Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [168]
Selznick left the studio to form his own company, and Mankiewicz told the front office he wanted Lang as the director of Mob Rule. In America, Lang’s reputation was based largely on his brilliant 1931 production of M, the story of a man hunted down as a murderer of children. He drew the assignment to direct Mob Rule about the same time Tracy encountered Mankiewicz for the first time at the M-G-M commissary.
About to start Riffraff, Tracy heard the story in much the same way L. B. Mayer had, but his reaction was much different: “I remember playing The Baby Cyclone in Boston the night Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted,” he later said. “The execution was to take place at midnight, and when I got out of the theater at eleven o’clock, the Boston Common was filled with people protesting the execution. The undercurrent of violence was frightening. It’s easy to see, after watching a thing like that, how mob hysteria can whip up riots or lynchings.”
Lang and screenwriter Leonard Praskins began work on a script by looking at the story from three different perspectives: the wife (“a typical American girl, married to a man in a very good social position”), the mob (“people in a small town—blacksmiths, gas station men, tailors, uneducated people”), and the man through whose character they decided all three of the stories could most effectively be told.
“Spencer Tracy,” wrote Lang,
is a lawyer, a very idealistic type of man who believes that the man is good, that crime is only a disease, that criminals are unhappy people and that the law is there to help them. He is an idealist, an optimist … When this lynching occurs to him his philosophy breaks down … This man must be made in black and white, not in color hues. Short scenes can give us this man’s character. Need no long dialogue scenes … I think his guilt is that this man who always believed that he was an idealist tries to do something for personal revenge. He does not try to understand how everything happened. He does not try to understand what drove these people to this uprising. He now has only one idea. He suffered unbelievably. He wants revenge. This is his guilt.
One of the more memorable characters on the M-G-M lot was a former title writer and gag man named Robert E. “Bob” Hopkins. “Hoppy,” as he was known to just about everyone, was the closest thing to a handyman they had when it came to a script, and when he wasn’t on a set somewhere, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he was lurking in the studio commissary or standing on the corner—“the crossroads” they called it—ready to nab a producer and shout an idea at him. Tall and profane, Hoppy was easy to laugh off, but the words that shot out of him sometimes amounted to story gold if anyone bothered to pay attention.2
“I was walking along the street one day on the lot,” recalled Jeanette MacDonald,
and he yelled across, “Hey Jeanette, I’ve got a hell of an idea for you and Clark Gable.” He came rushing over to me. I said, “Oh you have? What is it?” So we stood there and he talked to me and told me this wonderful idea he had. I must confess it was exciting. But he said, “You know I can’t get to first base with the g.d. thing.” I said, “What do you mean, Bob?” He said, “Well, I’m getting the run-around. I try to see Eddie Mannix and he’s too busy, I’ve tried to see Thalberg and he’s too busy. I’ve just tried to see everybody and nobody wants to see me. Look, I think you could do something with it. They all like you up there. You go up and tell them you like the idea.”
Hoppy’s idea had size and punch. According to Gottfried Reinhardt, son of Max Reinhardt and new to the studio, it consisted of just six words: “ ‘San Francisco—earthquake—atheist becomes religious.’ That was