| Summary: | After becoming a major star thanks to his performances in Fury (1936) and San Francisco (1936), Spencer Tracy consolidated his popularity in the US by starring in critical and commercial successes such as Captain Courageous (1937), Test Pilot (1938), Boys Town (1938) or Boom Town (1940). The polls made by Gallup in 1940 confirmed that he was at the time the most loved Hollywood star in the US, far ahead of Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable and Bette Davis, the three most popular stars after him. This article attempts to understand the reasons for this exceptional success, by shedding light on Tracy’s image in the US ideological context of the second half of the 1930s. Analyzing the actor’s films and magazine articles about him, I highlight the complexity of his persona, particularly it’s national and gendered facets. I aim to show that Tracy’s image thus articulates two conceptions of American masculinity, usually distinguished in english by the terms “manhood” and “masculinity,” and thereby resolves an ideological contradiction exacerbated by the process of national reconstruction that followed the years of the Great Depression.
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