Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [87]
It was an idyllic summer, marred only by the terrible news that Mother Tracy had broken her back in Chicago. Spence was frantic; she had been riding in a taxi with Carroll when they were broadsided at an intersection. Carroll escaped with minor injuries, but Carrie cracked a vertebra and would be laid up for months. Stuck in California waiting for the picture to start, Spence could do nothing more than call and wire and send money and gifts. Then Louise saw an ominous squib in one of the papers: the number of infantile paralysis cases was on the decline. It was her first inkling that there had been an epidemic. “That’s all John needs,” she muttered to her sister. “If we had known this, we wouldn’t have come.” It would have been silly to go back to New York, so they decided they would just have to be careful, keeping Johnny away from crowds and other children. She combed the papers daily for news, saw the infection rate drop to only one or two cases a day for all of Los Angeles. Gradually, playgrounds and public pools reopened; in time she practically forgot about it.
Eventually, the people at Fox got around to making the picture. “[Ford] called us to the studio at long last to inform us that the drama was now going to be filmed as a comedy,” Claire Luce recalled. “We all groaned inwardly but somehow got through it.” It wasn’t all comedy, though. Ford and Collier had supplied a new frame to the story, turning the prison into a kind of coed country club, but a lot of Watkins’ material remained. The result was an awkward blend of farce and melodrama, a tall order for a newcomer like Tracy, who was called upon to play low comedy one minute, deliver a tense monologue on death row the next. Ford set the tone by opening the film with a nighttime prison break, Tracy and Hymer rendezvousing with a stolen vehicle. “Look at this!” Tracy mutters. “A roadster—and the gang promised me a limousine and a chauffeur!” He tells the dim-witted Hymer to get out and fix a flat, then cheerfully drives off without him. “I don’t see no flat tire!” Hymer shouts. “No?” calls Tracy as he pulls away. “Well, buy a mirror!”
At last there was something to do, and the California summer seemed to energize the whole family. Every morning, after his father had inched the Ford out of the little garage on Franklin, Johnny would race the car down to the corner as Louise watched. “Then, after Spencer had stepped on the gas and disappeared down the street, he would come tearing back again, up and down the sidewalk, brimming with sheer animal spirits, until panting, like a little puppy, he would throw himself down on the grass to rest.”
Up the River got under way on August 1, the company working nonstop to close with Tracy as scheduled. Joan Marie Lawes, who had turned nine while waiting for work on the film to begin, appreciated Tracy’s businesslike attitude toward the process of making the picture: “It was interesting at first, but it was a lot of time, a lot of hot lights and makeup. I couldn’t wait to get home.” Spence did his best to put her at her ease, gently joking with her between shots, and as one of the first actors to play a scene with him on film, she found him to be thoroughly in command of the material. “Playing a scene with him was just talking. That’s all. It was so impressive what he could convey with just his expression.”
As per Ford’s dictate, Tracy wore no makeup, and the wax face of the Vitaphone shorts gave way to a wizard’s grid of lines and crevices, the sort of landscape that told more about a character than a dozen lines of dialogue.6 The script called for as many exteriors as interiors, and a traveling shot atop a train was made using the relatively new Dunning process, where background action was