Tracking Tracey

I’ve been busy this summer watching Canadian character actor Ian Tracey in his many television and movie roles, a daunting task when you consider that he’s been acting for 35 years. You may not be familiar with the name, but you might recognize the face. He’s very distinctive looking, with a wide weathered face, a furrowed brow, and a large gap in his front teeth. He’s not very tall. He reminds me of a pit bull, and I mean that in best possible way. Tracey has a gruff voice and he’s not a classically trained actor, so he’s perfectly suited to play blue collar, regular-guy types. He’s played cops, criminals, bar owners, fishermen, sociopaths, soldiers, homeless guys, and henchmen. He is able to convey a dangerous menace, so it’s not ridiculous when he shoves around a guy who’s much bigger.

Tracey first came to my attention on The X-Files, when he guest starred in the episode The Walk. He played a bitter vet in a VA hospital with no arms or legs. If I hadn’t been so focused on Johnny Depp, I would have noticed him a decade earlier in his four appearances on 21 Jump Street. Tracey is based in Vancouver, and both of these American television shows were filmed there.

Huck Finn

Ian Tracey began his career as a child actor. I’ve already discussed Tracey’s first television series, Huckleberry Finn and His Friends.  I found this series on YouTube, where I also discovered his 1976 film Dreamspeaker, which is one of the most depressing movies I’ve ever watched. I even found stills from Tracey’s first film, The Keeper with Christopher Lee. Watching the YouTube trailer to the cheesy series Tropical Heat (a.k.a Sweating Bullets) led me to buy the third season on DVD at a bargain price, but I can’t bear to write about it. I’ll just say that Tracey played bar owner Spider Garvin in seasons 2 and 3, and maybe he just needed the money. Or, maybe he wanted to soak up some sun in South Africa, since this is one of his few shows that wasn’t filmed in Vancouver.

The Outer Limits: Judgment Day

Hulu.com is a good place to find more of Tracey’s work. All the episodes of 21 Jump Street are here, as well as The X-Files (season 3, episode 7: The Walk), Highlander (season 5, episode 4: Glory Days), and The Dead Zone (season 2, episode 17: The Mountain). Two episodes of The Outer Limits (season 2, episode 9: Trial by Fire; season 6, episode 1: Judgment Day) and one of Poltergeist: The Legacy (season 2, episode 13: The Devil’s Lighthouse) are also on hulu. There’s the more recent series Rookie Blue (season 1, episode 10: Big Nickel) which is available with a paid hulu plus subscription. [Sadly, it seems like every time I go back to hulu, something that was free before has now become part of the paid subscription.]  His six episodes of Sanctuary rotate in and out, so you just have to watch for those to stream. The first two seasons of the Canadian series Da Vinci’s Inquest are also on hulu, and this is the show that kicked off my interest in Tracey.

Da Vinci’s Inquest ran for 7 seasons from 1998 through 2005, followed by one season of Da Vinci’s City Hall. Dominic Da Vinci is a Vancouver coroner, played by the brilliant Nicholas Campbell, and he works with pathologists, forensic scientists, and Vancouver homicide detectives on cases of suspicious death. What makes this show unique is the realistic depiction of police work. More often than not, the bad guys aren’t caught, let alone identified. Even when they are identified, many times a case can’t be made to convict. There are even times when it can’t be determined if the cause of a death was accident or homicide. The good guys don’t always win, if ever. It often leaves me at the end of an episode feeling seriously blue. What really depresses me, though, is that only the first three seasons are available on DVD or streaming. Petitions, emails, and messages in fan forums have so far failed to get the rest of this excellent series released. As the show reaches the end the third season on my local Retro TV station, I’m holding my breath to see if we go into season 4, or if they just start airing season 1 again. My email inquiry to the station has received no answer.

