Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [455]
Humphrey Bogart knew it was an illusion, that the wheels were always turning, but that Tracy never showed the mechanism at work. “He covers up,” Bogart said. “He never overacts or is hammy. He makes you believe he is what he is playing.” Laraine Day saw a hint of it in The Last Hurrah, the precision with which Tracy tackled a scene. “Well, for example, an actor is normally trained never to turn his back on an audience, unless it’s for some deliberate purpose … Tracy is talking [to Jeffrey Hunter] and he’s going to walk to a window over there. So he walks away from the camera and stoops and picks up a pin for absolutely no reason, sets it on the table, and continues on. And I will bet you that no one in that theater will remember he ever did that. But watch his performances: they are filled with everyday things like that. Finding a little thing here, a little thing there and getting rid of it, but you’re never aware that he’s done it.” Said James Cagney, who loved watching him: “I’m easy to imitate, but you never saw anyone imitate Spence Tracy. You can’t mimic reserve and control very well.”
Tracy’s best performances were orchestrated in movements, as in a symphonic score. He touched on this when he told John Sturges he would go over a script, read it aloud, and determine “where he should come on and where he should lay back.” There was no impact in hitting all the time, no advantage in constantly trying to overwhelm an audience. To do it well required the right material, and only occasionally did he get it. Fury was such a script, as were The Show-Off, The Power and the Glory, and, curiously, Northwest Passage. He never thought he had achieved it with Jekyll and Hyde, couldn’t feel it with Edison or Cass Timberlane. The best pictures with Kate had it—Woman of the Year, Adam’s Rib, Pat and Mike. Father of the Bride had it; The Actress, certainly. And, of course, Bad Day at Black Rock, though you couldn’t have convinced him of that at the time.
“Spencer Tracy is the kind of actor I like to watch,” Marlon Brando told Truman Capote in a 1957 New Yorker profile. “The way he holds back, holds back—then darts in to make his point, darts back. Tracy, Muni, Cary Grant. They know what they’re doing. You can learn something from them.”
Despite the quality of Frank Nugent’s screenplay, there was no real chance for Tracy to open up in The Last Hurrah, no darting in and darting back. Ford had surrounded him with such a broadly drawn cast of characters that he went through much of the film serving as straight man to actors like Gleason, Brophy, Wally Ford, Frank McHugh.
Inherit the Wind would be an entirely different proposition, however, a shrewd dramatization of one of the century’s most colorful trials, a story pulsing with the natural ebb and flow of controversy. In taking on the role of Henry Drummond, Tracy would be assuming the mantle of one of Kramer’s boyhood heroes, the crusading criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow. It was Darrow’s courtroom battle with Bryan, spurred by the determination of the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge a Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution in the schools, that defined both men in the public imagination: Darrow, the passionate Chicago progressive, squaring off against Bryan, the bumptious Bible-thumper. They were images—cartoons almost—that proved irresistible to Lawrence and Lee, radio dramatists with a keen