Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [331]
M-G-M’s new year was awash in Technicolor and all-star casts, the few genuine vehicles on the schedule relegated to B-picture status, the studio settling into a new epoch as the leader in glossy musicals and little else. As a nod to the tastes of prewar audiences, there was still Andy Hardy, still Wallace Beery, still Lionel Barrymore and Robert Montgomery, Ann Sothern and Myrna Loy, but their appearances were fewer, their aging audiences now staying home more with the radio and, in a few cases, the TV set, leaving the neighborhood theaters to changing tastes and kids who wondered what the big deal was over someone like Gable. The Sea of Grass was tossed in with the other black-and-white features, a major attraction but not the event it might once have been. Set to open at Radio City Music Hall, its initial success was virtually assured, given the receptions accorded the three previous Tracy-Hepburn collaborations. The big question was whether Middle America would embrace a western so insistently artificial at a time when even Roy Rogers shot his pictures out of doors.
“I find my feeling for Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn is a mixture of personal respect and professional regret,” Shirley O’Hara wrote for the New Republic.
I’ve admired them for years, and would still rather watch them than any other team on the screen, but in The Sea of Grass it seems wasteful to let two such good, attractive actors wander through a lavish production like thoroughbred somnambulists. Hepburn of the beautiful bones is more polished than ever; Tracy, though he is no longer a priest—here he is a colonel and what the press has called a Cattle Baron—is still playing Father Tracy and is getting more pensive and solemn and good every day. I think back to when he was just Spencer Tracy and an exciting actor, though I minded his always wearing a gray felt hat, and those days are like a noisy picnic remembered in church. His playing has always been on the quiet side, but now that former underacting seems like a wild romp in the sun. And yet I’m sure there is still fire and magnetism behind his strength. It must be some mistaken actor’s mold he has made for himself (or his reputation), and the story chosen because of it, and the awed direction, that give his performance a static quality.
In Los Angeles, Louise and Jane Feely (in town for a job interview) went to a sneak at Spence’s behest. “It was one of those performances that was not all great on his part,” Jane recounted. “Louise said to me, ‘This is her picture.’ I said, ‘Sure is.’ When we came home, the phone rang. She said, ‘Uh oh, there he is. That’s Spencer.’ On the phone she was a good hour. She had to answer all the questions—Which scene? What scene? What did you think? She was in the other room and I kept hearing her say, ‘Well, it was her picture, Spencer. You let her have it. It was HER picture.’ When she got off the telephone, I said, ‘Was he not so happy with it?’ She said, ‘Well, it’s his own fault. She walked off with scenes.’ ”
Remarkably, The Sea of Grass did more than $3 million domestically and another $1.5 million in foreign billings, making it the most popular, commercially, of all the Tracy-Hepburn features. It now remained for Tracy to see if he had the same kind of commercial appeal without Hepburn, given that he hadn’t made a film without her since 1944. Starkly subtitled “A Novel of Husbands and Wives,” Cass