Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [418]
Jenny’s time in the hospital was brief—six weeks—and Spencer underwrote it. When she died, word came through Carroll that the funeral expenses were to be covered, too.
The Mountain, at first glance, would have seemed an unlikely vehicle for Spencer Tracy. The work of the prolific Russian-born novelist and historian Henri Troyat, it told the story of a retired mountain guide pressed back into service when an airliner crashes in the French Alps. Based on an actual event, the 122-page novel was first published in the United States in 1953. Tracy read a review of the book in England; subsequently, he gave it to Eddie Dmytryk. “It’s a simple story,” he later said, “full of honest suspense and character, a Cain and Abel tale of two brothers on a mission to a wrecked airplane in the Alps. They fight the elements, themselves, and each other. It depicts the contrast of good and evil. An emotional back-breaker, believe me.”
He tried getting Metro to buy the rights, only to learn that Paramount had snapped them up for the bargain price of $10,000. Within a couple of months, Tracy had made a deal with Don Hartman, Paramount’s production chief, to star in the picture as soon as he was free of his M-G-M contract. Alpine weather conditions dictated a start in late August or early September, when the snow level would be at seven thousand feet and the daytime temperature at Luzern would be a very tolerable sixty-five degrees. Dmytryk signed on in May while Tracy and Sam Zimbalist were locking horns over Tribute to a Bad Man. The irony was lost on no one that Tracy gained his release from that picture on the basis of altitude, only to step into a part that would put him at elevations considerably higher than the six thousand feet he found so debilitating at Montrose.
Tackling the script was the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, whose previous job for Paramount had been the listless Humphrey Bogart comedy We’re No Angels. Agreeing with Tracy that the story was essentially “Cain and Abel on a mountain,” MacDougall deliberately simplified the two brothers—the older one embarking on one last climb to rescue survivors, the younger intent more on looting the crash site than on checking it for signs of life. The result became a treatise on the nature of human greed, a sort of snowbound Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Having carefully balanced the story between the two competing characters, MacDougall clashed with Dmytryk over the casting of twenty-five-year-old Robert Wagner as brother to the fifty-five-year-old Tracy. “To me, as a primal contest between simple good and simple evil, it called for an equality of forces involved,” MacDougall said. “Wagner seemed to me to be a born loser in a contest with Tracy. I am not questioning the ability of Wagner as an actor by this, merely stating my approach to the subject. I had written the part with Charlton Heston in mind.1 As an antagonist for Tracy, it seemed to me the outcome of the contest would be in doubt with a stronger man. With Wagner, I felt that the younger man would emerge as being petulant rather than powerfully evil. Also, of course, the mountain climbing contest of man against nature did not play as well as it might have with a stronger pair.”
Dmytryk explained his rationale: “Spence had had a good relationship with Robert Wagner during the shooting of Broken Lance; he also had a very realistic attitude regarding his own box office appeal. He felt that Wagner might attract the younger and larger audience and suggested we try to borrow him from 20th. I agreed with his analysis (as it turned out,