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the same controlled-burn techniques pioneered for Gone With the Wind. Exposed negative was flown nightly to Los Angeles, where it was processed at Technicolor’s Hollywood plant and sent on to the studio. Stromberg would see the rushes and then have them sent to Payette via Boise where Vidor and his crew would have them screened in what was once a gambling hall.1 It took twelve days to complete the sequence, and by the time the final takes were made, the copper tubing that fed the flames with gasoline had literally melted away. The remains of the ten-acre village were doused with 150 gallons of kerosene, and the heat from the blaze was so intense it could be felt against the granite cliffs on the opposite side of the Payette River.

Tracy grew increasingly irritable as production wore on, anxious to finish and intolerant of anything that might cause a delay. “He had an expression,” Vidor remembered. “I think it was ‘Happy days!’ which meant they just were not worrying about the film, not worrying about anything. There is always a big group in a company like that; they have hours and hours to sit around and play cards and yak without having the responsibility of making the film. That always seemed to annoy him and he’d say, ‘Happy days, happy days!’ They were just making a lark out of the whole thing.”

On location near McCall, Idaho, with director King Vidor, 1939. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

Tracy’s big speech in the picture comes when Rogers and his men reach Fort Wentworth and discover it abandoned. Running up ahead of them, Rogers takes in its weathered boards, the brush sprouting in its central yard, the utter emptiness of the place where they were to have had their first real food in weeks, and as his men approach excitedly, he leans up against a collapsed section of gate and breaks into tears. It was part of Vidor’s plan to signal a crack in Rogers’ heroic facade, a hint of the trouble to come in the second half of the story. Tracy, said Vidor, fought him bitterly: “At the end of the picture he breaks down for a minute when the British are not there to meet him at the fort. Well, Spencer didn’t want to cry. I persuaded him, though, and he did it, and I think he liked the results. But he didn’t want to, not at all. He said, ‘A strong man would never cry.’ ”

Pulling himself together, Rogers rallies his demoralized men. (“Now the first thing we have to do is get this fort in shape—for Amherst and his men when they get here with the food.”) And when they balk he launches into what was dubbed his “Moses speech” by King Vidor: “Moses went without the slightest taste of food for 40 days! He didn’t have any good cooked roots. No, not a thing. He didn’t have a single bite, did he Towne?” The first take was spoiled when the bulky Technicolor camera ran out of film, the second when Tracy stumbled over a word in a Bible passage. Vidor called for a third take, and Tracy did the entire three-minute-and-thirty-five-second speech flawlessly, his character teetering on the brink of madness, a shrewd amalgam of desperation and hope. When he finished there was dead silence. Vidor called “Cut!” and the crew erupted in a burst of applause.

More than any other bit in the picture, it was this one scene that caused Vidor to regard Tracy as just about the best actor with whom he ever worked. “Everything that Spence did,” he said, “came over with tremendous conviction.” Stromberg wired Vidor:

AGREE WITH YOU THAT SPENCER’S MOSES SCENE IS GREAT, JUST SCREENED IT WITH TALBOT AND WE WERE VERY ENTHUSIASTIC.

Vidor suggested that Stromberg communicate his enthusiasm directly to Tracy, and Stromberg did so, wiring:

HAVE SCREENED RUSHES FROM TWO TO THREE TIMES EACH DAY THEY ARRIVE WITH ONE SCREENING DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO SIZING UP YOUR PERFORMANCE AND TO SAY THAT I AM ENTHUSED AND ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE THAT WE ARE HEADED FOR A WONDERFUL ACHIEVEMENT IS PUTTING IT CONSERVATIVELY.

The company finished at Payette Lake on August 14 after forty-two days in the wilderness, and resumed work eight days later in the relative comfort of M-G-M’s Lot 3.