Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [457]
“We were rehearsing and practicing some camera moves on a boom, which gives you a chance for another movement,” Kramer recalled, “and Spence said, ‘Why years ago I could remember at M-G-M, why Eddie Mannix came down on the set and he took the boom away from guys like you … They took it away, they locked it up in a room. They wouldn’t let you get near it.’ He said, ‘Here we are moving all over the place like a frightened barracuda.’ I got the message, which was: Let’s shoot this picture and let’s not start moving all over the place.”
Donna Anderson, relatively new to films, remembered Kramer’s mobile camera as a challenge Tracy chose to ignore. “When the shot was on me, I was doing waltzes around people because he wanted the camera to be working in. If I was saying something, I had to justify moving this way and then moving that way so he could have the fluidity in this little space with the camera. Well, when it came time for Spencer Tracy, he just said, ‘The camera will find me.’ ”
Drummond’s admonition to Rachael and Cates in the now empty Hillsboro courtroom, Hornbeck off to one side, the townspeople’s taunts still ringing in their ears, was Tracy’s first opportunity to come on, to take command of the film, the camera slowly circling him in one continuous three-minute take.
“I know what Bert is going through,” he tells the minister’s daughter. “It’s the loneliest feeling in the world. It’s like walking down an empty street, listening to your own footsteps.” And then to Cates, a harder edge to his words: “But all you have to do is to knock on any door and say, ‘If you’ll let me in I’ll live the way you want me to live and I’ll think the way you want me to think,’ and all the blinds will go up and all the doors will open and you’ll never be lonely, ever again. Now it’s up to you, Cates. You just say the word and we’ll change the plea— That is, of course, if you honestly believe that the law is right and you’re wrong. Now if that’s the case, just tell me and I’ll pack my bag and go back to Chicago where it’s a nice cool hundred in the shade.”
The business, the body language, the passion behind the eyes. There was no polish to Tracy’s Drummond, nothing mannered in his ragged delivery. Tracy, said Kramer, “reduced everything to a fine powder of simplicity, and that takes hard work, it takes a lot of hard work. ‘Improvisation,’ he always said, ‘is perspiration.’ There’s so much advance work to do so you can recognize something good if you saw it.”
There can be little doubt the performance took a lot out of him, and he didn’t seem well during the course of the shoot. Said Kramer,
I had been warned that he could be a bit irascible at times and kick up his heels if things got a little tight or if they weren’t going so well … He was doing a scene, about the third or fourth day we were shooting, and he mumbled a line, which is a stock-in-trade, really. He’d throw away a line or put an emphasis somewhere. He’ll play with it and tinker with it and put it here and put it there and finally get it the way he wants it, and that’s one of the reasons he’s so wonderful and so natural.
And I cut the scene and said, “Spence, I know what you’re doing with that line,” but I said, “We just didn’t understand it at all. It didn’t come through at all.” So there was a long pause, and when I tell you a long pause I mean a pause—you could have driven a train right through this pause—and he looked at me and he kind of clenched his teeth. He was overdoing it purposely a little bit. He looked at me and said, “Mr. Kramer”—just about in that tempo, but he never