Ian Tracey as Mick Leary in Da Vinci’s Inquest

Ian Tracey plays detective Mick Leary, a younger cop who is usually paired up with old school veteran Leo Shannon, the wonderful actor Donnelly Rhodes. Leary has a problem ex-wife, a problem brother, and a sweet romance with one of the pathologists. One of Tracey’s best episodes in the season 1 finale, The Capture. A traumatized victim leaves him in tears, and later he gets pissed off at a suspect and threatens to shoot her through a car trunk. I love his range of emotion and his intensity.

Da Vinci’s Inquest was created and written by Chris Haddock. Once it ended, Haddock cast Tracey as crime boss Jimmy Reardon in his CBC series Intelligence. This show only lasted for two seasons, and I knew when I started watching that it ended abruptly with a cliffhanger that was never resolved. I’ve read online debates over whether the story was veering too close to the truth about water rights and Canadian/US politics, leading to its cancellation. Even knowing I wouldn’t get any resolution, I am still surprised about how emotionally invested I got in this show. I’d love to know what was going to happen next.

Klea Scott and Ian Tracey in Intelligence

Intelligence is a complex drama about Mary Spalding, head of the Vancouver Organized Crime Unit, who’s fighting for a promotion to CSIS, a Canadian version of the CIA. When a stolen briefcase containing informant files lands in Jimmy Reardon’s hands, she is forced to swap information with him. Reardon is a third generation weed smuggler, who heads up the family business which includes legitimate operations like shipping. He’s fighting his volatile ex-wife for custody of their 12-year-old daughter, and he’s also struggling to keep his loyal but undisciplined brother in line. Reardon should be the bad guy, but he turns out to be the most moral, level-headed character in the show, and the most sympathetic. Sure, he’s in the drug trade, but he won’t touch anything besides marijuana. He’s fair to his business associates. He obviously hates resorting to violence, and he just want to go about his business. His long term goal is to become legitimate and move away from criminal activities. The real bad guys here are the agents in the intelligence network, who are busy backstabbing their associates, when they’re not covertly recording them or lying to their faces. They never arrest any bad guys, they just turn them into informants and let them continue their activities. Matt Frewer plays one of the worst offenders, and he’s also a fascinating actor. In the first season, his character Ted Altman is secretly working with the DEA to bring down Jimmy Reardon, threatening Mary Spalding’s career in the process. This show has a bunch of other interesting characters, too many to describe here, and it helps to watch these episodes back to back to keep them all straight. Chris Haddock uses many of the same actors who appear in Da Vinci’s Inquest, and it’s fun to see them playing different roles.

I’ve got many more films and television shows to watch before I’m finished with Ian Tracey’s body of work. I won’t be able to watch everything, since so many series and seasons and TV movies are not available. At least I can look forward to new roles in the future. He’s appearing in the pilot of Alcatraz, a midseason drama series airing on Fox. It’s set here in San Francisco. Was he filming in my own backyard? Possibly. According to IMDb, filming locations included both San Francisco and Vancouver. [Update: I couldn’t find him in the pilot when it aired.]

One of the things that surprises me about Ian Tracey is that he has almost no internet presence. There is no facebook fan page, no twitter, no major fan site, not even an actor profile on the official Da Vinci’s Inquest website, at least not on the international version. Here’s his profile from the US site. He’s obviously a very private person. Perhaps his brush with teen idol status during the Huckleberry Finn days makes him avoid the limelight, or perhaps he just wants to work as an actor without all the fuss of stardom. I will respect his privacy and not make a fuss, but I will recommend that you watch some of his brilliant work.

Update:  Here’s an article about Tracey from 2006. It gives more information about the missing Da Vinci’s Inquest seasons than I’ve found elsewhere, at least about Tracey’s character. [see updated link in comments below]

Happily, my Retro TV channel is showing season 4. Tracey is brilliant, especially in the fifth episode, “Ugly Quick,” where his character is reeling over the shooting death of a fellow officer.

If you’re a fellow fan of Tracey’s work, be sure to leave a comment! Also, let me know if you have seasons 5-7 of Da Vinci’s Inquest, or Da Vinci’s City Hall.

