Spencer Tracy Movies

Want to know the best Spencer Tracy movies?  How about the worst Spencer Tracy movies?  Curious about Spencer Tracy’s box office grosses or which Spencer Tracy movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Spencer Tracy movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well, you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.

Fox Films signed Spencer Tracy (1900-1967) to his first movie contract. His first movie was Up the River, directed by John Ford and co-starred another newcomer, Humphrey Bogart.  For the next five years, Tracy appeared in nearly five films a year. Most of these films were low budget films that were forgotten as soon as they were produced. Just how bad were this movies? After making Dante’s Inferno in 1935, Tracy’s contract was terminated. Being fired was Spencer Tracy’s big break, as it allowed him to sign a contract with MGM. At MGM, Spencer Tracy became one of the greatest actors of all-time. This page has every movie he made from 1935 to 1967.

His IMDb page shows 78 acting credits from 1930-1967. This page will rank 60 Spencer Tracy movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, shorts, cameos and many of his early Fox Films’ movies that were not released in theaters were not included in the rankings.

Spencer Tracy, Judy Holliday and Katharine Hepburn in 1949's Adam's Rib
Spencer Tracy, Judy Holliday and Katharine Hepburn in 1949’s Adam’s Rib

Spencer Tracy Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.

Spencer Tracy Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table

The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort Spencer Tracy movies by co-stars of his movies.
  • Sort Spencer Tracy movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort Spencer Tracy movies by adjusted worldwide box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort Spencer Tracy movies how they were received by critics and audiences.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
  • Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Spencer Tracy movie received.
  • Sort Spencer Tracy movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
  • Use the sort and search buttons to make this table very interactive.  For example type in “Katharine Hepburn” in the search box…and the Hepburn/Tracy movies pop right up

Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Spencer Tracy Table

  1. Thirty-one Spencer Tracy movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark.  That is a percentage of 51.66% of his movies listed. How the West Was Won (1963) was his biggest box office ht just barely holding off 1936’s San Francisco.
  2. An average Spencer Tracy movie grosses $149.80 million in adjusted box office gross.
  3. Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter.  43 of Spencer Tracy’s movies are rated as good movies…or 71.66% of his movies. Adam’s Rib (1949) is his highest rated movie while Plymouth Adventure (1952) was his lowest rated movie.
  4. Thirty Spencer Tracy movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 50.00% of his movies.
  5. Twelve Spencer Tracy movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 20.00% of his movies.
  6. An average Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score is 40.00.  42 Spencer Tracy movies scored higher than that average….or 70.00% of his movies.  Boys Town (1938) got the the highest UMR Score while Up the River (1930) got the lowest UMR Score.
Spencer Tracy in 1963's It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
Spencer Tracy in 1963’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

Possibly Interesting Facts About Sir Spencer Tracy

1. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Tracy ninth among the Greatest Male Actors of All-Time.

2. He received 9 Oscar(®) nominations for Best Actor.…..he won twice…for 1937’s Captain Courageous and 1938’s Boys Town.

3. Spencer Tracy joins Luise Rainer, Jason Robards, Katharine Hepburn and Tom Hanks as the only actors to win back to back acting Oscars®.

4. Spencer Tracy had to drop out of the movies, Cheyenne Autumn and The Cincinnati Kid, due to health issues, both times his part was played by Edward G. Robinson.

5. In the Oscar(®) winning Pixar movie Up, Carl the main character is a combination of Spencer Tracy and Walter Matthau….the next time you see Up try and not think of Spencer Tracy whenever Carl is on screen….it can not be done.

6. Turned down Cary Grant’s role in The Philadelphia Story in order to make Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

7. Along with Katharine Hepburn, visited an ailing Humphrey Bogart almost daily as he was dying of cancer…..while Katharine Hepburn was with Spencer Tracy on the night he died.  Tracy died only 17 days after filming of 1967’s Guess Who`s Coming to Dinner had been completed.

