Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (19 page)

Paramount boasted of employing an 881-man crew and more than 500 extras at one time in
Lord Jim;
Fleming keeps everything in balance. From the beginning, he uses compositions that hold the characters in clear focus while the dockside shops and piers vanish in a line that stretches into the horizon. It takes Fleming no more than a few title cards and vignettes to establish Jim as an upright English sailor who sees a top berth on any ship, even one as shabby as the
Patna,
as a stepping-stone to a skipper’s position. Speedily and indelibly, the direc
tor
etches the casual racism of every other white man on the
Patna
and the equivocal position of the human cargo, Muslim pilgrims en route to the Red Sea. When the steamer hits a rock or a derelict ship in a murky night and threatens to go down, Jim’s—and our—understanding of the situation comes in an instant. There’s no way the scurrilous Cap’n Brown (Noah Beery) and his crew are going to risk their necks for eight hundred Muslims.

Fleming already knew the emotional dynamics of melodrama inside out. Where he excels in
Lord Jim
is in the
poetry
of disaster: the rustling movement of the sleeping pilgrims when the collision in the dark disturbs their sleep; the fog and mist clouding Jim’s judgment literally as Brown and his men urge him to jump into their lifeboat; close-ups that home in on Jim’s confusion just as he’s about to take that leap.

These touches display the knack for synesthesia that the best silent directors would bring into the talkies. With crack staging and timing, Fleming turns the
Patna
crew’s dumbfounding realization that their ship made it to port into a black-comic knockout: the Port Office master pulls open the shade on his window and there’s the
Patna
, docked at the pier behind him.

Inevitably, in any Conrad adaptation, some dialogue devolves into abstraction, such as when the sympathetic trader Stein says to a sailor at the Court of Inquiry that it’s futile “trying to judge a man’s soul by his actions.” But the filmmakers deploy their metaphysics much more sparingly here than Brooks did in his version, counterpointing it with earthiness and humor. After his judges cancel his seagoing certification on the grounds of desertion from duty, Jim leaves the court exactly as an onlooker is telling a mangy canine, “Get out, you cur.” Of course, Jim thinks he’s the one being called a foul dog.

Lord Jim
marked Fleming’s coming of age as a creator of thinking-man’s spectacles, not only because of his mastery of intimacy within scope, but also because of his ability to meld a diverse cast into a winning hand. Jim agrees to reform Stein’s outpost in the village of Patusan, which Stein’s drunken, unscrupulous agent Cornelius (Raymond Hatton) has been running into the swamp. Duke Kahanamoku plays Tamb’ Itam, the villager who becomes Jim’s stalwart right-hand man out of love for him. (In real life he was a hero, too, winning three gold and two silver Olympic swimming medals for the United States.) Shirley Mason as Jewel, the daughter of Cornelius’s abused and long-
dead
native wife, conveys the underlying innocence and ardor that
would
attract a starry-eyed soul like Jim.

The film combines the
Patna
’s skipper with Conrad’s dangerous aristocratic raider, Gentleman Brown. When Cap’n Brown, a couple of
Patna
veterans, and the deposed Cornelius raid the village, Jim foils them but decides to give them safe passage rather than an eye-for-an-eye brand of native justice. He vows to forfeit his own life to the village leader Doramin (Nick De Ruiz) if Brown and his men slaughter any more Patusanese.

The director shows his mettle when he stages Jim’s resulting self-sacrifice. The corpse of Doramin’s son, Dain Waris (George Magrill), lies in state when Jim takes his fateful walk, idly running his hand across the vine-laden rail of a bridge, blithely demonstrating that he has no gun and has accepted his fate. Doramin shoots—and Jim totters back across the bridge and into the arms of Jewel. As promised in the opening quotation from Conrad’s final pages, Jim ends up “inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.”

Between
Empty Hands
and
Lord Jim,
a number of characteristic Fleming projects went unrealized, including a Zane Grey Western,
The Border Legion,
and
Outcasts of Poker Flat,
based on the celebrated Bret Harte story that had last been filmed in 1919. The most intriguing was a remake of the 1918 Sessue Hayakawa hit,
The Honor of His House—
a love triangle with a Japanese-American girl at its apex and a Japanese and an American at its corners. Fleming’s later political foes would accuse him of anti-Semitism, but the necessity for cross-racial understanding crops up often as a theme in his work.

