When it comes to Spencer Tracy, “the ultimate actor’s actor” is less a figure of speech than a matter of consensus. He was the favorite screen performer of legions of colleagues including Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Richard Widmark, and Sir Laurence Olivier claimed, “I’ve learned more about acting from watching Tracy than in any other way.” He was a truck salesman’s son from Milwaukee who, by his own account, flunked out of 15 or more grammar schools and considered the hallmarks of his profession to be “Know your lines, show up on time, and don’t bump into the furniture.” Yet he possessed an instinct for the nuances of screen acting that most performers can only envy.
Unlike Olivier, his technique was invisible; unlike Cagney and Bogart, he had no trademark mannerisms. “There’s nothing to imitate except his genius,” Cagney proclaimed, “and that can’t be mimicked.” His greatest talent was his ability to listen, not as an actor awaiting his cue, but as an inhabitant of the scene, absorbing information as it’s offered and responding with an immaculate air of spontaneity. “Effortless” is too glib a descriptor for Tracy’s style: it’s not that he appears to do nothing; it’s that he appears to do nothing planned. His reactions feel motivated not by plot necessity but by situational urgency.
Ironically, it’s that very naturalism which tends to keep
him eclipsed in the pantheon of stars. As Cagney notes, a Tracy impression
would consist of little more than intelligence and reserve—hardly nightclub
fodder—and this may have cost him a personality cult. Hindsight being a
sentimental bird, it’s likely that he’s best remembered for his nine pairings
with Katharine Hepburn, grounding her New England dithering with his Midwestern
pragmatism. Though he was always a great deal more than her foil, Tracy’s gifts were in
fullest flower elsewhere—as the lynch mob survivor in Fury (1936), the Colonial militia leader in Northwest Passage (1940), the concentration camp escapee in The Seventh Cross (1944), the one-armed
stranger in Bad Day at Black Rock
(1955), and perhaps above all, the bare knuckle politician in The Last Hurrah (1958).
The latter film is fascinating to watch during election
season, as we are reminded just how much of campaigning is political theater.
We don’t need director John Ford or screenwriter Frank Nugent to tell us that charisma
counts for more than policy on the stump, but seeing a veteran actor take on
the role of statesman affords a sense of balance in times when the inverse
dominates the airwaves—and shows how actorly control (or calculated lack of it)
undergirds every discerning campaign.
Adapted from Edwin O’Connor’s novel of the same name, The Last Hurrah marked Tracy’s first and
only pairing with Ford since the star’s debut feature, Up the River (1930). He plays Frank Skeffington, a populist
Irish-American mayor making a last bid for reelection, eschewing modern office-seeking
methods for the same cocktail of speeches, rallies, and personal appearances
that worked so well in the past—and with the same steadfast crew of Runyonesque
ward heelers, portrayed by character actors extraordinaire (and fellow members
of Tracy’s “Irish Mafia”) Pat O’Brien, James Gleason, and Edward Brophy.
Skeffington knows the days of the old-style candidate are numbered, but the
slum-born mayor seeks one final victory for self-made politicians against the
city’s moneyed elite and the callow law school grads they endorse.
The superficially guileless star is an ideal choice for
Skeffington, as shrewd a politico as Tracy was an actor. Skeffington works
every angle clandestinely, listening with rapt attention, charming and
manipulating all while feigning transparency—in both men’s discharge of their
duties, five or six things are always happening beneath the surface. Most
scenes consist of Tracy entering a room and effectuating a desired outcome, and
the actor uses every aspect of his mien to make this plausible. His attentive
eyes are always reading the crowd—sometimes literally, when his irises shift in
thought as he contemplates his next move. Even the tilt of his head is
communicative: bowed slightly, doubling his chin, to show sympathy or
condescension (the latter sometimes taking the pose of the former), or even
righteousness depending on the angle. Whimsy and melancholy coalesce in his
tone as he speaks confidingly of his methods, punctuating his cadence with redolent
pauses (“I speak in fight arenas…armories…street corners…anywhere I can gather
a crowd…I even kiss babies!”) He finds the sly comedy in a scene where he
blackmails a foe by making the man’s feckless son city fire commissioner.
Overplaying by perhaps 10 percent so his aide will catch his drift, Tracy
grandstands about “men of daring” and emphasizes the absurdity of words like
“big red car,” nodding appreciatively at the fireman’s helmet as the young
stooge laps it up. He affects the faintest brogue in the company of Irish
constituents, and places his hand on the shoulders of those who need extra
persuasion. But as he’s seducing them, he’s seducing the audience. However we
feel about Frank Skeffington, Spencer Tracy knows how to win votes.
In a scene so pregnant with mawkish potential that perhaps
only Ford and Tracy could make it work, Skeffington takes his nephew (Jeffrey
Hunter) to an alleyway on skid row. “The Castle of Dramore,” a harp-laced Irish
lullaby, plays on the soundtrack as a baby cries out from a second story
apartment. Fedora cocked, Tracy climbs two steps of the fire escape, gazes up
in the direction of the wailing and intones, “I was born here, Adam.” We’re
inclined to read the screen as we would a book, the flow of time moving in a
rightward, downward course, so Tracy’s gaze into the space beyond the northwest
corner of the frame intimates he’s staring into his own past—the cries harking
back to a time when his forum was not city hall but a ramshackle tenement. He
strikes a match to show Hunter where he carved his initials on a wooden post, above
those of the girl who would become his late wife. With most of his face shaded
by the fedora, he has only the wrinkled smile illuminated by the tinder stick
to express his feelings, and he manages a look of reverie and pain that sails
past craft into the realm of the sublime.
Even when Tracy is shot from behind—shoulders square, hands
concealed—he conveys intent. But despite its laid-back effect, it’s quite a
busy performance; he’s forever pacing and coming to rest, modulating his rich,
protean voice not just in volume and speed but in hardness. In his first scene
with Hunter, he speaks almost continuously for three and a half minutes of
politics as “the greatest spectator sport in the country today.” We are too
entranced to be distracted by (and indeed we’re hardly are aware of) the
blocking: Skeffington lights a cigarette, takes a seat, rises and walks to the
window, doubles back and reclaims his chair, stubs out the cigarette, stands,
picks a match from the floor, returns to the window, turns around, pitches the
match (on the verbal cue “Last hoo-rah”), and thrusts his hand in his pocket. In
his unassuming way, he makes even elaborate stage business seem organic.
But most of all there’s the face, creased from a lifetime of
battles, with an easy smile borne of confidence in his skill and sparkling,
searching eyes. And in keeping with the plaintive tone of The Last Hurrah, as we canvass the latter-day denizens of Hollywood
and Washington, we can permit ourselves the slightest pangs of nostalgia.
Mister, we could use a man like Spencer Tracy again.
