Motion Picture (Aug 1938-Jan 1939)

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Tonic to regain and to maintain your red-blood-cells ... to restore lost weight ... to regain energy ... to strengthen nerves . . . and to give to your skin that natural health glow. Take the S.S.S. Tonic treatment and shortly you should be delighted with the way you feel ... and have your friends compliment you on the way you look. At all drug stores in two convenient sizes. The larger size represents a price saving." There is no substitute for this time-tested remedy. No ethical druggist will suggest something "just as good." i The S.S.S. Co. ajAo.c^Avz<? Msmtdt&ljh wem m%£, 'fswa? Wffi 0m£S> thing to chuckle about for a moment, something to forget the next moment. But Spencer's chuckle told me nothing beyond that. So I asked him which was right : Barrymore, or the fellow who said that the Tracy acting was just Tracy naturalness. SPENCER eased himself down into his dressing-room chair more comfortably, crossed his legs, and treated himself to the familiar offside Tracy grin. Idly, for a moment, he jiggled some coins in his right hand. "All I know is that I work harder than most people give me credit for," he said, with a brief laugh. "Every role I do, I study pretty carefully in advance. I try to figure out what a character needs, to be real — what he would do, naturally, in this situation or that. But it's not always so easy to figure. You can't set any rules. You can't say, 'Now he'd do this here, and that there.' "That's what makes the business interesting." He paused, thoughtfully jiggled the coins a moment. "For example — I'll never forget what happened, the first day on location for Test Pilot. We wanted to do a scene tearing the wings off a big bomber. One ofthe Army test pilots said, 'But that can't be done. The wings can't be torn off one of those ships. They're too tough.' And one of the M-G-M boys had the perfect answer. 'Who says it can't be done ? Who knows what's impossible, and what isn't? Maybe some day someone will tear the wings off a bomber on a test flight, or maybe one of them will go into a spin — even though you say that's impossible, too. We'll shoot the scene.' "The same thing applies to acting. You can't say. 'This character would never do this.' How do you know he'd never do it? There isn't anything that can't be done, if the set-up's right for it. And how do von know when the set-up's right? You don't know. You have to rely on instinct. If your instinct's right, they call you a good actor. If your instinct's wrong, they call you a ham. "I mean it. You can't set any rules for acting. Things come to you instinctively, playing a character. Facial expressions. Little mannerisms. Ways of talking. And, coming to you instinctively, they come spontaneously. They look natural. "That's the nearest I can come to telling the secret." He chuckled again. R 64 EMINDS me of a story I heard once about Edwin Booth. Some young sprout in his company, brand-new in the theatre, came to him one day and said, 'Mr. Booth, will you please tell me what acting is?' Booth answered, 'I don't know.' The sprout said, 'But Mr. Booth— you are the greatest actor of your day, probably the greatest actor America has ever had. You can't be serious, saying you don't know what acting.is.' And Booth told him, 'I have been an actor for forty years, but if I had been in the theatre for twice forty years, I'm sure I'd still tell you, 'I don't know what acting is.' " And Booth was never more serious in his life. "But nobody can tell anybody else what acting is. Only two things can tell you— instinct and experience. And no two people have the same instincts or experiences. I've seen cases where an actor would be playing a small part, and playing it unconvincingly, because he had no independence. He was letting someone else tell him how to do it. And I've suffered for him. If a man's goimj to be an actor, he has to have the courage of his own instincts." Spencer grinned embarrassedly. Never glib, he hadn't started out to put his credo of acting into a verbal nutshell. Now that he had clone just that, he was abashed. He tried to change the subject with a cigarette. However, as far as I was concerned, he had only started to be self-revealing. He had given an inkling of how he happened to be an actor. But he hadn't explained something else. Some actors, I reminded him, did their best acting off-screen. Most actors went in for off-screen dramatics a little. But he didn't seem to succumb to the temptation. What was the answer ? "I can't get away with it," he said, smilingly lighting our cigarettes. "I have a family with a sense of humor. The other night, Susy and Johnny — the younger generation in our house — were having dinner with us. I was talking across the table to Airs. Tracy, telling her something about my work, some little acting problem. Susy kept butting in. I interrupted myself to ask her to be quiet. 1 was just .yetting steamed up again, when she butted in again. I looked at her sternly. 'Yes, Susy,' smiled Mrs. Tracy, 'be quiet — while Daddy holds the center of the stage.' "Try to have a nice, comfortable ego in an atmosphere like that! I'm not allowed to portray any roles at home. "It would be wonderful," he added, "if I could drop my worrying, too, when I leave the set — not carry that home with me, not keep on agonizing after hours about whether a role is good or whether I'm giving it everything it could have. I don't force my worries on other people as a rule, but I can't escape them, myself. That's the penalty lor working so hard at my job. I can't get to sleep at night, for the nerves jumping. And then I wake up in the middle of the night, thinking of something I should have done or ought to do. B UT there's still hope for me. I'm slowly agony I did when I was making four or five pictures a year. Boy, it's awfully hard to be good four times a year! Nowadays, I'm making three. And I take time out to try to get laughs on the set. If an airplane flies overhead and action has to stop till the sound dies away, I don't, go higher than a kite. I take things more calmly now. But — I haven't i cached the ultimate in calmness yet. The sitting, waiting, still gets me. It's the only thing that gives me a hankering for the stage. I'd like to go back — not to stay, but once every two or three years — just to get a performance out of my system in one evening." Has the winning of the Academy Award given him a new mental hazard, complicated his worries ? He shook his head, good-naturedly. "No, I don't feel as if anybody's expecting me to be a genius, now that I've got a little gold statuette among my souvenirs. I don't think the critics are impressed much. Every time I make a picture, they still hand out their own awards. Sometimes orchids. And — sometimes — onions." In short, the Academy Award hasn't changed him. But has he changed in other ways? How does he happen to be playing a priest a second time, when he objected so strenuously to playing one the first time? He grinned. "Against all my expectations, MOTION PICTURES ARE YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT