Mob Rule went into production just six days after San Francisco, destined to be as grueling a shoot as Tracy had ever endured. (“2 months on wagon,” he noted in his datebook.) Lang, meticulous in his preparation, had taken nearly six months to get the script into shape, and by the starting date had storyboarded the entire film. The girl in the story was Sylvia Sidney, a first-rate actress who had heard about Lang making his American film debut and took a substantial cut in price to be part of it. She respected and admired his work, she said, and thought it important to work for him, to “back him up” after his escape from the Nazis.
San Francisco was a big, boisterous carnival of a film, festooned with balloons and good cheer and enveloped in the kind of candy apple coating that was emblematic of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer school of moviemaking. Mob Rule, on the other hand, was anything but. Grim and Teutonic, it had none of the high spirits for which the studio was typically known, and Tracy found himself stepping from Father Tim’s chapel office, brewing coffee for the chaste Mary Blake, to the opening shots of Mob Rule, in which he and Sidney portrayed all the lust and frustration an engaged couple could possibly feel in the hours prior to a long separation. Joe can’t keep his eyes off Katherine and she can’t keep her hands off him. They munch peanuts, coo words of love, and when they’re separated by the window of a Pullman car they press the glass as if electricity were passing between them. Sam Katz, the Chicago theater executive who was Mankiewicz’s titular boss, sensed the carnal energy of the rushes and sent Lang a note: “I saw your first day’s work and I am delighted. I am leaving today on a trip for about two weeks and I am sorry I will not be here with you during this period. However, I know you are going to give us a great picture.”
Tracy was used to making one take, two at the most, and was completely unaccustomed to the multiple takes Lang routinely insisted upon. One of the ways the local sheriff puts his suspect at ease early in the film is by noting the character’s fondness for peanuts. (“Some peanuts?” actor Edward Ellis asks during the interrogation scene, casually setting a bowl of salted nuts in front of him.) Tracy had done take after take, accepting a handful of nuts and tossing them into his mouth. “Well, now you’re talking my language, Sheriff. I’ve—.” And the line was aborted with an explosive cough.
“Cut,” said Lang impassively. “Bring this peanut addict a glass of water, somebody.”
Tracy’s face reddened as he spat out the chewed remains. “This guy,” he said, indicating Lang, “is trying to kill me with salted peanuts—a new variety of murder. So far, I’ve had to eat fourteen bags in succession.”
“Uh, no, Spence,” corrected the prop man. “Only thirteen.”
After quietly printing what he wanted, Lang kept it up, torturing Tracy until Sylvia Sidney signaled him that the scene was already in the can. “I’ll get even,” Tracy grinned as he stepped out of camera range. “This picture isn’t finished yet by a long shot.”
After vigorously pursuing the part of Katherine and turning down another picture to take it, Sylvia Sidney found herself unfazed by Lang’s temperament. “Fritz had a big ego, to put it bluntly. When he walked on the set, he was the master of the show. He wasn’t that tough on me, because he had to get what he wanted on film. He was rough on men … Tracy had a very rough time with him.”
Lang seemed to regard his players as graphic elements; his rigidity put him at odds with his lead actor, a man who needed the latitude to inhabit a character and make him breathe. For Tracy, the real trick to Mob Rule was managing the transformation from the solid, good-natured Joe Wilson, all-around straight arrow, eyes shining with a kind of textbook virtue, to the grim, vengeful shell of a man on the other side of the fire, a walking corpse animated by the sheer power of hate. It wasn’t Lang that gave it to him, yet it’s hard to imagine quite the same effect from another director. Given a comfortable forty-eight-day schedule, Lang, completely unaccustomed to working in a studio where meal breaks were dictated by law, proceeded to direct Mob Rule as if he were back at Babelsberg.
