Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (27 page)

There came finally the scene in which I caught my old friend Steve, played by Dick Arlen, with a rustled herd of cows. We were to play it in semi-closeup, squatting on the ground, with the camera shooting across Dick’s shoulder into my face. My opening line was, “Ah’m sorry, Steve, that ah had to come up with you at a time like this.”

We
took our places. The steam-shovel operator lowered the boom and nearly scalped both of us with the bucket of charcoal. There was one more formality, because it was no longer enough to hold up a slate in front of the camera on which would be chalked, “
The Virginian,
Take 147.” The sound track had to be cued in, too. For this purpose they had invented the slapstick. The boy would hold the slate up in front of the camera, cueing it in, and then he would bring the slapstick down on top of the slate. Clack!

I watched the take boy nervously. He held the slate in front of my nose, brought the stick down with a violent slap, and wham, he blew my lines right out of my head. After three attempts, I thought I was all right, but that was only my opinion. If I got my lines across to the satisfaction of the sound director, Fleming complained that I looked like a schoolboy making his first public recital. If I pleased Fleming, the sound director . . . would claim I came through the microphone like something abandoned by a soap opera. With this heckling I began to disintegrate fast. Finally I couldn’t even remember my line, let alone act it out. Fleming and the sound director weren’t speaking to each other when that day’s work went into the ashcan . . .

That night in our tent, Arlen came up with an idea. “Since I’m turned partly away from the camera in this scene,” he said, “I’ll write down your line on my chaps. When you look past me toward the camera, your line will be staring you right in the face where you can’t forget it.”

The next morning, I took a look at the bold print on the inside of Arlen’s chaps, and away I went. Fleming applauded. The sound director looked sour.

“He stammered. The line wasn’t smooth,” he said.

“But didn’t you catch the expression on his face?” asked Fleming. “He has discovered his best friend to be a cow thief. Wouldn’t you stammer, too?”

“I don’t care about the expression on his face. I was listening to the sound track, and it didn’t have enough punch . . . All right, fellows, back where you were. We’ll take this one over.”

“Who’s directing this picture?” asked Fleming after a slow recovery. “You or me?”

“
This is sound, and sound—”

Right then and there Fleming made a firm and violent stand, and, after that, movie directors began regaining their authority. They’ve never suffered serious competition since.

In February 1961, just three months before Cooper’s death at age sixty, Hedda Hopper asked him if his favorite Western was
High Noon.
“No,” he answered, “I think it’s
The Virginian.
” He recalled Vic’s old nemesis Pomeroy: “He’d set up a spook joint, no visitors allowed. The sound department wanted to direct; there was quite a hassle when Vic Fleming put his foot down and said, ‘You know sound, I don’t, but I’m the director and I’m directing.’ It was a good decision.”

Four years later, Coop’s and Vic’s old lover Clara Bow, afflicted with schizophrenia and a recluse for three decades, was watching a broadcast of
The Virginian
in the modest Culver City home she shared with a live-in nurse. Ninety-six minutes after Mary Brian told Cooper, “I love you,” Bow quietly died. She, too, was just sixty years old.

12

A Woman’s Film and a Man’s Adventure at Fox

In 1927, six months after the spectacular success of
Mantrap,
Paramount raised Fleming from $1,750 a week to $2,000. But in the immediate wake of the sound revolution, the studio had neglected Fleming and other seasoned pros. His long-term contract expired before he shot
Wolf Song
and
The Virginian.
One Paramount producer who recognized Fleming’s worth was David O. Selznick. After those back-to-back hits, the director let Selznick know that Fox had offered him $3,250 weekly and that he wanted to concentrate on “epics, not melodramas.” Selznick badly wanted to reteam Fleming with Cooper, Lighton, Paramore, and Keene Thompson to follow up their stellar work on
The Virginian.
Despite Selznick’s efforts, Paramount didn’t make a counteroffer, and Fleming did make a deal with Fox.

