Prime Romances Part One: Man's Castle (1933)
Frank Borzage's pre-Code masterpiece is one of the great films of the 1930s.
Loretta Young as Trina and Spencer Tracy as Bill in Man’s Castle
It’s time for essential prime projections, the Borzage edition. Man’s Castle (1933) and History is Made at Night (1937), coming soon in part two, are not only the best films from Frank Borzage, but are among the best films the classical era of Hollywood ever produced.
As I wrote in my last post, Borzage was known for espousing the power of romantic love to overcome suffering. In the case of the wonderful and lyrical Man’s Caste (1933), the suffering was caused by that major event viewers of the time were more than familiar with: the Great Depression. Working on loan from their respective studios, Spencer Tracy (Fox) and Loretta Young (Warner Bros.) joined Borzage at Columbia Pictures and made a masterpiece of the pre-Code era. Tracy is Bill, a homeless man who feigns wealth on a whim in order to take Trina (Young), a starving woman he met on a park bench, to dinner. When he surprises Trina and tells the manager at the restaurant he can’t pay for the meal, he raucously drops some statistics about hungry Americans and how one free meal won’t hurt this particular establishment. The manager has no choice but to let them go. Bill invites Trina to live with him in a shantytown (similar to the one seen in the 1936 Depression screwball My Man Godfrey) under a bridge and near a train station. He gets odd jobs every now and then (one in which he’s a walking advertisement for a coffee company, a tagline lit up and shining through his white shirt) and is able to provide some money and food for Trina (an awfully bad instance of rear projection inadvertently works to enhance the couple’s growing intimacy). He wants to blow from New York eventually; the horns of the trains haunt him and his waywardness.
Since this film inhabits pre-Code territory, we get a couple living together and sleeping in the same bed before marriage. Young’s character, as I’ll get to soon, also gets pregnant out of wedlock. With that comes a Spencer Tracy character that is cranky and a bit chauvinistic, which was common for his roles at this time and one that gets just as exasperating here. Tracy’s Bill, though he really does love Trina, has methods of expressing his affection for her that are, well, not exactly gratifying. He taunts her about her thin figure, fondly threatens to knock her teeth out, and hugs her a little too rough. Violence, verbally or physically, was also common in a Borzage picture, especially at the expense of women. However, harassment was used by Borzage to show how quotidian such instances were (and are), especially, again, for women. As Richard Brody writes in The New Yorker, “the freedom of women is narrowed not only by men (and the social and political order established by men) but also by their own propensity for love - even the love of men who bear doom in their very being. For Borzage, the original sin of mankind - of male-kind, rather - is violence, and violence is inseparable from the ordinary run of daily activity at all levels of society.” The only thing that can conquer that violence is, of course, love.
This may not be the best sell so far for Man’s Castle. But if you're willing to put up with Bill’s grousing and lustful wandering (at the same time made so watchable by Tracy) for most of the picture, you’ll see how it pays off in the best possible way. A way so refreshing and so unconventional for a classical Hollywood film, it’s ecstatic to see. But until then, we deal with the undulating relationship between Bill and Trina. Bill ventures from their little shed everyday to seemingly spontaneous gigs - walking on carnival stilts, forging Babe Ruth’s autograph on a baseball to give to a youngster (Dickie Moore), failing as the only adult in a backyard baseball game with some neighborhood kids (“You big butterfingered palooka”), or having a fling with a nightclub dame named Fay La Rue (the charming Glenda Farrell), who also may be his way out of town and poverty. Trina, meanwhile, stays home to cook or clean. She loves Bill, takes care of him, and basically lets him do whatever he wants in return for her staying in the shanty house.
Tracy and Glenda Farrell as Fay La Rue in Man’s Castle
Their neighbors include Flossie (Marjorie Rambeau), an alcoholic, and Ira (Walter Connolly), a former preacher. Ira’s always pushing the Bible on an unwavering Bill. Religion isn’t exactly peddled and forced on audiences in post-Code enforcement films, but it sure wasn’t this bluntly resisted here before the Catholic legions and Production Code head Joseph Breen were more than happy to see Hollywood films promote God and country. In pre-Code time, Bill can say things like “I don't believe in that stuff” and also read, with tongue in cheek, passages from “Song of Solomon” to Trina. That scene wouldn’t stand a chance a year later and in fact, was cut by the censors when Columbia reissued the film not long after. A scene with Bill and Trina skinny dipping featuring a brief shot of a nude Spencer Tracy (though it might’ve been a stunt double) was also cut. We’re lucky today that the film’s been restored to its true pre-Code self.
