The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (419 page)

It was in 1985 that he began, and then lost, his sequel to
Chinatown, The Two Jakes
. The script for that film was very promising—more comic, more human, more Renoirlike than
Chinatown
. The cast was aces, except for Towne’s choice of Robert Evans to play opposite Jack Nicholson. Shooting began, but Evans was ill-prepared, Nicholson was less than fully supportive, and there were wider anxieties about Towne’s authority. This was his second great loss, in no way redeemed by the eventual film (90), directed by Jack Nicholson, whose friendship with Towne had been sundered.

The reputation Towne had once enjoyed for mysterious power was now sadly altered. He seemed more like a loser, someone who could not quite take charge in a crisis.
Tequila Sunrise
was a very disappointing follow-up, and Towne’s more recent writing has lacked character as often as credit:
Swing Shift
(84, Jonathan Demme), where he was called in by Goldie Hawn;
8 Million Ways to Die
(86, Ashby);
The Bedroom Window
(87, Curtis Hanson), on which he was executive producer;
Frantic
(88, Polanski);
The Pick-up Artist
(89, James Toback), in which he also acted; and the lamentable
Days of Thunder
(90, Tony Scott). He was cowriter on
The Firm
(93, Pollack). For Beatty, he wrote the script of
Love Affair
(94, Glenn Gordon Caron)—which was then discreetly doctored by others. Paranoids are always right.

And so, one way and another, Towne had lost friendships with Nicholson and Beatty, who were the twin engines of his work. But
Days of Thunder
and
The Firm
showed a new motor—alliance with Tom Cruise. Thus, Towne came to be the screenwriter on two massive hits,
Mission: Impossible
(96, Brian De Palma) and
Mission: Impossible II
(00, John Woo). At the same time, Cruise produced Towne’s second athletics film—and the second film on the runner Steve Prefontaine—
Without Limits
. This was a real achievement, for a sports film, but Towne’s recent “success” is a sad measure of where talent has gone in Hollywood. Still, the
Missions
won him the chance to film John Fanté’s novel
Ask the Dust
and a return to the air of
Chinatown
.

Spencer Tracy
(1900–67), b. Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Educated at the Northwestern Military Academy, at Ripon College, and AADA, Tracy made his New York stage debut in 1922 as a robot in Karel Capek’s
R.U.R
. He worked in the theatre throughout the 1920s, often for George M. Cohan, and it was his 1930 performance as a killer in jail in
The Last Mile
that made his name and earned him several movie tests. He made two shorts for Vitaphone before John Ford cast him in
Up the River
(30), whereupon Fox put him under contract. But he was not happy with the parts Fox provided:
Quick Millions
(31, Rowland Brown);
She Wanted a Millionaire
(32, John Blystone);
Young America
(32, Frank Borzage); and
Me and My Gal
(32, Raoul Walsh).

In any event, Tracy was to earn himself the role of a robust, decent American; a gruff, unpretentious man, capable of temper or horseplay, embarrassed by women, and led by sincerity either to self-sacrifice or to brooding concentration. In comedy or drama, he was very near the roots of American ideals: not handsome but rugged; not intelligent but shrewd; not imaginative but sympathetic. Long before his death he had been raised above the generality of actors; even professionals claimed that his inability to be anything other than himself was a mark of special intuition and application. He has also had the best P.R.—Katharine Hepburn. A clear eye may decide that he became homespun, inclined to sentimentality and best as the object of affectionate ridicule in comedy or as a man transformed by rage. Age made him crusty and it must be stressed that his most original work came in the 1930s.

In 1933 Warners borrowed him for Curtiz’s
20,000 Years in Sing Sing
and for the next two years Tracy seemed intent on freeing himself from Fox and finding a more amenable studio. Even so, Fox put him in one interesting movie:
The Power and the Glory
(33, William K. Howard)—but he was more often on loan:
Man’s Castle
(33, Frank Borzage);
Looking for Trouble
(34, William Wellman) and, at MGM,
The ShowOff
(34, Charles Reisner). After making
Dante’s Inferno
(35, Harry Lachman) and
It’s a Small World
(35, Irving Cummings), a drunken Tracy landed briefly in jail and later that year Fox fired him and MGM hired him. (Booze and womanizing were fuel for Tracy’s errors—and he was a Catholic, too, haunted by his own failings.) Tracy was a subtle expression of the hero in the Depression: a proud man who had suppressed his frustrations to stand still in welfare lines; a romantic already hardened by the realization that fortune is capricious and callous; a man whose patience was always being tested. Both
Man’s Castle
and
The Power and the Glory
use Tracy’s sense of the fickleness of success and failure. Never glamorous, he was the idealized screen version of every American who could make or lose a million. But amid such free enterprise, Tracy showed how far the system isolated the American. No wonder, in 1944, that King Vidor wanted him for
An American Romance
, for Tracy was able to play the industrialist and the laborer: he proved that the one could be the other, encouraged ambition but never lost the haunting shadow of recession and the humbled tycoon.

