Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [153]
Tracy’s estrangement from Leo Morrison was a significant factor in the deal’s getting made, for it would have been considered improper for another company to have opened talks with Tracy while his contract with Fox was still in force. He likely could have doubled his weekly rate by freelancing, yet he had no clear perception of his position in the marketplace. “Spence’s naiveté,” his pal Mook once said, “runs second only to his ability as an actor.” Competition for established screen personalities was at an all-time high, the flow of new talent from the legitimate stage having slowed considerably.
Tracy returned from Honolulu sunburned but rested and went back on salary on November 5, 1934. The next day he signed a new two-year contract calling for $2,250 a week during the first year and $2,500 a week for the second. Sol Wurtzel, grinding out programmers at the Fox Western Avenue complex, had Tracy’s final assignment under the old pact: a high-concept, effects-laden spectacle built around the title Dante’s Inferno.
Wurtzel, whose commercial instincts ranged from the plebeian to the downright bizarre, had overseen a 1924 feature of the same title. What he proposed to get from a talking version was not much different from the earlier picture, an allegorical tale of damnation and redemption with a fabulous tour of the Inferno as its centerpiece. The idea was first floated back in January, the crown jewel of the seventeen pictures Wurtzel proposed to deliver that season. It was formally announced for the program in June, promising an “amazing drama” depicting the “afterlife fate of ruthless millionaires in lower regions” as envisioned by director Harry Lachman and a small army of artists and technicians.
The original outline by Philip Klein and Rose Franklin proposed a radical break from the plotline of the original film, suggesting a sort of Cavalcade of tormented souls: “The drama aims at three separate groups of people—the romance of the so-called flaming youth of today, the middle-age story of a man and wife, and the lonely strength of a financial genius. Each contributes to, and enriches, the other while the pictorial leveler of the Inferno is an integral part of the story development, rather than an illusion of abstract thought.” Wurtzel thought the storyline too fussy, and when Robert Yost, onetime head of the Fox story department, got involved, it was reduced to the rise and fall of one principal character, an itinerant carny by the name of Jim Carter. Wurtzel declared he wanted Tracy for the part of Carter, proposing once again to team him with Claire Trevor.
As a junior writer, Eric Knight, the British journalist who would come to be known as the creator of Lassie, was brought in on a story conference. Carter, Wurtzel explained, was to be a stoker on a ship. “He clouts the engineer and swims to shore and lands at a sort of Coney Island, where there’s a concession—a sort of side show—called the Inferno. He goes inside and meets the daughter of the man and they get married and have a kid. Then he gets the ambition bug. Before long, he owns the concession—then the whole island—then he builds a great big inferno sideshow on a weak pier that collapses.”
So far, so good, but then Wurtzel, Klein, and Lachman proceeded, in true Fox fashion, to bring in a current—and completely unrelated—story, the previous month’s disastrous sinking of the S.S. Morro Castle, making it the third act of the picture. Bewildered, Knight withdrew, deciding it would be better “to play Achilles and sulk in his tent” than to try and urge Wurtzel and his associates to a more coherent treatment. Dante’s Inferno entered production the week of December 3, 1934, as did Will Rogers’ Life Begins at 40, George White’s Scandals, and The Little Colonel, a musical from the makers of Bottoms Up with Fox’s newest and most commercially potent star, six-year-old