Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [104]
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1 Filmed as The Doorway to Hell (1930).
2 During the six-week period Tracy would receive $4,500 from Fox, leaving the studio with a net profit on his services of $6,687.50.
3 Screenwriter Frederica Sagor once described Sheehan’s story mind as “unhinged.”
CHAPTER 8
The Power and the Glory
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Tracy followed John Cromwell’s advice and looked up Snowy Baker, the rugged Australian sportsman who ran the Riviera Polo Club and Equestrian Center in the Santa Monica Canyon. Reginald Leslie “Snowy” Baker was a genuine legend in his home country, a champion horseman, swimmer, rugby player, oarsman, cricketer, and boxer whose work in movies brought him to the United States. He started coaching on the side, and fell in with the developers of the Riviera Country Club in 1928. With Baker as his mentor, Tracy went headlong into polo, embracing it, as Louise put it, “the way people sometimes go when they have waited so long to find something which they really want to do.” He arranged for a horse by the month and lessons, and he took a room at the club so that he would be sure to get in his daily stick-and-ball practice, rising at 6:30 each morning to ride for thirty or forty-five minutes before going to the studio.
As with Tracy’s three previous Fox pictures, Disorderly Conduct had been designed for other actors. Originally it was to be another Quirt and Flagg comedy with Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe. When Lowe failed to come to terms over a new contract, Tracy was promptly dropped in his place. Then McLaglen was shifted to another picture, making room for Ralph Bellamy. With the company hemorrhaging red ink, Sheehan renewed his commitment to building Tracy into a marketable commodity, and one of the men he entrusted with the task was producer John W. Considine, Jr.
At Riviera with Reginald Leslie “Snowy” Baker. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
The son of a noted vaudeville impresario, Johnny Considine was, in the words of Joan Bennett, a “wild, attractive Irishman” who had worked almost exclusively for Joseph M. Schenck, the president of United Artists. He started with Schenck as a script clerk and was line producer on most of Schenck’s later productions, Son of the Sheik, Tempest, and Abraham Lincoln among them. Considine made the jump to Fox in November 1930 and Sheehan gave him his own unit, a move which led to speculation he was grooming the younger man to replace Sol Wurtzel. Considine’s third picture at Fox was Six Cylinder Love, a project hardly calculated to bond him to Tracy, and when he was subsequently given She Wanted a Millionaire, Considine spent an inordinate amount of time haunting the set, convinced that Tracy and Joan Bennett, to whom he would soon propose marriage, were having an affair. His concerns were hardly assuaged after Bennett’s accident, when Tracy became a daily visitor to her hospital room.
Disorderly Conduct was again the work of William Anthony McGuire, who was more a hand at comedy than anything approaching melodrama and whose famous technique of seeing the first act of a play in rehearsal before writing the second and third acts did not stand him in good stead as a screenwriter. McGuire’s scripts tended to start out well before sputtering out in a fantasia of clichés. Disorderly Conduct was no different, a plot-driven muddle that nevertheless gave Tracy his strongest screen character yet. Rather than playing a crook or a con man, Tracy found himself cast as an honest cop disillusioned by the graft and corruption he sees around him. Filming began November 30 with Considine making his directorial debut under Sheehan’s supervision. In support were Sally Eilers, Ralph Bellamy, Allan Dinehart, Ralph Morgan, and the ubiquitous faux Swedish comedian El Brendel.
It wasn’t an easy picture to make. Tightly wound, Tracy often brought tension to a set and was liable to explode if something went awry. Considine knew next to nothing about directing actors and leaned heavily on cinematographer Ray June, who, in collaboration with William Cameron Menzies, had shot many of his productions