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The Rediscovery of a Depression-Era Masterpiece
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.
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. 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. Perhaps no director but Kenji Mizoguchi —whose 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.
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