Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [82]
The Last Mile drew the most consistently favorable notices a nonmusical had gotten in months, and was far and away the critical favorite of the nine Broadway shows that opened that week. “The Last Mile,” wrote Whitney Bolton, “is a play of desperation and fury with the power and sweep to drive the blood from your heart and leave you frozen before the granitic spectacle of the condemned. It is a ferment of steel and stone and the withering frost of terror, a restless working force to fasten the mind and nerves and hold them resolutely.” Brooks Atkinson called it “taut, searing drama with a motive” and Richard Lockridge described it as “grimly effective.”
To all, the play was memorably acted, and the ensemble cast was praised as widely as the play itself. Robert Littell in the World said that Tracy had made Killer Mears into “a thrillingly savage and icy rebel.” The whole fire and grandeur of the play, as Bolton put it, was encompassed in Tracy’s masterful portrayal of Mears, “a murderer of brutality and an imprudent but iron-hearted man, a man for the gods to wonder upon as he thrashes through the redoubtable, inexorable application of doom.” Richard Dana Skinner, critic for the Commonweal, declared that Tracy had put “the final seal on his qualifications as one of our best and most versatile young actors—a position he has been headed for ever since his outstanding work in that trivial little comedy, The Baby Cyclone.”
The Harris was practically sold out the following evening, and the gross for the first full week of performances was about $11,000—moderate, given the exceptional reviews, but predictable given the weak matinee trade. Woollcott’s letter arrived, thanking Shumlin for the most satisfactory evening in the theater that any new play had given him that season. “Mr. Erskine’s direction was brilliant in its imaginativeness and in its resourcefulness,” he wrote. “After having been told that all the good actors have deserted to the talkies, it is mystifying to find a cast packed with good ones. Perhaps, after all, it does help to have intelligence, intuition, and energy employed in casting.” The next day, under the headline ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT GOES TO THE PLAY, Shumlin ran it as a two-column ad in every newspaper in the city.
The drama’s appeal was completely lost on women, and there was talk of eliminating the Wednesday matinee altogether. One critic actually recorded some of the comments he overheard from female audience members as he sat “enthralled by the terrible intensity and realism” of the thing: “For goodness sakes! What did you ever pick out such a thing as this for?” And: “My dear, this is simply terrible. Let’s go someplace and dance.” And: “Why in Heaven’s name did the critics rave about this melodrama?” Playing Killer Mears wouldn’t make a matinee idol of Spencer Tracy, but the name gained new prominence in the minds of theatergoers, and new respect on the parts of producers and critics. By Lent, when business everywhere was typically slow, the box office had leveled off at around $13,000, putting The Last Mile on a par with Street Scene and Death Takes a Holiday.
For Tracy the timing was right, for unlike Baby Cyclone, which had opened when most movies were still free of voice, The Last Mile came at a time when Broadway was vigorously being scouted for actors, directors, and writers who could manage dialogue. Within a month he had made his screen debut in a lively Vitaphone short called Taxi Talks.
Tracy had already made two tests, one for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and one for Fox at that company’s Tenth Avenue studio. Nothing had come of either of them. “Nobody ever said a word—they never even called to tell me I was lousy. In those days they loaded you with makeup for a screen test.