Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (15 page)

What makes the movie so appealing is the way it touches on the common desire of ordinary men and women to shuck all traces of comfort and etiquette and to sharpen reflexes and senses in the great out
doors.
Doug’s attempt to join an Indian dance may trigger alarms on P.C. meters, but even the orthodox should see that his I’ll-try-anything attitude is disarmingly democratic. Doug the revitalized frontiersman displays a good-humored noblesse oblige both to the Hopi and to the college boys, far removed from the cutthroat ethos promulgated in twenty-first-century wilderness adventures. The famous Fairbanks smile suggests not inherited arrogance or smarminess but a gleeful acknowledgment of his own luck.

In Fairbanks’s movies, if not always in his self-help books, his humor makes his most relentless proselytizing for healthy activity and good cheer palatable. It did in his off-set shenanigans, too. During the making of
The Mollycoddle,
Fleming and Fairbanks knocked off early one day to jaunt over to Chaplin’s studio with three of their crew members. Spontaneously, they marched through Chaplin’s offices silently and deadpan, then started running at a dogtrot, still in single file. Chaplin was working on
The Kid,
but they jogged straight through his set, not saying a word—and Chaplin, getting the stunt, joined right in, flapping along at the end of the line in the Little Tramp’s big shoes. With Fairbanks leading the way, they toured the entire lot, without breaking formation or uttering a peep. When they got to Chaplin’s studio swimming pool, they dived in and swam the length of it, with Chaplin bringing up the rear in his Little Tramp costume and makeup. As Fleming told the tale to a reporter a few years later, he and Fairbanks and their men got out of the pool, “started running again and drove off in perfect silence, dripping wet, and went home.”

The Mollycoddle
emerged as a marvelous follow-up to
When the Clouds Roll By,
with the same casual authority at mixing comedy, fantasy, and adventure. The history of the hero’s forebears begins with a tableau lifted from the painter Frederic Remington: Doug’s grandfather and a sidekick fending off Indians from a water hole. (Fairbanks pads himself out and ages his face to play the role of the mollycoddle’s ancestor; he also plays a Wild West sheriff forebear.) When Doug explains to Renick that he’s heard New York is wild, Fleming cuts with the directorial equivalent of a deadpan to Western gunslingers raising hell on Wall Street. He uses simple line and figure animation to illustrate Beery’s smuggling operation. The sequence serves as a visual palate cleanser, and also echoes later in the mind.

When Fleming shoots some of the desert action, he uses long shots that reduce Doug’s figure to an animated speck among the buttes and
ledges.
And when Doug shows Renick his notes on the Dutchman’s operation, the drawings that he’s made within a flip book have a comic-strip-and-caption quality. The movie is always visually alive; there’s a brief use of subjective camera when the picture rotates with the hero’s stomach as he feels queasy in the stokehold, watching his fellow stoker shoveling coal. The killer climax is a landslide that the
New York Times
reviewer declared

outdoes anything of the kind in the memory of the writer. Half a mountain, it seems, moves down the steep slope, through an Indian village and over half a dozen people protected by a thin ledge . . . [Fairbanks] even challenges the landslide to beat him at its own game and demonstrates that he and Wallace Beery, the villain of his story, can roll and tumble, and fall and slide, down a steep mountain with quite as much concentration on getting to the bottom as any rock that was ever started anywhere by the single-purposed force of gravity. The two men start fighting in a tree at the top of a mountain and are still at it after they have dived over a waterfall, several precipices, many feet of rough ground and two or three brick walls below. Camera tricks? Some of it, but none that can be noticed and more that must have been performed exactly as it is seen.

The greatest milestone of
When the Clouds Roll By
and
The Mollycoddle
is artistic: they mark American moviemakers’ early grasp of the ineffable. They convey what Graham Greene articulated when he wrote, “Only the cinema is able in its most fantastic moments to give a sense of absurd unreasoning happiness, a kind of poignant release: you can’t catch it in prose.”

7

Scaling Paramount Pictures

If Fleming had remained with Fairbanks for many more years, his career might have stumbled like Ted Reed’s. Reed stayed a Fairbanks colleague for a decade. He became a full-fledged director with
The Nut
(1921), the last of Fairbanks’s modern comic adventures—in part, a Chaplinesque satire of mechanical obsessions. But the success of
The Mark of Zorro
(1920) persuaded Fairbanks, after
The Nut,
to concentrate on heroic period spectacles that consumed months in production. Fairbanks turned to Fred Niblo (
The Three Musketeers,
1921) and Dwan (
Robin Hood,
1922) to direct these epics; Reed later served the company as a production manager on
Don Q, Son of Zorro
(1925) and
The Black Pirate
(1926). One of Reed’s lasting contributions never made it into the film history books: as the first director on
I Wanted Wings,
in 1941, he designed Veronica Lake’s peekaboo hairdo; Mitchell Leisen got the directing credit.

