Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [175]
When San Francisco was cut together, the result left Hyman and his colleagues deflated. “The earthquake was flat, impersonal, ineffectual,” said John Hoffman, who was brought from Slavko Vorkapich’s montage unit to fix the problem. “It didn’t touch people.” Hoffman set to work giving the picture “a brand new, really convincing quake” as well as a rowdy New Year’s Eve celebration to serve as its bookend. He shot new material—a stone Atlas pitching forward and smashing a vegetable wagon, its horse rearing, its stock rolling, a solitary wheel spinning aimlessly being one of his more memorable images—but his contribution principally was in the editing, the juxtaposition of disaster footage with the reactions of the people in danger, the rhythmic cuts giving size and immediacy to otherwise ponderous footage. But all this was after the fact for Tracy, who did his last work in the film on Saturday, April 25, 1936.
The more modestly proportioned Fury finished two days later, but there were retakes that kept the film open until May 6. The last days were given over to exteriors, largely night work that convinced Joe Ruttenberg that Lang was genuinely a sadist. “He was hell on everybody—actors, technicians, everybody.” The centerpiece of the picture was the mob’s storming of the jail, and Ruttenberg remembered it being scheduled for a Saturday night so that the company could go straight through without a break. “We worked like slaves,” said Tracy. “One day we worked from nine in the morning until five-thirty the next.” Mankiewicz heard that some of the crew members were plotting to drop a piece of equipment on Lang to get him off the picture. “Well, it went from that bad to much worse,” he said, “till I was summoned from my house one night about four-thirty in the morning. Tracy said, ‘Bring the lamp.’ He was going to drop it on Lang.”
The sheriff’s standoff with the mob began with sharp words and angry demands, then accelerated to the hurling of rocks and bottles. Retreating into the jail, the sheriff’s men barricade the doors, firing tear gas out the windows. The ringleaders start battering down the doors, and upstairs Joe Wilson, Lang’s everyman, calls out desperately to anyone within earshot: “Jailer! Jailer! Can’t anyone hear me? Let me out! I’ll talk to ’em! Let me out! Give me a chance!” The mob pushes past the sheriff and his men and overruns the jail, but when they find the keys are beyond their reach, they torch the building instead. Stroking his dog, hard against the corner of his cell, Joe watches helplessly as the smoke thickens and begins to curl around them. “Well, Rainbow, it doesn’t look so good for us.” And down below, as the mob grotesquely watches the building burn in utter silence, Katherine pushes her way through in time to see Joe’s anguished face framed in a barred window and faints dead away.
The last segment, shot midway through production when Tracy and Lang were still on speaking terms, was Joe’s appearance in court after Katherine has discovered that he is still alive. He witnesses the conviction of the people responsible for the torching of the jail, then makes his entrance. The mob’s de facto leader, Dawson, clambers over the others and is sprinting toward the door when he freezes in midstride, his eyes wide with astonishment. There, in reverse, is the dead man himself, moving