Fleming might have considered the circus movie
The Mountebank
(released as
The Side Show of Life
) beyond his range then, like the World War I service comedy
Behind the Front.
And he probably thought the oil-well melodrama
Tongues of Flame
beneath him; it went to his old pal Joseph Henabery. Though Vic’s detractors have branded him a roughneck, his studio bosses thought him qualified to follow
Lord Jim
with a high-society melodrama,
The Blind Goddess.
Fleming had to orchestrate a plot that combined courtroom theatrics with the mother-daughter suds of
Stella Dallas.
The cast boasted Esther Ralston, star of
The American Venus,
as the daughter of a New York political boss (Ernest Torrence); Louise Dresser as the mother she never knew; and square-chinned Jack Holt (Chester Gould’s visual model for Dick Tracy) as the girl’s fighting district-attorney fiancé. Holt resigns his
post
to defend Dresser from the charge of killing Ralston’s father. The author of the original novel, Arthur Cheney Train, was a Harvard-educated lawyer turned storyteller long before Scott Turow; Train’s most popular creation, Ephraim Tutt, was once as famous as Charlie Chan. But the scribblers who would have a lasting effect on Fleming’s career were the screenwriters on
The Blind Goddess,
the husband-and-wife team of Louis Lighton and Hope Loring. They and Fleming won praise from critics for “a pace that keeps the audience keyed up all the way.” Lighton would eventually collaborate with Fleming as a producer on three classics
—The Virginian, Captains Courageous,
and
Test Pilot.

Hoping that a jolt of barnstorming energy would rev up a potentially stuffy big-star contraption, Fleming directed Ralston, on location, to jump into a big Hispano-Suiza roadster (borrowed from Jack Pickford) and race alongside a real Santa Fe passenger train carrying her fictional father. The car was known internationally for its get-up-and-go. (Luis Buñuel hailed Buster Keaton’s
College
for being “as vital as a Hispano-Suiza.”) The problem was that Ralston couldn’t drive. Ralston recalled that Fleming “yelped, ‘Oh, God. I hear the train coming now. Somebody put it in gear for her. I hope you can at least steer. Just follow behind the camera car and stay in the road!’ ” She did, at eighty miles an hour in her recollection, until she had to wave at Torrence, who, as her father, was standing on the train’s rear platform. “I took my hands off the wheel and waved, and almost plowed into the camera car ahead of me. I grabbed the wheel and swerved to miss it, almost overturning the Hispano in the ditch. From then on, Mr. Fleming decided to use a double for my future driving scenes.”

Ralston “couldn’t squeeze a tear” in the courtroom for the character’s dead father until Dresser came over and murmured, “Esther, dear, my beloved mother is in the Hollywood Hospital, dying of cancer. They just phoned me and said if I could get right over there, I’d be able to see her once more before she dies. I can’t leave until we do this scene.” Ralston began sobbing, and Fleming ordered, “Get her closeup . . . quick.” Fleming sometimes cooked up soap operas to get what he needed from his actors, but this was no desperate ploy: Dresser did rush to the hospital once the scene was done, and her mother died an hour after she got there.

Ralston, a compact, well-behaved blonde, was Hollywood’s idea of a smart young leading lady. Clara Bow, Fleming’s next star (and next
lover),
was anything but. When Joseph Moncure March described a redheaded flapper in his notorious 1928 verse novel,
The Wild Party,
he must have modeled her on the flame-haired Bow, who was dubbed the It Girl two years earlier.

A rogue—

But her manner was gay and delicious.

She could make a Baptist preacher choke

With laughter over a dirty joke.

From 1925 to 1933, the entire moviegoing world knew this ravishing live wire as the epitome of the jazz baby: “naughty of eye” and “expressive-lipped”; “cute, lecherous; lovable, treacherous.”

Well, maybe not “treacherous”—except in the minds of scandalmongers and pop moralists. Bow was a generous and plucky gal, on and off the screen. Her multifaceted beauty was dreamy, spellbinding, and spine-tingling. She wasn’t merely a movie star but a battered Hollywood heroine. On ambition and street wit alone, she pulled herself out of Brooklyn tenements, escaping from a sexually abusive father and a murderously unbalanced mother who once tried to slit the teenage Clara’s throat when she was sleeping—catalyzing, among other repercussions, a lifelong case of insomnia. Clara’s father put her mother in an insane asylum, where she died while her daughter was appearing in a picture.

Becoming a performer in a disreputable fledgling art form, Clara managed to use her disadvantages and her psychic wounds to invent her own acting grammar and vocabulary built on uninhibited energy and movement. Her swift, intuitive mastery of a new erotic syntax made her a revolutionary star. She was all the more alluring—and, to some onlookers, “dangerous”—because her sexuality informed her overall life force. Neither a vamp nor a Goody Two-Shoes, she provided the figure of the girl next door with a healthy sex drive.

