Man's Castle
A Columbia Picture 1933 / Dir. Frank Borzage
Blu-ray: Sony / Columbia $26.99
Occasionally, when I watch a film for reviewing purposes, I have no idea where I’m going to have to go with it. This is one of those times. Borzage is a masterful director, two-time Oscar winner (including the first Best Director Academy Award, for the brilliant 7th Heaven), and he gave us such personal favorites as The Mortal Storm and the unforgettable History is Made at Night. Man’s Castle is well directed, well acted, beautifully shot, and is impressive in many ways, but simply can’t overcome the clunky relationship between its two stars and what the script puts them through. The result is flawed but fascinating.
The depths of the Depression, and Loretta Young is starving to death in Central Park because the only job she’s fit for she’s too moral to undertake (despite the entreaties of most of the people in the picture, who find it an honest profession). She meets handsome and apparently wealthy Spencer Tracy, who takes her out to an impressive dinner at a swanky restaurant, but it turns out his tux and spats are merely for show, he’s a sandwich board operator hawking coffee for a few bits a day. Long story short, they set up a warm, cozy love nest in a rat-and-roach-infested hovel in a Hooverville off the East River, but by not showing us the vermin, Borzage and Columbia think we can go for this as some sort of a love story, despite the salient fact that Tracy is a lout who can’t stop verbally abusing the wide-eyed fawning Miss Young. Based on a play by Lawrence Hazard and adapted for the screen by the talented Jo Swerling, it’s a pity nobody thought to end this by having Loretta shoot Spencer off the top of a building. Just deserts play well in the nabes, and by reports this film was every bit the box-office bomb I would’ve expected it to be. Depression-era filmgoers, one imagines, liked to see dancing, comedy, highbrow hijinks, and a bit of ha-cha-cha, not a romance between the only two people in America worse off than the audience.
Wish I’d Said That
Miss Young, pleading not for the first time for Mr. Tracy to pull his head out of his bum and appreciate her: “Even birds can’t fly ALL the time. They get tired and have to come home.”
The drunken neighbor, with advice Miss Young should’ve taken: “This ain’t murder. This is just housekeepin’.”
As if all this isn’t enough, Tracy is carrying on simultaneously with sultry singer Glenda Farrell (channeling her inner Mae West) and making time with both of them while he waits for the right moment to hop a freight out of town and dump 'em both. Before that moment comes, though, he’s going to have some tough choices to make.
The backstory on this picture is a corker, and I wish somebody’d asked somebody to do commentary for it. The film was a flopperoo and would’ve been forgotten and lost except Mr. Tracy within a few years was a double Oscar winner himself and one of the biggest stars in the movies. Columbia dusted this off, rearranged a couple of scenes, judiciously cut others (including a nude swim in the Hudson) or simply expunged dialog, losing about a reel but gaining a film that the Hays Office would allow to be released. Thankfully, after decades in ill repair, the film has been restored and returned to the glory Borzage and Columbia thought it had back in 1933.
The supporting cast lends a lot to the film, particularly Marjorie Rambeau as the alcoholic next-door neighbor and Walter Connoly as the minister and conscience of the Hooverville tenants. You can't miss future Our Gang star Dickie Moore as a young baseball fan, either.
On the new Sony Blu-ray, the film itself looks terrific and I have no complaints about the Hi-Def presentation, except in Sony MOD tradition, there is no menu, the Columbia torch lady just pops right in and starts the show. Chapter stops occur at regular 10 min. intervals.
All in all, it's a film of great historical interest and the stars do their best with difficult material, although I’d call it how not to envision a romance when times get tough.
“When you’re dead, you get a hunk of earth. When you’re alive, you wanna hang onto your hunk of blue. That’s all I’ve got in the world. That’s all anybody’s got, is a hunk o’ blue.”
