Spencer Tracy balked at the prospect of playing another one for Columbia Pictures' The Devil at 4 O'clock (1961), an adaptation of the Max Catto novel about a South Seas missionary who joins forces with a trio of prison convicts to clear an orphanage that lies in the path of an erupting volcano. (Tracy had first donned a Catholic collar in 1936 for MGM's San Francisco, which climaxed with a recreation of the devastating 1906 earthquake.) Aging and infirm from the debilitating effects of diabetes, Tracy accepted the assignment grudgingly and had the film's start date pushed back as he demanded script changes and the replacement of first choice director Peter Glenville (a veteran of British theatre, Glenville would go on to helm the multi-Academy Award-winning Becket) with utility director Mervyn LeRoy. Tracy's costar, Frank Sinatra, had agreed to second billing for the chance of acting opposite his boyhood idol but then made himself largely unavailable on the Hawaiian location as he campaigned for Democratic presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy; LeRoy was forced to shoot the actors separately, with Sinatra subbed in his scenes with Tracy by a broomstick, held by a grip while a script girl read Sinatra's lines. Tracy's commitment to the film prevented him from promoting Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind (1960) - a project for which he had considerably more passion- and though he received top billing for The Devil at 4 O'clock (1961) it was Sinatra who appeared more prominently in the film's posters.

By Richard Harland Smith