When Cooper talked about Fleming being “old-fashioned” on
The Virginian,
he was being complimentary and, in his clipped way, ironic. Fighting to keep the movie alive visually as well as aurally, Fleming was ahead of his time. In a memo pillorying B. P. Schulberg’s Paramount regime, Selznick wrote that Schulberg mistakenly considered Fleming “old-fashioned” and “impossible for talking pictures.” (Selznick listed among Schulberg’s sins turning down Hawks “as an absurd incompetent” and Wellman as an “incompetent, a has-been and a maniac.” Schulberg also fired Jules Furthman and mistreated other Selznick and Fleming friends and collaborators, past and future, including Lewis Milestone, George Cukor, Janet Gaynor, and Constance Bennett.) Selznick soon left Paramount to become West Coast production chief of RKO.

Fleming’s long run at Paramount and lucrative two-picture agreement at Fox enabled him to indulge his passions and also to be exceptionally generous to his family. In August 1929, he flew Howard Hawks
and
the Rossons to the Cleveland Air Races in his new Travel Air, a high-end luxury model with a closed cabin. (They became part of a search for a downed plane on the return trip.) In 1930, he gave his nephew Newell Morris his Cord roadster, though the lad was only fourteen. Then he startled and delighted his niece Yvonne with a Ford roadster. “I was fifteen years old in 1931,” she said, “and he thought it was high time that I had a car . . . He just rang the doorbell one day and there he was: ‘I got your car here. Come on, let’s go.’ Of course, I’d never driven. At fifteen, you’re not supposed to be driving. He hastily taught me, and I was so glad. He was a wonderful driver.”

Thumbing his nose at Schulberg, Fleming brought Furthman and Bennett along with him and made a property as gabby as they come for his first Fox picture,
Common Clay
(1930). This proved to be a commercial trendsetter, creating a new pattern for (as
Variety
put it) “the tragedy of the sweet, trusting young thing who goes wrong.” With
Common Clay,
Fleming tuned up another breakthrough vehicle for a female performer, this time Bennett, daughter of Richard Bennett and eldest sister of Joan. Constance had achieved an early vogue in silent pictures, but she took three years off in the mid-1920s to marry a playboy, Philip Morgan Plant, and frolic in Paris and Biarritz. When the Plants’ union fell apart, Hollywood beckoned: aside from a marriage into wealth, acting was the only way Constance knew to make money. She was a natural performer, but not yet a star.
Common Clay
would make her one.

In this update of a 1915 play first filmed in 1919, Bennett portrays the heroine, Ellen Neal, as a bright, lowborn gal who gets in over her head with the smart set. In one of Furthman’s contemporary twists, she starts the movie as a speakeasy hostess—and persuades the judge (and the audience) after a raid that she really was only a hostess. He convinces her that if she stays at that job, she won’t be a hostess very long. So she goes into service at the mansion of the fabulously wealthy Fullertons. There, even the butler paws her over. Hugh Fullerton (played by Lew Ayres), the heir to the family fortune, offers what she thinks is love and protection. But Ellen is a summer fling for Hugh (partly because he doesn’t realize the depth of his feelings).

When she becomes pregnant and he doesn’t answer her letters, she hires a lawyer. They file suit for improper relations with a minor against Hugh
and
his friend Coakley (Matty Kemp), who’s bragged of knowing Ellen intimately from the speakeasy. (He didn’t.) Revelations flare up in the courtroom scenes: Ellen’s “mother,” Mrs. Neal (Beryl Mercer), turns out to be the best friend of her real, dead mother, who
threw
herself into the Hudson River rather than impede the career of Ellen’s VIP father. The rich fellows’ attorney, Judge Filson (Hale Hamilton), realizes that he’s Ellen’s long-lost dad. Ellen decides that the proudest thing to do would be to drop the case and bring up baby alone. Suddenly Filson and the Fullertons want to make things right. But Ellen won’t be won over until Hugh, repentant and besotted, swears that she is all he wants from life. Fleming’s picture has the sharp trajectory of a feminist crusade.
Variety
was on the money when
Rush
wrote that the “original play had the ‘ruined’ girl rather abject about it all. Now she has been made an utterly defiant heroine.”

