Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (18 page)

When a horse-drawn lifesaving crew gallops to the rescue, its members shoot a line out to Bruce, who ties it to his waist, leaves his wave-tossed skiff, and swims out to save Jenny. With Bruce steeling himself on the yacht’s deck, the lifesavers establish a winch to haul the passengers in a makeshift shuttle. Of course, Bruce insists on being the last man on board; the boat breaks up with him still on it; and everyone expects him to die. The documentary details of the operation, and the sight of waves hitting the passengers as they lurch to shore, are frightening, and Fleming pushes the heartbreak as far as he can without
enraging
the audience or deflating its hopes. As the dawn breaks, Bruce’s mother stands on the rocks and searches the horizon like one of J. M. Synge’s mournful matriarchs in
Riders to the Sea.
Bruce’s trusty mongrel finds him washed up on shore, alive. Jenny and Bruce embrace. And Bruce’s newly emboldened mutt gives chase to the bull terrier.

Code of the Sea
didn’t impress the critics, but it gave Fleming his best chance to flex his muscles since
The Mollycoddle,
and in Hollywood it increased his growing directorial star power. The director “was mistaken for the leading man on location,” stated a newspaper item for the next Fleming production,
Empty Hands.
“A lady visitor at Yosemite Lodge where the company put up while on location, made audible remarks anent his handsome and commanding appearance! Jack Holt was well camouflaged behind a week’s growth of whiskers at the time and enjoyed the joke on his director as much as the rest of the company, including Norma Shearer.” Shearer probably enjoyed it more. She, too, fell in love with her director.

Shearer had wanted to act since she was a teenager. She owed her success partially to the connections and influence of her uncle (who had married an actress) and the tenacity and drive of her mother, Edith, who moved Norma and her sister, Athole, from Montreal to New York City. D. W. Griffith told Norma that she’d never make it after he used her as an extra in
Way Down East,
and Florenz Ziegfeld rejected her for his Follies. Shearer persisted anyway, until her made-in-New-York movies and serials earned her and her mother a trip to Hollywood with a contract waiting for Norma at the Mayer studio. She gamboled through a half-dozen pictures without creating a stir until she starred in
Broadway After Dark
for the director Monta Bell (who’d assisted Chaplin on
A Woman of Paris
) and followed it with
Empty Hands
(1924), made on a loan-out to Paramount. Four years from her woes as a bit player, she was on the brink of major stardom—and adult independence.

Fleming called
Empty Hands
“an ‘Adam and Eve’ story.”
Variety
called it yet another variation on J. M. Barrie’s
Admirable Crichton
scheme—“desert island stuff, with a man and a woman.” Except this time the “desert island” is the Canadian wilderness, where the father of the heroine, a worn-out flapper, has dragged her away from a debauched life. Holt plays her dad’s chief engineer, who saves her from a rocky death when she’s swept down some rapids in a canoe. They end up in virgin territory: the sylvan mountains of Lake Arrowhead, in the
San
Bernardino National Forest. “After a few days on location in this romantic setting,” Shearer wrote in her unpublished autobiography, “I developed a big crush on the sweet man who was the director of this picture.”

Norma thought of Fleming as a substitute for Andrew Shearer, her father. Andrew was “a gay blade” and a “sport.” He’d “sown plenty of wild oats,” built two homes for his wife and daughters, and designed the modern hockey stick before his lumber and construction company went belly-up and he ceased to be a presence in his family’s life. Shearer wrote of Fleming:

Because he was fifteen or twenty years older than me [eleven, in fact] I found him very endearing. His few silver hairs and kind gentle ways attracted me enormously. I supposed psychiatrists would have said my love for my father, whom I was missing so much, expressed itself in my romantic yearning for this mature man—this undoubtedly was the basis for my tender affection which must have overwhelmed me one moonlit night as we sat in a hammock on the terrace of the hotel overlooking the beautiful lake. I found myself saying, for no reason at all, “Mr. Fleming, would you kiss me?” And to my surprise he did and I loved it.

Mother Edie disapproved of what that “sweet gentle kiss led to,” which Norma characterizes as “a most beautiful friendship.” The actress said, “I had a lovely time courting this mature man—the first I had known.” She said she loved “his amazing hands” and the way he called her “dear darling.” And Victor even knew how to throw Edie off balance. “Sports cars were his passion, and he drove a beautiful dark grey Duesenberg too fast—except when Edie was in the back seat—because she would scream ‘Victor!’ and hit him on the back and he would pretend she had knocked him off the seat onto the floor.”

