry, Truman Bradley, Dorothy Adams, Barbara Bedford, Sonny Bupp, Hans Conried, Doris Rankin.
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art Director: Cedric Gibbons
Wardrobe: Dolly Tree
Film Editor: George Boemler
Music Composer: Franz Waxman
Screenplay by Alice D.G. Miller, Frank O’Neill, Claudine West from the play by Paul Osborn from the novel by Lawrence Edward Watkin
Produced by Sidney Franklin
Directed by Harold S. Bucquet

Not quite accepted as a genre or a style is the kind of movie called Film Blanc — fanciful tales that invent a continuity between our here and now and the Afterlife. Heaven is real and various kinds of waiting rooms exist before you can get in; often there’s an amusing bureucracy to send people where they’re supposed to go. Molnár’s  Liliom can’t be the first example; Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has major elements. Placing the sober subject of life and death in a fantasy context can feel liberating, especially when done in good humor. We love the impish comedy in the musical  Cabin in the Sky.

Before Film Blanc, ‘Death’ was usually personified as a ghost-like creature in a shroud, maybe even a skeleton with a scythe. The granddaddy of stories with an ‘elegant’ Death figure is the celebrated Italian-sourced movie Death Takes a Holiday. Death is a noble called Prince Sirki, who falls in love with a mortal in a marble villa. Should he take her with him into the realm beyond?  A morbid situation results: while Sirki loiters in human form, nobody on Earth can die.

In the 1938 play On Borrowed Time, the grim reaper has no noble title but is still our social ‘better.’ He’s Mr. Brink (Sir Cedric Hardwick), a refined, aloof gentleman who shows up at deathbeds and fatal accidents. The setting is rural Americana. Instead of a romantic triangle, we have a family that must struggle with a terrible loss. A doctor Northrup and his wife die in a car crash, which is shown to be Fated: Mr. Brink literally hitches a ride with them before the accident. That leaves only old Gramps (Lionel Barrymore) and the sickly Grandma Nellie (Beulah Bondi) to protect the newly orphaned Pud (Bobs Watson) from the avaricious relative Demetria Riffle (Eily Malyon), who wants Gramps declared insane so she can take charge of the boy’s inheritance.

Mr. Brink comes to take Nellie, which reduces both Pud and the maid Marcia Giles (Una Merkel) to tearful despair. But when Brink returns for Gramps, the cranky old guy is prepared. The cranky old coot is determined not to die, because he needs to be there to protect Pud and guide him to adulthood.

It seems that Gramps has a ‘Magic Tree.’  Because he once ‘did a good deed,’ anybody who climbs his tree can only come down if Gramps lets him. Brink ends up trapped in the tree and unable to perform his natural function. Gramps won’t relent, even though he’s condemning millions of humans to untold suffering — the sick and gravely injured endure constant agony without the merciful release of death.

But Mr. Brink’s cosmic duty is to stay on the job. He can still kill anything that touches the tree. Gramps won’t budge, so Death goes to work on somebody who will listen to him … Pud.

We love the film’s first dialogue exchange — Mr. Brink passes up the chance to claim a motorist coughing with a lung ailment — Hans Conreid!  The actor looks impossibly young.

Films Blanc are supposed to be uplifting but is this one even good for one’s mental health?  The drama is given the MGM aura of ‘quality,’ that already presented a sanitized view of life. Gramps supposedly talks with unfiltered vulgarities, but they’ve all been euphemized, as in “Well, I’ll be dipped in gravy.”  Gramps keeps referring to the despised Demetria Riffle as a ‘pismire’ … a word carefully chosen because it sounds obscene. Very clever.

On Borrowed Time pushes maudlin sentimentality to the limit. Everybody cries. Beulah Bondi is almost painfully endearing as the universally identifiable mother figure; Una Merkel and Bob Watson’s sobs never stop. The show could induce depression in sentimental people; it might be traumatic for a child who hasn’t yet thought out the difficult issue of mortality.  ^*

The ‘magical’ tree is a story element we just have to accept — Mr. Brink is all but omniscient, so we wonder why he can’t appeal to his superiors to override Gramps’ infernal meddling. The story element of an anti-death tree may come from Greek myth, and a preamble alludes to  Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. It seems related to the Garden of Eden, somehow.

The play is a good fit for the MGM Tradition of Quality — all the nice people are noble and deserving, the greedy relative is evil, and various experts mean well, including the kindly Dr. Evans (Henry Travers), who conducts experiments to verify the power of Gramps’ tree. Just as the phrase ‘cabin in the sky’ somewhat condescendingly describes a Heaven for American blacks, Mr. Brink tells Gramps that he needs to stop his interference and accept his proper fate, to go to “where the woodbine twineth.”

The dying in this movie affects us more than that in the average annihilating Film Noir. It’s Maudlin In Extremis — almost to the point of being unhealthy. Bobs Watson is an old fashioned ‘movie child’ who projects his emotions at all times; the little brat sobs so much that his nickname ought to have been ‘Waterworks.’

Reviewers point out that the film features three stars from  It’s a Wonderful Life, and that the ‘pause’ put on death is a bit like George Bailey’s cosmic time-out, projecting him into an alternate reality where he was never born. Here in On Borrowed Time, the terrible effects of Gramps’ actions aren’t depicted. It feels a little sick to be invited to imagine tens of thousands in agony and still conscious. The vision belongs in the horror tale  The Monkey’s Paw.

