Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (2 page)

Many of Fleming’s silent pictures boast a prickly, evergreen freshness that emanates from their spirit of discovery. He designed his Fairbanks films as if they were pop-up toys, playing with special effects, animation, and the audience’s knowledge of Fairbanks as a movie star. (Later, he brought some of that modernism into
Bombshell
and parts of
The Wizard of Oz.
) He became a household name in Hollywood. When the author of
What Makes Sammy Run?
and screenwriter of
On the Waterfront,
Budd Schulberg, and his boyhood pal Maurice Rapf played at being studio executives like their fathers (B. P. Schulberg and Harry Rapf), Maurice would name King Vidor his prize director, and Budd would counter with Vic Fleming.

That other underrated director, Henry Hathaway (
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
), who trained with Fleming, once declared, without reservation, “Clark Gable on the screen is Fleming . . . He dressed like him, talked like him, stood like him, his attitude was the same toward women. He was funny.” But Hathaway hit closer to the truth when he said, “Every man that ever worked for him patterned himself after him. Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, all of them. He had a strong personality, not to the point of imposing himself on anyone, but just forceful and masculine.”

Among the stars of the major studios’ heyday, Gable was the charismatic cock of the walk; Gary Cooper, the natural aristocrat; Tracy, the grudgingly articulate Everyman. Fleming shaped each man’s
legacy.
Seven years before
Gone With the Wind,
Gable broke through as the hero of Fleming’s
Red Dust
(1932); its screenwriter, John Lee Mahin, Fleming’s close friend and collaborator, evoked the director in the character’s brusque authority, technical savvy, rough-edged humor, and lodestone sexuality. Gable was a projection of the Fleming who, on meeting the Olympic swimmer Eleanor Saville in 1932 at the Ambassador Hotel, genially snapped, “Nice legs, sister!” (And that’s
all
he said.)

A few years before Fleming partnered with Gable, he turned Gary Cooper into the paradigm of a chivalrous cowboy in
The Virginian.
Cooper became known as “the strong, silent type” less because he was silent (the Virginian is a joker and a genial if haphazard conversationalist) than because his banked intuition made every syllable count, gave richness to each casual gesture and weight to every decisive one. Cooper was the Vic who knew how few words it took to express emotion. When the producer of
The Virginian,
Louis “Bud” Lighton, wired Fleming that Lighton’s mother had died, he wired back, simply,

Dear Bud

Vic

A few years
after
Fleming partnered with Gable, he forged a bond with Spencer Tracy that won Tracy the best actor Academy Award for
Captains Courageous
(1937). “He is probably the only guy in the world who really understands me,” Fleming said. “We’re alike: bursting with emotions we cannot express; depressed all the time because we feel we could have done our work better.” In
Captains Courageous
and other films, like
Test Pilot
(1938, co-starring Gable), Fleming and Tracy succeeded in creating characters who conveyed, physically and facially, more knotted-up notions and feelings than they could put across in words. “Fleming was quite inarticulate in explaining something to an actor, but he had such a way of getting around his inarticulateness that the actor would get it just like
that,
” said the Paramount propman William Kaplan, snapping his fingers.

With Gable, Cooper, and Tracy, Fleming mined some of the same territory as Hemingway and his creative progeny. The stars he helped create have never stopped hovering over the heads of Hollywood actors, who still try to emulate their careers, or of American men in
general,
who still try to live up to their examples. The director’s combination of gritty nobility and erotic frankness and his ability to mix action and rumination helped mint a new composite image for the American male. Fleming’s big-screen alter egos melded nineteenth-century beliefs in individual strength
and
family with twentieth-century appetites for sex, speed, and inner and outer exploration. His heroes were unpretentious, direct, and honest, though not sloppily self-revealing.

To Olivia de Havilland, “Vic was attractive because he was intelligent, talented, handsomely built, and virile in a non-aggressive way. He was also sensitive. A potent combination.”

