A Soft Focus Fairy Tale: An Essay on MAN'S CASTLE
I wrote this for a project I did over at Rotten Tomatoes, and I figured I'd post it here, since this movie deserves all the attention it can get.
Contains very tiny spoilers....
Frank Borzage was the master of romance. His films were so much more rewarding than most romances because his characters truly earned their happiness. His very best films were made during the very worst of times, the Great Depression. Mannequin, Bad Girl, and his masterpiece Man's Castle all stand out as three of the best films made in the 1930s.
In Man's Castle, Borzage manages to make even such a harsh and awful time seem like a fairytale, and the precedent for that style is set in the very first scene. It's Central Park at night, filmed in extremely soft focus, giving the scene a romantic and gentle feel, while what's going on in the scene is anything but. Bill (Spencer Tracy) is sitting on a bench, throwing popcorn to the birds, watching almost apathetically while Trina (Loretta Young) cries to herself because she's so hungry. The rest of the film works in this same way, turning the most tragic and hopeless of situations into a dreamy fairytale. Borzage creates a the fairy tale not by ignoring the problems of the world around them, but by making them live through these things to earn their happiness. The soft and dreamy feeling makes the film warm throughout, enforcing Borzage's message that home is about who you're with, not where you are.
Borzage stresses the connection between Bill and Trina and their isolation from the "rest of the world" early in the film. After they meet in the park, Bill takes Trina to a fancy restaurant, where they're eventually kicked out because they can't pay the bill. They follow that by walking the streets of New York. With not enough money to shoot on location, or even afford ectras for the backlot, Borzage used rear projection for this scene, and it only helps to make Trina and Bill stand out from the masses, and emphasize their separation from a happier world.
Not until they get to Bill's Hooverville home do they mix in with the surroundings. These are the people they belong with. But despite the natually shabby appearance, the squatters village is filmed like a majestic castle. Bill and Trina make their home here, but it's what that home symblolizes to each of them that drives the story onward. To Bill, home is nothing more than something that ties him to one place, and he constantly tells Trina throughout the film that he's likely to leave her at any time. To Trina, the home is the one place where she's finally found stability and something permanent. She refers to it in the film as her safety zone. She tells Bill that he's free to leave anytime he wants, and even though that though truly does terrify her, she knows that even if Bill leaves, she'll still have their home.
At first glance, Bill and Trina's relationship doesn't seem particularly loving or stable. Bill's fear of being tied down leads him to ridicule Trina, and Trina's need for committment and affection leads her to take that ridicule without fighting back. As Bill's love for Trina grows, so does his restlessness, because he thinks that loving Trina means benig trapped. Bill constantly struggles between keeping himself free and making the woman he loves happy. This shows in his struggle over the stove that Trina wants. At first, he refuses to buy her the stove on the installment plan, knowing that he'd have to stay around for a year just to pay the stove off. Eventually though, he relents. His presentation of the stove to Trina is the most beautiful scene in the film. After a few minutes of gentle bullying and banter, he bring the stove into the house, surprising her. Trina, so overjoyed by the gesture, drops to her knees in front of the stove and dissolves into tears. It's an awkward moment for Bill, not because of his lack of affection for Trina, but because he has so much for her that seeing her so happy makes him uncomfortable.
The struggle between Bill's desires - to be free and never tied down, and to be loved and to love someone - continues to drive the plot of the film until the extremely satisfying ending, where Bill discovers that he doesn't have to have one thing or the other.
I want to be alone... ~Garbo~