8. Has three films on the American Film Institute`s 100 Most Inspiring Movies of All Time. They are: Captains Courageous (1937) at #94, Boys Town (1938) at #81 and Guess Who`s Coming to Dinner (1967) at #35.

9. The John Tracy Clinic is a private, non-profit education center for infants and preschool children with hearing loss in Los Angeles, California. It was founded by Lousie Treadwell Tracy , wife of actor Spencer Tracy, in 1942. It provides free, parent-centered services worldwide. The Clinic has over 60 years of expertise in the spoken language option.

10.  Recently I discovered one awesome Spencer Tracy tribute site.  Highly recommend checking out The Greatest of All Spencer Tracy.  This site has some awesome Spencer Tracy photos, links to Spencer Tracy information and much much more.

Check out Spencer Tracy’s career compared to current and classic actors.  Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.

Proof of possibly interesting fact # 5 about Spencer Tracy.

 

For comments….all you need is a name and a comment….please ignore the rest.

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.

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87 thoughts on “Spencer Tracy Movies”

    1. Thanks Stein….I was all for Movie Rankers until Steve ruined it for me….lol. You will be happy to know I have finished your Walter Wanger page’s research…..61 movies from 1929’s The Cocanuts to 1963’s Cleopatra. Hoping to publish tonight after fireworks.

      Reply

  2. Hey Bob….when I did my first Hub Page movie page it was on Bruce Willis….as I signed up it asked for a name…..I quickly picked Cogerson….well about 3 months later…I realized that Cogerson was not a good name for attracting people to my movie pages…..but HubPages would not let me change the name….so I had to either start over or move ahead with Cogerson….I picked sticking with Cogerson.

    Anyway….after about a million views at HubPages….we decided to move on. Mainly because HubPages was driving me crazy….our format is the same….but each page has different actors, different movies different everything…..but each time I published a new page they would say it was duplicate page and not let the page be seen. I would have to wait days for somebody at Hub Pages to read our Tom Hanks page and realize it was not a duplicate of our Fred Astaire page. They would tag my page “original” and let it be seen…they would say the problem was fixed but the next time I hit publish up popped the duplicate tag….it took almost a month for my Doris Day to clear….because they said it was too much like my Rock Hudson page..as you know they made some movies together….so we moved to our first owned website.

    When it came time to name that website…..I thought it was important that the name be close to the HubPage website…so we picked CogersonMovieScore.com. For the first 10 months it was awesome…..Google loved our pages our rankings were good…the views were outstanding….and then a Google Panda update took us from 30,000 views a week to 315 views for the first month after the Panda update. So we spent the next months following some terrible advice from our website provider to get our traffic back….finally when we realized they were clueless….we did some different stuff and got our traffic back. Then our website provider got rid of their “tables”…..which we need….as the “tables” are our main part of our page.

    So we had to move again. This time when picking a name Cogerson was dropped. We had lots of possibles…..The name I liked the most ….and the one we almost went with was shot down by Steve Lensman…..who told us that name in London meant something not too flattering…..so we decided on ultimate movie rankings. So during our switch….Cogerson Movie Score went away and UMR arrived. On some of the pages that have not been updated recently you can still find Cogerson Movie Score in the pages….but those references are quickly becoming extinct. Wow sorry…this is so long….but you asked…..lol. Now you know more about Cogerson than you ever wanted to know.

    Reply

    1. I found this is very interesting. I do have one question. What was the name that was so offensive in Londen? Glad to see you have found a new home for your movie reviews.

      Reply

      1. Hey Helakoski…..ever since I wrote that long comment….it has been driving me crazy what the other name was…I know I really liked it……but when I e-mailed Steve with that name….he quickly popped that balloon. I am hoping either he or my wife can remember…..stuff like that drives me nuts….which in my case is not a far ride….lol.

        Reply

    2. BRUCE

      1 This is most interesting. I had always wanted to ask about the beginnings but thought I might be a nuisance because of how busy you are..So your volunteering a comprehensive explanation is a kind of blog world parallel of Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but were Afraid to Ask !

