For those who haven’t seen it (and for those of us who love it), TCM will be playing the hard-to-find (and not available in any commercial format) Man’s Castle this Sunday, 8/31 on Spencer Tracy day.
Starring Tracy, Loretta Young, and a wonderful Marjorie Rambeau, it is quite simply one of the most beautiful screen love stories ever made. It’s an unsparing immersion into Depression-era life, and its pre-Code origins (released in 1933) means it doesn’t have to compromise on its depiction of makeshift common-law relationships borne out of economic expediency (as well as the two leads’ own bitter loneliness). Director Frank Borzage may be the most criminally underappreciated of all American mainstream filmmakers (very few of his films are out on DVD), and he was never in better form in conveying his own unique brand of romantic (but never sentimental) poeticism–helped immeasurably by Joe August’s exquisite photography.
Some have called Tracy’s character a misogynist (and it certainly isn’t particularly progressive in its view of gender roles), but I find it’s more than just a product of its “less-than-enlightened” times, but also his personal defense mechanism to keep the world at arm’s length, since any vulnerability, in his mind, would be weakness when dealing with the hardscrabble realities of abject poverty. Still, while it’s been known to make some of my female friends bristle, I can’t recommend the film highly enough. In a year that brought us King Kong, Duck Soup, Footlight Parade and many other movie classics, this still gets my vote for the finest cinematic achievement of its year. Check it out.
Robert Osbourne said that Spencer Tracy considered it to be one of his best films. I’ll admit, I wasn’t thrilled. Yes, the cinematography was gorgeous. But I just couldn’t like Joe. Although as I’m composing this, I do see that some of the things I disliked (down to scamming a meal at a swanky place, with the whole Socialist “there’s plenty of food, so you should feed me for free”) were not really the way he acted when acting only for himself. He got the meal for Trina (and what was that - cottage cheese? ice cream?) but didn’t eat anything himself. He wouldn’t knock over the toy factory when first brought into the deal until he thought he needed to provide for Trina and the baby. But still - he mistreated Trina, IMHO, with his needs being met before anything else (the window open over the bed, even though she had a perpetual cold). Even kind acts, like the flower, were mean to someone else. It wasn’t that he couldn’t work, he chose not to except to meet that day’s needs.
It was definitely not a happy ending, everyone lives happily ever after. But this was the depression - most people had hard lives, and it did illustrate that.
[suicide note]I can’t believe I missed this. I don’t have cable right now, but surely I could’ve found someone to record it for me. It’s one of only 12 titles left on Rosenbaum’s top 100 that I haven’t ever even been able to track down a bootleg of. Maybe this is a sign of impending availability . . . ? [/suicide note]