Yet even if she looked askance at Norma and Vic’s fling, Edie must have been euphoric over their cinematic liaison. Howard Hawks said, “When Lasky saw the finished picture, which Victor Fleming made, I thought he’d break both legs getting out of the projection room to sign her.” Norma’s performance propelled Thalberg, newly ensconced as Louis Mayer’s production chief at MGM, to cast her in a prestigious film,
He Who Gets Slapped
(released later in 1924). Fleming, too, won
praise,
for directing the stock story in (as the
Los Angeles Times
put it) “a breezy, refreshed style.” Fleming himself marveled at its ease of production: In 1944, he pictured “a group of people on a river bank in Yosemite National Park in 1924. In the group are Norma Shearer and Jack Holt, our principals; a cameraman, a couple of automobile drivers, a bit player or two, and myself . . . Less than ten people in the production unit to make that picture! Contrast that with the huge resources Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and other major companies put behind a production today! More than ten persons will be engaged in the research alone if it is a big production.”

Despite his later reputation as a “man’s director,” Fleming launched or cannily revamped a host of female stars from the 1920s on. As Shearer rode the crest of her
Empty Hands
success, she was happy to be seen in Fleming’s company. The Los Angeles reporter Grace Kingsley, running into her one afternoon in October, praised the star’s elegant taste and noted that her companion, Fleming, “seemed quite devoted.” But the affair between Shearer and Fleming didn’t affect the director’s eye for the potential of his next leading lady, Pauline Starke. In
The Devil’s Cargo
and
Adventure
(both 1925—and both lost), he turned Starke from a long-suffering starlet into a happy hell-raiser. And she thrived under his guidance.
Photoplay
once asked her to name the moment when movie producers found out that she had sex appeal. She credited
The Devil’s Cargo:
“For the first time in my life I had a role that meant something, and I loved it.” She plays a gambler’s daughter and casino chanteuse during the Sacramento gold rush of 1849 who falls for a crusading newspaper editor and ends up uniting with him against vigilantes and a drunken steamboat stoker (Wallace Beery). Starke carried the picture with the critics and the public—from then on, she’d win comparisons to the robust, erotic Gloria Swanson. Fleming rebuilt Old Sacramento on the Sacramento River and filled it with a couple hundred cast and crew, slaking his growing thirst for the epic. The erstwhile mechanic in Fleming listed among his requests to Paramount’s props chief “a stern-wheel river steamboat of the type used in 1850” and “a Washington hand press.”

In Fleming’s 1925
Adventure
(based on a Jack London novel of the same name), Starke played a maverick globe-trotter who enters into partnership with a plantation owner on the Solomon Islands and defends him against usurers who covet the hero’s land and stir up the locals. (Wallace Beery again pops up as one of the bad guys.) Hawaii’s
Olympic
swimmer Duke Kahanamoku made his first appearance for Fleming in this movie and said he “nearly drowned” after swimming four hundred yards with Starke to a ship and then, on the return swim, getting tangled in seaweed. Critics took
Adventure
for what it was—as
The New York Times
put it, “a compact serial.” Its most influential scene was “a table duel.” Two men place a loaded revolver, a lit cigarette, and a match on a table in the middle of a room; only when the burning end of the cigarette starts to ignite the match can the men jump for the gun. Fleming mastered ritualized machismo—and directors would emulate him for decades.

Fleming also began talking like a studio employee, telling a Paramount flack that a typical 1925 picture was a “staple article,” yet “a staple article of superlative quality.” He might have been thinking of his third 1925 movie,
A Son of His Father,
another lost Western, which
Variety
dubbed “one more of Harold Bell Wright’s handsome hero and dirty villain stories.” Wright’s best-selling celebrations of frontier virtues included
The Shepherd of the Hills,
frequently filmed (most famously by Fleming’s former assistant Henry Hathaway, with John Wayne in 1941) and still performed today as an outdoor play in Bran-son, Missouri. Paramount hoped that
A Son of His Father
would start a series of Wright adaptations, and chose Fleming to launch it based on his success with Zane Grey. Fleming’s female lead, Bessie Love, remembered in her memoir that after the production, when she “asked him, frankly, why he had agreed to make such a bad film,” Fleming “asked me, frankly, if I knew how much money the film had made.” Of course, Love had met Fleming on the set of
The Good Bad Man
nine years before. It was on
A Son of His Father
that she “got to know him pretty well; he was as big as a bull moose and one of my beaux.” Yet Love thought “he could be cruel.” Fleming’s crew warned him not to fire a gun near an electrician who suffered from shell shock, but the director went ahead and did it anyway. “I asked him why he’d been so cruel—of course, he didn’t think he was. I suppose he felt the man had been through a war, he could take it.”

