Man's Castle (1933) - May 21, 2024

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On May 21st, Sony will release Frank Borzage's pre-code masterpiece Man's Castle:

https://www.moviezyng.com/mans-castl...y/043396636385



It has a brand new 4K restoration that is screening this coming week at MoMA, and here is the blurb about its restoration and reconstruction of the original and long thought lost original cut:

Frank Borzage’s 1933 Man’s Castle has long been considered one of the most profound and transporting of Borzage’s spiritual love stories—a cohort that includes 7th Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1928), History Is Made at Night (1935) and The Moral Storm (1940). But for decades Man’s Castle has been available only in a heavily censored cut created in 1938, when this extremely pre-Code film was reissued to cash in on the back-to-back Oscar wins of its star, Spencer Tracy. A major subplot was dropped, weakening the film’s central conflict between the easygoing eroticism represented by showgirl Glenda Farrell and the more difficult and soulful connection proposed by Loretta Young, here astonishingly beautiful as an innocent young woman cast adrift in the Great Depression. Many individual shots were deleted to appease the strict moral guidelines of the Production Code Administration; perhaps most absurdly, a wedding scene in the seventh reel was moved up to the first, to give some moral cover to Tracy and Young as they share a shack in a Central Park shantytown.

Now, thanks to Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Rita Belda, Man’s Castle has been restored to a state quite close to its premiere version, and one can only say that a great film has emerged as something even greater, richer in its emotions and more profound in its philosophy.