First, a confession: Before watching The Mad Game I was not a huge Spencer Tracy fan, feeling that at some point in his career he took his acting advice of “Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture,” a little too seriously, and didn’t follow Bette Davis’s recommendation, which was to be ‘bigger than life.’

So I was thrilled to see Tracy doing very much more than not bumping into the furniture in The Mad Game. Tracy plays a successful bootlegger, Edward Carson, who runs a large crime syndicate selling illegal liquor. Smart, arrogant and not one to suffer fools gladly (or in any other mood), he has managed to maintain his image of a legit businessman, but when he’s double-crossed by his own gang, that image is destroyed. Found guilty of bootlegging, he’s sent to prison.

Edward Carson is in love with reporter Jane Lee (Claire Trevor) who is also the daughter of the judge who put him in jail. Eager to get even with his former chief henchman, Chopper Allen (J. Carrol Naish) who has taken over control of his bootlegging empire, Carson schemes with a sympathetic warden and agrees to help bring down his own syndicate by faking his own death, having plastic surgery, and with a new identity, infiltrating his former gang.

 

In The Mad Game, Spencer Tracy brings in whole new levels of ‘bigger than life’ star power with his interpretation of a betrayed bootlegger, and after the plastic surgery, Tracy switches acting gears on a dime, now with a brutal sense of Lon Chaney-like monstrous pathos. Up to the task of matching Tracy scene for scene, Claire Trevor sashays into her role as a newspaper reporter with all the assurance of an actress with decades of experience, Tracy and Trevor have terrific chemistry together, they make a great if brief, onscreen couple.

There’s so much I like about this film, it’s easier to do it by item lists:

The screenplay – written by Henry Johnson and William Counselman, this is one great script, with at least three surprises I never saw coming. And instead of a typical dumb cops vs dumber robbers setup, The Mad Game has the opposite, with smart cops always one step behind smarter crooks. And the script goes out of its way to give everyone motivation for what they do – this is an ‘actor’s script’ all the way.

Speaking of acting – not only Tracy and Trevor are memorable, all the acting is terrific, especially J. Carrol Naish as Chopper Allen, one of the meanest and most believable bad guys I’ve seen in a Hollywood movie. Another memorable character is the doctor played by John Davidson. Davidson labored in obscurity during most of his career in Hollywood, but at least in this film, he gets a choice roll as a seriously messed up physician who’s helping the crooks. We never know what his demons are, but he’s totally believable in his part.

Direction – Irving Cummings doesn’t get much attention from today’s critics, but he’s ‘aces’ in this movie. Using great pace, Cummings chooses moments of ellipses to advance the story – for example, in a scene where gangsters machine-gun a couple in their car, we see the couple’s car leave, then Naish nods to his boys, their car slowly follows, and he cuts to the wrecked car, riddled with bullet holes. Economical and very effective. And Cummings is very good with his actors, giving them lots of ‘space’ both in time and screen coverage to make a big impression.

And finally I want to mention something people rarely talk about: Acting business. All the leads have a specific business with their hands – for Tracy it’s bending a silver dollar with his fist when he’s angry, for Trevor it’s rolling a cigarette with only one hand, (tying off the tobacco bag with her teeth, a neat trick). It’s a quick way to make a point about all the characters, for Tracy, he’s a hugely strong man when crossed, for Trevor, it’s being self-sufficient. And it all pays off at the end of the film when we see Naish, having assumed Tracy’s position, is unable to bend a coin, and left with cracking nuts instead – he’ll never be the man Tracy is, and he knows it.

This film is a huge addition to the pre-Code canon and anyone who is a Tracy fan (yes, this film converted me), a Claire Trevor fan (no conversion needed, a fan since 1994) will love this movie. The Mad Game is another great pre-Code film to put on your list to see.