“Every dame he ever worked with fell on her ass for him,” said Hathaway, naming “Norma Shearer. Clara Bow. Ingrid Bergman.” (He could have added Bessie Love and Lupe Velez.) Fleming helped turn Shearer and Bow into stars, and became the first director to bring out Bergman’s full sexuality, in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
From the start, he was as much a woman’s director as a man’s director. Fleming and Bow’s collaboration in
Mantrap
(1926) has won belated recognition as groundbreaking comedy. Bow’s embodiment of guilt-free sexual energy exploded stereotypes of the vamp and the girl next door and made clear to everyone that she had “It.” (She didn’t actually make the movie
It
until a year later.)

Much of Fleming’s attractiveness came from his vigor. He kept revitalizing himself away from movies with an anti-Hollywood home life and round-the-world travel and hunting. With his six-foot-two-inch frame and broken-nose profile and eyes that could narrow to slits and intensify humor or emotion, he looked as if he could handle himself on and off the movie set. Actors felt energized by the sight of this tall, powerfully built figure reflexively brushing back his mane and training a sharpshooter’s vision on their performances and on all the workings of the set. Craftsmen felt secure serving a director who could correct errors on the run, from lax ad-libs to skewed camera angles or faulty props. The cinematographer Harold Rosson, who collaborated with everyone from René Clair to John Huston, said, “Victor Fleming knew as much about the making of pictures as any man I’ve ever known—all departments.” And Fleming kept growing and extending his versatility for decades. To Hathaway, who worked with Fleming mostly during the silent era, “Fleming was the realist.” If a story was set in a certain place, “he wanted to go where it said it was made.” When
talkies
took over, Fleming was able to move indoors when necessary. He re-created Indochina in a studio for
Red Dust
and reveled in artifice on the most beloved flight of fancy of them all:
The Wizard of Oz.
This director knew how much visual detail an audience needed to make illusions feel real, and how much had to be contained in one shot. In that sense he was the Lucas or Spielberg of his day.

He was also the Sydney Pollack of his day. Male and female stars alike, Judy Garland as well as Gable, de Havilland and Bow as well as Cooper and Tracy, delivered, simultaneously, their boldest and most characteristic performances in Fleming’s movies. Unlike the stage-trained directors who invaded Hollywood in the sound era, Fleming had no set vocabulary to communicate with his actors. He relied on every ounce of his own being, expressing in face, tone, and body language the desired pitch of a performance and the impact he wanted for a comic or dramatic situation. To the sophisticated producer David Lewis, who watched Fleming film
The Virginian,
“he had an inner power that made him almost hypnotic.”

Fleming had the emotional advantage of being a Californian and an outdoorsman in an industry dominated by transplanted urban Easterners. In his book
The Industry
(1981), the producer Saul David characterized directors of Fleming’s stripe as “The Old-Time Wild Men”:

They are intensely physical men who make physical movies in a physical world. Strength is their religion, endurance their pride, and alcohol their undoing. They are clannish and contemptuous of everything most of the world thinks is movie-making. They are boorish and overbearing, tend to vote “wrong” and use socially unacceptable epithets in public. They are an unutterable pain to the Hollywood New Yorkers and a boon to caricaturists—but no one has yet figured out how to make big outdoor movies as well as they do without them.

What gave Fleming special sway in Hollywood was that he was an Old-TimeWild Man who could also be elegant, intelligent, and at ease indoors. (And he knew how to handle his alcohol.) Going through a roster of gifted directors who’d bridged silent films and talkies, the cult silent star Louise Brooks listed “Eddie Sutherland, the gay sophisticate; Clarence Brown, the serious repressed; Billy Wellman, the ordinary vulgar. Fleming combined all of them with a much finer intellect.”
Fleming
didn’t actively cultivate the Old-Time Wild Man image—he never enlisted a publicist to increase his visibility. Then again, he didn’t have to. When colorful fables clung to him like barnacles—even Mahin said “he was part Indian, and proud of it”—Fleming did nothing to scrape them off. Not only were his movies successful and acclaimed, but with female stars as different as Shearer and Bow falling hard for him, and male stars copying him, his personal reputation was stratospheric.

