Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (10 page)

If Fairbanks’s action heroes inspired the creation of Superman and Batman, his movies helped catalyze comic-book graphic artistry with their breakneck mixture of visual ambition and vulgar excitement. Like vintage comics, a madcap mini-masterpiece like
The Matrimaniac—
with photography credited to Fleming, though no credits survive on-screen—keeps producing frissons that tremble like surreal found art. This story of an elopement gone wrong contains riotous tableaux: a mule doing an impromptu hind-legs dance with Fairbanks and a parson; Fairbanks balancing on phone lines like a high-wire walker or a modern-art mobile. (The movie climaxes with a marriage ceremony performed over the phone. The day I re-watched it, in September 2004, the news carried a story of a U.S. soldier in Iraq wedding a girl back home the same way.)

Dwan shared Fleming’s curiosity, range, and sensitivity, and the cinematographer had plenty to learn from Fairbanks’s other directors. Joseph Henabery, who worked for Fairbanks as an assistant director before taking the helm of
The Man from Painted Post,
was a shrewd exploiter of locations. He took a camera unit to the Yosemite Valley to
shoot
a brief mountain-climbing scene in the early part of
Down to Earth.
But a later shot of Fairbanks in full Great White Hunter regalia, commanding loin-clothed dark-skinned natives, might have been filmed anywhere from Long Island to Santa Monica. With little more than blinding light and tropical flora, it conjures a torrid spot on the equator. Most of
Down to Earth
hinges on Fairbanks’s ability to convince some upper-crust hypochondriacs that they’re on a desert island, not a spit of beach. It’s as if Fairbanks were proclaiming that all the world’s his studio. Fleming’s camerawork here is remarkable for its ingenuity and clarity
and
for the way his images abet humor and satire. When Doug directs a ship’s hand to guard the land beyond the beach from the patients, he newly dubs the seaman “a wild man from Weehawken.” This sunbaked fellow, getting the message, adopts a caveman’s pose near the top of a sandy hill in a composition that’s as startling as it is funny.

When Loos and Emerson stumbled at answering Doug’s demand to concoct a Western shot in the real West, Henabery and Fairbanks came up with a story of a range detective posing as a greenhorn rounding up rustlers for
The Man from Painted Post.
It’s the sort of square Western that the hero of
Wild and Woolly
would devour; it’s as if Fairbanks made his revisionist Western comedy, then decided to do the straight version. But it’s a well-paced shoot-’em-up, and a feel of fresh air courses through it. “Nice and cool up here,” Fleming wrote his mother from the Hotel Connor in Laramie, Wyoming, “and it’s rained a couple of times. We are going to camp out on the ranch where we work.” Fleming’s use of the Wyoming hills gives
The Man from Painted Post
a hint of grandeur.

It was evidently as a result of the prestige and popularity of his work with Fairbanks that Fleming got his key job in the Signal Corps during World War I, which led to his assignment as chief cameraman for President Wilson’s European tour. These experiences would burnish his reputation as an American original—a self-taught virtuoso—and turn him into an even more dynamic character: a rough-hewn man of the world.

4

In Manhattan for the Great War

When the United States entered the Great War in April 1917, every healthy male between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one anticipated induction by autumn and then service in the field. The twenty-eight-year-old Fleming didn’t appreciate the bump it would put in his career path; in what looks like an attempt to lower his chances of going in the first wave of draftees, he changed his birth year to 1888 on his draft card. But once he was called up, he didn’t flinch from the challenge. He wrote his mother in August that John Fairbanks arranged to have Fleming’s draft exam take place in Laramie, Wyoming, where he was shooting
The Man from Painted Post.
“Hope I pass it” was his comment. And he did.

After he squeezed in one more Fairbanks picture,
Reaching for the Moon,
the Army inducted him “with what appeared to be the rest of Hollywood” on October 18. He arrived at Camp Lewis, outside Tacoma, Washington, on October 23. In a letter to his mother that night—“I have made up my bed and am going to hit it very soon”—his only complaint is about the crowding in the car on the way. “All the boys say it is great up here,” he adds, and “one can’t expect too much because things are so new up here they have not had time to get things running smooth.”

