Motion picture producers were well aware of audiences who now looked to Walter Brennan to spice up the action, to do something that would entertain them in pictures that were otherwise commonplace. Even in a major A film starring Spencer Tracy as the explorer Henry M. Stanley, Brennan was added for comic relief--in effect because he was Walter Brennan, screenwriter Philip Dunne recalled. When Brennan and Tracy, both Academy Award winners, appeared on the set of Stanley and Livingston, the huge assemblage of extras applauded both men.