      2 It strikes me from what you have said that whilst naturally there must always be reasonable controls those calling the shots in the beginning seem to have been unduly dictatorial and were exercising disruptive censorship.

      3. Also on the face of it they didn’t seem to have much common sense. Even if they knew nothing about movies a moment’s scrutiny would have revealed that each page was about a different person. Or am I missing something?

      4 Certainly consistency of format is most helpful. Many times every day I move back and forward over your pages to confirm points of fact and I can do so quickly and with minimum frustration because I know where I am going.

      5 Anyway you persevered and won out in the end to the benefit of people who ARE clued in about movies. Congratulations

      6 The only question that remains to be answered now is that when in future Flora and I lapse into referring to you by your surname should we not as a matter of courtesy say MR Cogerson?.

      Reply

      1. Hey Bob.
        1. The HubPage community was generally pretty awesome. Generally the HubPage management was awesome too…..I won 3 Hubbies there….which makes me an award winning writer….lol. But their program they used to monitor their site was horrible.

        2. & 3. To their computer the format looked like a duplicate….to a human it only took a second to realize they were different. Doris Day was a problem….because Pillow Talk was ranked high on both the Day page and the Hudson page. So a human saw that and said the pages were too similar. They suggested I pick Day or Hudson to have Pillow Talk, Send Me No Flowers and Lover Come Back..but leave them off the other one. It was during these discussions that my wife started looking at website providers.

        4. I think the format is easy….I use the pages all the time too….especially when I watch a classic movie…..not thinking the pages are hard to navigate at all.

        5. Thank you.

        6. I am cool with anything you and Flora want to call me…..the Cogerson family is still going strong…..lol.

        Reply

          1. Hey Bob.

            Between my movie knowledge and her computer programming knowledge…we make a good team……we rule together…..lol.

            And Steve Lensman comes through again. The name we (especially me) liked was Movie Rankers…..but as he pointed our it sounded too close to Movie Wankers……which is not the approach we wanted to take….so we picked an adjective (Ultimate) kept the Movie and and tweeked Rank…..for UltimateMovieRankings…..thanks Steve for your excellent memory

        2. FLORA:

          1 It is a tired old cliche but nonetheless very true in our case – it’s their loss.

          2. Besides another often accurate standard saying is that it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. You can now devote more time to us !

          Reply

        3. Hey Wife of Cogerson…hijacking my comment avatar….it was very confusing to see a comment by me that was not by me.

          Thanks for the emotion tech help….you are awesome?????❤️???

          Reply

  3. BRUCE

    1 Great work on Tracy with all three levels of grosses provided for 38 films. I think you have not previously done more than two of those columns on any one page. Therefore it must be the most comprehensive grosses table you’ve done for up to 38 movies?

    2 I note that you have left out worldwide grosses for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Mad, Mad World. IMDB respectively quotes 70 and 60 million actual worldwide figures for those two movies Perhaps though you concluded that the figures were too fragmented with run-ons to permit meaningful inflation adjustment.

    3 Spence was regarded as one of the greatest under-players in movies. Robert Wagner tells of filming of Broken Lance when he and Spence were to share a scene in which a ranch burns. Robert discussed with his agent how he should react in the scene. His agent told him that if he became too animated Tracy would underplay him off the screen.

    4. At the filming both Robert and Tracy sat motionless on their horses and a Mexican standoff ensued and Robert sensed Tracy’s annoyance. Later when Robert was passing Spence’s dressing room the latter beckoned him over and growled “Don’t YOU ever try to underplay ME again!”

    5 It was reported that in the mid to late 50s Spence became difficult to work with as his health problems multiplied. Apparently he was sacked on the spot while making one film and immediately burst into tears.

    6 Spence was the actor Bogie most admired. Only one name goes above mine – Spencer Tracy.” Humph is said to have remarked. However according to Katie Hep when it came to the acid test of a contract neither man would give up top billing despite several forms of billing compromise being offered to them.

    Have a good weekend, Bruce. You’ve more than earned it this week

    BOB

    PS Why does Flora occasionally lapse into reference to you by your surname? Some hidden significance?

