A celebrant of redemptive love, Frank Borzage (1893-1962) was essentially the most romantic of traditional Hollywood administrators and, nevertheless unconventionally, maybe essentially the most non secular as effectively. “Man’s Fort” (1933) conflates an financial disaster — particularly the Nice Despair — with a non secular one. The film additionally represents premarital being pregnant as salvation somewhat than sin, and scenes had been consequently minimize for its post-Manufacturing Code rerelease within the late Nineteen Thirties.
Restored to its unique size of 78 minutes, screening on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork (April 18-24), “Man’s Fort” feels distinctive — without delay surprisingly frank and disquietingly coy.
A number one director of silent movies, Borzage (Bor-ZAY-ghee) left the Fox studio and went impartial in 1932. His first manufacturing was an adaptation of Hemingway’s World Struggle I novel “A Farewell to Arms.” “Man’s Fort” additionally considerations love in extremis with the ravenous harmless Trina (20-year-old Loretta Younger) falling for and shacking up with an older if equally indigent man of the world, Invoice (Spencer Tracy).
Their meet-cute on a park bench, with Invoice feeding the pigeons as ravenous Trina appears to be like longingly on, proceeds to a pleasant restaurant (the place Invoice will get out of paying the test) and winds up again at his jerry-built hovel in a homeless encampment close to the East River. A pure man, Invoice amazes Trina (and probably the viewer) by diving bare into the water. She extra discreetly follows. Lower from Edenic skinny-dipping to radiant Trina on the washboard fortunately scrubbing Invoice’s garments.
A brash roughneck with a golden coronary heart, Invoice conjures up Trina’s puppy-like devotion. In his New York Occasions evaluation, Mordaunt Corridor praised the celebs’ “totally environment friendly portrayals” — an odd alternative of phrases to explain their evident mutual attraction. Certainly, the chemistry was actual. Younger’s daughter would later element the pair’s guilt-ridden love affair. (Each had been Catholic; Tracy was married.)
For Trina, Invoice’s Hooverville house is “heaven,” with varied down-and-out denizens including to the allegorical taste. Bragg (Arthur Hohl) will not be solely a lech and a thief however a leftist loudmouth. His alcoholic companion, Flossie (Marjorie Rambeau), is each a fallen lady and a salvation undertaking tended to by a former minister (Walter Connolly). Dismissive of all three, the cynical Invoice is tempted by the fun-loving cabaret star Fay La Rue (a reliably sassy Glenda Farrell, right here mimicking Mae West).
Topical but timeless, “Man’s Fort” units its characters on the planet of well-liked tradition. A theater marquee glimpsed when Trina and Invoice first meet advertises George Raft and Sylvia Sidney within the film “Decide Up” (1933). Invoice’s kiss-off missive to Faye is a phrase minimize out from a bit of sheet music. Trina explains herself by citing a music from “Present Boat.” On the similar time, the film evokes scripture — the Tune of Songs and story of the Nativity — ending as Trina and Invoice hit the highway with intimations of a December start, even perhaps in a manger.
MoMA is displaying “Man’s Fort” along with 4 different Borzage restorations — the misleadingly titled “Unhealthy Woman” (1931), the antiwar “No Better Glory” (1934), the genre-mixing “Historical past is Made at Night time” (1937) and the late-career “Moonrise” (1949), a low-budget hillbilly noir later championed by auteurist critics. When this “wonderful alternative” to make a posh, guilt-shadowed redemptive love story offered itself, the critic Andrew Sarris would write, “Borzage was not stale or jaded.” Neither is “Man’s Fort.”
Man’s Fort
By April 24 on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, Manhattan; moma.org.