It was several years before Tracy properly established himself at MGM, but he collected on the way a number of his best and best-known performances: as Fritz Lang’s wronged hero himself driven to malice in
Fury
(36)—a beautiful use of Tracy’s truculence, especially when he returns from the grave, stands silhouetted in the doorway, and tells his brothers, “I could smell myself burning”; as the priest in
San Francisco
(36, W. S. Van Dyke); in
Libeled Lady
(36, Jack Conway); winning an Oscar as the Portuguese fisherman in
Captains Courageous
(37, Victor Fleming);
They Gave Him a Gun
(37, Van Dyke);
Big City
(37, Borzage), as a cab driver who stands up to organized crime, a beautiful portrait of rugged individualism; uneasily opposite Joan Crawford—beer and sweet martini—in
Mannequin
(38, Borzage);
Test Pilot
(38, Victor Fleming); and a second Oscar as Father Flanagan in Norman Taurog’s
Boy’s Town
(38)—an unbridled masterpiece of boys’ sentiment, very well suited to Tracy’s clipped emotionalism. For the next few years, he was the obvious candidate for major parts:
Stanley and Livingstone
(39, Henry King); with Hedy Lamarr in
I Take This Woman
(40, Van Dyke)—beer and crème de menthe; in King Vidor’s
Northwest Passage
(40), challenging nature itself; as
Edison, The Man
(40, Clarence Brown); very enjoyable sparring with Gable in
Boom Town
(40, Conway); as Flanagan again in
Men of Boy’s Town
(41, Taurog); uneasy with masquerade but very menacing in the Victor Fleming
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(41).

It was at this point that he met Katharine Hepburn—beer and salty crackers. Their relationship was special, if easy to sentimentalize. Tracy’s marriage, though never dissolved, was not a success and he was on close terms with Hepburn to his death. More to the point, she teased him without making him feel insecure. It put up his hackles and made for one of the most emotionally natural of comedy pairings:
Woman of the Year
(42, George Stevens); outstanding as the reporter deflating the career of a dead great man in
Keeper of the Flame
(42, George Cukor);
State of the Union
(48, Frank Capra); delicious as married lawyers in
Adam’s Rib
(49, Cukor);
Pat and Mike
(52, Cukor);
The Desk Set
(57, Walter Lang); and finally, visibly reduced, in Stanley Kramer’s awful
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
(67)—a gross banality of which the supposedly hokum-dispelling Tracy seemed unaware.

He made not many other satisfactory films after 1942—as though by soothing his hurts, Hepburn left him more unmanageable for others. After two more for Victor Fleming,
Tortilla Flat
(42) and
A Guy Named Joe
(43), he was in two war pictures:
The Seventh Cross
(44, Fred Zinnemann) and
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
(44, Mervyn Le Roy). After the war, he was awkward with Hepburn in
The Sea of Grass
(46, Elia Kazan);
Cass Timberlane
(47, George Sidney);
Edward, My Son
(48, Cukor); before he found himself again with Vincente Minnelli and Joan Bennett (a partner from the 1930s) in
Father of the Bride
(50) and
Father’s Little Dividend
(51), delightful portraits of an ineffectually gruff father.

Thereafter, judgment seemed largely to have deserted him—apart from
The Actress
(53, Cukor), the one-armed investigator in
Bad Day at Black Rock
(54, John Sturges), and in one of his best films, as the lovably conniving politician in John Ford’s
The Last Hurrah
(58). Against these must be set
Plymouth Adventure
(52, Clarence Brown);
Broken Lance
(54, Edward Dmytryk);
The Mountain
(56, Dmytryk); the very unhappy
Old Man and the Sea
(58, Sturges and Fred Zinnemann)—an elderly beer drinker, belching sourly at back projections of sea; and the last surrender to Stanley Kramer—
Inherit the Wind
(60);
Judgment at Nuremberg
(61);
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
(63); and
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
(67).

