Man's Castle (Columbia, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After You Can’t Take It With You, with all the late-night talk shows still in reruns after the holidays, I kept on Turner Classic Movies for a film that’s long been a quirky favorite of mine: Man’s Castle, made at Columbia in 1933 and directed by Frank Borzage. At the time Borzage was a prestige director known for romantic melodramas; he’d become a star director with the 1927 mega-hit Seventh Heaven, made at Fox and starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell (it won Gaynor the first-ever Academy Award for Best Actress). He was one of the first directors to free-lance instead of being tied to one studio, and among his other films during this period was A Farewell to Arms (1932), the first film based on a story by Ernest Hemingway, in which Borzage and writers Benjamin Glazer and Oliver H. P. Garrett managed the interesting feat of turning a Hemingway novel into a “women’s picture.” A Farewell to Arms was made for Paramount and starred Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. Always on the lookout for major directors he could induce into working at Columbia – he’d scored Howard Hawks to make the marvelous prison picture The Criminal Code in 1931 with Walter Huston, Constance Cummings, Boris Karloff and Phillips Holmes – Columbia Pictures production chief Harry Cohn snagged Borzage to make Man’s Castle, a surprisingly downbeat romance among Depression-era people. Written by Jo Swerling based on a play by Lawrence Hazard, Man’s Castle tells the story of Bill (Spencer Tracy) and Trina (Loretta Young), who meet-cute one night when they go skinny-dipping in New York’s Central Park Lake. Bill is wearing a tuxedo, a top hat and a cummerbund, and naturally both Trina and we assume he’s rich – especially when he takes her to a swanky restaurant and orders her a fancy meal, since she hasn’t eaten in two days. Then he announces to the proprietor that he doesn’t have any money to pay the bill, either, and he causes such a ruckus that the owner throws him out rather than let him stay there and keep ranting how unjust it is that there are 12 million unemployed people in the U.S. He also dares the owner to have him arrested, pointing out that if he’s sent to jail he’ll serve a 30-day sentence and the government will feed him at taxpayers’ (including the restaurateur’s) expense.

When Bill finds out that Trina is homeless, he offers her a chance to move in with him at a squatter’s camp on the edge of the lake, where his neighbors include retired minister Ira (Walter Connolly, who usually played irascible editors chewing out star reporters played by people like Clark Gable or Fredric March) and his roommate Flossie (a marvelous character performance by Marjorie Rambeau). They become lovers, only there’s a villain in the piece, Bragg (Arthur Hohl), who’s after Trina himself. At one point Bragg tells Bill that there’s a burlesque star named Fay La Rue (Glenda Farrell) and he’s been hired to serve a summons on her, only she’s surrounded by three bodyguards who won’t let anyone get close enough to her to serve her. Offering to take on the job for $5 – half the fee Bragg was promised – Bill gets in the theatre where Fay is performing a song called “Surprise,” and he makes his way through the house and crashes the stage, serving her with the word “Surprise.” Fay is taken with Bill enough that she invites him to her place, obviously to make him her sexual boy-toy (she complains that she’s tired of the man she had to sleep with to get her burlesque job in the first place), and asks him to accompany her to London for her next job. But he begs off out of loyalty to Trina. Trina is proud of her new stove – which Bill bought her on the installment plan, using he $5 he got from serving Fay as the down payment – but Bill is a “bindlestiff,” a wanderer who doesn’t like to stay in one place very long. He misses the freedom of the open road, and every time he hears a train go by he wants to leave Trina and the camp and head out on it. Then Trina tells him she’s pregnant, and Ira marries them. But Bill still wants to leave, and in desperation and because he wants to make sure Trina and their child (whom Bill is convinced will be a boy even though in 1933 there was no way to tell in advance) are well provided for when he hits the open road, he reluctantly agrees to join Bragg in a robbery of the toy company where Bragg used to work until he got laid off. Complicating things is that Ira is the night watchman at the toy factory, though he’s given to sleeping on the job. The night of the robbery Bill becomes obsessed with a toy soldier that plays “Yankee Doodle,” and he keeps playing with this item until he wakes up Ira, who breaks up the robbery. Bragg then decides to turn on the burglar alarm himself, confident that he can escape in time and the cops will arrest Bill, which will eliminate the competition for Trina. Only when Bragg gets back to the squatters’ camp, Flossie (ya remember Flossie?) shoots him with Ira’s gun – which Bill took away from him during the robbery but Flossie induced him to give it back – and ultimately Bill decides to leave town but to take Flossie with him.

Man’s Castle is a quite chilling film – not surprisingly, it was a box-office flop (audiences living through the Depression weren’t interested in seeing a movie that reflected their own conditions; instead they wanted escapist fantasies or crime and horror films) – that holds up stunningly, though for years the only prints available were from a 1938 reissue. Columbia re-released the film to take advantage of Spencer Tracy’s new-found popularity after he moved from Fox to MGM in 1935, but they had to cut the shit out of it to meet the new, tougher enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code that had started in 1934 with the formation of the Legion of Decency, a pressure group from the Roman Catholic Church that determined to force off the screen any content they didn’t consider morally acceptable. Accordingly Columbia had to cut Man’s Castle down from its original 75 minutes to 66, and according to the Wikipedia page on the film, “This resulted in a number of blatantly obvious jump cuts where racy dialogue has been removed, as well as the deletion of a shot of a nude Young (or more likely a stunt double) diving into the river.” (Ironically, Loretta Young was a hard-core Catholic in real life, and this adds a special piquance to the lines in which she rejects Bill’s and others’ oblique suggestions that she become a prostitute to earn a living.) Fortunately, Turner Classic Movies showed a print of the full 75-minute version, with the deleted scenes restored and the delightfully cheesy original Columbia logo, an animated scene of the Statue of Liberty with the words “A Columbia Production” in an arc across the top of it. (The 1938 reissue featured the then-current Columbia logo with a more credible representation of the Statue of Liberty and the word “COLUMBIA” in intimidating all-caps emblazoned in a straight line above it.) Man’s Castle holds up quite well as a romantic melodrama about people in poverty eking out a living as best they can, though critics of the time compared it invidiously to Seventh Heaven; New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall wrote, “[T]he story is by no means as plausible or as poetic as that memorable old work.” But the quiet dignity of Spencer Tracy’s and Loretta Young’s performances, as well as the marvelous supporting work of Marjorie Rambeau, Glenda Farrell and child actor Dickie Moore (a baseball-obsessed kid on whom Bill palms off a baseball supposedly autographed by Babe Ruth) and the typically atmospheric photography of Joseph August, who’s expert at creating the haunting images of doomed romanticism Borzage was known for, make this a worthwhile movie that holds up surprisingly well.