Tracy and Clark Gable shoot their first scene together for San Francisco, 1936. (SUSIE TRACY)
“Lang,” said Joe Mankiewicz,
would have his secretary, affectionately known as The Iron Butterfly, bring on a small silver tray—it might have been a vitamin pill or something more horrible. I don’t know. And a little shot of cognac which Mr. Lang would have as his lunch and continue working. And the crew started grumbling a bit … and the crew came to Spence and said, “Look, what about our lunch?” And so he says, “Yeah, it’s getting late.” And he looked over at Fritz and said, “Mr. Lang, it’s one-thirty and the fellows haven’t had their lunch yet. Don’t you think we ought to break?” And Lang said, “On my set, Mr. Tracy, I will call lunch when I think it should be called.” And Spence took it with that wonderful look, that meek look—and look out when he looked at you meekly—and just took his hand and brushed it across his face, smeared the makeup hopelessly. Take an hour and a half to replace that makeup. And he yelled “Lunch!” and walked, and the crew went with him.
The contrast between Mob Rule and San Francisco could not have been more stark. Where Lang lingered over a scene, making take after take, Van Dyke got in and out as quickly as possible. “He gained a lot by having the actors fresh,” Joe Newman said. “He had that momentum going for him, where he let the actors have sway. If they understood the part, he didn’t indulge in a lot of explanation, and he didn’t believe in a lot of rehearsal.” Though his speed worked largely to the cast’s advantage—no heavy breathing or time for second thoughts—Van Dyke’s stuff tended to be ragged as it came off the stage, and Hyman was already ordering retakes just three days into the schedule.
Tracy was needed only occasionally and seemed to regard his time on the picture as something of a vacation. Still, where Mob Rule was well within his comfort zone as an actor, San Francisco decidedly was not. “We were pretty serious all through that picture,” Gable recalled. “We both had our worries. He was worried about playing a priest, and I was worried about playing an atheist. I had a scene where I was supposed to hit him. How was the public going to take that—seeing a man strike a priest? It took three real priests to convince me I could do it safely if the script had me reforming in the end, and believing.”
The conflict between the two boyhood friends—one who became a roisterer, the other a priest—had been built into the script from the very beginning, when Herman Mankiewicz drafted the first sequence and made notes concerning the general tone and structure of the story. The character of “Father Jim” was introduced during a sparring match with his pal “Aces” Hatfield in which the two traded dialogue between punches. (“No dame’s on the level,” Aces says, to which Jim responds with a quick jab to the chin.) It was Mankiewicz’s idea that the camera reveal Jim as a priest only after he has changed his clothes and emerged from the locker room in the Roman collar. By the time the scene was shot some thirteen months later, Jim had become Tim, Aces had become Blackie, and the scene had been sharpened by Anita Loos with a shot of Tim knocking Blackie clear off his feet, thus establishing that Tim could flatten Blackie if he so wished—a vivid image the audience, in its collective memory, would later call to mind when Blackie socks Tim and the priest, in effect, turns the other cheek.
The heated scene in which Blackie pops Father Tim establishes Mary as the force that comes between the two men. All aglitter in gold braid, black tights, and plumed headdress, she is about to walk out onstage at the Paradise Music Hall, where she will become, in Blackie’s words, “Queen of the Coast.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Tim asks incredulously as he takes her in.
“Why?” asks Blackie innocently.
“Showing Mary like this to that mob out there.”
Mary tells Tim that she loves Blackie.
“It isn’t love to let him drag you down to his level.”
Blackie tells Tim he’s going to marry her, and Tim, with eyes narrowed and jaw set, says, �
�Not if I can stop you, you’re not going to marry her. You can’t take a woman in marriage and then sell her immortal soul.” He puts out his hand and asks Mary to come with him. The stage manager is knocking, they’re striking up the band.
“I’ve listened to this psalm-singing blather of yours for years and never squawked,” says Blackie. “But you can’t bring it in here. This is my joint!”
“She’s not going out there!” Tim says firmly, and Blackie hauls off and socks him—a moment of shock for both the characters and the audience.
Gable, who never warmed up to MacDonald, marveled at Spence’s seemingly effortless work as the priest: “I couldn’t see what Tracy was worried about. He said he felt like a man walking a tightrope. He had to be human and, at the same time, holy. For my money, he hit the perfect balance between the two from the opening scene.”