Not even Fleming’s nonstop run of romances, from Valli to Shearer to Love, kept him from his family. His sister Ruth got divorced and returned to their mother’s house late in 1924. Fleming was an attentive uncle to Ruth’s daughter Yvonne. “He was at Nanny’s one day and he grabbed my chin and turned my head up and said ‘Open your mouth.’ And he hollered to Nanny, who was out in the kitchen,
‘
Mother, come here!’ So he said, ‘Yvonne has to have her teeth straightened. I will take care of it, I will call you and tell you who the dentist is, and you will see that she gets to the dentist.’ So that’s how I got my teeth straightened.” Yvonne thought of him as “a precisionist.” She’d iron his handkerchiefs for him, “and if those corners weren’t exactly done, they had to be redone.”

Fleming spent every Christmas dinner at his mother’s house, with Arletta’s son Newell sitting on one side of him and Yvonne on the other. Yvonne remembered that “he would come with his pockets full of $20 gold pieces, and everyone got a $20 gold piece for Christmas.” When Ruth bought a new house of her own, Vic gave her the down payment. In 1925, he also urged his favorite sister, unsuccessfully, not to marry Dick Kobe, nine years her junior, saying, “He’s going to find another woman, and it will never last.” But it did, more than fifty years, until her death. Fleming’s largesse was the only sign of his Hollywood success. He never brought over his girlfriends, and Yvonne said, “He never talked about himself. He was very, very private.”

When
A Son of His Father
opened, Fleming was already nearing completion on his next picture, one that would land him an upgrade of his contract at Paramount and increase his prestige. “I have just witnessed the first two reels of
Lord Jim,
which Mr. Fleming is now producing,” Jesse Lasky told
Moving Picture World
in August 1925, “and I am certain that it is greater than anything he has ever before directed. I very deeply admire both the man and his work, and it is our aim to keep him with Paramount for many years to come.”

No major writer, James Joyce included, has been more difficult to adapt than Joseph Conrad. What makes his fiction great is also what makes it hard to film—in Graham Greene’s words, “its strange removal of action to the second hand, its shades of thought.” (Probably the best Conrad adaptations are Hitchcock’s 1936
Sabotage,
loosely based on
The Secret Agent,
and the 1952
Outcast of the Islands,
directed by Greene’s friend and collaborator Carol Reed.) When Greene wrote that the object of filmmaking “should be the translation of thought back into images” and that “America has made the mistake of translating it into action,” he might have been thinking of Fleming’s
Lord Jim.
Fleming and his screenwriter, John Russell, aim at concision and dispatch as they present Jim’s momentary moral blackout during a crisis at sea and his tragic attempt to work out his own salvation by restoring order and morale to a jungle village.

Watching
the picture is direct and visceral, nothing like the knotty experience of reading the book. Yet Fleming imparts a remarkable amount of Conradian flavor into the look and feel of the movie. His Lord Jim wants to be a man of heroic action, but when he gets his chance to prove himself—and save the Mohammedan pilgrims on the
Patna,
or at least go down with the ship—he listens to the voices of the corrupt skipper and crew, not to his conscience or to the passengers crying for help. Then he becomes a penitent, self-destructive saint: a character of mixed gallantry, which would become a Fleming specialty.

Fleming’s spruce film, like Richard Brooks’s bloated 1965 version (shot by David Lean’s photographer, Frederick Young), demonstrates how difficult it is to turn a figure with a crippled self-image into the anchor of a sprawling adventure. In Brooks’s spectacle, Peter O’Toole comes off as a neurasthenic even though the actor is at his most athletic—indeed, 1982’s
My Favorite Year
used O’Toole’s swashbuckling fantasies from
Lord Jim
to illustrate the prime of his Errol Flynn–like character. In Fleming’s, Percy Marmont seems, at first, impossibly fey—a sad reflection of early Hollywood’s Anglophilia. (Even
The New York Times
noted that he lives up to the part “in all except bulk.”) But Fleming, shooting on the back lot and in the Los Angeles harbor, creates a strong tissue of atmosphere and incident. He gradually extracts from Marmont’s elusive presence the sardonic humor and strength he needs to bind it together. Fleming’s own naïve
and
worldly background connected him to what Greene isolated as the Conradian formula—the virtues of “courage, loyalty, labour” set against “the nihilistic background of purposeless suffering.” And Fleming responded decisively to the screenwriter Russell’s skill at sifting Conrad’s themes and action to dramatic essentials. (Russell next adapted that classic action novel about deception and valor,
Beau Geste,
with stunning success.) The outcome is a lucid, moving film about catastrophe.