This pre-Code love story set against an authentically rendered Depression background is one of Borzage's masterpieces. Spencer Tracy stars as a caustic, self-proclaimed vagabond who is threatened and eventually softened by the love of a young waif (Loretta Young at age 20) whom he takes in. They live together in a makeshift squatter's shack she calls their “safety zone,” conceive a child out of wedlock, and discover in love a way to transcend the chaos that surrounds them. John Belton writes in The Hollywood Professionals: Hawks, Borzage, Ulmer: “Unlike the physical oppressiveness of the anonymous environment surrounding King Vidor's characters in The Crowd (1928) and Our Daily Bread (1934), Borzage's Depression setting is less a physical than a spiritual threat to his characters. What endangers Borzage's characters is not the Depression's poverty or unemployment but, as in Little Man, What Now?, the spirit of decadence and aimlessness with which it pervades them.”