Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [396]
I had a resistance to my being in the movies from my father, you know. He didn’t want me to go into the movie business. So when Spence saw me in this movie and asked me to be in Broken Lance with him, it was great because he put his arm around me and he said, “You can really go someplace.” And I was one of a hundred and fifty good-looking young guys with a lot of hair in Hollywood.
As a boy, Wagner had lived at the Bel Air Country Club, where he occasionally caddied for Clark Gable. “He was always a terrific guy. I told him I got a job with Spence: ‘Jesus, can you imagine? I am going to do a movie with Spencer Tracy.’ He said to me, ‘Grab a prop and keep moving, kid.’ ”
Counting unbilled bits, Wagner had appeared in twelve motion pictures by the time of Broken Lance and thought he knew something of screen acting.
The first scene I had with Spence, we were on location in Arizona and we had to ride up into this sequence. I don’t remember what the dialogue was, but he said something like, “Were they here? Where did they go?” This guy says, “They went down that way.” And Spence says, “Did you hear that?” And I say, “Yeah, they went that way I guess.”
He said, “What? What was that? Can you bring it up a little next time so I can hear the cue?” And we ride back the next time and I bring it up a little. [Afterward,] I said, “Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t think there were very many people who could underplay you.”
He said, “Come here.” And he’d get that sort of face. “Come here!” He had this portable dressing room, and [we went inside and he] shut the door and sat down. He said, “Do you really think you could underplay me? Do you really think you could? Because you could never underplay me. That is not the point. What are you thinking about that for? Why would you be thinking that you could underplay me? Why don’t you think about playing the scene and being honest in it and bringing something of yourself to it and taking all this other stuff out of the way? Why don’t you think about that instead of being a smartass son of a bitch and trying to underplay me?”
I could see he was really starting to get hot. I said, “Yes sir, Mr. Tracy. You are absolutely right, and thank you very much.” He said, “Kid, get out of here!” But the fact that he took the time to do that was a big thing.
Directing Broken Lance was Edward Dmytryk, a former cutter who had graduated from formula product at Paramount to the first wave of film noir at RKO. Known as one of the Hollywood Ten, Dmytryk had rebuilt his career after a stretch in prison (and a controversial appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee) with a series of pictures for producer Stanley Kramer, the last of which, The Caine Mutiny, was still awaiting release. For Broken Lance, Dmytryk peopled the Santa Cruz Valley with a cast and crew numbering 130 individuals, along with forty steers and twelve unusually spirited horses.
Tracy and Dmytryk got on famously, in part because the director recognized the level of effort his fifty-three-year-old star was putting into his work. “He’d agonize over everything. He was searching for the character’s key.” Finding himself in a character was never easy for Tracy, and a long drive at the end of a workday gave him time to ponder the seemingly endless problem of inhabiting another man’s skin. For accommodations, Tracy chose to alternate between the Arizona Inn in Tucson, seventy miles from where the Broken Lance company was based, and Pantano Ranch, Lew Douglas’ 100,000-acre spread some thirty miles north at Sonoita.
Dmytryk knew that Tracy had played polo but wasn’t aware that it had been a number of years since he had last been on a horse. Tracy noted that Clark Gable refused to ride on camera and that Gary Cooper had to be hoisted into the saddle and would only ride