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PORTSIDE CULTURE

FRANK BORZAGE’S ‘MAN’S CASTLE’: THE REDISCOVERY OF A
DEPRESSION-ERA MASTERPIECE  
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Richard Brody
April 17, 2024
The New Yorker
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_ A new restoration of Frank Borzage’s 'Man’s Castle' starring
Loretta Young and Spencer Tracy, showcases the visionary Hollywood
director’s lusty yet spiritual artistry balancing a sharply etched
view of poverty in the shadow of wealth. _

'Man's Castle', Posterazzi

 

For decades, I’ve cherished the 1933 comedy-drama “Man’s
Castle” as a gem of classic Hollywood, and one that succeeds in
uniting rare romantic refinement and harsh, Depression-scarred candor.
It’s set mainly in a shantytown under a New York bridge, whose
inhabitants include Bill (Spencer Tracy), a hard-nosed wanderer with
boundless chutzpah, and Trina (Loretta Young), a starving yet
steadfast ingénue to whom he gives shelter. (Trina and Bill quickly
become a couple, and the movie’s central question is whether Bill,
whose wanderlust is stoked by the sound of a train whistle, will stay
put with Trina or hop a freight without her.) The movie balances a
sharply etched view of poverty in the shadow of wealth with an
attentiveness to the personalities and foibles of the shantytown
dwellers. The keen wit and wry antics of the film’s director, Frank
Borzage, match a deeply sympathetic tenderness for the characters’
strivings and vulnerabilities; “Man’s Castle” offers a vast
vision of exaltation and degradation, and of the wild daring, even
heroism, that is born of desperate circumstances.

However, the sixty-nine-minute film that I’ve been enjoying,
recorded from a TCM broadcast long ago, is a drastic abridgment of the
original, edited down and reissued by Columbia Pictures in 1938. The
studio wanted to rerelease the old picture to take advantage of
Tracy’s burgeoning stardom, and therefore sought to bring it into
line with the moral strictures of the Hays Code, a doctrine of
self-censorship that Hollywood had adopted to ward off the threat of
actual censorship. (The code was published in 1930, but the studios
didn’t enforce it strictly until 1934, the year after “Man’s
Castle” came out.) In all, about eight minutes of risqué plot
points and dialogue were cut, and my love of thmovie has ben
accompanied by tantalized curiosity about what was missing.

Now, thanks to the diligent detective work of Rita Belda, an executive
at Sony (the company that eventually bought Columbia), a
seventy-eight-minute restoration of “Man’s Castle” has been
painstakingly assembled, bringing the film close to the version that
was originally released. It will be screened at _moma_ from April
18th to 24th along with a mini-retrospective of other recently
restored works from the long career of Borzage, whose films are among
the most original and thematically complex ones of classic Hollywood.
(Belda will be on hand April 20th to discuss the restoration.) Even
truncated and bowdlerized, “Man’s Castle” is a classic, but the
restoration emphasizes all the more strongly the depth and power of
Borzage’s vision—and the wit and style with which he brings it to
light. The _moma_ series as a whole offers viewers a chance to
deepen their appreciation of a neglected filmmaker’s daring ideas.

Borzage’s very name is a sort of cinephile password—in the way
that the pronunciation of “Houston Street” is for New Yorkers. His
name is pronounced “bor-_zay_-ghy,” and the fact that it needs
mentioning suggests that his name is not mentioned often enough. Born
in Utah in 1894, to an Italian father and a Swiss mother, he started
out as an actor and began to direct in 1913 (yes, as a teen-ager). He
flourished in the silent era, and won the first ever Academy Award for
Best Director, in 1929, for “7th Heaven” (a silent movie, to which
synchronized music and sound effects, but no dialogue, were added).
Three years later, having made the leap to talking pictures, he won
again, for “Bad Girl.” Yet, though his career lasted nearly to his
death, in 1962, he never again figured in the Oscars race. And if I
needed to cite one movie that exemplifies his artistry and his world
view, “Man’s Castle” would be it.

For starters, there’s greatness in the playful but poignant touches
through which Borzage tells the story. The very first scene is a
meet-cute of misery: on a park bench, Bill, duded up in a tuxedo and a
top hat, is feeding popcorn to pigeons; sitting next to him, Trina
tries to find the courage to say that she hasn’t eaten in two days
and could really use some popcorn herself. Instead, Bill, posing as a
rich man, takes her to a fancy restaurant, only to reveal—after she
eats a lavish dinner—that he has no money to pay for it. (He’s
daring enough to get away with it, making a public scene with a
sharply political point—and, of course, the scene of righteous
indignation is, above all, Borzage’s.) Bill’s suit, it turns out,
has an illuminated advertisement embedded in its shirtfront. It’s a
kind of novelty sandwich board, with which Bill earns a bit of money
by parading up and down the streets advertising a brand of coffee.

