Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [134]
With Sheehan out of the country, Tracy was loaned to a start-up called 20th Century, which was based on the United Artists lot in Hollywood. Coincidentally, it was the same company Gretchen had just joined, an operation assembled by Joe Schenck and run by the former head of production at Warner Bros., Darryl F. Zanuck. At the moment, 20th Century was just an office, a line of credit, and Zanuck’s fabled way with a script. Everything else was rented, including most of the stars they used in their productions. George Arliss, also from Warners, was their big male draw, a distinguished British character actor who specialized in period subjects and biographies. Gretchen feared she would get stuck playing his daughter and tried to have a clause inserted into her contract preventing such a thing. When Zanuck refused, she signed anyway and ended up in her first picture, House of Rothschild, playing Arliss’ daughter.
Twentieth had a slate of twelve films for the 1933–34 season, Rothschild being the seventh. Others on the schedule were Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, The Affairs of Cellini, and The Trouble Shooter, a story based on the adventures of a telephone repairman that proposed to team Tracy with comedian Jack Oakie, borrowed from Paramount. (“The talk,” said Oakie, “was that with his underplaying and my jumping around we were a perfect twosome.”) Filming began on October 9, just as Man’s Castle was being readied for release.
The path to the screen for Man’s Castle was littered with parsed dialogue, trimmed footage, and the dubious approvals of the Hays office. Borzage flouted the Production Code in several key respects, insisting the lead characters remain unmarried until the very end of the picture, when an unplanned pregnancy forces Bill into an armed robbery from which he escapes unpunished. Flossie, the aging whore, retains most of her unsavory qualities, easy to discern for any adult paying attention, the details investing Borzage’s fantasy world with a sordid reality that would not have been possible only a year later.
The problems began in June when Dr. James Wingate of the MPPDA read Jo Swerling’s draft screenplay and ordered a number of cuts, including the removal of Bill’s climactic action of feeling Trina’s stomach and the line, “Geez! It’s movin’!” and Trina’s response, “Life.” It was daring for the time and absolutely essential to the picture as far as Borzage was concerned. Wingate subsequently met with the director, Swerling, and Columbia’s Sam Briskin over the proposed changes to the script, and most were eventually agreed to, save those specifically tied to the climax. “The studio believes they can handle this scene in such a way as to make it acceptable,” Wingate advised in an internal memorandum. “We are reserving our opinion until we see the picture.”
While the film was in production, Briskin, fighting back, reassured Dr. Wingate that “great care” would be used in the scene “and as both people are fully clothed, we see nothing that can be censorable about it.” Regarding the brief exchange of dialogue, “It is impossible to eliminate the words requested, as they are the essence of our story.” A scene of Bill and Trina skinny-dipping in the East River was similarly filmed with care, although a quick shot of Tracy diving, unclothed, into the water and Young’s similarly undressed body passing over his were removed before the film could be passed for release.
The matter was allowed to rest until the movie was ready to be screened in early October. Wingate, clearly under the spell Borzage had cast, saw nothing other than beauty in the way the story unfolded and was effusive afterward in his praise of the film. “It struck us as a fine and tender picture,” he wrote Harry Cohn, “treated in such a way as to be satisfactory under the Code. We also trust that it will be free from any serious danger of censorship difficulty.” Predictably, after Wingate had offered forth such a bold and authoritative assurance, the New York State Censor Board, which Wingate himself