Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [143]
There was no further communication from “Rattlesnake Pete” either, and Tracy could think of no one who might have written the letters, other than possibly Walter’s predecessor, whose name he mentioned only because he said that he had been forced to discharge the man. The only handwriting samples he could find—endorsements on the backs of canceled checks—were inconclusive, but police interviewed the man anyway. He denied he had been sacked, told them instead he had quit when Carrie Tracy moved out to Riviera, which was too far for him to go by streetcar. “He further stated that Mrs. Tracy, Sr., was a very nervous woman, highly-strung and hard to please.” The case wasn’t officially closed, but the police decided either the threat was a hoax or the crooks had gotten cold feet. Newspapers published details of the case on March 24, prompting the local office of the FBI to contact and interview Tracy for their own files.
With the tension surrounding the drop on March 10, the national release of The Show-Off passed almost without notice. On his best behavior, Tracy had finished the picture in just seventeen days—something of a record—and it had gone to preview six days after that, playing to a large, appreciative audience at the Fox Uptown Theatre. The Reporter, with obvious pride in having influenced the matter, trumpeted Tracy’s appeal in its notice the following day: “Spencer Tracy does the impossible in The Show-Off. He carries the entire thing on his own shoulders—and the part is terrific. The Show-Off is, of course, a one-part story, with everyone more or less taking back seats and leaving most of the work to the main character. And what Tracy does with it! In spite of the fact that the play as a whole is too widely familiar to hold any new excitement for the theatregoer, and that his role is a series of dramatic and emotional peaks that would tax the strength of any actor, Tracy turns in a performance that is all wool and a yard wide.”
When the picture opened at New York’s Capitol Theatre the following week, business went big, with Jimmy Durante, Polly Moran, and Lou Holtz accompanying it onstage. The entire bill was held a second week, a respectable showing for the 5,400-seat house. The New York critics proved a tougher audience than the public. The play itself had been sixteen months on Broadway in its original run and had just completed a successful revival with Raymond Walburn in the title role. On film, The Show-Off had been done twice already, Sennett stalwart Ford Sterling having originated the role for Paramount in 1926, and Hal Skelly having brought it to the talking screen in 1930.3 Reviewers wondered, with some justification, why bother?
The answer for Metro was Spencer Tracy, who was so ideal for the role of Aubrey Piper that familiarity with the storyline was immaterial. Mordaunt Hall in the Times took pains to detail the various differences between George Kelly’s original and Mankiewicz’s adaptation, allowing as how the play, in its newest incarnation, lacked “the nimble wit and subtle shadings” of the original. “Mr. Tracy gives a capital performance,” he concluded, “and if the picture does not come up to expectations, it is not his fault, for it would be difficult to select another player who can do as well by the part.”
Ed Sullivan, the popular columnist for the New York Daily News, thought it Tracy’s best work yet and suggested he was “in the vanguard of the youngsters upon whom the movies must rely to replace the aging veterans.” In England, John Betjeman ranked Tracy in the same class as Eddie Cantor and Chaplin, even as his style of acting was so vastly different: “His appeal is entirely based on dialogue and the wrinkled expression of his enormous Irish face.” At the