Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [190]
It was astonishing. Having resigned from the academy, Tracy hadn’t considered the possibility of a nomination, much less in the company of men like Huston and Muni, both of whom he regarded as better actors. Moreover, he had managed the trick with a mere seventeen minutes of screen time in a picture that ran just shy of two hours. Given the general antipathy toward the academy on the part of the Screen Actors Guild membership—which had boycotted the Oscars the previous year—he seemed a little embarrassed by the whole thing.
Fleming was back in time to shoot Tracy’s last and most difficult scene, the death of Manuel in the icy waters off Gloucester. Tangled in the broken topmast of the We’re Here, his legs and chest crushed, Manuel is as good as dead and he knows it. (“He’s got about five hundred pounds of wire stay cuttin’ and stretchin’ him down,” a crew member gasps, working the line.) Manuel calls out to the crew in Portuguese so that young Harvey won’t know what he is saying. To the tearful boy he is his usual carefree self, says he’s tired and that he’s going to ask Disko to let him go. “I want to go, little fish. I no good anymore fishing here. I go fish with my father. You …’member I say he keep seat for me in his boat?”
On the morning of February 12, 1937, Tracy, with a philosophical grin, slipped down from the mast and into the studio tank, tangling himself in the wreckage, his wetsuit hidden under the water, the camera on a crane overhead, the microphone boom on a skiff to one side, Fleming and Hal Rosson on a skiff to the other. A couple of uniformed nurses stood on the sectional deck of the We’re Here in case of an accident. At a signal from Fleming the storm began.
“And what a storm!” columnist Robbin Coons observed.
Huge paddles churn up a frothy sea, clouds of spray fly with a roar from a towering wooden reservoir, and a huge funnel batters Tracy’s head with wind. The waves rise higher, higher, engulfing him, knocking him about as he yells his dialogue. Rescuers are John Carradine—just up from the flu—Dave Thursby, and Jack Stirling, all of whom get nearly as drenched as Tracy. And they do the scene three times. Before the last take Tracy, submerged in his art if ever an actor was, catches me leering on the sidelines and jeers, “You like to try it? If you’ve got to laugh, you might stay out of my line of vision!” But another wave breaks over him before I can explain it wasn’t laughter but an expression I always wear when wondering whether Metro is trying to drown Tracy.
The six-page scene took three long days to shoot, the exchange between Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew playing primarily in close-ups. Screenwriter John Lee Mahin, who was present during much of the shoot, was puzzled early on by Fleming’s distant staging of the scenes with Bartholomew. “I said, ‘Geez, this is a beautiful kid, Vic. It seems to me you’re not getting the close-ups of this kid.’ He said, ‘Wait till we need ’em. Wait till they’ll have some effect.’ I said, ‘Well, when will that be?’ He said, ‘When he starts crying and breaking. That’s when we’ll go in to see him.’ And this tough bastard starts to move in on him. He was right.”
In an ever-rising state of panic, Harvey crawls out onto the splintered mast of the We’re Here. “You’re all right, aren’t you? You aren’t hurt, are you Manuel?” And Long Jack, floating alongside Manuel, calls out to the captain. “The drift is tightenin’ it! You got to cut loose, Disko—or it’ll take him in half!” And Harvey, scrambling into a dory, glances around