Her best-known picture was Clarence Badger’s 1927 adaptation of Elinor Glyn’s
It,
but her juiciest vehicle was the movie that led up to it: Fleming’s
Mantrap.
Its Sinclair Lewis source novel has been forgotten, but Lewis was coming off an unprecedented string of critical and popular successes (
Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith
) when
Mantrap
came out in 1926, and the movie was a plum assignment for Fleming. The director was ready for it. He saw that it was a new kind of sex comedy,
celebrating
a spunky, unstable erotic heroine (Bow) while poking fun at both her honest, backwoods-trader husband (Ernest Torrence) and the elegant urbanite (Percy Marmont) who almost steals her away. Professional critics took Lewis at his word when he called it “a straight, out-and-out romance of an unspoiled country . . . the most captivating love and adventure story I have ever conceived or told.” But young James Agee, writing to his friend and mentor Father Flye during his summer vacation from Exeter, hit the right note when he called it “always amusing” and “a sort of relaxation for Lewis” from “working on the biggest thing yet,” which turned out to be
Elmer Gantry.
Of course,
Mantrap
still had elements of social commentary: it popularized the concept of the “social climber.”

Whether on a Paramount set or on location at Little Bear Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains, Fleming sustains a summery tone from start to finish. Vincent Lawrence, fresh from Broadway, consulted on the script and instructed Hathaway and Fleming on the importance of structuring scenes rather than concocting clever titles. Lawrence had a benign influence; he’d later work on
Test Pilot
and Fleming’s unfortunate 1946
Adventure
(no relation to the silent Jack London piece). On its own terms
and
as an interpretation of the novel, the movie is a small comic masterpiece, though Lewis ended up hating it. (He told an audience at a movie theater where he was spotted that he was glad he’d read the book first, because he wouldn’t have been able to recognize it from the movie.) It’s consistently sprightly, as befits the theme that erotic attraction bubbles constantly beneath the surface of social life, even in the Canadian frontier town of Mantrap Landing.

Most romantic comedies, especially ones revolving around triangles, build to a clear amorous resolution.
Mantrap
’s characters don’t know or can’t accept what they want, especially the sophisticated Ralph Prescott (Marmont), a New York City divorce lawyer, and the flirty Minneapolis manicurist turned rural wife, Alverna (Bow). At the end, they all drift back to where they started, sadder and wiser and a little bit funnier, too. The movie begins with comical vignettes contrasting the sexual hunger of Mantrap Landing’s general-store operator Joe Easter (Torrence) with the sexual disgust of Prescott, a bored Manhattan attorney. Annoyed rather than flattered when a well-put-together blonde plays footsies with him under his desk, Prescott escapes into a hallway. There he runs into a business neighbor, Woodbury (Eugene Pallette), who beckons him into
his
office—past a display of papier-
mâché
legs and sashaying models (he runs a hosiery company)—and suggests that a vacation in the north woods will be therapy for Prescott.

James Wong Howe, returning as Fleming’s cinematographer, said it was the director’s idea to start with Prescott’s client crying in his office: “He had me open up on her little hand-mirror showing the lips being made up and I would dolly back.” When she puts the mirror down, we get our first view of Marmont’s lawyer, looking stern and stressed. Speaking in 1970, Howe remembered the gal as Bow, though it’s the skillful Patty DuPont as Prescott’s blond client (Fleming would use her in his next Bow picture, too). In a pungent counterpoint, we first see Joe in a marvelous tableau, modeling hats for local squaws; Torrence is priceless when he presents his wares to his audience with an obsequious deadpan. He’s been out of circulation far too long, and when he discovers that dames in the 1920s display more than their ankles, he decides he needs a trip to Minneapolis. Fleming told Howe, “You go ahead and shoot the montage of Ernest Torrence coming to town from the woods by yourself,” and Howe thought, “That’s wonderful.” In Minneapolis, Joe meets Alverna, a manicure girl who finds this endearing lug a welcome change of pace from slick city beaux. Even before Bow’s entrance, the movie’s zest and innovation outstrip even Fleming’s Fairbanks pictures: the camera glides among the characters with a skin-prickling emotional alertness. When Bow does arrive, she provides a power surge that never leaves the picture. From the moment Alverna waggles her way out of a taxi, Fleming lets Bow take charge of the film as if she were stuffing a hotel key down her blouse.