Read Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Online
Authors: Michael Sragow
Cooper saw that Fleming was in touch with his own inner twelve-year-old. When the cast arrived by seaplane at a secluded spot in Catalina Island, “a sort of a large rowboat came out to the seaplane to pick us up.” Cooper’s teacher stepped out on the edge of the boat before he and Fleming were off the seaplane—and “of course the boat went out from under her and she went in the water. With the water filling up her clothes and herself filling up her clothes, she looked like a balloon in the water, spouting great streams of salt water, and pilots and people were jumping in trying to save her—she couldn’t swim, the poor thing. My mother was screaming. They got her out, but she was
large
and heavy to get out. All Vic Fleming kept yelling was ‘Jackie, throw your schoolbooks in the water, throw your schoolbooks in the water!’ He and I were hysterical while this poor woman half drowned,” Cooper recalled, chuckling.
The actor needed to put his trust in Fleming, especially in physically uncertain scenes such as Jim’s race up the riggings of the
Hispaniola
with the pirate Israel Hands (Douglas Dumbrille) in pursuit. “Jackie’s perch sixty feet above the deck was precarious,” said Fleming. “The roll of the boat made it hard to maintain the balance of the cameras built on parallels over the edge of the boat. It was necessary to cover the mike boom to avoid the whistling of the wind.”
For Fleming, “the most difficult scene mechanically” was Smollett’s flight under fire from the
Hispaniola.
“The cannon being fired from the ship and the men in the small boat firing muskets back required several days to photograph. It was necessary repeatedly to remine the ocean, dry off the guns and the players, and reshoot the scene, although it consumes less than two minutes on the screen.” On the set for one of those days, Philip K. Scheuer of the
Los Angeles Times
observed, “A small charge of dynamite had to be planted each time in a fathom or two of water, its location marked by a cork. On signal there would be a puff of white smoke from the ship, a count of three, and then the charge would be set off. When there wasn’t a mix-up in signals, the skiff would either be too near or too far from the charge. As we departed, Victor Fleming, the director, was slowly going crazy. He didn’t even say good-by. Just ‘Cut!’ ”
Editing was the ultimate rewrite on
Treasure Island.
Mahin had written and Fleming had filmed the book’s melodrama-charged sequence of Jim’s witnessing the buccaneers handing Silver “the black spot,” just as Pew had handed it to Billy Bones. “But at this point,” Fleming said, “the preview audience grew restless; they shifted in their seats; they rattled programs; they coughed, all signs of diminished attention. It was obvious that their sympathy was with Jim, the Squire, Livesey.” So Fleming “confined the issue to Long John’s defense of Jim. This simple change, absolutely, at the next preview, eliminated the break in audience attention we had noticed here.”
Final cut on the movie, of course, belonged to Mayer. According to Cooper, Mayer was crestfallen for two reasons. First, Cooper, his biggest child star, the uncrowned prince of male weepies since
The Champ
(1931, also co-starring Beery), hadn’t a single good bawling
scene
in the whole picture. And the climax of Long John slipping away under the eye of Ben Gunn didn’t provide a suitable theatrical crescendo for the friendship between the pirate and Jim Hawkins. So LB “had a new ending written—Jim Hawkins frees Long John Silver just before the end of the film, but first, he cries because his piratical friend will be gone forever.” This capper has caused Stevenson scholars to charge the film with sentimentality ever since.
Still, the relationship between the boy and the buccaneer generally cleaves to the novel. From the time he lies hidden in an apple barrel and eavesdrops on Long John laying plans for mutiny, Jim sees through the pirate’s feigned innocence. Yet even after he witnesses Long John commit cold-blooded murder, he retains a reluctant admiration for the man’s leadership, cleverness, and persistence, just as Long John appreciates the boy’s true grit even after Jim brags of setting the
Hispaniola
adrift and bollixing the pirates’ plans. Cooper and Beery are at their best when Long John and Jim are enjoying each other’s mettle. The characters’ mutual admiration needs no underlining. Small wonder that Cooper was to write, “We were all unhappy at the summons to return to work.” Beery hated the idea of Cooper getting a climactic showcase, so he flubbed lines and stalled and stretched a day of retakes into a week. As for the director, Cooper said, “Fleming nearly had a stroke; to him, the idea of mucking about with a Stevenson ending was damn near sacrilegious.”