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob.
      1. Due to space issues…..I can pick two columns of box office numbers….rentals, actual, adjusted, worldwide or yearly rank are the 5 I can pick from…. In that case space issues were not an issue. ..although I still left two categories off.
      2. It’s A Mad Mad Mad World….had many re-issues……re-issues and Paramount are the two big obstacles for me while doing these pages.
      3. Tracy had an ease about him that was great on the screen….I think Morgan Freeman has that today. To me Freeman is the Tracy of this generation.
      4. Good stories from Wagner….very funny.
      5. Bogie and Tracy made Up The River when they were babies…and then sadly never made another movie together again….now that was a great loss.

      Cogerson was my HubPage name…..my family is a blended one….I have two kids from a previous marriage….WoC has two as well….since our marriage we have added two more. Co-ger-son comes from taking the last names of the three families….and combines them. So we reference ourselves as the Cogerson family. At HubPages…I never used my first name….then I think Steve Lensman figured it out…and started using my first name……since then some people call me Cogerson and others call me Bruce….I think Flora goes back and forth depending on how well she knows the person she is commenting with. If it is somebody new…I am Cogerson…..if it is somebody like you or Steve…I am Bruce. This is of course my opinion….I could be 100% wrong.

      Reply

      1. BRUCE

        1. Thanks for clarifying Dinner/Mad, Mad World for me.and for explaining the background to Cogerson for me. I tend to lapse into your surname when referring in the 3rd person to your work or your blog.

        2 I currently get from Flora ROBERT ROY BOB or ROBERT so goodness knows where I’ll end up with her.

        3 Meanwhile if she wishes for even further variety she can use BOBBY – that’ what my own family have always called me ! ! !

        4 But please not ROB ROY – the fabled Highland Rogue of Scotland ! ! !

        Reply

        1. No way will I ever call you by that Scottish name.

          I will call you what name you want.

          You like the name Bobby ?

          I will call you Bobby.

          I know several people named Robert in my life both people I actually know as well as celebrities who are my favourites.

          -Bobby

          Reply

          1. 1 Forget about Rob Roy – FLORA was a very prominent name in Scottish literature and history.

            2 For example the poem Skye Boat Song was about Bonnie Prince Charlie’s escape by sea following a serious military defeat.. Apparently he was assisted in his flight by a Flora MacDonald.

            Speed bonny boat like a bird on the wing
            Onward the sailors cry
            Carry the lad that’s born to be king
            Over the sea to Skye.

            Though the waves leap softly shall ye sleep
            Ocean’s a royal bed
            Rock’d in the deep Flora will keep
            Watch by your tiny head.

            .

        2. Yes I know about Flora being Scottish. Flora is also the twin sister of Fauna, Roman Goddesses of Flowers/vegitation and The animal Kingdom.

          And I was named after my grandmother on my mother’s side – family name.

          I’ve spent a lifetime telling people I was NOT named after Dame Flora Robson, much as she is a favourite character actress of mine.

          Reply

      2. That is exactly correct.

        I can you Bruce when I talk to people Bruce knows well.

        I call Bruce “Cogerson” when I am talking to new people who don’t yet know you – especially if they came off of Facebook or twitter.

        Reply

  4. Nice update. I like the only box office table at the bottom. Also I like the sidebar of the Top 50 UMR pages. Looks like a nice mix of classic and current stars. Hard to believe my favorite Stanley Kubrick did not make the Top 50. I alone should have put it there as I have visited that many times. FYI. Not sure who James Garfield is but I know John Garfield was in Torittala Flats.

    Reply

    1. Hey Stein….glad you liked the update. I like the Top 50 links too…..in my mind I thought the current stars were not getting many views…..but looking at the Top 50….I would say 1/3 of them would be modern pages. Thanks for the catch on Garfield….I have fixed that error. Sorry Kubrick is not in the Top50…..during the website moves it has gone from one of my best view getters…to a middle of the road view getter. Currently it is ranked 139th of my pages. Thanks for the comment and the visit.

      Reply

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