Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [171]
Gable impressed playgoers at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, where The Last Mile had a brief but notable run. John Wexley thought him better in the part of Mears than Tracy (“less self-conscious, more dynamic”) and director William Wyler shot a test of him for Universal. By the end of the year, Gable was under contract to M-G-M, while Tracy was similarly committed to Fox. “Hollywood didn’t have any Lambs Club where we could bump into each other,” Gable said, “but both of us went out more in those days. Every now and then we’d meet at some night club or some party and we’d sit around and take the picture business apart.” The two men also occasionally saw each other at Riviera, where Gable briefly tried polo and was, in Tracy’s early judgment, pretty good.
They began shooting San Francisco on Valentine’s Day, 1936, Gable reeking of garlic in a rousing show of contempt for his leading lady. (“Gable is a mess!” she complained to her manager Bob Ritchie. “I’ve never been more disappointed in anyone in my life.”) Tracy did his first work as Father Mullin the following day and surprised some members of the crew with his level of professionalism. “I’d heard all the stories about him at Fox, that he’d go off on drinking sprees,” said Joe Newman, Van Dyke’s assistant director on the picture. “He didn’t on San Francisco; he was fine. He was always on time. He was perfect in his lines. Everything I’d heard about him, he erased.”
Clad in black cassock and biretta, Tracy played a brief phone exchange with Gable, then presided over a nighttime organ recital at the rescue mission. MacDonald sang “The Holy City” (“Jerusalem, Jerusalem”), then took part in an expository scene in which Tracy provided the backstory on Blackie Norton, “the most Godless, scoffing and unbelieving soul in all San Francisco,” and a little on himself as well. “Blackie and I were kids together—born and brought up on the Coast. We used to sell newspapers in the joints along Pacific Street. Blackie was the leader of all the kids in the neighborhood, and I was his pal.” He tells her he’s tried to do something with Blackie for years, but that “maybe I’m not the right one.”
It was one of the most critical movie scenes Tracy had ever played, and he played it as he played all scenes, with simplicity and honesty and a conviction that he was the character in all its natural shadings. The authority he exuded was unalloyed with theatrical tricks or the calculations of a leading man suddenly beyond his depth. If he had any fear, it was the fear of artificiality, the fear that lifelong Catholics would look at Father Tim and see a movie star pretending to be a priest and not the soul of a real priest, with a hardscrabble childhood in his background and wisdom as to the ways of the Barbary Coast.
There was an effort to load Tracy’s principal scenes toward the front of the schedule, as the start of Mob Rule was looming and no one knew quite what to expect of Fritz Lang. There was tension between Gable and Van Dyke, Gable and the front office. “I like Tracy very much,” MacDonald wrote after two weeks on the picture. “There’s as much difference between the two as day from nite. Gable acts as tho’ he were really too bored to play the scenes with me. Typical ham.”
Mob Rule went into production just six days after San Francisco, destined to be as grueling a shoot as Tracy had ever endured. (“2 months on wagon,” he noted in his datebook.) Lang, meticulous in his preparation, had taken nearly six months to get the script into shape, and by the starting date had storyboarded the entire film. The girl in the story was Sylvia Sidney, a first-rate actress who had heard about Lang making his American film debut and took a substantial cut in price to be part of it. She respected and admired his work, she said, and thought it important to work