Fleming, though, maintained his partnership with Anita Loos and John Emerson, making three of their snappy, ultracontemporary scripts in rapid succession. By then, Emerson had given up directing. When he and Loos broke with Fairbanks, Emerson gave a series of physical ailments as his public excuse. Some were genuine.

After Emerson and Loos married and took a European tour, they adapted Rachel Barton Butler’s
Mamma’s Affair
as a vehicle for that deft comedienne and Loos friend, Constance “Dutch” Talmadge. They surrounded Dutch with veterans of the hit 1920 Broadway stage production. Effie Shannon repeated her crowd-pleasing performance as the mother whose psychosomatic (or hypochondriac) attacks keep her at the center of attention every time the spotlight—or her daughter—threatens to stray from her. Emerson and Loos cast Kenneth Harlan as the doctor who, at the movie’s comic pinnacle, takes one look
at
the family and realizes that it’s the daughter who needs to be cured of mom-induced neurasthenia.

“To direct,” Loos wrote in 1978, “John chose a newcomer, Victor Fleming.” (Fleming actually worked for the producer Joseph Schenck, who was married to Constance’s sister Norma at the time and later co-founded 20th Century, which eventually merged with Fox. Schenck also sent the director to another Broadway play,
The BrokenWing,
to scout it as a possible Talmadge vehicle.) Fleming’s industry and unexpected enthusiasms snared Loos’s interest. “I respected Vic’s enterprise,” she wrote, “and was intrigued by the interest he took in things outside the movies. I recall one night when Vic was bringing me home from a party and we stopped to watch a fleet of fireflies skimming about Beverly Hills. ‘Those small insects have mastered a problem that’s never been solved by science,’ Vic informed me. ‘They can produce
light
without
heat
!’ ”

Fleming focused his attention on Talmadge.
Mamma’s Affair
would be no more than stagy piffle with a dynamite opening if not for Fleming’s loving treatment of his lead actress. Loos and Emerson kick off their comedy-drama with a burlesque prologue set in the Garden of Eden. Proud of this addition, the team devoted much of an article they wrote on the script to “Eve forcing Adam to let her eat the apple by throwing a fit of hysteria,” the point being “that ‘nerves’ have always been woman’s greatest weapon to secure what she wants.” The movie’s introduction exemplifies wiseacre humor circa 1921
and
Fleming’s gift of putting over outrageous material without fuss. Eve is a babe in a foliage-decorated body stocking, Adam is a scrawny, thatch-haired, Keatonesque caveman, and the snake is a low-tech hand puppet with the infectious effrontery of Burr Tillstrom’s Ollie (or maybe Robert Smigel’s Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog). When the snake urges Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, Adam says, “Nix on that. We ain’t supposed to eat the apple,” and warns him to stay away from his family. So the reptile advises Eve to escalate her complaints about Adam denying her any pleasure. “I never see anything but this old garden,” says Eve. The bit is funny and offhand in its daring. It’s as if the flight from paradise were the source story for all domestic hilarity from Aristophanes to boulevard farce to sitcoms.

Then the stage material begins. Shannon plays Mrs. Orrin, a rich, not-so-merry widow who has tied her sweet, beautiful daughter, Eve (Talmadge), to her own solipsistic mood swings. Fleming knows where the laughs are and where the audience’s affections are, too. Eve, on the
verge
of going out for the first time without her mother (with some girlfriends, to the theater), decides she has to kiss her mom goodbye. Talmadge is so tragicomically vulnerable and Shannon so farcically dominating that you feel an “uh-oh” rise in your throat without the benefit of a setup. Eve cancels the theater trip and cuts short her first evening party to be home with her ailing parent. Ma Orrin and her best friend and enabler, Mrs. Marchant (Katherine Kaelred), plot to marry Eve off to Marchant’s son, Henry (George Le Guere), a bespectacled mama’s boy who resembles the epicene young Joe E. Brown, and set the date to coincide with Mrs. Orrin’s birthday. But when Dr. Harmon (Harlan) observes the melodramatically tremulous matriarch and the furtively coughing and shaking Eve, he decides the young woman must be saved—and can be saved only if he separates her from her mother. Mrs. Orrin is reluctant to lose her “prop in all life’s sorrows,” but Eve reaches what the titles call “the breaking point” with a nervous outbreak of loathing and self-loathing that ends with her fainting.