In both this tale and Death Takes a Holiday the Grim Reaper is a dapper gent one can reason with, which doesn’t at all align with the reality of the Human Condition. The fairy tale complications are dramatically balanced, but they kind of clog up one’s perceptions of how existence works. That’s for everyone to decide for themselves, we should hope.

Perhaps On Borrowed Time does have its finger on a bit of truth. The overall message is that Life is a painful process in which one must watch everything important being ripped away. Old people try to instil courage in children. Young people’s dreams are deferred. Una Merkel’s adorable Marcia is heart-wrenching as well. She loves her employer-friend Nellie; the morose attitude almost takes us to the negative mindset of characters in Val Lewton’s  The Seventh Victim, most of whom consider themselves unhappy, unfulfilled failures.

Bizzare deals with Fate didn’t begin with Fritz Lang’s silent classic  Destiny. We know Mr. Brink will find a way to free himself. We expect Gramps to make some kind of compromise with destiny, but screwing around with Death is even riskier than double-crossing Mother Nature. If It’s a Wonderful Life concluded like this movie, Harry Bailey’s airplane would have crashed into George’s house on Christmas Eve, wiping out half of Bedford Falls. On Borrowed Time sells its leap to oblivion as a glorious happy ending.

Louis B. Mayer liked tearjerkers and was committed to actor Lionel Barrymore. He let the actor take on the role even when he had to perform in a wheelchair. Gramps really is a miserable old crank. He thinks it’s not his business to worry about anybody besides his immediate family. He boasts about fighting at Bull Run and San Juan Hill, which makes him at least 85 years old. We wonder if Gramps’ pro-Republican, anti-Democrat dialogue was part of the original play, or something the writers added to keep Mayer happy.

Director Harold S. Bucquet already had experience directing Barrymore in a wheelchair, on a pair of Dr. Kildare movies. We’re big fans of Bucquet’s crazy wartime movie  The Adventures of Tartu, a forerunner of 1960s super-spy spectaculars.

One drawback — when we showed this in the UCLA dorm, the screening became an unintentional laugh riot, just because of the name given Bobs Watson’s character. And they were a pretty respectful audience. It shouldn’t deter one’s appreciation of what’s good about the movie.

MGM had a tendency to take mawkish, maudlin movie material too far. Getting fully into the ‘spirit’ of On Borrowed Time seems neither particularly constructive nor healthy. Taken in perspective, the film’s attitude has to be less harmful than today’s onslaught of movies that condone and glamorize aggression and killing. Maybe ‘having a good cry’ is a positive thing in itself. If so, boy have we found the right movie for you.

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of On Borrowed Time is the expected fine encoding of this less-remembered feature from Hollywood’s Golden Year, 1939. Fantasic Film Blancs usually found an audience, but not that many were blockbusters.

This particular show always looked pretty good on TV, and the old Films Incorporated 16mm prints were excellent. Here we get to admire Joseph Ruttenberg’s precise images, mostly studio interior-exteriors. A few wooded areas are said to have been filmed out in Agoura, which in 1939 was a long car ride from Culver City.

The old WAC DVD was one of the first released when the division came online in 2009.

The extras have something of a treat for us — two brief radio adaptations of On Borrowed Time with very special performers. Lionel Barrymore returns for one broadcast, but the actors playing Mr. Brink will entice fans: Vincent Price and Boris Karloff. Each interprets Death differently that their established ‘horror’ characterizations. Price’s congenial Mr. Brink also narrates. Karloff’s Brink is formal but very kindly. ‘Pud’ in both shows is played by an obvious adult. How did they record live radio shows with ‘kids’ without audience members laughing?

Also included is a vintage travelogue short with no apparent connection to the main feature. The same goes for an oddball B&W MGM cartoon for a franchise that didn’t take off, starring  Milt Gross’s ‘Count Screwloose and J.R. the Wonder Dog.’ We can see why it’s not shown much, as a main character is a demeaned black servant.

A trailer is included as well; it pushes the book and Broadway play as Big News for America.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

On Borrowed Time
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Radio adaptation Screen Guild Theater 30 min with Lionel Barrymore, Agnes Moorehead and Vincent Price.
Radio adaptation Great Scenes from Great Plays 26 min with Walter Hampden and Boris Karloff.
Fitzpatrick Traveltalks: A Day on Treasure Island
MGM Cartoon Wanted No Master with Count Screwloose and J.R. the Wonder Dog
Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: December 28, 2025
(7445time)

^*  Kids try to hide their emotional vulnerabilities, but dramatic experiences can bring them out hard and fast. In high school in the late 1960s, a friend’s date cried all the home in the car after seeing  Cool Hand Luke. It was like she’d never been exposed to a sad story about injustice. I was very moved. Then, when a Los Angeles TV station showed On Borrowed Time on a New Years’ Eve, my girlfriend an I watched it at home with my mom. It was if that thoughtful 17 year-old had never realized that everybody dies, that her beloved family members were not going to be there forever. In its creaky, old-fashioned way, the movie really hit a nerve. It’s a good thing to discover strong emotions in one’s self, but I’m not sure the experience was really that necessary.

Growing up as sheltered as we were had the advantage that we learned about some of the uglier, scarier parts of living when we were at least a tiny bit prepared for them.

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