My Huckleberry Friend

I love Huckleberry Finn. Having just watched the 1979-80 Canadian/German television series on YouTube, I’ve been thinking back on all the different versions of Huckleberry Finn I’ve seen.

Video and DVD covers of Huckleberry Finn

My first exposure to Twain’s characters was the 1969 television series The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which aired on Sunday evenings alongside The Wonderful World of Disney. Huck, Tom and Becky got chased through animated scenery by Injun Joe. This series didn’t last very long, but it made a real impression on me.  Because I heard the name Injun Joe before I ever encountered it as a reader, I spent many years thinking he was “Engine Joe.” I always thought he was a railroad engineer. More confusion ensued when I tried to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the age of seven. I just didn’t have a big enough vocabulary yet. When Huck finds a canoe and floats downriver to get away from Pap, I read the word as “cannon” and just couldn’t imagine a floating cannon. I gave up, but fortunately I tried again later, and I’ve re-read it many times over the years, always preferring it to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Huckleberry Finn

The use of the ‘N’ word in Huckleberry Finn causes all sorts of problems for educators and book censors. A bigger problem is the weak ending, when Tom Sawyer re-enters the story. Most adaptations of the story try to “fix” the ending by swapping it for something more satisfying. I love these alternate endings, since there aren’t many classic stories you can watch without knowing exactly how it will conclude. (Great Expectations is another one, since Dickens wrote more than one ending to his book.) If you don’t like plot spoilers, be warned. In this next part, I’m discussing the endings of several movie versions.

Jeff East as Huckleberry Finn

One of my favorite versions of Huckleberry Finn is also one of the oddest. It’s the Reader’s Digest musical version from 1974, starring Jeff East (Huck) and Paul Winfield (Jim). It followed the more successful Tom Sawyer, with Johnny Whitaker as Tom and Jodie Foster as Becky. In both movies, the production values are high, with beautiful locations and believable period sets. Winfield as Jim probably sounds too educated, but he’s a wonderful actor, and the King and the Duke are well portrayed by Harvey Korman and David Wayne. Having all these characters break out into song is what makes this movie strange, and even though I had a big crush on Jeff East, his singing isn’t that great. He’s a good size and age (about 16) for Huck, who’s been played by actors ranging from age 10 to 30. Well, maybe 30 is an exaggeration, but there have been some actors who were too old for the role. I also like how this Huck is suitably dirty, since I’ve seen so many who’ve had too many baths and haircuts. This movie ditches the Tom Sawyer ending altogether. Huck rescues Jim from slavers, sends him ahead on the raft to Cairo with a promise to buy his wife and children, then stands on the bank of the Mississippi while a song called “Freedom” plays.

Elijah Wood as Huck Finn

Another favorite version is The Adventures of Huck Finn (1993) with Elijah Wood as Huck. He’s the smallest Huck I’ve seen, and he’s spirited and feisty, if somewhat too clean. Robbie Coltrane and Jason Robards are great as the Duke and the King. It’s really fun to see Renee O’Connor as Susan Wilks, a few years before she played Gabrielle on Xena: Warrior Princess. Ron Perlman is genuinely scary as Pap, and his scenes, along with the death of the youngest Grangerford, make this Huck Finn pretty frightening for younger children. This one also ends without Tom Sawyer. After saving the Wilks family from the Duke and the King, Huck frees Jim from a jail cell, and they run for a riverboat. Huck gets shot in the back, and Jim stops to help him. Jim is almost lynched, but Mary Jane Wilks arrives in time, and Huck passes out. He wakes up to find Jim a happy man, since Miss Watson set him free in her will. Widow Douglas tries to take Huck back to be further civilized. He slips off, and the movie ends with him tossing his fancy clothes away as he runs back to the river.

