Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [174]
“She’s not going out there!” Tim says firmly, and Blackie hauls off and socks him—a moment of shock for both the characters and the audience.
Gable, who never warmed up to MacDonald, marveled at Spence’s seemingly effortless work as the priest: “I couldn’t see what Tracy was worried about. He said he felt like a man walking a tightrope. He had to be human and, at the same time, holy. For my money, he hit the perfect balance between the two from the opening scene.”
Tracy observed his thirty-sixth birthday while working on both pictures (Mob Rule by that time had acquired the title Fury) and he came to regard them as “that double jackpot”—the two best things that had happened to him in his six years on the screen. “When Sylvia Sidney and I put in 21 hours a day on Fury, we did it because we knew that Lang had something; that it would be something worthwhile. It was the same with San Francisco. It was all the difference between that ‘just a job’ feeling that I’d once had in pictures and the conviction that we were getting somewhere.”
The time Lang took seemed partially rooted in the mistaken notion that he had to wear Tracy down in order to get his best performance. According to Joe Mankiewicz, who felt somewhat responsible for Lang’s treatment of the cast and crew (“I put my own personal guarantee that he was great for this movie”), one of the key scenes Lang put into the script was the mob’s ghostly pursuit of Joe in the hours leading up to their conviction for murder. “Now figure Spence in an overcoat … the overcoat flapping in the wind, at night on the back lot, down a very narrow passage followed by a camera car, running for his life. And Fritz Lang letting the car go faster, faster, faster until Tracy was running for his life.”
Tracy and Lang grew to hate each other, and cinematographer Joe Ruttenberg found himself in the middle. “Spencer Tracy said, ‘I can’t stand this any longer,’ but it was Spencer’s first major part [at M-G-M], you know, so he wouldn’t quit. He argued with Lang, and the officers in back of me said, ‘You do whatever you think.’ Mannix says, ‘If they can’t get along with Joe, they can’t get along with anybody.’ ” Tracy consistently gave Ruttenberg what he needed, even when he was at odds with Lang. “In shooting, he knew what he had to do, he minded his own business, he did his work, went back to his dressing room. But he fought with Fritz all the time. They were always fighting, always fighting.”
With actress Sylvia Sidney during production of Fury. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
San Francisco was a film largely written by committee, producer Bernie Hyman holding story conferences with his key people—Hopkins, Loos, Emerson—every few days while the picture was in production. Retakes continued into the first week of April, when the group turned its collective attention to the problem of putting the great earthquake together. The mechanical effects developed by Arnold “Buddy” Gillespie, one of three associate art directors on the show, formed the nucleus of the sequence, principally the quake as experienced from the interior of Lyric Hall as the annual Chickens’ Ball is in progress. The set was built on rockers, with breakaway walls of rubber brick and balsa wood, but much of the effect was achieved with the simple combination of jiggling camera and off-balance actors, inserts showing small details of the devastation, the ominous rumblings of the soundtrack setting the nerves on edge.
With his proud mother on the set of San Francisco. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Tracy, who observed the shooting of the scene even though he wasn’t in it, recalled that it was covered with seven cameras. There were 250 extras on the stage, and Van Dyke was careful to explain what they were to do once he gave them the signal. As soon as the building started to shake, though, everyone panicked and surged to one corner. The balcony collapsed, which wasn’t planned, but since no one was injured, the shot stayed in the film. Exteriors—cracking walls, falling debris—were intercut with actors in motion. Whole buildings were