Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [181]
“Spencer Tracy plays the priest, and it’s the most difficult role in the picture,” Joe Bigelow, acknowledging the significance of Tracy’s achievement, wrote in Variety.
It was a daring piece of writing to begin with, and only the most expert and understanding handling could have kept it within the proper bounds. This man of the cloth would not be unusual in real life, but on the screen he’s a type never attempted before. His slang—he calls Gable “mugg” and “sucker” good naturedly—is the sort usually associated with men of lesser spiritual quality; in this instance the lingo is casually uttered by a character dressed in the vestments of the church. It’s explained that he was born on the Barbary Coast and that he and Blackie were raised together, and that qualifies his “eccentricities.” Tracy makes him human and refreshing, and his performance precludes any possibility of offense.
There was hardly a review published anywhere that wasn’t a rave, and even in summer, when business was typically slow, the crowds were phenomenal. In New York, Variety dubbed it “the smash of the town,” going up against a particularly strong slate of competing pictures that included the latest Shirley Temple movie and W. C. Fields’ hit comedy Poppy. “All signs point to a terrific $60,000 the first week, backed by a campaign that worked hard to push this one to a high peak. It’s the best business the Cap[itol] has done in as long as the boys want to remember, and a run of three or four weeks appears assured.”
The film, in fact, climbed to nearly $70,000 that first week, and held nicely over the Independence Day weekend. The story was the same in other cities as the release widened, and Tracy dutifully went on the CBS network’s Camel Caravan to push the picture. Underrehearsed and flat, he performed a scene from Saturday’s Children with Rosalind Russell and failed to impress the few trade reviewers who managed to catch the show. Radio was building into a bonanza for big-name movie personalities who could command as much as $5,000 an appearance, but it held little attraction for Spencer Tracy, who didn’t consider it acting to stand in front of a microphone while holding a script in his hand.
With both Fury and San Francisco in release simultaneously, network radio made little difference to him. In his review of the latter in the New York Times, Frank Nugent pointed to “another brilliant portrayal by Spencer Tracy” as the two-fisted Father Mullin. “Mr. Tracy, late of Fury, is heading surely toward an award for the finest performances of the year.” And columnist Ed Sullivan, who was actually appearing onstage with Fury at Loew’s State, filed a story with Silver Screen magazine in which he labeled Tracy “The Best Bet of the Year” for true stardom.
“A year ago,” Sullivan wrote,
it was Victor McLaglen who won the Academy Award for the year’s outstanding performance in The Informer. This year, Tracy will be in the forefront of the select group who will fight it out for the premiere award of the celluloid pundits … His Father Tim will be recognized in every Catholic parish in America, and perhaps the original walked the streets of Milwaukee when Spencer Tracy was going to the public schools there. It was the integrity of the priestly portrait