Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [132]
With the completion of Man’s Castle, Tracy returned to his home studio and almost immediately was put into a picture called The Mad Game, which was being rushed to meet a November 17 release date. Resentment over long hours and salary cuts—not to mention quality of material—ran deep among contract players, many of whom were coming to see the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a tool of the producers and not the impartial arbiter of labor disputes it had proposed to be. With virtually no time off between pictures, Tracy joined the nascent Screen Actors Guild, becoming one of twenty-five directors of the organization alongside such friends and colleagues as Ralph Bellamy, George Raft, Robert Montgomery, Chester Morris, Miriam Hopkins, James Cagney, Ann Harding, Boris Karloff, Edward G. Robinson, Ralph Morgan, and Grant Mitchell.
Within a month, twenty-three major stars would resign from the academy and more than five hundred actors would answer the call to complete SAG membership forms in the first serious blow to the academy since its inception in 1927. The Mad Game counted as another regression after the twin experiences of The Power and the Glory and Man’s Castle. It was, like Shanghai Madness before it, a formula picture, the sort of gangster melodrama Warner Bros. did better than anyone. It had been a story with the Hammettesque title Lead Harvest, but then William Conselman started drafting the screenplay under Winnie Sheehan’s supervision and it evolved into a film about the kidnapping game—the “snatch racket” that was emerging with the end of Prohibition.
After the taking of the Lindbergh baby in March 1932, most city and state censor boards discouraged such storylines, fearful the public would take offense. And with the release of First National’s Three on a Match in October of that year, the industry entered into a gentlemen’s agreement not to make any more like it. Sheehan was adamant about The Mad Game, however, and agreed to remove actual scenes of kidnapping in order to keep the project alive. In July 1933 the Hays office warned Fox the film would likely encounter problems in New York State, where the son of a prominent politician was being held for ransom. Sheehan left for Europe that same month, confident all problems with the script had been worked out and that the film would start as planned as soon as Tracy had finished at Columbia.
For the girl in The Mad Game, Sheehan wanted Tracy teamed with Claire Trevor, a pairing that had almost taken place for Shanghai Madness. Like Tracy, Trevor had studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and then moved on to stock and a string of Vitaphone shorts. She made a genuine Broadway hit for herself in The Party’s Over, then left to accept Sheehan’s offer of a contract, a move she already had reason to regret. “The pictures were so cheesy,” she said late in life, “those eighteen-day schedules. And usually directors had full sway—directors who had failed long before and were sort of resurrected to do a picture. Or else we’d have a brand-new guy who had never done anything.” The director of The Mad Game, Irving Cummings, fell more into the first category than the second, a large, sonorous figure who, like Ed Sedgwick, was a holdover from silent days.
Tracy found himself pleasantly surprised by Trevor’s smart work as the newspaper reporter who loves his blustery beer baron and rolls her own cigarettes. “He liked the way I delivered lines, tossed lines away. He really liked my style.” He also liked the looks of the twenty-three-year-old hazel-eyed