Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [219]
After observing three days of Boys Town being filmed in Omaha, Tracy’s uncle Andrew got the idea to have a print of the completed film sent to Williamsville, in upstate New York, where Spencer’s eighty-three-year-old aunt, Sister Mary Perpetua, was living. Having taken her vows in 1875, the nun had never seen a moving picture, and Andrew thought Spencer’s playing a priest would be a terrific introduction to his work as an actor. Frank Whitbeck promised to arrange a showing, and everyone at the convent was invited to attend. Sister remembered Spencer all right—not as an actor but as a truck driver who came through Buffalo during the brief time he had been on the payroll at Sterling Truck. “A bum!” she’d erupt when his name came up. Pressed, she’d tell how she and another nun had been to downtown Buffalo and had seen his name on a marquee. “Humph! He never called me up, never wrote to me, never invited me out!” They couldn’t seem to make her understand that he wasn’t physically present at the theater, so her half-sister, Jenny Feely, went to Williamsville to be with her for the showing.
“She was in a wheelchair,” Jenny’s daughter, Jane, said of the nun, “and they wheeled her in to see the movie of her nephew as Father Flanagan. All the nuns were there and they thought it was great, it was wonderful, and they congratulated her afterwards. ‘Wasn’t that wonderful?’ they’d say. ‘Yes,’ she’d say, ‘Father Flanagan, he was a good man. He had an orphanage, you know.’ Because she had run an orphanage. Mama said she wasn’t really sure that she connected Spencer with Father Flanagan.”
Boys Town drew fresh attention to Tracy’s work as a priest, coming as it did some two years after his turn as Father Tim in San Francisco, as no one had stepped up and attempted another modern priest in the interim.1 The reviews of the New York dailies weren’t quite as laudatory as the ones that had come out of the press preview, Frank Nugent, for one, pointing out the “artificial plot leverage” that came to the rescue once the screenwriters realized they had made Whitey Marsh “too tough a nut to crack” in the natural development of the story. “The highway accident involving Pee Wee, his little chum; the bank robbery and kidnaping; the flood of tears in the last reel, strike a too-familiar discord. It manages, in spite of the embarrassing sentimentality of its closing scenes, to be a consistently interesting and frequently touching motion picture.”
Tracy’s performance was universally praised, and several prominent critics predicted another Oscar win. When Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times omitted his name from his annual list of proposed nominees, the volume of Schallert’s mail swelled in protest. (One letter objecting to the snub was signed by thirty-six students from Santa Monica Junior College.) “The omission is duly recognized,” Schallert assured his readers in a follow-up, “and certainly Spencer Tracy merits a place in the nominations for both his performances in Test Pilot and Boys Town. And from a practical standpoint, Mr. Tracy could win the Academy statuette again this year if the voters in the organization are so minded. In fact, Mr. Tracy’s qualifications as an actor would entitle him to win the award almost every year.”
Boys Town was a big commercial success, taking in over $4 million in worldwide billings. As Schallert discovered, there was broad popular support for Tracy’s Best Actor nomination, and when the announcement came down on the night of February 5, 1939, nobody was surprised other than perhaps Tracy himself. The nominations, made by Class A members of the Screen Actors Guild, put James Cagney up for his work in Angels With Dirty Faces—a terrific performance—as well as Charles Boyer (Algiers), Robert Donat (The Citadel), and Leslie Howard (Pygmalion). M-G-M came away with four productions,