• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3845 0

committed, Ford set about creating the most comfortable of working environments. The script, written by Ford’s frequent collaborator Frank Nugent, was such a faithful job of adaptation that it was scarcely mentioned in the few meetings between Tracy and Ford that led up to production. Surrounding Tracy in the film would be, as Ford put it, his “ex-pals and ex-playmates”—Jimmy Gleason, Wallace Ford, Frank McHugh, and, making his first major studio appearance in six years, Pat O’Brien. Ford filled out the cast with a sterling collection of character people, Basil Rathbone, Donald Crisp, Edward Brophy, John Carradine, and Jane Darwell among them. Jeffrey Hunter was borrowed from Fox to play Adam Caulfield, the pipe-smoking sportswriter invited to follow one last campaign by his uncle Frank, and the cast was completed with such vintage names as Ricardo Cortez, Basil Ruysdael, Edmund Lowe, Anna Lee, Ruth Clifford, Hank Mann, Tom Neal, Mae Marsh, and Julius Tannen.

A wardrobe fitting on February 13 gave Ford an opportunity to stress the importance of Tracy’s performance in the film. This was a big picture, Ford emphasized, with a budget of $2.5 million and an aggressive thirty-five-day schedule. Tracy would have a wonderful line of support, but in the end it would be up to him—and him alone—to carry the picture. Tracy spent the next few days at home, studying the script, honing his characterization. From the book he knew Skeffington as a vigorous seventy-two-year-old, a man of thoroughgoing cynicism who nevertheless made himself the most accessible of public figures, comfortable in the knowledge that all successful political activity harbored an element of quid pro quo.

“I’d like to say that I have a theory about acting,” Tracy had said at the time of The Mountain. “But I don’t. It’s just that I was born a sentimental Irishman, and I play the parts the way they react on me.” The way the part of Skeffington reacted on him was a constant source of delight to John Ford. He was, Ford later said, a “wonderful guy” with whom to work. “When I say Spencer Tracy is the best actor we ever had, I’m giving you something of my philosophy of acting. The best is most natural. Scenery never gets chewed in my pictures. I prefer actors who can just be.”

Filming began on February 24, 1958. Returning to Gower Gulch for the first time since Man’s Castle, Tracy marveled at the span of time. “John Ford—after 28 years—!” he wrote in his datebook. The first scene that morning had Skeffington descending the staircase of the mayoral mansion, the usual crowd of supplicants gathered outside the gate. Pausing on the landing before a portrait of his late wife, he gently removes the single rose at its base, as he has done every day since her death, and replaces it with a fresh one. He then pauses to gaze up at her, warmed by her memory. The moment is as brief as it is heartfelt, and it energizes him for the day ahead. “Well, Winslow,” he says, resuming his descent, “is the lark on the wing this morning?”

Tracy resisted The Last Hurrah because of John Ford’s involvement, but the experience was a pleasant surprise for both men. (SUSIE TRACY)

Surrounded in this initial scene by Gleason, Brophy, O’Brien, others, Tracy’s natural charm and authority took hold, and he was at once the wily politician of O’Connor’s famed novel. Regarding the stack of wires on his desk—the result of his announcement that he will run for reelection—he says wryly, “We should be getting a kickback from Western Union.” To which one of his henchmen responds, “I spoke to them about it last year—negative.”

Though envisioned by Ford as a character study, much of The Last Hurrah was played as broad comedy, the humor rooted in the reality of the Irish-American experience. When Skeffington storms the restricted battlements of the Plymouth Club, he does so with a Jewish ward healer in tow. When a prominent banker blocks a slum clearance project, Skeffington appoints the man’s wastrel son to the post of fire commissioner and then uses the resulting photographs as blackmail.

When it came time