Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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FRANKLYN W. KELLEY North Hollywood, Calif...
FRANK VINCENT WADDY Hollywood...
Spencer Tracy, despite his refusal to wear makeup, is once more trying to play the role of someone other than himself. In The Old Man and the Sea, Tracy emerges from his "late Cary Grant Period" of recent years, turns in one of Hollywood's few notable renderings of theatrical monologue, and does what he can for a generally unimpressive movie...
...Tracy) tells those of us who can hear him that "the old man knew the depth of his tiredness." It is not difficult to see why Tracy is tired. His director, John Sturges, has insisted on everything, and allowed for nothing. He has Tracy running the gamut from the Hollywood equivalent of an El Grecian Christ figure, to the benign, twinkling-eyed mentor of an obnoxious little boy, who takes himself as seriously as the ambitious lead in an amateur Caucasian production of a Japanese morality play...
...ambitious undertaking. But with the realization that La Mar is "a woman who can give or withhold great favors" from the moviemaker as well as from the fisherman, and with less overall slavishness to Hemingway's manuscript, The Old Man and the Sea could have been one of Hollywood's all-too-few artistic successes...