Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [191]
“No!” he gulps.
“We ain’t cuttin’ loose,” Disko returns, “unless it’s gonna help you free Manuel!”
And Manuel calls out, “You cut him away, Disko! You hear me?”
Resigned, the captain says, “Get me an ax,” knowing that cutting the line is a task that only he can do.
“No!” pleads Harvey. “Captain Disko! No!”
With Freddie now within inches of Tracy’s face, Fleming managed the most intimate of exchanges against the commotion of Barrymore’s futile attempts at rescue, the ax’s blows registering ominously on the soundtrack, Tracy bobbing and wincing in pain, striving mightily to convince the boy that he’s really okay. “We have good times together, eh, little fish? We laugh, we sing, so you smile now. Come on, little fish …”
“Long Jack can fix it. You’ll be all right, won’t you Manuel?”
“Manuel, he be watching you. You be best fisherman ever.”
And as the ax severed the line, the apparatus pulled Tracy down into the water and out of sight, Freddie clawing at the surface, the men restraining him, the cold finality of the moment weighing on both him and the audience.
Freddie Bartholomew managed the scene with tremendous restraint, on the verge of tears as the terror grips him yet never out of control, never permitting himself to completely let go. Tracy understood that it was Freddie’s scene more fully than it was his own, and he played it as would an expert straight man, feeding the lines the boy could respond to, giving him the spotlight even as Fleming insistently cut to Manuel. In the end, it’s the audience’s empathy with Harvey, and not Manuel’s brave exit, that so powerfully puts the scene across.
“Well, I got away with it,” Tracy said after it was all over. “Want to know why? Because of Freddie, because of that kid’s performance, because he sold it 98%. The kid had to believe in Manuel, or Manuel wasn’t worth a quarter. The way he would look at me, believe every word I said, made me believe in it myself. I’ve never said this before, and I’ll never say it again. Freddie Bartholomew’s acting is so fine and so simple and so true that it’s way over people’s heads. It’ll only be by thinking back two or three years from now that they’ll realize how great it was.”
One day on the lot a few weeks later, Tracy breezed into his dressing room and told Yvonne Beaudry they could see a runoff of the finished picture, which had taken five long months to shoot. Inside a studio projection room, they watched Manuel regenerate the pampered Harvey and then go to his watery grave. “When we emerged from the dark room into bright sunlight,” Beaudry remembered, “I was ashamed that my eyes were filled with tears. To my astonishment, Tracy’s eyes also were moist and red and he quickly hid them behind sunglasses.”
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1 There was no “hazardous acts” clause in Tracy’s M-G-M contract, but the matter was taken up with a number of players after the death of actor Gordon Westcott in October 1935. Tracy informally agreed to refrain from playing polo during the production of a picture, as did Robert Montgomery and Clark Gable. Under pressure from their respective boards, studio executives Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck gave up the game altogether—Zanuck quite reluctantly—and, in time, so did Walt Disney.
2 Announced as Three Time Loser, the film was ultimately made and released as You Only Live Once (1937).
3 This was the Portuguese actor Rodrigo de Medicis.
CHAPTER 13
The New Rage
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With the completion of his scenes for Victor Fleming, Tracy went into his next picture without a break. As he remembered it, “they hauled me out of the water on a Saturday afternoon when we finished Captains Courageous. Monday morning, I was standing in the middle of the street of a shell-torn village on the back lot, and Woody Van Dyke was ordering Harry Albiez, his prop man, to outfit me to the last cartridge.”
The film version of a pacifist best seller, They Gave Him a Gun was initially to have been directed by Fleming, who saw it as “a great anti-war document.” Then, when Captains