His “first job in the army was to peel potatoes with a kitchen police detail at Camp Lewis,” Fleming wrote in
Action.
He was initially a private in the Ninety-first Division of the American Expeditionary Force, known as the Wild West Division because the bulk of its draftees came from California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The Army dammed this flood of men into the division’s 166th Depot Brigade before assigning them to units. According to Fleming, he “had enlisted in the Officers’ Training Corps”; unfortu
nately,
“before the commission came through, my number went up in the draft.” Had Fleming remained in the Ninety-first Division and the 316th Field Signal Battalion, he might have seen battle in France as a combat photographer.

A few days after his arrival at Camp Lewis, Major Charles Wyman, the division signal officer for the battalion, summoned Fleming to his office. Wyman had received a telegram concerning Fleming’s enlistment, either from the War Department, as Fleming remembered it, or from the office of the chief signal officer. The way Fleming recounted the interview, Wyman told him, “We have about thirty-five hundred applications from the infantry for service in the Signal Corps. They all want to get into the photographic division. They all say they’re A-1 cameramen, or laboratory experts. What we want you to do, Fleming, is to get ten good men out of the bunch.”

Fleming wrote that he “knew there weren’t that many cameramen and laboratory specialists in the country, but I kept my lips buttoned.” Wyman’s nephew Richard V. Wyman remarks that “Charley was not one to make up figures, and he might have said there were ‘a lot’ or ‘many’ from which to pick ten.” Wyman, perhaps unwittingly, had orchestrated an ideal match of job and soldier. After Fleming chose those men, he was transferred to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and became a soldier in the 251st Aero Squadron and the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, in part devoted to making “pictures from the air that would help the artillery locate its target.” (Eventually, the Army handed aerial photography from the Signal Corps to the newly formed Army Air Service. The Army Air Corps had temporarily disbanded in 1911.)

Although the Signal Corps was founded in 1861 to take charge of all field communications, it had not kept up with technology and had trained its officers and soldiers mostly in semaphore flags and telegraphy. Still photographs had no place in the Signal Corps of the Civil War, and prior to World War I the Army used motion picture photography only for isolated events, like the Wright brothers’ flight in 1907 at Fort Myer, Virginia. But on July 21, 1917, it designated the Signal Corps “the bureau which will obtain the necessary photographs to form a comprehensive pictorial history” of the war. Fleming would become a member of the fledgling Photographic Section.

Once he put on the uniform, Fleming hoped to be in the thick of the action. He later said that what
he
really wanted to become in the war was a machine gunner or an aviator, but the Army rejected his
efforts
to enter the field of battle. Even officers far removed from Hollywood recognized Fleming’s importance as the chief cameraman for Fairbanks, the most inspiring producer-star of his day and a phenomenal wartime fund-raiser and morale booster. And Fleming “found compensation in the knowledge that motion pictures had served a great many purposes in the war, apart from their ordinary utility as entertainment.” He would use his unique experience to serve his country first as a maker of training films, next as an instructor, and ultimately as a cameraman for military intelligence.

The Army intended to use Fort Sill as the base for its school of land photography, probably because it had already become a center for instruction in multiple fields, including gunnery and aviation. It was an apt spot for a private from the Wild West Division. Fort Sill dated to frontier days and had been the prison holding the Apache chief Geronimo before his death in 1909. Starting in September 1917, its School of Fire trained field artillery officers in the thousands, peaking at two hundred a week. Fort Sill also turned out one hundred air service observers a week. The ranks were a lot thinner for the Photographic Section. In August 1917, it numbered only twenty-five men, with cinematographers especially scarce; it could field only four motion picture cameramen as late as March 1918. Fleming answered to a couple of scholarly captains, Olin O. Ellis and Enoch Garey, and under their command did breakthrough work, creating some of the first military training films. “These films were used to demonstrate . . . the whole machinery of the guns,” he recalled. They “gave recruits about everything there is in gunnery except the feel of hot metal and the smell of powder.” Sadly, a series of arson fires in the 1920s incinerated those films. But the experience grounded Fleming and his colleagues in wartime reality. “It was my first consideration of the camera as a weapon of warfare and it was highly impressive.”

