Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [172]
San Francisco was a big, boisterous carnival of a film, festooned with balloons and good cheer and enveloped in the kind of candy apple coating that was emblematic of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer school of moviemaking. Mob Rule, on the other hand, was anything but. Grim and Teutonic, it had none of the high spirits for which the studio was typically known, and Tracy found himself stepping from Father Tim’s chapel office, brewing coffee for the chaste Mary Blake, to the opening shots of Mob Rule, in which he and Sidney portrayed all the lust and frustration an engaged couple could possibly feel in the hours prior to a long separation. Joe can’t keep his eyes off Katherine and she can’t keep her hands off him. They munch peanuts, coo words of love, and when they’re separated by the window of a Pullman car they press the glass as if electricity were passing between them. Sam Katz, the Chicago theater executive who was Mankiewicz’s titular boss, sensed the carnal energy of the rushes and sent Lang a note: “I saw your first day’s work and I am delighted. I am leaving today on a trip for about two weeks and I am sorry I will not be here with you during this period. However, I know you are going to give us a great picture.”
Tracy was used to making one take, two at the most, and was completely unaccustomed to the multiple takes Lang routinely insisted upon. One of the ways the local sheriff puts his suspect at ease early in the film is by noting the character’s fondness for peanuts. (“Some peanuts?” actor Edward Ellis asks during the interrogation scene, casually setting a bowl of salted nuts in front of him.) Tracy had done take after take, accepting a handful of nuts and tossing them into his mouth. “Well, now you’re talking my language, Sheriff. I’ve—.” And the line was aborted with an explosive cough.
“Cut,” said Lang impassively. “Bring this peanut addict a glass of water, somebody.”
Tracy’s face reddened as he spat out the chewed remains. “This guy,” he said, indicating Lang, “is trying to kill me with salted peanuts—a new variety of murder. So far, I’ve had to eat fourteen bags in succession.”
“Uh, no, Spence,” corrected the prop man. “Only thirteen.”
After quietly printing what he wanted, Lang kept it up, torturing Tracy until Sylvia Sidney signaled him that the scene was already in the can. “I’ll get even,” Tracy grinned as he stepped out of camera range. “This picture isn’t finished yet by a long shot.”
After vigorously pursuing the part of Katherine and turning down another picture to take it, Sylvia Sidney found herself unfazed by Lang’s temperament. “Fritz had a big ego, to put it bluntly. When he walked on the set, he was the master of the show. He wasn’t that tough on me, because he had to get what he wanted on film. He was rough on men … Tracy had a very rough time with him.”
Lang seemed to regard his players as graphic elements; his rigidity put him at odds with his lead actor, a man who needed the latitude to inhabit a character and make him breathe. For Tracy, the real trick to Mob Rule was managing the transformation from the solid, good-natured Joe Wilson, all-around straight arrow, eyes shining with a kind of textbook virtue, to the grim, vengeful shell of a man on the other side of the fire, a walking corpse animated by the sheer power of hate. It wasn’t Lang that gave it to him, yet it’s hard to imagine quite the same effect from another director. Given a comfortable forty-eight-day schedule, Lang, completely unaccustomed to working in a studio where meal breaks were dictated by law, proceeded to direct Mob Rule as if he were back at Babelsberg.
Tracy and Clark Gable shoot their first scene together for San Francisco, 1936. (SUSIE TRACY)
“Lang,” said Joe Mankiewicz,
would have his secretary, affectionately known as The Iron Butterfly, bring on a small silver tray—it might have been a vitamin pill or something more horrible. I don’t know. And a little shot of cognac which Mr. Lang would have as his lunch and continue working. And the crew