Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [383]
Plymouth Adventure was released on November 28, 1952, a Thanksgiving turkey that inspired more respect than praise, more lip service than business. While Clarence Brown readily admitted it was “not my best, not by any means,” Dore Schary was relentlessly optimistic about the picture, advising Tracy by cable of how well it was doing in preview (“cards wonderful, reaction good”) and how well Tracy’s performance had been received (“You are simply great and everybody says so.”) The press preview on October 20 had been polite, dignified, like the opening of a museum exhibit. The notices carefully embalmed the picture, Bosley Crowther labeling it “a thoroughly respectful and respectable adjunct to the schoolroom histories,” while Otis Guernsey, in the Herald Tribune, called it “the kind of film in which the characters cannot help being self-conscious of destiny.”
Most reviewers noted the truly spectacular storm sequence at the movie’s core but reserved comment on the pallid on-screen romance between Tracy and the doomed Gene Tierney. Business was weak from the outset, with its first-day gross comparable to that of The Magnificent Yankee, a modestly filmed play that boasted Louis Calhern and Ann Harding as its nominal stars. It went on to lose $1.8 million on total billings of just over $3 million—a disastrous showing.
Near the end of his life, Schary contemplated what exactly happened with the picture. “It sank!” he said after thinking a moment. “Plymouth Adventure had some wonderful things. The voyage. Clarence Brown did some great things. But we made terrible mistakes in the casting. I thought some of the people were good. I thought Tracy did well, Gene Tierney was nice, Leo Genn was properly stolid, but Van Johnson was a thorough error, just terrible. It just never worked. Maybe because pictures where they wear long knickers and those big collars can’t be made real. They can’t come to life. I wanted that picture very badly; I fought for it. But it was a loss.”
When Ruth Gordon began dabbling in autobiography, the results came in the form of articles in Forum and the Atlantic Monthly. In 1944 she collected her experiences as a hopelessly stage-struck young girl living on the outskirts of Boston into a play called Journey to a Star. Two years later, a substantially revised version titled Years Ago opened at the Mansfield Theatre in New York with Fredric March as Clinton Jones, Florence Eldridge as his wife Annie, and Patricia Kirkland as the playwright’s own younger self, Ruth Gordon Jones. The play was a modest hit, lasting 206 performances, and March walked off with the Tony that season for Best Actor. Just prior to its closing in May 1947, M-G-M was erroneously reported as having agreed to pay $425,000 to bring Years Ago to the screen, an astounding sum for the time. Much later, the price was fixed at a more realistic $75,000, and Metro acquired the rights with the understanding that Spencer Tracy was to star in it.
The screenplay was drafted over the summer of 1951, then put on ice as Pat and Mike and Plymouth Adventure took precedence. By the fall of 1952, the picture was moving toward production with Debbie Reynolds in the part of Ruth, an idea that had followed the property since its purchase. Tracy was happy to do the picture, but was against the casting of Reynolds, and over the space of sixteen months did everything he could to scuttle it. The first salvo came in the form of a letter from Garson Kanin to George Cukor in August 1951. Tracy, Kanin advised,