Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [97]
Goldie, as the film came to be known, seemed designed to showcase the new Fox lot in Beverly Hills, 108 acres of prime California real estate known officially as Movietone City. The story took Tracy and Hymer through a succession of international locales, Russia to Venice to Greece to Rio and finally to a carnival in Calais, where they discover the title character diving into a tub of water from a height of two hundred feet. The principal girl in a picture full of them was Jean Harlow, who was being rented to Fox at the rate of $1,250 a week by producer Howard Hughes. Just twenty, Harlow had risen from extra work and bit parts to the female lead in Hughes’ $4 million air spectacle Hell’s Angels. Having been kept under wraps for nearly a year, Harlow now had three pictures in the can, and their collective impact would make her a star. Her delivery tended to be wooden—more so after speech lessons—but her milky white complexion and platinum hair made the eye go straight to her in any shot she was in. She played tarts, gangsters’ molls, and the like, and the script for Goldie broke questionable ground when the word “tramp” was applied to her character on four separate occasions. She was sweet-natured, though, earnest and professional, and had a photographic memory to rival Tracy’s own. When director Ben Stoloff had to call for another take, it was generally because she mispronounced a word or moved incorrectly, never because she went up.
Spence had two pictures in the queue himself, and the similar circumstances forged a bond between them. Ten days into production on Goldie, Quick Millions opened at the Roxy in New York while Universal’s Iron Man, a fight drama from the author of Little Caesar, debuted at the Globe with Harlow in the female lead opposite Lew Ayres. The Fox publicity people gave Tracy every support, billing his name above the title in ads that bore the headline “A New Star Shines.” The picture garnered generally favorable reviews from a fraternity clearly fed up with racketeer stories, and Tracy’s personal notices were uniformly fine. (“Mr. Tracy’s performance is forceful and he succeeds in impressing one with his characterization,” wrote Mordaunt Hall. “Through his gait and the angle at which he wears his hat, the conception of the truck driver is always in evidence, despite his expensive clothes.”) Yet the overnight figures were disappointing.
Harlow’s picture did better at the much smaller Globe, where fight and gang subjects often found a warm reception. Filling the 5,886-seat Roxy was a terrific burden to place on a film as modest as Quick Millions. Tracy knew it wasn’t the breakout hit he had hoped it would be, and no one had to tell him Six Cylinder Love would be a stiff. Both Sheehan and Wurtzel cooled, and the film wound up the week with a gate of $62,000—brutally bad for the world’s largest movie theater. Then temperatures broke and Warners’ Public Enemy, featuring Harlow and an equally unknown James Cagney in the leads, moved into the New York Strand. Fueled by a predominantly male audience that liked its gangster pictures loud and violent, Public Enemy took in about as much money as Quick Millions in a theater less than half the size of the plateresque Roxy. With two successful movies playing simultaneously on Broadway, Harlow was suddenly big news, and M-G-M’s Secret Six made her even bigger news when it was released