John Travolta
, b. Englewood, New Jersey, 1954
Travolta is a remarkable example of the kiddie hipster, thirty-minute demonstration of the screen’s magical transmission of animated presence, but sad evidence of the picture business’s betrayal of adulthood. In 1978, he had two films in circulation that dominated the year commercially. They were pictures that could persuade the industry of its own vitality and universal audience only because so many juveniles went to see them more than once.
Saturday Night Fever
(77, John Badham) had raunchy sex action and a fatal accident, but children ignored its rating and its sordid suburban context. That film only existed when Travolta danced, or when he made his camp
paso doble
assertion: “Here,
this
is dancing, not that Fred Astaire thing—I just move and strut, and
that’s dancing!”

The kid carried the crowd. His will enlarged (or narrowed) dance and made for a hothouse enchantment as he hit his protective but mannered poses and the floor changed color. It was homemade, but it was exotic too. Disco-movie: smooth, unending, thoughtless, and a total rendering of personality into style. No self-respecting adolescent, I hope, could believe in it. But the ten-to fifteen-year-old age group was captivated. It was like the early Beatles’ cheeky swagger turned into Pop Art. The story was trite, but no one was listening to it: you could go out for popcorn and hot dogs, knowing that the beat would bring you back in time. And Travolta had all the anodyne sexual thrust of virginal horniness. It’s a mother’s boy’s face, a gaunt, narcissistic horse’s head flabby with self-pity and butterfly lips. Vinnie Barbarino, the sweathog he played in
Welcome Back, Kotter
, was his emotional touchstone: a street dandy so dedicated to impressing people that he has bypassed self-knowledge. It’s the face of heavy, swollen passion brought on by mirror-gazing. Travolta was an odalisque of sorrowful self; his dynamic was inward and stroking.

He never dominated
Kotter
, he looked like nothing in
The Devil’s Rain
(75, Robert Fuest), and only flashy in
Carrie
(76, Brian De Palma). Though
Grease
(78, Randal Kleiser) was another huge success, it was far less of a vehicle. It had its own pastiche of the fifties, plenty of songs, and a lively cast. Travolta sang like someone whose voice hadn’t broken yet, and again it was the solemn, infant fierceness of his movements that won attention.

Moment by Moment
(78, Jane Wagner) was the end of the dream. If only that film had had the wit or nerve to run with its suggestive undertone—that Travolta and Lily Tomlin were incestuous mother and son—instead of attempting a forlorn mixed-generations romance.

No rescue arrived. He was rather upstaged by Debra Winger and Scott Glenn in
Urban Cowboy
(80, James Bridges);
Blow Out
(81, De Palma); as the
Saturday Night Fever
character—later—in
Staying Alive
(83, Sylvester Stallone); in the dreadful
Two of a Kind
(83, John Herzfeld); and the helplessly camp
Perfect
(85, Bridges). After a few years away, he made
The Experts
(89, Dave Thomas), which was barely released. Despite
The Dumb Waiter
(89, Robert Altman) and
Shout
(91, Jeffrey Hornaday), he regained the mainstream in
Look Who’s Talking
(89, Amy Heckerling);
Look Who’s Talking Too
(90, Heckerling);
Look Who’s Talking Now
(93, Heckerling); and
Pulp Fiction
(94, Quentin Tarantino).

Pulp Fiction
brought Travolta back, and it seemed for a while as if he and the public were both touched by the reunion. But enough time has passed for us to relearn something we always knew: that he’s a limited actor with the kind of confidence that burns off before lunch.
Eyes of an Angel
(91, Robert Harmon), a wretched shelf-jailed film freed by
Pulp Fiction; Get Shorty
(95, Barry Sonnenfeld), at his relaxed best;
White Man’s Burden
(95, Desmond Nakano); as a fancy villain in
Broken Arrow
(96, John Woo);
Phenomenon
(96, Jon Turteltaub); not sharp enough in
Michael
(96, Nora Ephron); with Nicolas Cage in
Face/Off
(97, Woo);
She’s So Lovely
(97, Nick Cassavetes).