“He was always the biggest star on his sets,” said the MGM publicist Emily Torchia. “You could tell that by the attitude of the people who were there around him—he was very well appreciated,” says the former MGM child star John Sheffield (“Boy” in the Johnny Weissmuller
Tarzan
movies). In her book on MGM,
This Was Hollywood
(1960), Beth Day observed, “Tall, silver-haired director Victor Fleming was privately considered by many feminine employees ‘the handsomest man on the lot’ ” and drew as much attention at the commissary as the man everyone knew as the King—Gable. Fairbanks had been billed as the King of Hollywood, too. But throughout his career, Fleming didn’t just serve Hollywood royals: he put them on their thrones. When he guided fresh young talents, he saw them whole and inside out, tapping qualities that turned them into new American archetypes.

When talkies ruled and production boomed and the Hollywood studios became dream factories, fellows like Fleming and his favorite writers ( Jules Furthman, Mahin) developed the special seen and spoken language of “golden age” sound movies. This audiovisual dialect of expressive actors punching across snappy or suggestive talk in the molded light of a square frame was intensely stylized. It was also unabashedly emotional and sometimes cunningly erotic, even after the enforcement of the Production Code made explicit lovemaking verboten. Vintage Hollywood styles often felt more real than the slangy, jittery realism of today because the characters were substantial enough to cast long shadows and special effects didn’t swamp their crises and predicaments.

If he’d died before directing
The Wizard of Oz
and most of
Gone With the Wind
(in the same year) instead of a decade afterward, Victor Fleming would remain an outsized figure in American culture.
The Virginian
was a Western milestone as influential as John Ford’s
Stagecoach. Red Dust
was a classic sexual melodrama, fierce and funny—the peak of Hollywood’s few-holds-barred approach to sex before the enforcement of the Production Code.
Bombshell
predates Howard Hawks’s
Twentieth
Century
(1934) as
the
seminal showbiz screwball comedy.
Captains Courageous
proved that movies
without
sex appeal could be smash hits and that something non-mawkish could be fashioned from tales of surrogate fathers and sons. And
Test Pilot,
an incisive look at what happens to flying partners when one gets married, brought the first wave of sound-film buddy pictures to a resounding culmination. Fleming’s daring matched his taste, tact, and craft. He frequently demonstrated that free adaptations of beloved novels could both honor their sources and become their own enduring works of art and entertainment.

When Hathaway, Tracy, Gable, and others called Fleming the real Rhett Butler, they were referring not only to manner but also to mind. Rhett and Fleming shared the cynic-idealist’s ability to rise to a challenge realistically and, with competence and wiliness, achieve a tough nobility. From Fleming’s day to our own, American directors who navigate the whirlpools of movie-industry politics often generate denser moral and emotional environments in their films than the wanly virtuous or frivolous worlds too often found in independent fare. Fleming’s artistry lay in the way he molded other men’s material. What’s extraordinary about his work is how often he fully realized or even transcended that material, not how often it defeated him. What’s extraordinary about his life is that he filled it with as much passion and adventure as he did his movies.

1

Born in a Tent

Victor Fleming got his biggest professional break when he began working the camera for Douglas Fairbanks Sr., the actor and producer who set the early-twentieth-century standard for all-American exuberance and athleticism. Fleming often photographed Doug in robust Westerns—frontier sagas such as
The Man from Painted Post
(1917) or contemporary cowboy tales like
Wild and Woolly
(1917). Before Fleming entered the service in World War I, he may even have shot pieces of Fairbanks’s
Modern Musketeer
(1918), which featured a fictional Kansas cyclone twenty-one years before
The Wizard of Oz.

The humor and heroism of these Fairbanks mini-epics must have been piquant for Fleming. His family had enacted a
real
hardscrabble pioneer story, complete with a rampaging twister. When they migrated from Summersville, Missouri, to San Dimas, one of the sparser, dustier outposts of Southern California’s Citrus Belt, they became part of America’s national saga of farm-raised men and women staking out their piece of the emerging middle class. As Carey McWilliams wrote in
Southern California Country
(1946), the Citrus Belt featured settlements that were “neither town nor country, rural nor urban.” San Dimas was a scrubby bucolic province in America’s first burgeoning suburbia.