Tracy observed his thirty-sixth birthday while working on both pictures (Mob Rule by that time had acquired the title Fury) and he came to regard them as “that double jackpot”—the two best things that had happened to him in his six years on the screen. “When Sylvia Sidney and I put in 21 hours a day on Fury, we did it because we knew that Lang had something; that it would be something worthwhile. It was the same with San Francisco. It was all the difference between that ‘just a job’ feeling that I’d once had in pictures and the conviction that we were getting somewhere.”
The time Lang took seemed partially rooted in the mistaken notion that he had to wear Tracy down in order to get his best performance. According to Joe Mankiewicz, who felt somewhat responsible for Lang’s treatment of the cast and crew (“I put my own personal guarantee that he was great for this movie”), one of the key scenes Lang put into the script was the mob’s ghostly pursuit of Joe in the hours leading up to their conviction for murder. “Now figure Spence in an overcoat … the overcoat flapping in the wind, at night on the back lot, down a very narrow passage followed by a camera car, running for his life. And Fritz Lang letting the car go faster, faster, faster until Tracy was running for his life.”
Tracy and Lang grew to hate each other, and cinematographer Joe Ruttenberg found himself in the middle. “Spencer Tracy said, ‘I can’t stand this any longer,’ but it was Spencer’s first major part [at M-G-M], you know, so he wouldn’t quit. He argued with Lang, and the officers in back of me said, ‘You do whatever you think.’ Mannix says, ‘If they can’t get along with Joe, they can’t get along with anybody.’ ” Tracy consistently gave Ruttenberg what he needed, even when he was at odds with Lang. “In shooting, he knew what he had to do, he minded his own business, he did his work, went back to his dressing room. But he fought with Fritz all the time. They were always fighting, always fighting.”
With actress Sylvia Sidney during production of Fury. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
San Francisco was a film largely written by committee, producer Bernie Hyman holding story conferences with his key people—Hopkins, Loos, Emerson—every few days while the picture was in production. Retakes continued into the first week of April, when the group turned its collective attention to the problem of putting the great earthquake together. The mechanical effects developed by Arnold “Buddy” Gillespie, one of three associate art directors on the show, formed the nucleus of the sequence, principally the quake as experienced from the interior of Lyric Hall as the annual Chickens’ Ball is in progress. The set was built on rockers, with breakaway walls of rubber brick and balsa wood, but much of the effect was achieved with the simple combination of jiggling camera and off-balance actors, inserts showing small details of the devastation, the ominous rumblings of the soundtrack setting the nerves on edge.
With his proud mother on the set of San Francisco. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Tracy, who observed the shooting of the scene even though he wasn’t in it, recalled that it was covered with seven cameras. There were 250 extras on the stage, and Van Dyke was careful to explain what they were to do once he gave them the signal. As soon as the building started to shake, though, everyone panicked and surged to one corner. The balcony collapsed, which wasn’t planned, but since no one was injured, the shot stayed in the film. Exteriors—cracking walls, falling debris—were intercut with actors in motion. Whole buildings were crumbled in miniature, bit players fleeing for their lives in front of a process screen. One of the few mechanical effects to incorporate stunt personnel was the splitting of the earth, a shot accomplished with a section of street built on rollers, a hydraulic ram driving rocks and dirt up through the rupture, water spewing through an underground pipe to complete the effect. Tracy didn’t have to endure the simulated quake but was called upon to step gingerly through the rubble in its aftermath, calmly leading the dazed and broken Gable through the tent city of survivors and back into the arms of Jeanette MacDonald, who has weathered the experience in fine voice and feathered gown, every hair in place and her makeup perfect.
When San Francisco was cut together, the result left Hyman and his colleagues deflated. “The earthquake was flat, impersonal, ineffectual,” said John Hoffman, who was brought from Slavko Vorkapich’s montage unit to fix the problem. “It didn’t touch people.” Hoffman set to work giving the picture “a brand new, really convincing quake” as well as a rowdy New Year’s Eve celebration to serve as its bookend. He shot new material—a stone Atlas pitching forward and smashing a vegetable wagon, its horse rearing, its stock rolling, a solitary wheel spinning aimlessly being one of his more memorable images—but his contribution principally was in the editing, the juxtaposition of disaster footage with the reactions of the people in danger, the rhythmic cuts giving size and immediacy to otherwise ponderous footage. But all this was after the fact for Tracy, who did his last work in the film on Saturday, April 25, 1936.
