• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3664 0

28 with Virginia Bruce, a pale blonde who had been one of the original Goldwyn girls, as his leading lady. The film was, like The Show-Off, a quickie by Metro standards, and production zipped along at a brisk pace. Shooting in Culver City was a different experience from working at Fox Hills, where the atmosphere was decidedly more administrative than creative. Sheehan’s shimmering Movietone complex was like a gigantic amusement park, expansive and contiguous. Metro, by comparison, was scattered over six separate lots, cramped and shedded and separated from one another by public thoroughfares. Exteriors at many studios were marred by airplanes and wind noise and the chirping of birds, but at M-G-M there were also Pacific Electric train whistles to contend with and the sounds of traffic just steps away.

Stages, dressing rooms, and administrative offices were concentrated on Lot 1, where the colonnade along Washington Boulevard was originally designed as frontage for the Triangle Film Corporation, so named because it was conceived as a gathering of three major producers: Thomas Ince, D. W. Griffith, and Mack Sennett. When that fragile alliance failed in 1919, the plant passed to Goldwyn, which based its production activities there until its acquisition by Marcus Loew’s Metro Pictures Corporation in 1924. Louis B. Mayer, whose own company was located on the grounds of Colonel William Selig’s former studio and zoo in East Los Angeles, came aboard to manage the newly formed company, bringing Irving Thalberg and the dour Harry Rapf with him.

With Robert Barrat and Virginia Bruce in The Murder Man, Tracy’s first assignment under his new M-G-M contract, 1935. (SUSIE TRACY)

Whelan had been a gag writer for Harold Lloyd, and he kept the action smart and sassy. He held Tracy’s first appearance until the second reel, but, unlike at Fox, where Tracy frequently appeared out of nowhere, his character dominated the early action as reporters for the Star fanned out over the city in search of Steve Gray, the paper’s famed “murder man,” missing after one of his legendary benders. In Whelan’s fanciful scenario, Gray is found aboard an all-night merry-go-round, snoozing soundly, a long string of tickets draped carelessly around his neck. As with The Show-Off, Tracy was on his best behavior, his lines down, his scenes frequently in the can with a single take. Thrown from a horse one Sunday while riding with cameraman Les White, he worked the next day as usual, nursing a back injury and a sprained arm. When a bit player failed to show for a brief exchange in a phone booth at the climax of the picture, Tracy mussed his hair and played the part himself.

It was when The Murder Man wrapped after seventeen days of filming that Tracy got a real sense of why M-G-M pictures were a cut above all the others. Where Fox would likely have shipped the film or settled at best for a few trims, Rapf ordered retakes, a new scene, and, ultimately, a completely new finish. When the picture was finally put before a preview audience on the night of July 5, 1935, it unfolded with such impact that the crowd was visibly saddened when Gray was revealed as the guilty party in the picture’s closing moments.

Tracy, said the man from Daily Variety, played the role with “quiet, compelling conviction.” A week later, The Murder Man was released nationally, finding its way to Loew’s Capitol for the week of July 26. Bolstered by a $10,000 stage show starring Lou Holtz and Belle Baker, it drew $54,000 for the week, excellent despite the common judgment that the picture itself was too modest for a deluxe house. Print critics such as Abel Green objected to Tracy’s character as “the criminal reporter type of make-believe city-roomer who dictates his stories into an Ediphone, gets pickled in the time-honored Jesse Lynch Williams tradition, and talks to and insults his managing editor in a manner no star legman ever dreamed of doing without getting the blue slip pronto.”

“Despite all this,” wrote Leo Mishkin in the Telegraph, “The Murder Man manages to be a fairly exciting piece