As anyone who reads this Substack knows, I could go on about the virtues of pre-Code and I will forever and always say screw the production code! And I would argue that much of Man’s Castle’s emotional complexity is thanks to its pre-Code place. However, the film has aged well and is great beyond its surprisingly casual and explicit pre-Codeness. As in any Borzage picture, there are so many beautiful moments that work whatever the context.
Loretta Young and Spencer Tracy fell in love in real life on the set of Man’s Castle
One of these moments involves an especially gloomy Bill laying down on his cot, looking through a window on the roof that can open and close from a pulley. He watches birds flying in the blue sky or clouds floating by. Trina asks him why he’s always “looking through that hole for.” “When you’re dead, you get a hunk of earth,” he replies. “When you’re alive you want to hang onto your hunk of blue. That’s all I got in the world, that’s all anybody’s got, is that hunk of blue.” Soon Trina lays down with him (Borzage’s signature shallow focus is striking here, the lovers isolated together) and after some further loving insults by Bill at her expense and implying that he might leave her at any moment, she decides to break the news to him about her pregnancy. She says all the things Bill doesn’t want to hear. The train horn blows and roars by. Bill gets up and leaves. He leaves a crying Trina in the cot while he jumps aboard the train. A beautiful moment of editing ensues, Bill holding onto the edge of the train looking back, Trina’s tear-strewn face looking through the roof, seeing birds flutter by. The intercutting between the two almost feels as if they are looking at each other. It made me wonder if George Lucas has seen Man’s Castle because it reminded me of the heart-wrenching scene in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, when Anakin and Padme are ostensibly gazing at each other through windows on different skyscrapers that may or may not be adjacent. In Man’s Castle, however, it’s not the force of a jedi connecting Bill and Trina. They love each other and Bill ultimately jumping off the train, deciding to stay, is the end of his resistance to Trina’s love.
It’s Borzage’s depiction of love, always in its purest, concrete form. It’s almost a religion in a Borzage picture. Perhaps that’s why the film has so many mentions and undertones of religion - “She ain’t so far away from God herself. Are you, kid?” Bill asks Trina at one point. “I am too,” she says. “I ain’t no closer than you are. How could I be, when I’m with you?” For Trina, her love for Bill is what forms both her faith and fate. For Bill, love is the only thing that will save him and the love he has belongs to Trina.
However, being the idealist he is, Bill does one last desperate act of self-destruction. He attempts a robbery with one of the ne'er-do-wells of the shantytown, wanting to finally get away and leave money for Trina and the baby. He’s careless in his approach, joking and playing around while his partner tries to crack a safe. He doesn’t care to get caught or maybe even be shot. So vividly human, to consistently fight against what we know is good for us. When they do almost get caught and Bill does take a bullet in the arm, he goes back to Trina who patches up his wound. The penultimate scene of the film finally brings things together and Bill releases all of his grievances, misgivings, and regrets to Trina. And Trina, for her part, finally gives Bill his due, telling him to grow up and scolding him for his cowardness, bravado, and foolish fantasies. Bill breaks down into Trina’s arms. He holds her close. Now this scene brought me to a similar scene in the 1971 western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, where Warren Beatty’s character drops his machismo act and lays his head on Julie Christie’s lap. A touching and beautiful case of a man putting on an act finally letting it all out, sobbing in a woman’s arms and holding her, doing the complete opposite of all that his era demands of him.
With Bill now on the lam, he and Trina hop on a train together, their plans and new location unknown. One thing is for certain, though. While laying together on a bed of hay in the train car, the horn goes off. They both look up and Trina says, “Bill.” Bill looks at her and says, “You don’t have to worry about that anymore, darling.” He will never leave Trina. He nestles his head into her neck and closes his eyes; Trina strokes his head, looking up, perhaps seeking a hole in the roof. The camera overhead booms back, a heavenly light falls on Trina and her shiny dress, Bill’s angel and savior. It’s one of the most beautiful final shots ever put to celluloid. They don’t know what’s next, but they know their fate forever together is sealed, their faith in love abounding and trust fully established, content with eros and its complete unconditional essence. In other words, a Borzage picture.