Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [110]
Tracy was mortified by the recent pictures he had been asked to make and said as much to Sheehan when he got the chance. “Sheehan … had steadfast faith in Tracy,” Dick Mook said, “but he seemed unable to find decent pictures for him.” After nine features in the space of two years, Tracy was scarcely noticeable to the 70 million viewers who took in films on a weekly basis. In August, concurrent with the release of After the Rain (retitled The Painted Woman), Variety published the results of a survey conducted by exhibitor Harold B. Franklin in which 133 players were graded according to their marquee value. The biggest moneymakers were Maurice Chevalier, Greta Garbo, George Arliss, and Ronald Colman. Will Rogers and Janet Gaynor, the top Fox draws, were rated as third-tier stars, with Warner Baxter, Jimmy Dunn, and Charles Farrell occupying the fifth tier. Other Fox personalities to make the list were George O’Brien, Marian Nixon, Sally Eilers, Joan Bennett, El Brendel, Frank Albertson, William Collier, Sr., and Minna Gombel. After ten feature pictures, Tracy didn’t rate a mention.
“If pressed, he’ll admit that he may be a fair actor,” Mook wrote at the time, “but his looks are a source of constant anxiety to him. Once he said to me wildly, ‘Look, for Pete’s sake, they’ve got me playing love scenes with Joan Bennett. I should be playing muggs, because that’s what I look like.’ ” Money was a constant worry. Tracy was pulling down $1,000 a week but seemingly spending it as fast as he was taking it in. “It was nice to see all that money,” Louise said. “I don’t think we thought it would really last. Of course, when you get more money you find there are many more places to put it. We were just as poor as we had always been.”
Upon his return to the studio, Sheehan pretty much laid waste to Wurtzel’s plans for the new season, canceling What Price Glory? and pulling Tracy out of Rackety Rax when a more promising picture came up at Warners. Warden Lewis E. Lawes, who carried warm memories of Tracy from the days of The Last Mile and Up the River, suggested him for the role of Tommy Connors in the film version of Lawes’ best-selling memoir, Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing. At a price of $10,400 for four weeks, the deal was considerably richer for Fox than the previous loan-outs to Howard Hughes had been, but Tracy didn’t mind, given his genuine affection for Lawes and the realization this would likely be the closest he would ever come to playing The Last Mile on screen.1 “I remember one night he, his wife, and I were going to a picture,” said Mook. “He was telling me Warner Bros. had just borrowed him for the lead in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. ‘If this doesn’t put me over,’ he said, ‘I’ll just have to resign myself to playing character parts the rest of my life.’ ”
The film was originally planned as another pairing of James Cagney and director William Wellman, the team responsible for Public Enemy, but when Cagney declared himself a free agent in a contract dispute with the studio, actor George Brent was assigned the role. Lawes, who had script approval, disliked Courtenay Terrett’s attempt at flushing a storyline out of the episodic book and kept up a steady correspondence with Jack L. Warner, even as plans went forward for director Ray Enright and a four-man crew to shoot nine days of exteriors at the prison. With Tracy obtained from Fox and a revised screenplay by Wilson Mizner and Brown Holmes (who had contributed to the script of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang), Lawes finally got on board, suggesting the film had “every possibility of becoming a masterpiece.”
The cast was a notch above the typical assemblage at Fox.