Cinema: Two with Tracy

Spencer Tracy is a man of many moods, and he is rich and famous enough to indulge them—even while the cameras are rolling. In one of two new pictures he worked hard and gave a performance that may well win him an Academy Award. In the other he sulked at the director and hardly bothered to act at all.

The Last Hurrah (John Ford; Columbia) is based on Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 bestseller about the bad old days when political machines were run on blarney, graft, openhanded charity and shamrock oil, and about the last of the great Irish-American city bosses in the grand, 19th century manner—a man, the author protests, who is not to be confused with ex-Mayor James Michael Curley of Boston.

In the film, at any rate, there is little danger of confusion. Boston’s Curley was a charming, slush-funding, machine-tooled rascal who, on two occasions, found himself awearing o’ the stripes when he was caught in the act of fraud. Tracy’s Skeffington is just about the dearest old party since Santa Claus: a combination of Robin Hood and Mother Machree. Sure and if he steals, ’tis only from the rich, and doesn’t the darlin’ man turn right around and give it all to the poor?

Actor Tracy, who bears a certain physical resemblance to Mayor Curley in his political prime, plays the part with more Celtic charm than a carload of leprechauns. The Last Hurrah could easily become one of the biggest sentimental successes since Going My Way left the public quivering like one vast harp.

Like the book, the film tells the story of Skeffington’s last campaign. His henchmen go out and get their Irish up, and the whole South Side is voting mad on election day. But this time the banks (Basil Rathbone) and the church (Donald Crisp) and the big newspaper (John Carradine) combine against the old man. Their candidate is just a “6ft. hunk of talking putty,” but what with a pretty wife, four kids and a rented dog, he looks great on television; and so he carries the day. All alone, the old man walks through the night to his empty home. All alone, he has a heart attack.

And so begins a death scene that for temporal duration (18 minutes) and sentimental excruciation has scarcely been equaled since Sonny Boy kicked the bucket in The Singing Fool (1928). It is a masterpiece that should wring tears from an Ulsterman. But as the henchmen file piteously past the deathbed to murmur their last, tearful goodbyes, the serious sort first and the dopey guy last, many moviegoers may wonder where they have seen the heart-wrenching but somehow faintly silly scene before. A few may remember. It occurs, with only minor variations, in Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The Old Man and the Sea (Leland Hayward; Warner) suffered from a variety of production ills. Star Spencer Tracy had hot and cold flashes of temperament. Director Fred Zinnemann began the picture, withdrew and was replaced by John Sturges. Producer Leland Hayward went nearly $3,000,000 over his budget (to $5,000,000) as he dispatched camera crews to the Caribbean, the Pacific and a tank on the Warner lot in search of suitable fish footage. What has finally reached the screen is, according to Director Sturges, “technically the sloppiest picture I have ever made.” The color is rheumy; the process shots would have been laughable in 1939. But the production problems are minor in comparison with the story problem: Hemingway’s fable is no more suitable for the screen than The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

In Old Man, Hemingway was fishing for greatness, for another Moby Dick. Like Melville, he was less interested in the physical events of the story than in their metaphysical significance. The fish is Life; the fisherman is Man. But to photograph these grand abstractions requires a lens more sensitive than any the Warner studio seems to have discovered in its locker. Most of the time all the spectator sees is Spencer Tracy sitting in a rowboat and mumbling to himself, and all he hears is Hemingway’s own narrative prosing along the sound track.

The script follows the book in almost every detail. The old man comes ashore after his 84th straight day without hooking a fish. A boy (Felipe Pazos), who once fished with him and loves him, helps him with his gear, buys him a beer and some food, talks him to sleep. Next morning the old man sets out again, and from there until he returns three days later with the mutilated skeleton of the marlin lashed to his boat, the picture is wholly concerned with the old man’s battle with the marlin and his struggle against sharks.

Director Sturges has tried to preserve the mystical sense of communion between the old man and his fish (“Fish, I love you, and I respect you very much”), and the simplicity of the old man’s understanding of his triumph and defeat (“I went out too far”). Unfortunately, Actor Tracy apparently had other ideas. In most roles Tracy plays himself, but usually, out of deference to the part, he plays himself with a difference. This time he plays himself with indifference. Furthermore, on location he was never permitted to catch a marlin, and so the camera could never catch him at it. Result is that Director Sturges must cross-cut so interminably—fish, Tracy, fish, Tracy—that Old Man loses the lifelikeness, the excitement, and above all the generosity of rhythm that the theme requires.