Man’s Castle

A New York housing estate for the homeless at the time of the Great Depression as the improbable setting for a love story staged by Frank Borzage like a dream: Trina (Loretta Young) and Bill (Spencer Tracy) meet on a park bench while Bill is feeding the pigeons and Trina, who is sitting next to him, nearly collapses from hunger. Bill takes her with him to the village of improvised huts that has become an almost utopian community for the city’s poor and outcasts. While the pragmatic Trina makes a cosy home from a tiny hut with a stove, curtains and a nicely laid table, the superficially uncouth Bill can only engage with this new happiness against his will and feels a constant desire to flee. “A limitless, deliberately non-bourgeois love that is at once the object and subject of Borzage’s entire filmography and transcends time, space and even death depending on the individual story.” (Hervé Dumont)