Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [298]
The Seventh Cross was the story of seven escapees from a German concentration camp in 1936. It was written by Anna Seghers, a Communist refugee who had made her way to Mexico in the opening days of World War II and obviously knew of what she wrote. The commandant swears he will return all the escaped men and display their bodies on crudely fashioned crosses in the prison yard as a lesson to the others. It is the one who ultimately escapes to freedom, George Heisler, who leaves the seventh cross empty.
When published in 1942 by Little, Brown, Seghers’ book was an immediate best seller, moving more than three hundred thousand copies in the space of twelve days. Pandro S. Berman, the producer responsible for most of Kate’s pictures at RKO, got Metro to buy the rights and subsequently sent the draft script, by first-time scenarist Helen Deutsch, to M-G-M contract director Fred Zinnemann for his “opinion.” Zinnemann had graduated to B-level features after serving an apprenticeship in the studio’s short subject department. He already knew the book well and thought it would make a very good movie. His participation, it turned out, was contingent upon Tracy’s approval.
Zinnemann approached the project with characteristic zeal, marking up his copy of the novel and storyboarding the entire movie with his own thumbnail sketches. On his heavily annotated copy of Deutsch’s October 22 script he wrote, “This is about the dignity of human beings.” He ran a number of Tracy’s M-G-M pictures and decided to model Tracy’s performance on his work in Fury. He did a good deal of character analysis and wanted Tracy to see The Informer. He also thought Tracy needed to lose weight for the role. Since the entire picture was set in Germany, standing sets on Lot 2 had to be modified, and the supporting cast became a colorful collection of refugees and character people headed by the husband-wife team of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.
Cronyn, making only his third film, bonded instantly with Zinnemann, who was bullied by a headstrong cinematographer in the person of Karl Freund. “His lighting took hours,” Cronyn remembered. “Walking onto the set, threading one’s way through the light stands, was like entering a bamboo thicket, and some lamp or other would inevitably get nudged and have to be refocused.” Tracy had worked with Freund before and knew him to be punctilious and overbearing, but Zinnemann was completely thrown by him. “Freund was anything but a friend,” said Zinnemann. “He was loud, slow, and obstreperous; working with him was like pulling out teeth, one by one.” Within days the picture was behind schedule.
“Zinnemann was first chosen as director for The Seventh Cross,” said Katharine Hepburn, “and Spencer did not know him [other than he’d] done some picture in Germany, and I cannot remember the name of it.3 Very distinguished, so Spencer said, Okay, he would take [him]. After a week, Metro wanted to yank Freddie Zinnemann off that picture. They were not satisfied with what he was doing, and Spencer said, ‘My friends, if you yank him, I’m joining him. You can make up your minds to that. You should not have suggested him in the first place. Now you have to give him the chance.’ ”
Backing down, Berman, who was also overseeing the production of Dragon Seed, peopled the stage with surrogates, including Helen Deutsch (who was, said Zinnemann, “possessive about changing a dot or a comma”) and his longtime assistant, Jane Loring. “I felt it was very important to get across the fact that just because you were a German it didn’t mean