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with young Pazos, still not sure how the narration would work in around it. Reshot by Sturges were Zinnemann’s scenes at the terraza, where the boy buys the Old Man a beer after eighty-four days without a fish, and a lengthy exchange in the Old Man’s shack, where Santiago talks hopefully of the work ahead. (“Tomorrow is the eighty-fifth day. Eighty-five is a lucky number.”) Paul Osborn always felt the core of the picture was the relationship between the Old Man and the boy, and now their love for each other was finally coming across. “He is very appealing and very touching,” Hayward said of Pazos. “The fact that he is little and has that serious face has been greatly utilized by John Sturges, and he comes out of it like a little boy who is trying very hard to be a grown up and like a man. Sturges has done an extraordinary job with him.”

They finished with the boy on August 6, leaving the balance of the work to be done on the process stage and in the tank. Howe created the glare of the tropical sun with a blazing bank of photo floods that pulled sixty thousand watts of electricity when fully illuminated. Bob Thomas visited the set to do a piece on why the film had taken so long and found Tracy in his dressing room.

“Maybe Zinnemann couldn’t stand to see my face every morning,” Tracy suggested. “I don’t know. Anyway, he finally quit.” The company, he said, burned through $3 million in Cuba, yet the Cuban footage would comprise only 20 percent of the movie. By then Jack Warner figured he was in too deeply to scrap the thing and approved another $2 million to get it completed. “Luckily,” said Tracy, “they had an actor who was stupid. I put off other pictures to remain available for this one. I’ve got Ten North Frederick to do at Fox and The Last Hurrah at Columbia, and I didn’t know if they would wait for me. Fortunately, both schedules have been pushed back … Yeah, I really wanted to do The Old Man and the Sea. But if I had known what trouble it was going to be, I never would have agreed to it. This is for the birds.”

It was when floating alone in the tank on Stage 7 that Tracy’s value to the troubled company became most forcefully apparent, for he had nothing other than the Old Man’s words and his wits as an actor to carry the picture. The quiet routine at sea, the flying fish, the man-o’-war hovering overhead … and then comes the first tentative tugs at the line. “Never have I had such a strong fish,” he speaks wearily, “or one that acted so strangely … Maybe he’s too wise to jump. He could ruin me with a jump … or one quick rush … Maybe he has been hooked many times before and he knows this is how he must make his fight.” And then the resolve that comes when, rising to the night sky, the line clutched powerfully in his hands, he pulls at it with all the strength that is in him. “Fish,” he declares, his jaw set for battle, “I love you and I respect you very much—but I will kill you before this day ends!”

As Hayward wrote Hemingway, “The difference in Tracy’s performance is amazing. Freddie kind of played him like he was a senile old man tottering around barely able to walk or stand up. Sturges has directed him obviously like he is an old man but still with great virility and great strength still in him. Obviously unless he did have these qualities it would be impossible for him to go through the ordeal that he had to. Spencer is deeply moving in the picture and very believable.”

By August 9 they had roughly two weeks of work left to do, yet they still had not resolved the problem of narration. Knowing Tracy did not feel that he could play the part, say the dialogue, and do the voice-over as well, Hayward had actor Joseph Cotten record a scratch track that could be used for cutting purposes. He then proposed that Hemingway himself do the narration—a job Hemingway said that he “could not and would not do.” On August 30, Tracy marked his fifty-first and final day on the film, bringing an end, nine days behind schedule, to a project that had been foremost in his mind for nearly five years. The following day he shaved off