The more modestly proportioned Fury finished two days later, but there were retakes that kept the film open until May 6. The last days were given over to exteriors, largely night work that convinced Joe Ruttenberg that Lang was genuinely a sadist. “He was hell on everybody—actors, technicians, everybody.” The centerpiece of the picture was the mob’s storming of the jail, and Ruttenberg remembered it being scheduled for a Saturday night so that the company could go straight through without a break. “We worked like slaves,” said Tracy. “One day we worked from nine in the morning until five-thirty the next.” Mankiewicz heard that some of the crew members were plotting to drop a piece of equipment on Lang to get him off the picture. “Well, it went from that bad to much worse,” he said, “till I was summoned from my house one night about four-thirty in the morning. Tracy said, ‘Bring the lamp.’ He was going to drop it on Lang.”
The sheriff’s standoff with the mob began with sharp words and angry demands, then accelerated to the hurling of rocks and bottles. Retreating into the jail, the sheriff’s men barricade the doors, firing tear gas out the windows. The ringleaders start battering down the doors, and upstairs Joe Wilson, Lang’s everyman, calls out desperately to anyone within earshot: “Jailer! Jailer! Can’t anyone hear me? Let me out! I’ll talk to ’em! Let me out! Give me a chance!” The mob pushes past the sheriff and his men and overruns the jail, but when they find the keys are beyond their reach, they torch the building instead. Stroking his dog, hard against the corner of his cell, Joe watches helplessly as the smoke thickens and begins to curl around them. “Well, Rainbow, it doesn’t look so good for us.” And down below, as the mob grotesquely watches the building burn in utter silence, Katherine pushes her way through in time to see Joe’s anguished face framed in a barred window and faints dead away.
The last segment, shot midway through production when Tracy and Lang were still on speaking terms, was Joe’s appearance in court after Katherine has discovered that he is still alive. He witnesses the conviction of the people responsible for the torching of the jail, then makes his entrance. The mob’s de facto leader, Dawson, clambers over the others and is sprinting toward the door when he freezes in midstride, his eyes wide with astonishment. There, in reverse, is the d
ead man himself, moving purposefully toward the bench, clean-shaven once again, his three-piece suit suggesting the very image of a model citizen. “Your honor,” he says, “I am Joseph Wilson.” And the court erupts in a roar of disbelief.
I know by coming here I saved the lives of these twenty-two people. But that isn’t why I’m here. I don’t care anything about saving them. They’re murderers. I know the law says they’re not because I’m still alive, but that’s not their fault. And the law doesn’t know that a lot of things that were very important to me—silly things, maybe—like a belief in justice, and an idea that men were civilized, and a feeling of pride that this country of mine was different from all others—the law doesn’t know that those things were burned to death within me that night. I came here today for my own sake. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I couldn’t stop thinking about them with every breath and every step I took. And I didn’t believe Katherine when she said—Katherine is the young lady who was going to marry me. Maybe some day after I’ve paid for what I did there’ll be a chance to begin again. And then maybe Katherine and I—
As Lang envisioned the film’s final moments, Joe could be seen fumbling in his pocket, and as he says the last words of his statement, his eyes come to rest on what he has pulled from his pocket, nestled among tobacco crumbs and lint—a solitary salted peanut. “I guess that’s about all I can say,” he says and pops it into his mouth. Instantly, the scene would cut to a close-up of Katherine. “Her eyes dimmed with tears, her face aglow in recognition of the Joe she fell in love with, she moves toward him, smiling her forgiveness. ‘Joe—’ She moves closer and closer until her face, smiling with tremendous happiness, blots out everything and the picture fades out.”
James Curtis Page 38