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By Root 4010 0

in my hand full of blood. And we got started. I take the first blow, and his knee comes up and into my face and misses me by a quarter inch. I hit my face with the sponge and dropped it and the blood spurted out. And Spence was standing there watching and said, “Jesus Christ, they killed him!” Then I went through the [screen] door. In rehearsal, the door flew open. But for the take, they had closed the door, and locked it, and I can still see the screws flying out the door when I went through it. I picked up myself, and the take was fine. And then I went to find the son of a bitch that had locked the door. Well, no one would own up to it. Years later, I visited John Sturges in Cuernavaca, when he’s shooting The Magnificent Seven, and he owned up to it. It was Sturges that had locked the door.

Sturges said,

We were interested in [Black Rock] as a film, and what could be called the “message” in the film, to us, gave it the dimension of reality in the characters. It fleshed them out, it made them meaningful, gave them points of view. You can’t play scenes at a surface level. That’s Spence’s great trick in acting. Well, it’s not a trick; he has great ability in acting. He wasn’t playing on top. He was playing what was underneath.

He told me his method. It’s most interesting. I think it accounts for the substance in Spence’s work, certainly not just the talent of his ability on the screen. He would take the script, he told me, take it out to the desert, read it aloud, the whole script, not just his part, to evaluate not only the picture, [but] his relationship to it. And, perhaps most important of all from Spence’s standpoint, he said, was where he should come on and where he should lay back. You can’t hit all the time. You can’t overwhelm all the time. And Spence would lay away until those moments when he felt he should come on. And the nicest compliment I ever got as a director was when he said, “You know where those are too.” He said, “I can tell.” Then he would do that again—read it aloud. The only thing Spence ever suggested in a script were cuts of himself, so that he wasn’t on too much. Then he said that he prepared in a way that just kind of had to be a secret. He said, “It’s mechanical.” He’d memorize the lines, then he wouldn’t look at them for five days. So that when he looked at people, he was hanging onto them as if he was listening to them for the first time—because, in fact, he was. He wasn’t that sure what they were going to say.

“He listened,” said Millard Kaufman, “with every fiber of his entire body. It was almost to say he was leaning toward you to pick up every word. And then he knew a great deal about film. He knew what would work and he knew apparently what would not. I remember on more than one occasion we’d do a scene and the setup would be finished and John would say, ‘Thank you. Cut. Let’s go over here.’ And Spencer wouldn’t budge. He’d just stand there with his finger on his nose, the way he always does, and frown, and John would look over there and say, ‘Let’s do it once more.’ So, he was not a passive actor. He knew what was going on every minute of the time.”

John Ericson’s big scene with Tracy came at the top of the third act, when Macreedy knows that Smith and his men are going to kill him. Doc Velie (Brennan) has come over to Macreedy’s side, but there’s not much he can do without help.

“Tracy said to me, ‘What are the ideas in your head about this scene?’ ” Ericson recalled. “And I told him … He said, ‘All very good. You’ve got seven or eight things right there, but you’ve got to take the most important one—the one that works for you—and that’s the only hat you hang on the hat tree. That’s all, and you play that. Otherwise, it gets so cluttered up the audience is going to have a problem figuring out what’s going on. Because you’ve got seven different things going. The other six things can be underneath the surface, but you don’t let those out. You just have this one thing you hang your hat on.’ That was a wonderful piece of advice.”

When action was called, Tracy was positioned