The sequence is filled with false clues and strange incongruities, but
it’s only the first of many such twists that crop up throughout the
movie. Bill’s romantic dilemma is put on decisive display by his
miscues in a sandlot baseball game, and, later, a burglar gets
distracted playing with toys made by the company he’s stealing from.
In fact, such moments are a hallmark of Borzage’s work. His
direction is the art of indirection, something borne out by other
films in the _moma_ retrospective. The Oscar-winning “Bad Girl”
(1931)—the drama of a young couple whose married life is strained by
poverty, secrecy, and mismatched dreams—opens with a wedding scene
that turns out to be merely a fashion show. “History Is Made at
Night” (1937), a rapturous romantic comedy of unlikely encounters
and unlikelier reunions, involves an elaborately nested set of ruses:
a man rescues a woman from sexual assault by rushing into a hotel room
pretending to be a thief; afterward, returning the “stolen” items
to her, he makes like a rich man, taking her to dinner at a fancy
restaurant where he eventually turns out to be no patron but, rather,
the headwaiter. Such indirections—involving gender, family, sex, and
love—are more than mere whimsy. They embody Borzage’s vision of a
far more cosmic paradox: his films are mainly romances, but they’re
caustic and melancholy, suffused with pain and speeding toward doom.

For Borzage, the greatest indirection is love. In his world view,
doomed romanticism isn’t an oxymoron but a tautology: to experience
love deep within one’s bones comes at the cost of one’s earthly
comforts and worldly aspirations, even one’s life. Love in his films
is frankly sexual: one of the first things that happens at the
shantytown in “Man’s Castle” is that Bill and Trina go
skinny-dipping together in the river, and one of the censored moments
that has been restored shows their naked bodies in close contact.
Strikingly, Borzage’s fervent lustiness is matched by a passionate
Christianity. One character in “Man’s Castle” is a former
minister now working as a night watchman, and one of the restored
scenes shows Bill reading aloud to Trina from this man’s Bible. (The
reading features steamy passages from the Song of Songs—presumably
the reason that the scene got cut.)

Even when religion is less explicitly invoked, Borzage’s films are
marked by a sense of spiritual devotion, in which romantic desire
isn’t a contradiction of the spiritual but an incarnation of
it—not least because, for Borzage, lust and consummation are
inseparable from sacrifice and torment. Borzage presents sex with a
candor rare in Hollywood at the time—an out-of-wedlock pregnancy in
“Man’s Castle,” impulsive premarital sex in “Bad Girl”—but
he films it with a glow of sacralizing purity. He’s the master of
instantly kindled lust, as in a majestic, moonstruck scene of love at
first sight in the melodrama “Living on Velvet” (1935), but
agonies are built into these carnal extremes, which is what grants
them a kind of innocence. Borzage is an artist of sublime agony. He
excels in closeups of characters in a state of spiritual exaltation,
which he tends to emphasize with expressive, unnatural lighting, the
actors’ bodies sunk in shadow but their faces brightly lit as if the
illumination were coming from within. The expressions on their faces
present a pleasure that closely resembles pain.

Such happy endings as Borzage grants his lovers are often bitterly
ironic ones—tacked-on sequences that implausibly bring characters
back from certain death. The end of “Living on Velvet” is so
unreal as to seem posthumous; “History Is Made at Night” is a
transatlantic romance that essentially gives the wreck of the Titanic
a happy ending. “Moonrise” (1948), a violence-riddled romantic
noir also playing at _moma_, adds to an implausibly miraculous
survival a legalistic ending that, in the manner of “Crime and
Punishment
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will separate its young lovers for years. Even when Borzage’s
endings aren’t a matter of life and death, they’re a matter of
renunciation. “Man’s Castle” ends with a transcendent, cosmic
image—a sublime illusion achieved with a camera rising high—but
meanwhile Bill and Trina are giving up their big dreams and preparing
for a film-noir-ful of new troubles. “Bad Girl” ends with a
crushing of big plans and a seeming life sentence of poverty; the
ostensibly happy endings of a pair of Borzage’s great silent films,
“The Circle” and “Lazybones” (both 1925), are built upon
mountains of misery.

The unity of Borzage’s vision is all the more remarkable for having
been realized within the confines of the studio system—and for his
having no overt hand in his films’ scripts. (He received only four
writing credits, all for films made in 1916.) Still, in many of his
great films, including “Man’s Castle,” “Bad Girl,” and
“Lazybones,” Borzage made sure that he got the last word—as
producer, the person to whom the screenwriters reported. Seeing a
bunch of Borzage films in a short period of time brings to the fore
some themes that, noticeable and disturbing as they are in any one
movie, emerge as the center of the director’s troubled and troubling
world view. At the heart of this vision is women’s lot in life and
its biological essence, pregnancy, and the way that men often treat
children as unwanted constraints and burdens.

