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started grumbling a bit … and the crew came to Spence and said, “Look, what about our lunch?” And so he says, “Yeah, it’s getting late.” And he looked over at Fritz and said, “Mr. Lang, it’s one-thirty and the fellows haven’t had their lunch yet. Don’t you think we ought to break?” And Lang said, “On my set, Mr. Tracy, I will call lunch when I think it should be called.” And Spence took it with that wonderful look, that meek look—and look out when he looked at you meekly—and just took his hand and brushed it across his face, smeared the makeup hopelessly. Take an hour and a half to replace that makeup. And he yelled “Lunch!” and walked, and the crew went with him.

The contrast between Mob Rule and San Francisco could not have been more stark. Where Lang lingered over a scene, making take after take, Van Dyke got in and out as quickly as possible. “He gained a lot by having the actors fresh,” Joe Newman said. “He had that momentum going for him, where he let the actors have sway. If they understood the part, he didn’t indulge in a lot of explanation, and he didn’t believe in a lot of rehearsal.” Though his speed worked largely to the cast’s advantage—no heavy breathing or time for second thoughts—Van Dyke’s stuff tended to be ragged as it came off the stage, and Hyman was already ordering retakes just three days into the schedule.

Tracy was needed only occasionally and seemed to regard his time on the picture as something of a vacation. Still, where Mob Rule was well within his comfort zone as an actor, San Francisco decidedly was not. “We were pretty serious all through that picture,” Gable recalled. “We both had our worries. He was worried about playing a priest, and I was worried about playing an atheist. I had a scene where I was supposed to hit him. How was the public going to take that—seeing a man strike a priest? It took three real priests to convince me I could do it safely if the script had me reforming in the end, and believing.”

The conflict between the two boyhood friends—one who became a roisterer, the other a priest—had been built into the script from the very beginning, when Herman Mankiewicz drafted the first sequence and made notes concerning the general tone and structure of the story. The character of “Father Jim” was introduced during a sparring match with his pal “Aces” Hatfield in which the two traded dialogue between punches. (“No dame’s on the level,” Aces says, to which Jim responds with a quick jab to the chin.) It was Mankiewicz’s idea that the camera reveal Jim as a priest only after he has changed his clothes and emerged from the locker room in the Roman collar. By the time the scene was shot some thirteen months later, Jim had become Tim, Aces had become Blackie, and the scene had been sharpened by Anita Loos with a shot of Tim knocking Blackie clear off his feet, thus establishing that Tim could flatten Blackie if he so wished—a vivid image the audience, in its collective memory, would later call to mind when Blackie socks Tim and the priest, in effect, turns the other cheek.

The heated scene in which Blackie pops Father Tim establishes Mary as the force that comes between the two men. All aglitter in gold braid, black tights, and plumed headdress, she is about to walk out onstage at the Paradise Music Hall, where she will become, in Blackie’s words, “Queen of the Coast.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Tim asks incredulously as he takes her in.

“Why?” asks Blackie innocently.

“Showing Mary like this to that mob out there.”

Mary tells Tim that she loves Blackie.

“It isn’t love to let him drag you down to his level.”

Blackie tells Tim he’s going to marry her, and Tim, with eyes narrowed and jaw set, says, “Not if I can stop you, you’re not going to marry her. You can’t take a woman in marriage and then sell her immortal soul.” He puts out his hand and asks Mary to come with him. The stage manager is knocking, they’re striking up the band.

“I’ve listened to this psalm-singing blather of yours for years and never squawked,” says Blackie. “But you can’t bring it in here. This is my joint!