The Show-Off

Spencer Tracy went on to a career of more intense roles. Yes, he was in comedies with Katharine Hepburn. But he was the straight man.

Here he is a know-it-all who absolutely cannot keep his mouth shut and himself out of other people's business.

I have never seen the Pulitzer Prize winning play on which it's based. I'd guess he is very true to George Kelly's version, though.

Madge Evans is fine as his love interest. Her performance style has not dated well, though. Clara Blandick, on the other hand, is delightful as her shrewish mother.

Every time he has determined to toe the straight and narrow and overhears something he just must comment on, we cringe. It moves along at a fast clip. And it holds up very well.

This is the kind of role Spencer Tracy played before he became a symbol for honesty and respectability in the movies. He does a great job, but it's strange to see him be the object of a morality tale - albeit a comic one - about how not to succeed in life.

J. Aubrey Piper (Spencer Tracy) is an office clerk working for a railroad and out on an excursion boat when a man falls overboard. Piper jumps in and saves the man, winning the attention and interest of Amy Fisher (Madge Evans), the daughter in a respectable middle-class family. Aubrey is a bag of wind like the biggest hurricane you've ever seen, but Amy oddly seems blinded to all of this blustering. She doesn't seem to notice that although Aubrey always takes her out in the most fashionable of cars that it's always a different one every time - a "demonstration model". This was a custom years ago of letting people with no credit history drive new expensive cars around to see if they liked them enough to buy them. The problem is, the rest of Amy's family knows exactly what Aubrey is and they cringe every time he comes around, always with a big appetite and a tale overblowing his own importance.

Amy and Aubrey get married, and soon the problems begin. Amy's problem is not suddenly discovering that her husband is a liar, because he really isn't. He doesn't lie about his occupation or income, he just blows out of proportion his own importance in every event that occurs. Thus the death of their marriage is slow suffocation from a thousand disappointments - things bought on credit when Amy thought they were paid for, bills unpaid, wage attachments - all because Aubrey really believes his ship is about to come in although he has no plan as to how and why.

This one ends in a way that you wouldn't expect for an MGM movie in the 1930's that seems to be teaching a tale about the need for humility and realism, and maybe that was because in 1934 the last things Americans needed in the Great Depression was humility and realism in what is supposed to be a comedy.

I'd recommend this one as an opportunity to see Spencer Tracy early in his career in a very likable little film. In the hands of a lesser actor you'd probably just want to strangle Piper, but Tracy gives even this shallow fellow enough depth that you'll likely feel at least a little sympathy for him at points. I know I did.

Studio hacks didn't come any hackier than Charles Reisner, and his inept editing, mise-en-scene (how many useless reaction shots can one programmer contain?), and pacing almost sink this adaptation of a hit stage comedy-drama by George Kelly, uncle of Grace. A prosaic screenplay, surprisingly by Herman Mankiewicz, doesn't help. And the title character, a tediously lying blowhard, wouldn't be interesting to watch if Spencer Tracy, at the beginning of a long and profitable association with MGM, weren't playing him. Tracy brings some variety and emotional ballast to this one-note braggart, whom you might expect to be played by that other MGM Tracy of the day, Lee. Spence even makes him--almost--sympathetic by the rather rushed fadeout. Madge Evans, near the end of her too-brief career, is a lovely and womanly leading lady--you buy the devotion between her and Tracy, though nothing about him seems to warrant it--and Clara Blandick gets lots of footage entertainingly grumping about. And it's hardly the finest moment for the great cinematographer James Wong Howe, but he does come up with a couple of arresting compositions, as well as some expert fakery of New York locations in the first reel.

Spencer Tracy was busy working at Fox Studio at this time, turning out a succession of B film programmers that gave very little indication of the star he would eventually become. Fox loaned him out occasionally and they did here to MGM where he would really hit the big time.

Watching The Show-Off today I thought of two early television characters that Tracy reminded me of. A little bit of Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko and a whole lot of Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden.

The film is of course based on George Kelly's play of the same name and in doing a little research on Kelly I found there was a live production on television in the Fifties that starred none other than Jackie Gleason. Red Skelton did a remake of this as a feature film, but I hope that Gleason's performance is not lost and a kinescope of the performance exists and is preserved.

Tracy's a lovable mug with a gift for gab who like Ralph Kramden had every big scheme blow up in his face. And he's got his Alice here in the person of Madge Evans who Audrey Meadows could have played in a remake. Tracy's not a womanizer here, he really does love Madge and she him. But Madge is about at her wit's end with him.

During the course of things they have to move back with her mother. You remember Ralph's mother-in-law? Clara Blandick almost steals the film as Madge's mom who cannot stand her son-in-law. Like Bilko and Ralph he's always "on" all the time. I know I couldn't stand living with someone like that.

Tracy gives it a good try and the cast does well. But maybe the film needed a Norton character.

Today Spencer Tracy is looked upon as a sage contemplative man of wisdom in regards to his film persona as husband, father and priest over the decades. In the Show -Off Tracy becomes one of the many characters that would try his calm patience in the years to come.

J. Aubrey Piper is a lowly railroad office employee who freely gives vent to all who will listen or are in ear shot to his delusions of grandeur. After inadvertently becoming a hero by falling off a boat to save a drowning man he hooks up with Amy Fisher (Madge Evans) who believes in him even if her family (and you can't blame them) doesn't. J. Aubrey continues to make a mess of things though and loses his job and Amy leaves him while J A is now reduced to wearing a sandwich board advertising turkey dinners.

Tracy's Piper possesses a huge ego that fails to see the error of his ways in the most glaring of circumstances. He's so abrasive, annoying and audacious at times that you just want someone to slap some sense into him. Spence goes a little over the top at times but it's when chastened and free of mania that we see the performer that would go on to be as respected as any film actor of his era bring the audience to his side. The prolific Clara Blandick (she'd appear in 10 films in 1934) as the disapproving mother provides a perfect foil for Piper with cutting one liners and withering facial expressions.

Overall The Show-Off is a mild comedy with a thin story line but it does offer an energetic performance from Spencer Tracy seldom seen in a man with the cinema gravitas of Mount Rushmore.