by Allan Fish
(USA 1933 70m) not on DVD
$5 down, $2 a month thereafter
p Frank Borzage d Frank Borzage w Jo Swerling play Lawrence Hazard ph Joseph H.August ed Viola Lawrence m W.Franke Harling art Stephen Goosson
Spencer Tracy (Bill), Loretta Young (Trina), Glenda Farrell (Fay la Rue), Marjorie Rambeau (Flossie), Walter Connolly (Ira), Arthur Hohl (Bragg), Dickie Moore (Joey), Harvey Clark (restaurant manager),
When we first see Spencer Tracy in tux and tails at a bench one would be forgiven for thinking of him in one of his least finest hours, miscast in the title roles of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. This isn’t late 19th century, London, however, but Depression era New York, and the pigeons Tracy is feeding are in Central Park not in Trafalgar Square.
Tracy is Bill, a young man who meets an even younger girl, Trina, when he finds her hungry on a park bench. He takes her for a slap up feed at a posh restaurant, but despite appearances he’s just as poor as she is and the outfit is really an advertising gimmick for coffee. After conning a free feed, he takes her back to a Hooverville on the banks of the Hudson where she shares a shack with him and meets the crooked lecher, Bragg, the drunken Flossie, and the widower Ira, who’s recently got a job as a night-watchman. Trina loves Bill. Bill loves Trina, but doesn’t want to settle down, preferring to move on. He lingers, but won’t put it down to love, even helping her get a stove on an instalment plan for their shack, but when Trina gets pregnant, Bill realises it will need a little more than odds and ends to make ends meet.
It would be easy to be cynical towards Borzage’s overtly romantic style but the older it gets the more it seems to personify its era, the Depression, with its shanty towns, living for a job, starvation around the corner, and the sound of train whistles constantly in the ears of would-be travellers beckoning them aboard. It’s unreal but the world it depicts has more than a ring of truth. Throughout the film, there are references to how much worse the situation could be, such as when Tracy tells Young that “the unemployment question has nothing to do with women”, as veiled a reference to prostitution as even the pre-code era offered. She’d rather throw herself in the drink, and had never even considered it as a possibility, which is perhaps part of the reason Tracy gets so attached to her. Those he surrounds himself with are as cynical as he is and, though there are no streetwalkers in Borzage’s film, one can be sure of Tracy’s knowing a few in his time.
Some have commented that Tracy’s Bill gets a bit wearisome after a while, with his tough guy bravado, but he’s still a joy to watch, especially in the wonderful restaurant scene early in the film. There are solid character performances from Rambeau (one of her many drunken floozies), Hohl (typically shifty and, in a scene where there are hints he’s like to rape Young, bordering on evil and thoroughly deserving his eventual end) and Connolly (one of his typical fatherly roles that were so welcome through the thirties), but it’s the stars who shine most, and if anything this is Young’s film. Already a five year veteran after making her debut aged 14 opposite Lon Chaney in Laugh, Clown, Laugh, 1933 would be her real breakthrough year, with this, Zoo in Budapest and two Wellman films at Warners, Midnight Mary and Heroes for Sale, all released the same year. She’s a quintessential Borzage heroine, a throwback to the Janet Gaynor roles of the late silent era. Just watch her nervousness as Tracy invites her in for a skinny dip in the Hudson or the way she handles the scene when she tells Tracy of her pregnancy.
For all its glowing romantic sheen, Borzage’s film is quite a tough one at heart. The final vision of Tracy and Young cuddling up to each other on a freight car, she still in a 40 year old wedding dress, is a highpoint of thirties romance, and yet the future they go to is very uncertain. They likely go only to another shanty town in another city. Yet we don’t think about that till after the film is over. While it’s on, soak up Borzage, Young and Tracy at their best, not to mention some lovely photography from the great Joseph August, which merits a DVD release as yet unforthcoming.
I saw this film about a year ago — it’s quite a gem and a shame that other films of the 1930s have received more prominence.
Pierre: I couldn’t agree with you more. This film and frankly a number of others from the era because of perceived racy underpinnings and some sexual innuendo have been denied legitimate DVD releasesd for years. Another Tracy that I saw recently at the just-completed “Pre-Code Festival” ME AND MY GAL has also been neglected, though like MAN’S CASTLE can easily be secured as booties.
Thank you Sir!
Thanks Sam. I don’t think it’s just the racy underpinnings that kept this one under wraps. In 1933, Hollywood was offering up “golddiggers” movies for escape, and stuff like this was maybe too real — sorta like films about the Mideast wars haven’t generally done so well the last decade. I can’t place “Me and My Gal” at the moment. . . .
An under-rated director, Borzage deserves greater recognition. His redemptive film noir Moonrise (1949) is canonical. Geoff Andrews in his The Film Handbook, wrote: “few directors have focused on the regenerative strengths of love with such evident sincerity or with such an expressively appropriate visual style”.
I’m sold. Looks like I’m gonna have to seek this one out…
This movie took a couple of viewings to grow on me – at first I found it strange that there is all that glowing romance, as you say, Allan, juxtaposed with the misery. The Hooverville is almost turned into a heaven, and indeed Loretta Young has a line where she compares it to one. But I agree it is tough at heart – the speech that Tracy gives at the restaurant near the start, and which nobody wants to listen to, lingers in the mind. Apparently some scenes with Tracy and Glenda Farrell were cut, which explains why there are one or two strange jumps between scenes in the middle. Yet another pre-Code that definitely needs a DVD release.