Fleming handles Talmadge as knowingly as the doctor does Eve, but far more exquisitely. In this film she has a wholesome, quizzical voluptuousness, with a full, slightly down-turned mouth and eyes that flash out of deep triangular sockets. When she wakes up in the good doctor’s care, she exhales a delicious air of freedom. Fleming tenderly shoots her pulling a wrap around a slip or negligee, one tiny strap still showing on her shoulder. Talmadge is a fresh, spontaneous actor. When Eve mimes a fit to disturb her mother’s plans for her, Talmadge cues the audience into Eve’s fakery without wrecking the illusion—she goes as far as she can with the gag, right up to writhing on the floor like a dog chasing its tail.

A smattering of wit keeps the mix of mirth and heartbreak lively. Eve delights in a rugged piece of pulp fiction called
Pirate’s Revenge;
then her mother grabs it and substitutes gushy ladies’ novels in which “marriage is the sacred road where two souls meet.” Fleming gives satisfying weight to the doctor’s setting things straight. “Mother love is beautiful,” he says, “but you’ve never known it. Your mother is a hysterical, selfish vampire.”

At age thirty-two, when he filmed
Mamma’s Affair,
Fleming was a “mature” figure in the giddy world of early Hollywood; Constance, for instance, was ten years younger. And Harlan’s doctor typifies an image found in several Fleming silent movies: a worldly and virile yet temperate man.

You lose patience with the doctor character when he clings to spu
rious
notions of male pride. He spurns Eve’s advances twice: first because others might think he’s after her money; second because of her superficial dishonesty when she throws that artificial fit. Eve ultimately convinces the doctor that she had to provoke him before he would acknowledge his own authentic feelings. “I can’t let you go because I love you,” he says, finally. “That’s what I’ve been trying to get at,” she responds. By the end he’s happy with his “bald-faced, brazen, scheming little darling.” As Fleming made future films his own, his notions of love and honor grew more complex and often involved a man and a woman divvying up traditional male and female roles. But
Mamma’s Affair,
though stagy and dated, still has a smidgen of audacity. Its revolt against a cloying nuclear family is timeless and true to the period; so is its cry for healthy sexual love.

The movie was obliquely true to Fleming’s own experiences. He did know genuine mother love with Eva, who resisted the spoils and spoiling of wealth even after Sid Deacon made his fortune, and Fleming was as frank with her as any mother could require of a son. In an undated letter from the Algonquin Hotel around this time, Victor wrote his mother, “I just finished cutting the picture we made out there” and in about three weeks “will begin a new one with Constance.” Given that Fleming never drew family members into the film business, the reference to Constance connotes a certain intimacy. Fleming followed
Mamma’s Affair
with one more Emerson-Loos-Talmadge movie,
Woman’s Place,
this time starring Dutch as a flapper who loses a mayoral race but becomes a political force behind the scenes. Harlan co-starred as her on-and-off-and-on fiancé, an established political boss. No print has survived.

Fleming’s relationship with Clifford ended in early 1923 when she was linked to the scandalous divorce of the operatic diva turned actress Geraldine Farrar and the screen heartthrob Lou Tellegen. Clifford had been one of Tellegen’s lesser flings—she spent a wild few days in a San Francisco hotel with him in 1918—but Fleming had little tolerance for cheating. (He didn’t leave Clifford empty-handed. He had advised her to invest in Signal Hill oil wells; by the time they split, one of the wells had begun to produce. Clifford opened a chain of flower shops with the proceeds. Fleming didn’t kick her out of his Gardner Street house. Instead,
he
moved out, to a small place in the Hollywood Hills.)

The last of Fleming’s Emerson-Loos productions,
Red Hot Romance
(1922), about an heir to an insurance fortune, harked back to Fairbanks’s globe-spanning satirical adventures. According to the terms of
his
father’s will, the hero gains his millions only if he successfully sells insurance for a year. His best bet is to peddle it in a land where there
is
no insurance—specifically, the tropical country of Bunkonia. There he runs into two giant problems. Rapacious international forces have been engineering a coup d’état in Bunkonia—and his fiancée’s father has become unwittingly enmeshed in it as the American consul. The hero parodies imperial capitalism and Fleming’s old boss Woodrow Wilson when he proclaims, “This country must be made safe for democracy and insurance!”