Spencer Tracy S/D

Now, really? There was no thread for maybe the greatest actor of pre-Brando Hollywood?

Armond OTM on Raoul Walsh's Me and My Gal:

http://www.nypress.com/article-22655-me-and-my-gal.html

Never got the appeal.

Love him in Fury, and Pat and Mike is the best of the Hepburn-Tracys, but I'm with Eric.

Of the straight Classic Hollywood underactors, gimme Joel McCrea and Dana Andrews.

nuts! and I like both of those.

His best middle-aged comedy is the sublime Father of the Bride.

I like that one too, and I'm maybe the only person who'll defend his casting and performance in Judgment at Nuremberg; he was already getting as granitic as a Supreme Court justice.

I feel schizy about him for reasons I won't go into here. But the man has an impressive filmography and worked with the very best (Lang, Borzage, Minnelli, etc.). Corny as it may sound, though, I'd say his greatest performance is in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Crummy film but seriously - his climactic speech is one of the all-time great moments in screen acting.

Haven't seen Me and My Gal in eons but remember fondly for its, well, schizy style. Never on VHS/DVD in this country afaik.

remember IT fondly

I liked him best when he and Hepburn licked ice cream cones and looked completely relaxed with each other.

his solidness often drifted into stolidness when unprovoked (i.e. boring).

agree on the Dinner final speech -- redeems the baloney.

I remember seeing Richard Burton rave in an interview about watching Tracy on the set of The Actress -- an autobiographical Ruth Gordon script where ST plays her father -- and sure enough, he has this amazing scene at the dinner table with his mouth full of food.

Of the straight Classic Hollywood underactors, gimme Joel McCrea and Dana Andrews.

Gimme Rudy Vallee...unless you're using "straight" as in "heterosexual." Wait how are you using it? Were there a lot of gay Classic Hollywood underactors?

Anyhoo, if you haven't already, get thee to Preminger's Fallen Angel which stars Andrews and Alice Faye the latter of whom gives THE great underacted performance. It's my favorite classical Hollywood performance ever.

the first few minutes of Fallen Angel are fantastic. The Preminger DVD releases of the last few years were revelatory for me.

always liked 'guess who's coming to dinner.' stanley kramer films are really nowhere near as bad as ppl seem to think they are.

They're not bad -- I quite like The Defiant Ones -- but many were designed to serve a specific agitprop function of the era.

Also, given that Tracy looked 80 when he was 60, it's amusing to see his stunt double racing around in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

btw Glenn Kenny and his wife are watching all the Hepburn-Tracy films:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2011/07/the-hepburn-tracy-project-3-without-love-tk-19tk.html

I forgot about Libeled Lady.

I'm with James Harvey re Adam's Rib. I don't like what Tracy did to Hepburn as an actress, which mirrored what went on backstage too. The audience was on his straight-arrow, mildly exasperated side as he brought her, down peg by peg, until her iconoclasm and sexual ambiguity dissipated:

They have their alarms and adventures, of course -- especially in the courtroom. And they even have their "causes" -- the same way the y have kitchen and summer places, with an air of wistful attachment. But finally there is nothing, they make us feel, that can't somehow be reduced to the manageable dimensions of that "small perfect kitchen" and the life of discreet, tasteful affluence that the movie both evokes and enacts. This coziness was precisely the sort of feeling that screwball comedy at its best had seemed to challenge.

Writing about To Sir with the Love and Poitier's 1967 the other day, I offered a half-apologetic defense of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It's been a long time since I saw it, but I remember Tracy, Hepburn, and Poitier as being quite good; the girl was kind of terrible, and I could have done without Cecil Kellaway. All of Mark Harris's background on the making of the film in Pictures at a Revolution, especially the stuff that concerned Tracy, was fascinating.

that pre-Citizen Kane film starring Tracy, written by Mankiewicz, is good and fascinating

Classic; semi-namesake.

available on YT!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbGTo2FX-mE

Anyone read David Thomson's review of the (huge) new biography in the NYROB? Apparently the book analyzes with subtlety of what Morbz might call the Bazinian doubling of the Kate-Spence on/offscreen relationship.

