Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [476]
Carefully, Clift adjusted his dialogue, scratching out Mann’s fussy stage directions and reconfiguring his lines to make them more disjointed—not complete sentences but rather bursts of painful memory, irrationally arranged. “He was bound and determined to do a better job,” said Schlom, “and he was so emotional. He was a real basket case. I think nothing Stanley or maybe even Tracy could have said to him would have calmed him down. Fidgeting, fidgeting, forever fidgeting. I was rather new to movies at the time, especially big-time movies, and I was nervous for him too.”
It was torturous to watch Clift as he worked his way through the scene that day, but all the anguish ultimately proved to be worth it. “It was marvelous,” said Widmark.
Judy Garland brought her own circuslike atmosphere to the set, arriving early and drawing applause from the cast and crew. “I wanted Julie Harris for the part,” Kramer remembered. “I was about to start dealing for Julie when I opened the newspaper that night. There was an item in it about Judy Garland. I even forget the item. But I said to myself, ‘Stanley, what’s the matter with you? Judy Garland is the actress you want. She knows the suffering I want.’ ”
Garland was cast as Irene Hoffman, a woman who was sent to prison for having an affair with a sixty-five-year-old man who was Jewish, a part played on television by the Czechoslovakian actress Marketa Kimbrell. Garland reportedly worked weeks with a coach to perfect a slight German accent, and her tearful testimony was as gut-wrenching as Clift’s. When she completed her five-minute scene, there was again applause.
“It’s a cliché come true,” wrote columnist Sidney Skolsky. “I never believed it before, always smiled when I heard about it. Now I was seeing it with my own eyes. Everybody—Tracy, Lancaster, Widmark, Schell, Kramer, the extras, applauded. When I say everybody, I’m including me.” Said Richard Widmark: “It meant a lot to her. It was therapy and it gave her great confidence.”
“Wasn’t that a performance!” Tracy marveled. “I don’t object to playing stooge to Judy. She’s a great actress, eh? You know, in all the years Judy and I have been together at M-G-M we never did a movie together. I guess Judy was eleven or twelve when I first arrived at Metro.” Mickey Rooney made his way onto the set, prompting a frenzy of activity with photographers from as far away as West Germany, where there was intense interest in the film and its subject matter. “Mickey knew Stanley,” said Marshall Schlom, “but he had to come in to say hello to Tracy and Judy, and the three of them hugged each other. The photographers went crazy, and it almost brought tears to your eyes. In context, it was just wonderful.”
It is Rolfe’s badgering of the witness that prompts Janning, the most prominent of the defendants, to break his self-imposed silence. (“Are you going to do this again?”) Said Lancaster, “I am almost a symbol of the dilemma in Germany during the Nazi period. I am the man of good intention who did things of which he did not approve. I am a man who once had a reputation for integrity and honesty; a concern for the law. But I am cynical about this trial. I doubt the ability of the judges. I am a man who has, in a sense, retreated into another world. At the same time I must not be a man in a cataleptic state. I must become involved in the trial.”
Tracy, who never ceased chiding Lancaster over his billing and his compensation, had become so fixated on Lancaster’s