Spencer Tracy
Final MGM years

Tracy received his first Academy Award nomination in 12 years for playing the role of Stanley Banks in Father of the Bride (1950). In the comedy film, Banks attempts to handle preparations for the upcoming wedding of his daughter (Elizabeth Taylor). "It's the second strong comedy in a row for Spencer Tracy, doing the title role, and he socks it", Variety commented. The film was the biggest commercial success of Tracy's career to date, earning $6 million worldwide. MGM wanted a sequel, and while Tracy was unsure, he accepted. Father's Little Dividend (1951) was released ten months later and performed well at the box office. On the strength of the two movies, Tracy polled as one of the nation's top stars once more.

Tracy portrayed a lawyer in The People Against O'Hara (1951) and re-teamed with Hepburn for the sports comedy Pat and Mike (1952), the second feature written expressly for them by Kanin and Gordon. Pat and Mike became one of the duo's most popular and critically acclaimed films. Tracy followed it with Plymouth Adventure (also 1952), an historical drama set aboard the Mayflower, co-starring Gene Tierney. It met with poor critical and box office response and posted a loss of $1.8 million for MGM. Tracy returned to the role of a concerned father in The Actress (1953). Producer Lawrence Weingarten recalled: "That film... got more from the critics than any film I ever made in all the years, and we didn't make enough to pay for the ushers in the theatre." For his performance in The Actress, Tracy won a Golden Globe Award and received a nomination for the British Academy Film Award.

MGM lent Tracy to Fox for the well-received Western film Broken Lance, his only film released in 1954. In 1955, Tracy turned down William Wyler 's The Desperate Hours because he refused to take second-billing to Humphrey Bogart. Instead, Tracy appeared as a one-armed protagonist who faces the hostility of a small desert town in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), a film directed by John Sturges. For his work, Tracy received a fifth Oscar nomination and was awarded the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Tracy had personally been unhappy with the picture and threatened to leave during production. This behavior became a regular occurrence for Tracy, who was increasingly lethargic and cynical. He began production on Tribute to a Bad Man in the summer of 1955, but pulled out when he claimed that the shooting location in the Colorado mountains gave him altitude sickness. The problems caused by the picture fractured Tracy's relationship with MGM. In June 1955, he was one of the two remaining stars of the studio's peak years (the other being Robert Taylor), but with his contract up for renewal, Tracy opted to freelance for the first time in his movie career.
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