Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [105]
“Tracy came into my dressing room and wanted a drink,” Ralph Bellamy remembered. “My God, he looked awful. I gave him the drink, and somehow he managed to get some more, I guess, because when it came time to shoot he wasn’t around. I finally found him passed out in his dressing room. In order to cover for him, I had a doctor friend say he was ill.” Bellamy, sure that Tracy was in no condition to drive, insisted that Spence follow behind him in his own car as they drove home. “He was still in the police uniform. In the rear-view mirror I saw him stop, so I turned around and went back. He had pulled over another car, and when I got there he was standing next to it in that uniform, bawling the hell out of a woman driver.”
Considine let Tracy have his head with the character of Officer Dick Fay and was rewarded with a performance that far exceeded the limitations of the material. Six pictures into his Fox contract, Tracy was essentially typed as a comedian, the failure of Quick Millions having convinced both Sheehan and Wurtzel that audiences wouldn’t accept him in a serious role. It was Jack Blystone who saw considerably more depth to him, but Blystone’s picture was now on hold and there was no telling if they’d ever get around to finishing it. So Tracy immersed himself in the role of Fay, the good-natured cop on the beat, and brought something extraordinary to it by illuminating the small details the story afforded him.
Demoted after pulling over the daughter of a rich bootlegger, Fay declares himself no longer on the square and takes a bribe in exchange for tipping off a gambling hall of an impending police raid. But turning crooked doesn’t suit him, and he wears his newfound notoriety as a prizefighter might wear an ill-fitting suit of clothes. Suspecting a double cross, the crooks make an attempt on Fay’s life, during which his little nephew is shot dead. In the intense reaction scene that follows, Tracy’s expression ripens from abject grief to horror as an all-consuming trance of vengeance overtakes him. “I did it,” he tells Lucy Beaumont, the distinguished British actress playing his widowed mother, quivering and backing away from her as if dripping with poison. “Just as sure as if I put my own gun to his little body, I killed him, Mom.” Instinctively she places her hands on his chest, and he erupts as if suddenly shot through with electricity. “Don’t touch me, Mom! I’m crooked! I’m low! I’m everything that you hate! That’s why those men were after me, Ma, and that’s why he’s dead! They killed him, Ma, but I’m the cause of it!” And then he kneels at the side of the bed that holds the body of his nephew and crumples into tears.
In Disorderly Conduct (1932). The critic for the Hollywood Citizen News likened Tracy’s work in the movie to that of “the late and great Lon Chaney in his straight roles.” Dickie Moore, who played Tracy’s nephew in the picture, remembered him as “warm yet distant.” (SUSIE TRACY)
Fay cleans up the gang in a memorably framed shot, his back to the camera, the action visible through the broken glass of an office door. The extreme violence of the last act was at odds with the earlier action, the wisecracking exchanges with Sally Eilers, the scenes of low comedy with El Brendel, but the character arc somehow managed to play, Tracy finding the humanity in brief vignettes where, for instance, Fay silently caresses the headlamp of his motorcycle after having been demoted from sergeant to patrolman, the machine drawing his affection like a familiar old horse.
Given the vigilantism of the character, Sheehan had two endings prepared and shot, one in which Fay is wounded in the confrontation but survives, the other in which he dies. Tracy appeared in both but favored the latter as the stronger and more dramatically valid way of ending the picture. Sheehan planned to preview the film with each of the endings