The Broadway musical Big River (1985)

The Broadway musical Big River, based on Huckleberry Finn, won a number of major Tony Awards in 1985. I got to see a touring production many years later, but I wasn’t that impressed. A stage musical about a river journey is going to have its limitations, even with imaginative staging and special effects.

This brings me to the 1979 series Huckleberry Finn and His Friends, starring Ian Tracey as Huck and Sammy Snyders as Tom. I didn’t see this television version when it was originally shown, but it may not have aired in Southern California. Maybe it wasn’t shown in the US at all, being a joint Canadian/German production. The complete DVD set came out in UK a few years ago, and all 26 episodes are on YouTube in 78 parts. The resolution varies but the quality isn’t too bad. This is a very faithful version of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, using much of the original dialogue and sticking close to the two books. Parts 1 through 11 cover Tom Sawyer, and parts 12-26 cover Huckleberry Finn. The ending is done as Mark Twain wrote it, although the entire storyline with the Wilks family swindle has been eliminated. Aunt Polly is played by Brigitte Horney, a German actress, and her voice is dubbed because of her accent. This is strange, but it’s even stranger that the German actress who plays Aunt Sally gets to keep her accent.  Aunt Sally wears an awful wig, and so does Injun Joe. In one scene, Injun Joe’s braids are sticking out from under another tangled wig, so maybe he is wearing the second wig as a disguise? Sammy Snyders shouts his lines playing Tom, and he’s a lot shorter than his Becky (Holly Findlay). I watched this show because I’m fascinated by Ian Tracey. He demonstrates a lot of the talent he later developed more fully, although he is one of those well-scrubbed Hucks. When you watch all these episodes back-to-back, it’s pretty funny to see both Tom and Huck go from blonde to light brown to blonde again. There’s some funny business happening with the hair color here. Ian Tracey is pretty pale for a character who spends most of his time outdoors. Maybe there wasn’t that much sun where this series was filmed, which must have been unpleasant for the actors, considering all the time they spend in the water. One more minor issue: I really wish that Tom Sawyer had a scene where we see him reading one of the books he’s always talking about. I may sound too critical of this version, but I thoroughly enjoyed watching it, and the theme song is now stuck in my head after hearing it 26 times.

Ian Tracey as Huck Finn

There are still more film versions of Huckleberry Finn in pre-production, according to IMDb. Maybe it keeps getting re-made because nobody has done a definitive version yet. Some folks swear by the 1981 version made in the Soviet Union. Researching it, I found that the only available DVD is drastically butchered, and the voices of Tom and Huck are dubbed by women. I can’t bring myself to watch it. The first time Huck appeared on film was in 1917, and even Mickey Rooney played Huck, back in 1939. Other actors who played the role include Patrick Day, Brad Renfro, Anthony Michael Hall, Ron Howard, Donald O’Connor, Mitchell Anderson, and Michael Dudikoff. These last three played grown versions of Huck, in sequels like Tom Sawyer, Detective and Return to Hannibal.

Speaking of sequels, these have been written as well as filmed, by Twain himself and other writers. The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Greg Matthews takes Huck and Jim out west, but the plot device used to set things in motion is the slaughter of several beloved characters in Hannibal. The rest of the story is suspiciously similar to Robert Lewis Taylor’s The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters. It would be better just to read this book and leave Hannibal in peace.

So, what is your favorite version? What do you think of Mark Twain’s original ending?

[Note: My title here is from the song Moon River.]

Footnote: When watching Huckleberry Finn and His Friends, I kept thinking that the actor playing Sid Sawyer (Bernie Coulson) looked more like Ian Tracey than his “brother” Sammy Snyders. Now I’m watching the Canadian television series Intelligence, made 27 years later, and guess who plays Ian Tracey’s brother??  Yep, Bernie Coulson. And, I’ve spotted three different Huckleberry Finn actors appearing with Ian Tracey in Da Vinci’s Inquest.

Edited 8/2020 to include Patrick Day as a Huck Finn actor, thanks to a reader’s comment.

Related post:  Tracking Tracey