Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [193]
Predictably, the reception accorded They Gave Him a Gun didn’t engage him nearly as much as that for Captains Courageous, which had its gala premiere at L.A.’s Carthay Circle on the night of May 14, 1937. Where Gun was essentially a programmer—albeit with some high-powered talent attached—Captains Courageous was a two-a-day roadshow attraction, a genuine event in the world of film. Unfortunately, the press preview at Grauman’s Chinese a few weeks earlier had taken some of the gleam off the film’s official opening, and a lot of top names passed on the privilege of paying five dollars apiece to see it again. Even with invites and comps worked in, the 1,500-seat theater was only half full, something of an embarrassment for M-G-M’s Strickling, who also had to contend with several hundred union pickets.
Tracy, however, seemed oddly relieved by the forced intimacy of the evening, and although the reaction at the press preview had been overwhelmingly positive, he was still unsure as to how his work would be received by the general public. All he could see in his own performance were the tricks of the characterization—the makeup, the curly hair, the dime store accent. (At Grauman’s, a man had patted him on the head and said, “All you needed was a derby hat.”) Two lines of Portuguese had to be dubbed by another actor, and those lines grated every time he heard them. “This is Freddie’s night,” he told the radio audience in all sincerity, “and that’s how it should be.”
But the audience could see that night what Tracy could not: a glowing portrayal of all that was good and profound in a simple man of the sea. The mechanics of the performance mattered not nearly so much as its heart, and Louella Parsons reported bursts of applause from the likes of Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Columnist Harrison Carroll, having passed on the press preview, marveled at the film’s power to move such a jaded crowd: “Of all the stiff-shirted gentlemen and the décolleté ladies in the audience, I doubt if there was a single one who did not weep with Freddie Bartholomew over the death of Spencer Tracy, the story’s lovable Manuel. The relationship of these two has been made into a masterpiece of screen sentiment.”
Tracy gave Victor Fleming full credit for the success of Captains Courageous. (SUSIE TRACY)
Audiences, perhaps aware the picture wasn’t another Mutiny on the Bounty, took their time embracing it. In Los Angeles, it started building after a dismal first few days, posting a second-week gross considerably better than the first. In New York, it followed The Good Earth into the elegant little Astor, Loew’s premiere house for roadshow attractions, and did well without ever quite reaching capacity business. Pushing the film with characteristic candor, Tracy talked to any number of journalists, both foreign and domestic. He told Philip K. Scheuer he thought his performance “hammy” but was nevertheless convinced it was a great picture.
“The man to be thanked because Captains Courageous turned out as well as it did is the director, Victor Fleming. You’ll never know what he went through—six months, mostly on a process stage with only three sections of boat to work with, the stinking smell of fish, Freddie Bartholomew limited to four hours of work a day—and Fleming himself sick as a dog half the time.” To Gladys Hall he added: “He must have done a magnificent job, because it was the first picture of mine I ever saw where I sat and forgot all about myself, lost track that that was me up there.”
Ida Zeitlin thought she caught something of Manuel’s glow in a story Carrie Tracy