Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [84]
“You better drive to the nearest police station,” she somberly tells him. “I just killed a man.”
Covered by two elaborately blimped cameras, the scene consumed roughly four minutes of screen time, and it is unlikely that Tracy and Alexander, even allowing for false starts and technical malfunctions, needed more than an hour or two to complete it. “It was all strange and new and uncomfortable and rather embarrassing,” Alexander said, “but, honestly, playing even the shortest scene with [Tracy] there was simply no question that he was a brilliant actor.” For an afternoon’s work Tracy collected $150 and was back at the Lambs by nightfall. The thing he would remember most vividly about the experience was the makeup they made him wear, as he was by then used to wearing none at all in his role as Killer Mears. Perversely, the only cast member signed as a result of Taxi Talks was Evelyn Knapp, a young actress who had no Broadway credits whatsoever.
The Last Mile continued to be an important show, outlasting The Criminal Code and seemingly set for the balance of the season. (Even the ticket brokers eventually came around and made an eight-week buy on seats.) In Hollywood, the success of both plays did not go unnoticed. The picture rights were snapped up, and M-G-M began filming its own prison melodrama, The Big House, with Martin Flavin, author of The Criminal Code, on hand to punch up the dialogue. John Wexley was similarly courted by Universal, and at Fox, generally the most derivative of the major studios, an original screenplay was commissioned from Maurine Watkins, author of the racy Jazz Age satire Chicago. Based in New York, Watkins naturally chose Sing Sing as the backdrop for her story, the nineteenth-century prison at Ossining—on the Hudson some forty miles north of Manhattan—being famous for the progressive policies of Warden Lewis E. Lawes, an author, lecturer, and death penalty opponent who had just recently made the cover of Time magazine. Unlike Wexley, Watkins had a firm and obvious title before writing a single word: Up the River.
John Ford, assigned to direct the film, was brought in from Los Angeles to “assess the new plays and scout young actors.” The next picture on his schedule being a prison yarn, he naturally arranged to see The Last Mile on his first night in town. “I liked it so much,” he remembered, “that I went back the next night and was tantalized by Spence. I began to see that he had it all—the consummate power of an actor. So, hell, I went a third time, and introduced myself to Spence backstage. He took me to the Lambs Club for what turned out to be quite an evening. We stayed until about four o’clock, when I think they threw us out. Most of the time we only talked baseball, but I liked Spence so much I knew I had to have him in my next picture, whether it was Up the River or something else. The way it turned out, I was supposed to see six plays in six nights, but I saw The Last Mile every night I was there.”
Ford, a crusty Irishman, was directing Harry Carey westerns when Tracy was still cadging dimes from his father to go see them. “I’d meet Spencer after the show and we’d go over to the Lambs Club and drink ale. In those days we could both drink pretty well after a fashion.” The management at Fox, Ford discovered, did not share his enthusiasm for Spencer Tracy. As Tracy described the scene: “Ford said, ‘I’d like to have him,’ and the Fox guy said, ‘Well, we made tests of him. They’re not very good. He looks lousy in makeup.’ Ford said, ‘Makeup? He’s not going to wear any makeup in my picture. He’s the guy I want.’ When we got out of the office, he told me how much money to ask for.”
While all the head scratching was taking place over on Tenth Avenue, Sam Sax, the newly appointed production chief at Vitaphone, took the opportunity to contract with Tracy for a second short. In the six weeks since they had filmed Taxi Talks, staffing at Warners’ Brooklyn studio had been beefed up to the point where it constituted the largest production