Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [473]
That said, he bristled at the inference that he was just playing himself. “Who the hell do you want me to play?” he would thunder. “Humphrey Bogart??” And then: “An actor’s personality is, naturally, a part of his performance. Alright, so you like mine. Big deal. Thanks.”
Chester Erskine went on to explain that “what he really meant was, ‘This judge is Spencer Tracy’ or ‘This priest is Spencer Tracy’ or ‘This lawyer is Spencer Tracy.’ He had learned how to bridge the gap between the real and unreal, the objective and the subjective. He did not act, he was.” Tracy, he continued, belonged to a school of art “which believed in selection—not how much the actor could do in any given scene, but how little he had to do to make the point, the constant refinement and editing of a performance until it had reached its minimum to make the maximum, the difference between those two margins being the audience’s own emotional participation.” As John Ford once said of Tracy: “I think he could play anything that he believed in.”
Following a week of rehearsal, getting the company on its feet, Kramer began shooting Judgment at Nuremberg on Wednesday, February 22—Washington’s Birthday. Working in sequence, he completed Scenes 24 through 26 and part of 27, the first scenes to take place in the courtroom at the Palace of Justice.
“The Tribunal will arraign the defendants,” Tracy said, delivering his first lines. “The microphone will now be placed in front of the defendant Emil Hahn.” His other lines that day were equally dry, and work broke off just ahead of Dick Widmark’s opening statement, a scene that would involve some ambitious camerawork. Impassioned and letter-perfect, Widmark’s speech the next day was covered with a 360-degree pan of the camera that took in the entirety of the courtroom and its spectator mix.
“Everyone in the crew had to carry the cables and equipment around in a circle for that,” Kramer explained. “It’s the funniest thing in the world to see happen on the set. Out of the dullness of the situation I circled him in order to pick up Tracy and the judges in the shot without simply cutting. It was just something I worked out—where Widmark’s lines would occur in relation to who is seen in the background. We rehearsed a long time for that—to photograph people just at the right Widmark line.”
Throughout the tedium of the technical rehearsals, Tracy remained in place, patient and compliant. “All you can do,” he said of the inherently static nature of the action, “is play it. The big difficulty in this picture is in Mr. Kramer’s lap as a director.”
Widmark’s scene was followed by Maximilian Schell’s equally impassioned opening statement for the defense. Testimony began with Widmark’s examination of actor John Wengraf, playing Ernst Janning’s former law professor. “When we started to shoot,” said Marshall Schlom, “Tracy would come in and do the off-stage shots as well. When he was off stage, he would say, ‘Come sit next to me.’ And then he would say, ‘Nudge me when I’m supposed to say something’ because every five or six pages he had to say something like, ‘Objection sustained.’ ”
Marlene Dietrich was on hand from the beginning, observing on the stage and distributing cookies and danishes to cast and crew members, some of whom had worked with her when she made Destry Rides Again on the Universal lot in 1939. She had no substantive scenes in the courtroom; it is, rather, Mrs. Bertholt’s former house in Nuremberg that