Mayer, however, did know his audience, and he didn’t stint on promotion.
Treasure Island
initially grossed $565,000 over its enormous $825,000 budget, then was revived both in the United States and overseas. It was during a London revival that Graham Greene, then a film critic (and a great one), compared it favorably to the nautical adventure
Midshipman Easy,
by Carol Reed, his future friend and collaborator on
The Fallen Idol, The Third Man,
and
Our Man in Havana.
Wrote Greene: “The story of
Treasure Island
has a deeper, more poetic value” because “the buried treasure, the desert island, the horrifying murder of the faithful sailor, the persons of Long John and blind Pew, all these have symbolic value.
Treasure Island
contains, as
Midshipman Easy
does not, a sense of good and evil. Even a child can recognize the greater dignity and depth of this Scottish Presbyterian’s
Mansoul
written in terms of an adventure-story for a boys’ magazine.”
Treasure Island
solidified Fleming’s reputation as a “big picture” man and a reliable moneymaker. Ever since 1929, he had wanted to do “epics, not melodramas,” but this at least was an epic melodrama.
He
was firming up his marriage, too. Lu was devoted, even witty. Vidor would say, “Fleming was very sort of tough with his wife, always,” but Victoria thought she was happy playing a supporting role and was “completely subordinate and quiet. He was a big director and she was his very little wren of a wife.” As far as his niece Blocksom could see, “She spent her days playing cards and gambling. She was a great gambler, so [now] she had money to gamble with. But Uncle Vic wanted children.” Lu visited Vic on Catalina, the site of a great casino, while he was filming there in May—Sally says her mother joked years later, “It was a dark and stormy night”—and gave birth to their first child, Victoria Sue, on January 28, 1935.
16
Introducing Henry Fonda, Farewell to Jean Harlow
A fan of Fleming’s since Vic’s Paramount days, David O. Selznick was in the middle of his brief but spectacular producing stint at MGM, designed, said his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, to take pressure off the ailing Irving Thalberg, who suffered from a bad heart. Under various working titles, including
Salute, There Goes Romance,
and
A Woman Called Cheap,
Selznick, using the pseudonym Oliver Jeffries, cooked up the original story for Fleming’s first musical,
Reckless
(1935), with the director himself. Ten writers, including Joseph Mankiewicz, Philip Barry, S. N. Behrman, and Val Lewton, had some involvement with the script; P. J. Wolfson got credit for the final screenplay.
Selznick and company loosely based the film on the mysterious demise of Smith Reynolds, the R. J. Reynolds tobacco heir who died of a gunshot wound to the head. His widow, torch singer Libby Holman, contended that it was suicide; the state of North Carolina nonetheless accused Holman and Reynolds’s best friend, Ab Walker, of murder. Holman was an easy target, being Jewish, bisexual, and culturally and politically adventurous, but the family successfully petitioned the state to drop the case because the evidence was not decisive. (Holman’s biographer Jon Bradshaw argues that Reynolds’s death resulted from Ab and Libby trying to wrest Smith’s gun from his hand.) Parallels to Holman run a zigzag path through
Reckless.
The movie’s heroine, Mona Leslie ( Jean Harlow)—also a Broadway musical star, but not Jewish, bisexual, educated, or culturally and politically adventurous—makes the mistake of eloping with a flamboyant, confused swell named Bob Harrison (Franchot Tone). His one accomplishment in life is founding the SAML: the Society for the Admiration of Mona Leslie. Bob’s belated recognition that he still loves the highborn woman (Rosalind Russell) whom he jilted to marry Mona
leads
to his suicide. The media and the district attorney accuse Mona of murder, and Bob’s snooty father (Henry Stephenson) threatens to bring their fight over the custody of his grandson to trial. Her support through all her troubles is the fellow who really loves her: Ned Riley (William Powell), a sports promoter who catapulted Mona from the sideshow circuit to headlining shows on the Great White Way. (Two weeks before the premiere of
Reckless,
MGM publicity chief Howard Strickling wrote Howard Dietz, his New York counterpart and a friend of Holman’s, assuring him there was “nothing ever done here to connect Holman case with RECKLESS and will be doubly careful in the future.”)
