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the sparest of dialogue, and the script gave the actors room to work. Its quality delighted Tracy, its bitter sarcasms unique in a medium still struggling to find its voice. Brown proved to be as good a director as he was a writer, moving quickly between setups, eschewing coverage and virtually cutting in the camera. “I had worked for Fox some years,” Sam Brown said, “thus it was I who chose his team: Joseph August as cameraman, Harold Schuster, Murnau’s editor on Sunrise. Even the script girl was the best in the studio; later she became a script writer for [Darryl F.] Zanuck. Happily, he was surrounded, because Rowland shot very little film … The heads at Fox when they saw the rushes went crazy. Rowland hadn’t covered himself at all. If he had Tom Mix’s editor, for example, he would not have known what to do with it. But Schuster knew.”

The process of making the film was less chaotic than for Up the River, Brown being eager to bring the picture in not only on time but substantially under budget. Tracy was equally anxious to do well, giving “Bugs” Raymond a sort of Cohanesque charm that ran counter to the shakedowns and murders he ordered. What emerged was the most engaging racketeer the talkies had yet produced, an affable crook with a glint of bedbug insanity in his eyes, one who aspired to legitimacy and then let it be his undoing.

With his illustrator’s sensibilities, Brown surrounded Tracy with an unusual group of supporting players, many picked as much for their faces as for their acting abilities. Typical was dancer George Raft, whom Brown had seen in vaudeville and who was dining with friends one evening at the Brown Derby when the director came over, introduced himself, and offered him a test. Raft, as it turned out, wasn’t good at delivering dialogue, but his pose as a ferret-faced hood was priceless. His dark hair slicked back with pomade, he made an ominous counterpoint to Tracy’s genial, offhanded mick. Making liberal use of locations in and around Los Angeles, Brown brought the film, retitled Quick Millions, in for a negative cost of $171,000. Everyone at Fox was thrilled with the result, and Sheehan awarded Brown a $1,000 bonus. “All the directors at the studio watched it,” Sam Brown remembered, “even Mr. Ford.”

Rowland Brown had brought forth a new kind of gangster picture, low-key and artfully composed and less nerve-rattling than the brassy Warner fare. Both he and Tracy were part of a new wave in Hollywood, doing fresh things with old ideas, but the public, with its collective mind on its pocketbook, wasn’t necessarily paying attention. Established stars were fading—John Gilbert, Ramon Navarro, Norma Talmadge, Harry Langdon—yet new ones were conspicuously slow in taking their place. And there was always the shared feeling among Irish Catholics that no matter how well something was going, it could all collapse without warning.

Around the house, Spence took to using the phrase “Now when the bubble bursts …” to preface any discussions of the future, as if it were a foregone conclusion. In shooting an early scene, he and Raft found themselves seated together at a testimonial dinner for Bugs’ associate, the vicious “Nails” Markey. Tracy recognized one of the diners, a dress extra, as King Baggott, one of the first genuine stars of the movies, an action hero back when Tracy was still lighting lamps in Bay View. “Look at that man,” he whispered to Raft. “Once a great star and now an extra for a few bucks a day when he can get the work. That could happen to me. That’s what really scares me.”

The humble beginnings of Daniel J. “Bugs” Raymond in the opening minutes of Quick Millions. (SUSIE TRACY)

With all the gladhanding and backslapping attendant on the completion of Quick Millions, it came as a letdown that Tracy’s next assignment was a talking remake of Six Cylinder Love. William Anthony McGuire’s hit comedy was in its seventh month at the Harris Theatre the night Tracy got his first look at Manhattan, and Fox had filmed it the following year with members of the original Broadway cast reprising their