This is a curious but wonderfully acted love story. The protagonists are not your typical love-struck young romantic couple but complicated broken people just about surviving the poverty of living in one of the Hooverville shanty towns of 1932's New York. There's not a lot of humour in this drama but that doesn't make it at all miserable and depressing. It's not like a badly written naïve play where happiness blooms in the face of adversity - it's more thoughtful than that but is nevertheless quite uplifting.
Spencer Tracy's character, Bill is the absolute opposite of a romantic hero. He is such a well written character played so well by Spencer Tracy that we really don't really know what he is like, who he is or what he's done. We would however love to find out who is really there behind that façade or how he got like that. On the surface he seems to be an unpleasant battle-scared shell of a man incapable of expressing any emotion, feelings or even sense of being part of society.
Loretta Young's 'Trina' could not be more different. She is from a different place to Bill, she is from a world that disappeared when Wall Street crashed three years ago and is a complete stranger to the world Bill seems so comfortable in. She longs for love and longs for the impossible dream of a happy life in this upside down world. Loretta Young's almost impossible prettiness adds to the tragedy and pathos of her character who seems so lost, so unable to cope with the life she now has to live. Bill is her lifeline and she's not going to let go. She throws herself into the fantasy of happiness with him despite being treated like his slave, despite the constant emotional cruelty and despite Bill having a fling with the local show-girl. If this story were written today, she would be the archetypical battered, mentally and physically abused wife, not leaving her abusive husband because she knows deep down that he loves her.
This has the feel of being a really good drama that you'd pay good money to watch live in a cramped theatre. It's a mature and surprisingly subtle look at how love - if indeed it is love, can happen in the most unlikely of places. Although it is quite stylised, especially the camp which doesn't look as awful as I suspect in reality it was, as a motion picture it is excellent. Director Frank Borzage creates an enclosed real little world inhabited by real people which plays with your emotions. Sometimes you're hoping Trina and Bill will stay together and live happily ever after - sometimes you're hoping something or someone will separate them because you can see that it's a destructive relationship. It's also beautifully filmed and although it gets a little slow at times is still entertaining and stays in your mind long after the final credits.