After the arduous
Treasure Island, Reckless
must have seemed like a cakewalk for Fleming, who had wanted to do a musical ever since
Burlesque
fell off his schedule in 1929. Fleming became acquainted with Broadway’s brand of personality-infused musical theater in his Columbia/Army days, when he and his company saw Al Jolson, in
Sin-bad,
step to the footlights and announce that he had been hunting down barbed wire to weave a sweater for the kaiser. Selznick obviously intended
Reckless
to be “Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s mammoth musical melodrama” of 1935 (to quote the poster copy). He aimed to star Joan Crawford as Mona and surround her with a clutch of top players: not just Powell as Ned and Tone as Bob Harrison but also, as Mona’s granny, May Robson, who had recently been Frank Capra’s Apple Annie in
Lady for a Day
(1933). “So this picture looms as of the multiple stellar variety,” noted one press release. But along the way, Harlow fell for Powell. MGM, hoping to capitalize on the eruption of this romance into the newspapers, pulled Crawford out and put Harlow in—though the story now seemed (to Harlow and others) a vulgar echo of her marriage to Paul Bern.
Powell urged Harlow to stay in the picture because walking out would enrage the studio into suspending her and further cloud her image. Selznick later wrote, “I thought she could do well by it and was for the substitution, even though I certainly never would have planned a musical for Jean Harlow,” who was no singer or dancer. Virginia Verrill dubbed her vocals. The choreography interlaced long shots of Harlow’s dancing double (Betty Halsey) with the star herself, swaying her shoulders, swinging her arms, and executing a cartwheel and some skips and bounces.
But
Reckless
doesn’t fail because of Harlow’s inadequacies; it fails
because
it plays like a sober and archaic Broadway version of the inside-showbiz melodramas that Fleming had already satirized to cinders with
Bombshell.
In
Reckless,
instead of a sponging family, there’s the square, straight-shooting grandma (Robson). Instead of
Bombshell
’s dozens of Hollywood hustlers, there are Ned Riley’s redoubtable lieutenants. They’re Runyonesque and funny-tough yet also
righteous
New Yorkers, played by
Bombshell
’s uncouth brother, Ted Healy (Smiley), and Nat Pendleton (Blossom), who had appeared with Powell in
The Thin Man.
Space Hanlon in
Bombshell
was as wily, witty, and manipulative as he was amorously abashed. In
Reckless,
the otherwise similar Ned Riley is more wounded and smitten. And Tone, as Harrison, is a rakish version of Gifford Middleton without the comical corkscrew of his
Bombshell
character.
Indeed, nearly everything Fleming played for laughs in
Bombshell
he played for melodrama or poignancy here, and his heart wasn’t in it. Nor did he have the instinct for backstage byplay that he had for soundstage hustle and flow.
Bombshell,
though broadly satirical, boasts a veracious edge.
Reckless
is stagy, even for a film about the stage.
Fleming was at his best in the modest moments of
Reckless.
Mona and Bob play out their madcap courtship on a merry-go-round and in a fun house. Ned is charming when he backs a lemonade stand for little Eddie (Mickey Rooney), whose street-corner rival has begun selling peanuts. It’s the movie’s glitz that dulls. The title number is a surreal mini-epic that follows Mona from a high-society cruise to a wild dance in a cantina with a flamboyant bandit who exits, Fairbanks-like, on a swinging rope after she’s shot dead. There’s no exuberance or lift beneath its nuttiness. The most amusing aspect of the other big number, “Everything’s Been Done Before,” is the way the choreographers position the chorines. In glittering sheaths with big bows across their breasts, they regularly block out the star in order to maintain the illusion that it’s Harlow and not her double executing the high kicks.
The rest of the movie sets out to prove, without any farcical or histrionic fizz, that there’s nothing worse than a mistaken marriage for everyone surrounding the bride and groom. Ned gets as depressed as Bob. Mona’s public turns fickle, even though a coroner’s inquiry clears her and Ned. After she gives birth to Bob’s son and seeks full custody of the child, she relinquishes any claims on the Harrison family fortune. In a twist out of
Common Clay,
that gesture wins over her snobby father-in-law, but she still must face down a jeering audience during
her
Broadway comeback. She wins
them
over with a heartfelt plea for understanding. As a result, despite the potentially snappy ambience, this film is even more stupefying than
The White Sister.