Fox put
Common Clay
on its slate before the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America adopted the morality-policing Production Code in 1930 and four years before the code developed teeth. In January 1930, Fleming told the code’s Colonel Jason S. Joy that he was willing to develop two awful alternate story lines. One would have hinged on the young couple’s comedy-stunt marriage in a New York nightclub, the other on a Tijuana marriage that Hugh’s father refuses to recognize because there is no official record of it. Happily, Fleming pursued neither.

The code administration tried to make filmmakers dilute their work at the script stage by specifying material that state and city censorship boards would cut from the finished movie, but the theatrical pedigree of
Common Clay
must have protected it. Despite voluminous suggested emendations and a smattering of changes in the dialogue, Fleming followed Furthman’s script almost to the letter. The most revolutionary act in the making of
Common Clay
was filming it in sequence, a practice as unusual then as it is now. It had worked for Fleming in
The Way of All Flesh,
and it worked for him in
Common Clay.
The movie gets talkier and more static as it goes along, but the forward motion of the speakeasy raid at the beginning propels a viewer into the cozy seductions and stagy courtroom histrionics. With Fleming, as with Wellman, the director’s urge to get on with things often made his material bristle.
Common Clay
half-bristles, half-creaks, and Bennett pulls you through.

Throughout Fleming’s career, and even throughout individual productions, he zeroed in on some actors and left others alone; mostly, he knew what he was doing. Sixty years later, Lew Ayres said he felt Fleming wouldn’t have cast him as Hugh if he’d had his choice of leading men. “He had been handed me and it was my first assignment after
All
Quiet on the Western Front,
and for some reason, he was a very different type than I . . . Very macho, I guess you’d say. Very positive.” Ayres was unable to characterize Fleming’s directing beyond “some of his ideas were good.” Yet the completed picture proves that Fleming knew exactly where to draw the line between Hugh’s upper-crust charm and ingratiation. Like many directors of his generation, he used manipulation to tame his ensembles. Hugh
needs
to be borderline effete for the melodrama to work and for Ellen to emerge victorious; it was good for Ayres to feel half the man that Vic was.

The director had to recognize that the critical performance was going to be Bennett’s. And she was on target. She plays a paradigm of tarnished virtue without ever becoming a nagging pain. She uses her blond sparkle and her mischievous, longing eyes to create a woman who doesn’t know her own sexual strength. When she gives in to amorous weakness, her husky voice becomes a bruised whisper. The courtroom scenes hand showstopping numbers to Mercer as her “mother” and Tully Marshall as her grandstanding lawyer, but it’s Bennett who holds the show together and mints the newly refined image of a reformed, unflappable flapper.

Selznick cited this movie to cap his indictment of Schulberg for misusing Fleming: Schulberg had doubted the director who turned
Common Clay
into one of the most successful talkies to date. “Constance Bennett had that audience at Loew’s State Theater so much with her in
Common Clay
yesterday that if she had walked into the theater she probably would have been mobbed,” wrote Louella Parsons. “I have never seen more tears shed in one afternoon over a heroine’s plight.” (Parsons, by now an established Hollywood character, reveled in superlatives.)

Fleming’s next Fox film,
Renegades
(also 1930), is a French Foreign Legion adventure starring Warner Baxter as the head of four ne’er-do-wells who are considered morally unreliable even among the other legionnaires in North Africa. Myrna Loy plays the Mata Hari–like spy who sends Baxter, a former French army officer, into disgrace, and Bela Lugosi, in his juiciest pre
-Dracula
role, plays the Arab leader whom Baxter and then Loy think they can turn into a continent-dominating dictator. Peopled with nihilistic, greedy, and unstable antiheroes,
Renegades
flirts with being prophetic and terrific, but doesn’t make good on its promise.

Dated colonial-adventure attitudes and conventions limit and taint it. Baxter takes Loy to the Arabs’ camp to punish her, only to see her
become
the chieftain’s mistress—which marks her, in Baxter’s
and
the movie’s terms, as the lowest sort of fallen woman. The antiheroic legionnaires’ redemption comes when they give in to their conventional guilty consciences: faced with their former barracks mates, they reflexively renew their loyalty to the West and turn their guns on their Arab collaborators. Reviewers drubbed the picture. They were probably responding not to the vigorous, clear action but to the confusions at the movie’s core.