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Everybody
Knows Spencer Tracy |
"In any event, Tracy was to earn himself the role of a robust, decent American; a gruff, unpretentious man, capable of temper or horseplay, embarassed by women, and led by sincerity either to self-sacrifice or to brooding concentration." So says David Thomson in his great, infuriating, and necessary A Biographical Dictionary of Film. I'm glad Thomson wrote that because I couldn't have done better...and I've tried. That decency is probably the most attractive thing about Tracy. In every movie I ever saw him in, his characters were always OK, decent guys who didn't always see things clearly but could be trusted to act from their own sound hearts. He was always a man, never really a boy in film. He didn't have the looks. You could tell the boy was in there somewhere; you just couldn't see him too well. Maybe it would show in his grin or that mischievous twinkle in the eye. It comes to me that I've never seen any of his films in the theater - all on tv , broadcast or video, the small screen. I'm that later generation, the grandkids. If Elizabeth Taylor were my mother, Spencer Tracy would be my gramps. We'd go fishing; riding through the country, he'd tell me stories about stuff he'd seen and done, or we'd sit quietly watching the world pass by, hot in the sun, him big and gruff, me puny and not so smart as I thought I was. He'd sit big behind the wheel beside me. I'd wonder how a person ever got to be so big, so old, so different from my littleboy self. He'd point out roadside attractions and tell me what he knew about them. When we got to the water, he'd show me how to work the worm. You get the picture. |