Both “Man’s Castle” and “Bad Girl” pivot on pregnancy. In
“Man’s Castle,” Trina becomes pregnant, bringing such trouble to
her relationship with Bill that she tells him that the unborn baby is
hers alone and needn’t involve him at all. (Another newly restored
scene features a woman with whom Bill is having an affair hinting that
Trina can get an abortion: “That jam you’re in can be fixed,”
she says. “There’s hardly anything money won’t fix.”) In the
earlier film, a couple’s lives are thrown out of whack less by the
woman’s pregnancy than by her fear of disclosing it to her husband,
a poor but ambitious man who wants no children. In “Lazybones,” a
secret maintained for years about the parentage of an adopted child
destroys the lives of two neighboring rural families—making both a
cruel mockery and a sacred sacrifice of the movie’s modestly happy
ending.

Another dominant aspect of Borzage’s work is the depiction of male
harassment of and violence against women as a direly epidemic fact of
life. The semi-comedic tone of the films, this theme notwithstanding,
suggests all the more just how commonplace such horrors are, and the
sort of ordinary heroism it costs women to bear them with equanimity.
In “Man’s Castle,” Bill, with his sharp talk, unleashes a long
but unbroken skein of threats on Trina—such as to sock her on the
chin, to knock out her teeth—that are meant to come off as
affectionate: as they lovingly embrace, he pokes her sharply in the
side and asks what she’d do if he punched her hard. (To a neighbor,
Trina laughingly shows off bruises received at Bill’s hands, saying
that he “doesn’t know his own strength.”) In “Bad Girl,”
also set in New York, the sexual harassment endured by women at work
and in the streets is so relentless that when the titular protagonist
meets one man who _doesn’t_ harass her, she’s suspicious of his
motives (and then yearns to marry him). In “History Is Made at
Night,” violence is part of a jilted husband’s scheme to deny his
wife a divorce; in “The Circle,” a jilted husband saves his
marriage by kidnapping his wife.

Perhaps no director but Kenji Mizoguchi
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career, running from 1923 to 1956, was roughly contemporaneous with
Borzage’s—filmed so insistently the social burdens, pressures, and
constraints endured by women, whether single or married or widowed,
employed or not, rural or urban, poor or middle-class or rich. It’s
here that Borzage manages to fuse his social vision with his religious
one. 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 minister turned
watchman in “Man’s Castle” has to carry a gun to eke out his
meagre living. Bill, in the attempt to earn his pittance, alternately
takes a physical beating (during one howlingly outrageous day as a
process server) and administers one. The protagonist’s husband in
“Bad Girl” must face the brutality of a boxing ring in order to
make ends meet.

Men’s original sin also involves the violence of war, as in the
Oscar-winning “7th Heaven,” a drama involving the First World War,
and in “No Greater Glory” (1934), another film in
the _moma_ series. This is a sort of post-First World War “Lord of
the Flies” in which boys in a Budapest neighborhood mimic the
militarism of their elders in the plan to go to “war” to defend a
vacant lot that’s the area’s one playground. “Moonrise” shows
how a culture of violence passed down from father to son in a small
Virginia town produces bullying abuses of power at a civic level. (The
violence endured by Black people in such a town, where the Confederacy
is still remembered fondly, finds expression in subplots involving a
Black man named Mose Jackson, played by Rex Ingram, who lives as a
hermit in a shack on an abandoned estate on the outskirts of town.)

The protagonist of “Moonrise” is terrified of perpetuating his
father’s violent legacy, and his fear seems almost a metaphor for
biology itself—not just men’s fates but man’s fate, which is to
say human nature. As the town’s sheriff says, reflecting on the
killing around which the movie revolves, “If you went into all the
reasons why that rock struck Jerry’s head, you might end up writing
the history of the world.” It isn’t merely maleness that gives
rise to the violence that scourges the world of Borzage’s films but
the very essence of society—ambition, lust, love, the profit motive,
the quest for status, indeed the very struggle to survive. (Women in
his movies, when forced into the public arena, also end up fighting
for their lives.) Borzage has no answer—except to withdraw. In
“Lazybones,” the protagonist, a young man who’s locally infamous
for his idleness, is the filmmaker’s very vision of a male
hero—essentially, a monk under his mother’s roof and under God’s
blue sky, lounging in the crook of a tree, falling asleep at riverside
with a fishing rod in his lap. Society itself is tainted, and
Borzage’s movies are as relentless as those of Martin Scorsese in
depicting the fascinating, horrifying tangle of a fallen world, and
the temptations of comfort, honor, and pleasure that are part of that
unending lifelong fall. ♦

THE FILM SCREENS IN NEW YORK CITY AT MOMA FROM APRIL 18 - 24TH.

 

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