Fleming nonetheless viewed Fort Sill as just a step along his way. In a telegram to his mother sent on Christmas Eve, he says, “Everything is fine” but he expects “to get somewhere soon.” He didn’t have long to wait. Late in 1917, the Signal Corps hierarchy realized that equipment for the Photographic Section would be easier to acquire in New York. In January 1918, Fleming was making gunnery films at the School of Fire at the rate of one or two every couple of days. He and twelve others from the 251st Aero Squadron got their orders to transfer from Fort Sill to the new photography school at Columbia University.
Standing
out in the group was the wiry, six-foot-five twenty-five-year-old Ernest B. Schoedsack, the co-creator of the epic documentaries
Grass
(1925) and
Chang
(1927) and then the epochal fantasy
King Kong
(1933). Within a month, Fleming had finished the last of his fifteen training films and was Manhattan-bound.

In his February 9 letter of recommendation for Fleming, Captain Ellis suggested that Fleming and two others receive commissions “should their work at Columbia prove satisfactory.” The letter testifies to Fleming’s ability to impress people in a matter of weeks; it also points up the stature of his civilian connections. “Private Fleming was Douglas Fairbanks’s cameraman. In fact, we have found him to be more than a cameraman. He understands the motion picture game from the ground up, and he has ingenuity, conception and imagination, which made him a most valuable man in our work.”

The U.S. School of Military Cinematography established at Columbia taught six-week courses in motion picture and still photography. Although more than seven hundred men would attend its classes and enjoy the many off-base diversions of Manhattan, the Army treated the school as a military secret. It hid in plain sight at 116th Street and Broadway, and went public only after the war ended.

Fleming arrived on February 9. He wasn’t the sole Fairbanks cameraman on campus. Three days earlier, Harris Thorpe had arrived; he’d worked on
Wild and Woolly
under Fleming’s supervision. An East Coast cameraman named Harold “Hal” Sintzenich had helped develop the Columbia curriculum. Sintzenich was a seasoned veteran of New York and New Jersey studios, but in his diary he responded to Fleming’s arrival with youthful alacrity: “Vic Fleming, cameraman for Douglas Fairbanks, has been put in charge of the movie men, temporarily. An awfully good fellow.” Sintzenich and Fleming spent the next day “examining for men who are to go to France.” Ray June, who would later shoot Fleming’s
Treasure Island
and
Test Pilot,
also taught there at some time, but the “chief” or “senior” instructor of motion picture photography was Second Lieutenant Carl L. Gregory. Like Dwan and the other film pioneers, Gregory had earned a college degree in another field—chemistry, from Ohio State University. Then he worked briefly as a cinematographer for the Edison Company in 1909 and became a jack-of-all-trades (including writing and directing) for the Thanhouser Film Corporation of New Rochelle, New York. Tending the egos of movie-industry vets became a sizable task for Gregory,
their
supervisor. Schoedsack, for example, who would scale Gotham’s heights with
King Kong,
brushed off his Columbia experience with the words “I taught them how to put a camera on a tripod.” But Gregory’s faculty offered students a high-level practical education in lenses, composition, and lab work as well as “news value, historical record and war caption writing.” It culminated in “lectures on work under actual field conditions in the trenches and at schools of fire located in nearby training camps.”

Wesley Ruggles was one student who took advantage of everything he could. A former Keystone Kop, Ruggles went on to direct the first Academy Award–winning Western, 1931’s
Cimarron.
And there was an activated reservist named Louis (formerly Lev) Milstein, a cutting-room assistant, posted after Columbia to the propaganda division of the Army War College in Washington, D.C. He hoisted equipment for a cameraman documenting Medical Corps operations, made health films about the benefits of good posture and dental hygiene, and edited combat footage. After the war he adopted the name Lewis Milestone and directed the most celebrated of all World War I movies,
All Quiet on the Western Front
(1930). Another Signal Corps enlistee, a former worker at the World Film Corporation, got his first taste of trade-paper coverage when he was in the Army.
Moving Picture World
noted, “Joe Sternberg has been stationed at Columbia University, where he will be engaged in important work connected with the preparation of a film which will be used as an aid in training recruits.” Later, a Hollywood producer persuaded him to change
his
name, and Jonas Sternberg became Josef von Sternberg, the director who made Marlene Dietrich an international star in a string of poetic melodramas.