A portion of the review: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/27/old-lion-eyes/

Thomson's rather fond of Bad Day at Black Rock, which was a PBS favorite when I was growing up and which I remember for the villains (Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine) and crisp pace rather than for Tracy's perf as a one-armed man of the law.

When you hanker after gruff-but-warmhearted with a dash of charmingly flustered splutter, Spencer Tracy is always the man to call.

That's what I did in my last relationship.

Anyone seen The Last Hurrah?

long ago. perhaps the kind of Irish corned beef you're allergic to.

Almost ordered some last night.

I say DELICIOUS.

so is Jeffrey Hunter the mustard in this sandwich?

more like tasty mayo.

Five early ST films at MoMA this weekend, hope to catch two or three:

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1222

new bio:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/james-curtiss-spencer-tracy-a-biography

Pamela is reading that right now.

Part of me wants to read this but I have a feeling it will be incredibly depressing and I just do not want to deal with more stories of alcoholism, dysfunction and despair right now. Maybe I will save it for another time.

It's also huge! I think it's the same person who wrote the W.C. Fields bio.

Part of me wants to read this but I have a feeling it will be incredibly depressing and I just do not want to deal with more stories of alcoholism, dysfunction and despair right now. Maybe I will save it for another time.

― Nicole, Tuesday, January 10, 2012 1:41 PM (14 minutes ago)

There's a really sweet moment in It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Tracy's next-to-last film, just before the climax; it's a two-shot of him and Buddy Hackett as bystanders while half the cast is digging up the treasure. They meet eyes, and Hackett wonders who the hell this old guy he hasn't seen is and what he's doing there, but Tracy just gives him a little smile, and Hackett just busts out into a satisfied grin and looks back to the dig. Given that the comedians in the cast apparently all treated Tracy with reverence, it seems to have some extra-textual meaning, sort of like Hepburn's tears at the end of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

As is generally true in his late years, he doesn't make a wrong move in The Last Hurrah, tho his corrupt mayor (thinly disguised James Curley) is too virtuous for anything much to be at stake (Kael: "so full of the milk of human kindness he almost moos"). John Ford signed up every (barely) breathing Irish-American character actor plus a few ringers, so Sotosyn's teeth would grind. Also JF makes it particularly clear how much he doesn't trust anyone under 55, so poor Jeffrey Hunter.

Great last shot, and one on election night, ST walking past a fountain while a victory parade passes in the bg.

There maybe needs to be an HBO-style 10-hour biodrama on Curley, tho:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Michael_Curley

you know how I feel about milk, udders, and teeth grinding

also Ma Joad plays an old Irish lady who goes to all the funerals.

He’s pretty great in Inherit the Wind, but the movie is so damn speech-heavy! Which is to say, pretty much what I’d been led to expect all these years: showy (but not unenjoyable) performances, a pious treatment of the material and mostly blah direction. I *did* like the eerieness of the nighttime prayer meeting scene and, of course, the long take that captures Tracy’s big speech, but Kramer was no stylist (again, what I’d been led to expect).

well, it's a '50s liberal play

I mean, Tony Randall was staging it on Broadway in the 1990s, imagine that

B-b-but what about Gene Kelly in the movie playing against type?

Finally saw Captains Courageous, in which Spence plays a salt-of-the-sea, visionary Catholic Portuguese fisherman who becomes spoiled rich brat Freddie Bartholomew's surrogate father. ST was nervous about his accent and curled hair, and I should certainly hope so. Still there's something about Kipling film adaps that sucker me in, as this one does, except in believing that Melvyn Douglas (in an unusually stiff part) has a chance at winning back Freddie from the memory of Manuel (he doesn't call him "leetle feesh" -- I'll leave that one to the Freudians). The worst of Tracy's '30s performances that I've seen, so yes, he won the first of his two consecutive Oscars for it.

Eve-of-stardom Mickey Rooney underplays as the schooner captain's no-nonsense son, a curious choice since his dad is Lionel Barrymore.