Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [408]
and he’s talking to me, trying to get me to say what happened. And I won’t say anything. He finally takes a bottle of booze and sets it on the counter in front of me and says, “It’s going to take a lot of whiskey to wash out your guts.” And I reach down to grab the bottle and take a swig. Sturges, I remember, had said, “John, now reach for the bottle.” So I look at the bottle and the scene’s not working.
It’s not working, and it’s getting to be quitting time for Mr. Tracy. (He quit at four o’clock every day. He was there bright and early, but he quit at four.) Finally, Tracy said to Sturges, “This scene isn’t working.” And I said, “Yes, it’s not working. I’m very uncomfortable in this scene.”
So Tracy says, “I’ll tell you what: Let’s call it a day. We’ll go at this in the morning.”
I said, “Great. Thank you.”
Sturges says, “Okay, quittin’ time!”
Next morning we come in, and we were getting ready for the scene again. Tracy comes out. “You know what’s wrong with the scene?” he says, and he looks at me. He looks at Walter Brennan. He looks at Sturges. And he’s waiting for somebody to respond. And we’re all afraid to respond because we’re thinking this genius here is really going to show us up, you know?
He said: “The problem is, when John goes for that whiskey bottle, we break eye contact. Can’t he just grab the bottle without breaking eye contact?”
I said, “I sure as hell can.”
Sturges said, “Okay, roll ’em.” So we did it, and that’s how the scene is.
The climactic face-off between Macreedy and Reno Smith takes place in the desert, Smith armed with a hunting rifle, Macreedy only his wits and his one good arm. Taking cover behind his jeep, Macreedy improvises a Molotov cocktail with an empty soda bottle and the gas in the vehicle’s tank. In order for the incendiary to have any value, the audience must know that Macreedy would be carrying matches.
“I had in the script,” said Millard Kaufman, “that Macreedy was a smoker. So to show a kind of determination (if you could call it that; anyway, it was theatrical) I had him at one point light a cigarette by taking a book of matches out of his pocket and, with one hand, flipping into a horseshoe shape a single match, [which he] rubs against the striking surface, and then he puts the flame to the cigarette. And Spencer calls and says, ‘Look, I’m an old man with arthritis. Why don’t I have a Zippo, which everybody in the army had? I still got a few of them.’ I said, ‘Fine.’ ”
Freed from a bit of business better suited to Lon Chaney in his prime, Tracy ignited the device with a common cigarette lighter and sent Ryan’s stunt double to a sizzling death. The last scene in the picture becomes a reversal of the first, the train pulling into Black Rock, Macreedy leaving the younger Komoko’s medal with the remaining townspeople as a way of giving them “something to build on.”
“What’s the excitement?” the conductor asks as Macreedy climbs aboard. “What happened?”
“A shooting,” Macreedy says.
“Thought it was something. First time this streamliner’s stopped here in four years.”
“Second time,” Macreedy corrects as he disappears into the car.
Tracy left for Europe on August 30, stopping off in Manhattan to see New York Giants manager Leo Durocher and his wife, the actress Laraine Day. Troubled by the pinched nerve in his neck, he spent the month of September following a regimen of traction and heat treatments while attending the playoffs and the first two games of the World Series.
“We were just going into the winning streak that clinched the pennant,” Durocher remembered, “and I was able to keep him with us for the next two weeks by convincing him that I needed his advice. ‘How could you leave me now?’ I’d say every time he pleaded that they were waiting for him in Europe. ‘I can’t possibly win without your help.’ I kept him in New York while