Man’s Castle (1933) - film review

During the Great Depression, a homeless young woman named Trina meets a dapper man in a New York park one evening.  The man, Bill, takes pity on Trina and invites her to dine with him at an expensive restaurant.  After a sumptuous meal, Bill declares that he is in the same predicament as Trina and reveals that he only just gets by on the little he earns.  Bill takes Trina to a Hooverville shanty town, one of many that blight the city, offering a last refuge to the poor and homeless.   Bill only intends to stick around until Trina is settled but he soon realises that she is deeply in love with him.  When he learns that Trina is pregnant with his child, Bill makes up his mind to run away...

Of the films that Frank Borzage made during the sound era, few match the intense lyricism and biting emotional power of Man’s Castle.  It is a classic Borzage tale of love triumphing over adversity and human frailty, and the director handles the subject with a delicacy and warmth that is surpassed only by his great silent masterpieces.  The setting may be the Great Depression, one of the bleakest times in American history, but Borzage crafts a modern fairy tale which, whilst not overlooking the extreme hardship of the time, is exquisitely romantic, without a whiff of bogus sentimentality.   Although it was made on a ludicrously small budget (so small that Borzage was unable to shoot some scenes on location and had to make do with some shoddy back-projection), the film offers both an authentic recreation of Depression era America and a visually captivating portrait of two people falling in love, one which comes close to matching the searing poetry of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927).

The casting of Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young as the romantic leads is inspired and both actors give exceptional performances, each convincingly portraying a character who struggles to conceal his or her true feelings beneath a mask of stoical imperturbability.  Although Tracy and Young were both married (to other people) at the time, they could not help falling in love during the make of this film, and their mutual feelings show in virtually every shot where they appear together.  Tracy has rarely looked this vulnerable on screen and his character’s attempts to reconcile his need for freedom with his need for love have such poignancy that you wonder if he is exposing something of his own personal angst.  Man’s Castle is testament both to Borzage’s undying belief in the redeeming power of love and to his well-earned reputation as a filmmaking poet of rare ability.

© James Travers 2010

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