Fantastic!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The film begins with a woman (the beautiful Loretta Young) who is starving because this is at the height of the Great Depression. She meets up with a man who looks rich (Spencer Tracy), in a park. He takes her to an expensive restaurant for dinner. But, it turns out he is just as poor as she is. After bilking the restaurant out of dinner, they return to his shack down along the river, and she stays the night (this is pre-code), falls deeply in love with him, but does so with a great deal of stress because she realizes that while he loves her, he is also a man who has a strong bent toward being free. And that is the crux of the film, and the first reason I give this film bonus points -- I know the feeling. I have been in two relationships where my partner wanted to be free almost as much as he wanted to be in a relationship. And, it was a constant struggle for both of us. So, in that sense, this is a really "real" dilemma for both characters.The other reason this film earns some bonus points is that it is at least a bit unique. Stop and think of what group of people are usually portrayed in Depression-era films -- it's usually gangsters or high society people. In contrast, in this film the people depicted are primarily honest people living in the slums of the Depression.Now, the film loses a few points, too. For one thing, some of the transitions between shots from different angles are very sloppy. But, this was only 1932, so I can let that slide...a bit.Spencer Tracy's acting here (he's one of my two favorite actors) is very good, considering this is early on in his career. You begin to see elements of the Tracy we came to know throughout his film career. Loretta Young is not only beautiful, but perfect in this role. I have mixed feelings about Marjorie Rambeau's portrayal of an alcoholic, though her part is central to the plot. Walter Connolly is very good here, though I noted his poor teeth, and found that distracting. This role is a bit different for him, so it's nice to see him in something this is not a comedy.And one of the joys of this film is that it's pre-code, but not in your face about it. As Tracy says early in the film, "No female has to starve in a town like this." And then there's the nude swimming scene...although, trust me, you won't see anything. And the fact that Young becomes pregnant later in the film. And of course, all this was filmed at a point when the real Tracy and the real Young were having a torrid affair.Although I won't put this film up to an "8", it is darned good and well-worth watching. You're likely to learn something about the Great Depression, to boot.

Nothing much new about the romantic stuff. Spencer Tracy takes Loretta Young into his shack, neither of them having anything resembling other resources. Tracy finds an older blond who is willing to keep him in food and clothes, but then Loretta Young has to go and spring it on Tracy that she's preggers. It puts Tracy in a quandary. He likes to think of himself as a free man, a drifter who rides the rails at will. He tries to pull off a robbery after marrying Young, with the intention of leaving the boodle with her and taking off on his own. But they are in love and he winds up taking her with him. Last scene: the married pair lying together on the straw of an empty box car rattling through the night.It sounded so dull at first that I thought for a moment box cars were forming on my retina. However, the film is saved by its ethnographic perspective and by the earnest performances. You just have to swallow the love story which, by the way, isn't entirely boring.The movie was released in 1933, meaning it was shot in 1932 and written a bit earlier. That was pre-code and in the depths of the Great Depression. (If it weren't pre-code, you wouldn't have Loretta Young getting pregnant and planning to have a bastard child.) But what a glimpse of life at the bottom when no one had any work. Tracy's Hooverville shack somewhere in New York City is made out of garbage. Cardboard, corrugated iron, no stove, discarded automobile doors, and other junk, a divine assembly of bricolage. And, boy, does Loretta Young dress it up and turn it into a home. Women are always doing things like that. They just can't leave a man alone to live like a billy goat. Anyway, it illustrates some of the stresses associated with utter poverty.The performances are fine too. Many actors seemed to follow a similar trajectory -- small parts in clumsy early movies (Bogart, Cary Grant) -- but Tracy came straight from Broadway and brought with him the persona that would last him throughout his career. He was tough, restrained, practical. Loretta Young -- I never realized how many movies she made in the 30s when she was young. She began at the age of 15 with a major part in one of Lon Chaney's silents. She's powerful pretty in an innocent and slightly chubby way. She can fix up the hovel I live in any time.

Any fan of either Spencer Tracy or Loretta Young should watch this movie when the opportunity presents itself. (It is currently in rotation on Antenna TV which is broadcast ((not cable)) in most major markets.) I particularly enjoyed the opening dinner date between the two and how Tracy "pays" for it. The real worth of this movie is its depiction of the time (early Depression) and the values of the time in which it was made. 1933 was, indeed, a very different world and a character like Tracy's and his attitude towards women was not that uncommon then. (Probably not that uncommon now, but an attitude only allowed to be expressed in the action genre.) Young plays a smitten young woman of 19 who may indeed be an "idiot" to use one other reviewer's less than charitable description of her, but that type of young "idiot"ic and naive woman is very much with us today and putting up with far worse from their men than anything Tracy dished out in this film. (Many of today's reputedly liberated young women will by the CDs with the most misogynistic lyrics which make up so much of what passes for modern music and call themselves the most vile and basest of names. There is no way Loretta Young's character in this movie would do that. Needless to say a woman clinging to an abusive man is a recognizable type in any era - as is an abusive man.) To my eye, Tracy's character was "abusive" only because he wanted to drive her away as he saw (correctly) that she would be able to tame him if given the chance. The only thing that truly surprised me was the out-of-wedlock pregnancy - mention of which was never made in films of that time, except for this one. And to see the very devout Tracy and Young in those roles in light of what came later for both of them personally was very surprising.Frankly I think that sums up this film for me - very surprising. The setting surprises. Ditto for the characters. The screenplay works well enough to bring out the world in which Bill & Trina, and Ira & Flossie and all the rest find themselves, and how they attempt to deal with it and to find what happiness they can.

As other reviewers have noted, this is an unjustly neglected Depression-era film. Directed by Frank Borzage (two Oscars) and written by Jo Swerling (Leave Her to Heaven, The Westerner, Lifeboat, etc.), it is a tough-minded, well-structured and -realized move about denizens of a New York City shantytown. They're grifters, beggars, and women forced into prostitution, but they're a community of people both good and bad, with loyalties as complex as any group's.Perhaps primary among this movie's many admirable qualities is the contrast between Spencer Tracy's character, Bill, and Loretta Young's Trina. He tough-talking, physically aggressive, and evidently fearless-- but Bill is not the character who gives this film its steely sense of survival. While he blusters, Trina actually hangs tough (if that term can be applied to a character so ladylike). Her devotion to him is obvious, and complete. When she becomes pregnant, she says she will raise it herself if he wants to leave. Such is the dignity of Loretta Young's performance (at age 20) as a very simple, even simple-minded character, that she seems neither weak or dependent, but rather a woman who recognizes happiness when she finds it, and love, and who has learned the hard way that it's worth holding on to because it doesn't come around often. nothing more.