Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [406]
Tracy made the five-hour trip home that evening, driving out to the valley on Saturday to discuss John’s plans for a divorce after fifteen months of marriage.
The release of Broken Lance came on July 29, 1954, when the picture opened its New York engagement at the Roxy Theatre. Tracy had seen it twice, once by himself, again with Louise and the kids. (Weeze thought the picture good and said it would do excellent business; Spence judged his own performance more harshly and thought he had overacted in spots.) The trade notices were wonderful, Variety proclaiming “a grownup CinemaScope, a process that has lived up to the pioneer The Robe.”
Tracy and Robert Ryan play a tense exchange for Bad Day at Black Rock. Director John Sturges, in sunglasses and white cap, is seated next to the camera. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Presented in four-track magnetic sound, Broken Lance promised audiences the kind of visual and aural thrills they now seemed to demand in pictures, and it came close to matching the success of The Robe in its initial engagements. The family dynamics and Tracy’s commanding performance as the hard-bitten Devereaux also seemed to resonate across generational and cultural lines.
“I thought I put my old man in Broken Lance,” screenwriter Richard Murphy commented, “and my son says, ‘Goddamn, there’s dad.’ So I guess the father’s universal. I went to Japan later on, and have a very dear friend over there, whom I met when I was shooting Three Stripes in the Sun, and the guy said to me, ‘I saw Broken Lance—it’s exactly like my father!’ Tracy didn’t look very Japanese, but I can see what the guy meant.”
When work on Black Rock resumed in Culver City on August 9, Tracy was at work on a painting of Mount Whitney he had started on location. The heat had been a considerable distraction, and in Culver City temperatures were twenty-five degrees cooler. The pressure that always accompanied the start of a film had dissipated; Sturges was working ahead of schedule, printing a lot of initial takes, supremely confident in the script, the actors, and the footage he had. “We shot almost no film at all—no negative, that is, because you shoot negative and then you print part of it—I think something like 86,000 negative [feet] for the whole picture. Only a handful of scenes were ever take two. Scene after scene after scene after scene was take one.”
After the implicit threat of violence colors the whole tone of the film, it finally erupts in the town diner, where Coley Trimble (Borgnine) crowds Macreedy to the point of no escape. Tracy, anxious about the scene, went to Sturges and Millard Kaufman.
“He was rather apologetic,” Kaufman remembered,
and he said, “I need a double for this.” John said, “Why?” And he said, “Well, if I hit somebody, I don’t think I’d be able to stop.” Now that could mean one of two things: It meant that he was so involved in a fictional character that it became natural or realistic to him to such an extent that he would get carried away by it. It could also have meant that he simply didn’t want to do it, which happens quite often with actors who are bright enough to give you another excuse for it. And he certainly was that. I don’t know what it was. All I know is that he did not want to hit anybody, so we got a double—and if you notice in the picture, all the close stuff with Coley, Ernie Borgnine, is over Spencer’s shoulder and you don’t see his face because it wasn’t him.
On location near Lone Pine for Bad Day at Black Rock. Left to right: Robert Ryan, Tracy, and studio head Dore Schary. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
“I wondered,” said Borgnine,
how the hell a man with one arm was going to fight me, and I’m a big husky guy. I went to John Sturges. “What do you have in mind?” [he said.] “Judo,” I said. And Sturges said, “Okay, do it.” So we got the stunt guy and worked out the scene.6 I figured I’d have somebody else double me, but Sturges wanted me to do it. Jesus Christ, what have I started? Well, I got ready and they put this piece of rubber