Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (46 page)

Test Pilot
placed similar life-or-death aeronautics into a Fleming-Lighton specialty—a buddy picture with the emotional intensity of an irresistible doomed romance. Gable’s Jim Lane, the test pilot for top-of-the-line Drake Aviation, uses dames and the bottle to siphon off tension after he breaks speed and altitude records. Spencer Tracy’s Gunner is as reliable and punctilious as Jim is seat-of-the-pants and breezy. Loy’s Ann Barton, a college-educated beauty, wins Jim’s heart and complicates both men’s lives.

MGM promoted the film—the only time Gable, Tracy, and Loy appeared together—as “The Captains Courageous of the Air.” Loy thought it a prime example “of what big-studio moviemaking could be: the writing, the directing, the photography, the technical expertise, the casting of that impeccable stock company.”

It also received a considerable publicity boost from a newly syndicated columnist, Ed Sullivan, who sought to raise his profile outside of his home city, New York, by sponsoring a “King and Queen of Hollywood” contest. Ballots ran in papers that carried his column, and though it’s facile to surmise that a studio fix was in, Gable and Loy, who won,
were
at the peak of their popularity during the filming of
Test Pilot.
The “Queen” title didn’t stick to Loy, but “King” did to Gable for the rest of his life.

In early December, Sullivan presented the actors with tin crowns for a newsreel, and in his account Fleming ended up directing the segment. Sullivan, whose wooden manner in front of a camera would
become
legendary with his long-running TV variety show, kept scrambling his consonants and saying Loy and Gable were the choice of “twenty million ficture pans.” Fleming halted filming and announced, “Stop being nervous, Sully, and let me hear you do it right this time.” A more revealing interchange took place when Sullivan had to cede the mike to Gable. “You might pretend to understand English even as Gable speaks it,” Fleming lectured. “Listen to him. He’s saying words and there must be a reaction from you.” Later he told Sullivan, “Don’t worry about it. Some of the alleged stars of this business are just as bad in scenes where they have to stand and listen. They’re all right if they can talk, but listening is the severest strain.”

The opening scene in Burbank has a beautiful bustle to it. Jim Lane is running late to break a cross-country record with the Drake Bullet. Gunner, fed up with waiting at the airport, goes to Jim’s hotel room, where one girl (Virginia Grey) waits for Jim as he arrives with another (Priscilla Lawson) on his arm. It’s not yet panic time—as the reactions of Gunner and Drake tell us, it’s Jim’s standard procedure. Fleming retained his veracious edge, improvising around the script. Martin Spellman, who played one of the kids crowding the Drake Bullet near the runway and yelling for Lane to break a record, recalls Fleming telling Gable, “This scene needs a line from one of the kids in the crowd.” So Spellman got to ask Lane for his autograph. In the finished film, the crowd noise crushes that line, but it was smart for Fleming to treat Lane as a blue-sky star.

The Drake Bullet breaks an oil pump (somewhat like Fleming’s Lockheed), forcing Jim to land in a Kansas field in front of the droll, admiring eyes of Ann Barton. “You’re a funny-looking gazebo,” she tells him. She also sees him as a modern-day prince who rode into her field on a plane rather than on a white horse. Ann knows that for all Jim’s dash, he’s not chivalrous. He still represents the larger world, a new life, the unknown.

The following sequence captures the giddiness of an impossible impromptu courtship. Ann and Jim generate the helium high lovers can get just before Cupid aims and stings. Jim is a romantic figure, but he’s determined to make light of romance. They spend a day rooting for the home team at a baseball game in Wichita, then pop into a movie. As the lovers on-screen pitch woo, Ann mock-melts against Jim. (Fleming shot the flowery film within a film himself. The woman on-screen, Mary Howard, went on to play Ann Rutledge in
Abe Lincoln in
Illinois.
) Before long, Ann is whooping it up in a borrowed twin-cockpit plane as Jim performs loop-the-loops.

Loy, typically a lithe charmer and occasionally sublime, rarely seemed as free, easy, and original in her banter as she is in these scenes. (It rivals her
Thin Man
badinage with William Powell.) The odd turns of phrase like “funny-looking gazebo” click because of the way Ann savors them. She glides like a corn-fed goddess who knows that even for a world-beater like Lane, she doesn’t have to push the allure. And Gable isn’t the confident seducer of
Red Dust.
Jim turns up the emotional heat, all right, but also lets himself be hooked.

The scowl of Tracy’s Gunner can’t bring them earthbound when he arrives with a new oil pump. Jim has neglected preparations for the next day’s flight, and Ann’s presence is a further irritant. While Jim and Ann sweet-talk in the front seat of her car, Fleming frames Gunner brooding in the back. It’s a perfect composition for a romantic triangle—and the entire film can be read that way, since Gunner’s life focuses on Jim. After Jim takes off, Gunner tells Ann that she’ll realize his departure is a good thing in the end, but flying over the baseball field, Jim gets an ache that grounds him again. He returns to the farm, warns Ann she’ll be sorry, then sweeps her up in the air. They marry (offscreen) in Indianapolis.

These long yet chipper opening scenes stir up roiling complications. Ann loves Jim’s untutored instinct. When anything takes him by surprise, he turns his head and glares—“like a big bear,” she says, or “like a cross between an Indian and a gazelle.” (She likes those “ga” words.) But she’s stumbled into an improvised life that’s as scary as it is exhilarating. Once Jim returns to New York, he refuses an assignment, and Drake fires him. So Ann, Jim, and Gunner begin looking for shared digs. The chemistry among the three is sensational. The movie is always fresh because Jim and Gunner constantly befuddle each other.

Fleming meshes the human and mechanical stories as cunningly as David Lean does in
Breaking the Sound Barrier
and Philip Kaufman does in
The Right Stuff.
Indeed, when Levon Helm’s Ridley hands Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager a piece of gum before each flight in
The Right Stuff,
he’s echoing Gunner and Jim’s good-luck ritual of pasting a wad of gum on each test plane’s fuselage. And when Ridley starts Kaufman’s movie with his talk of that demon that lives in the sky, he’s carrying on the tradition of Jim Lane, who talks of that “girl in the blue dress” who teases and taunts him and tries so hard to slap him down that he slaps
her
back. Ann says she wants a blue dress; she even says she wants to be slapped. Loy pulls off a portrait of love that includes everything, including a streak of masochism.

Gable is part id, part kid. Tracy is like a high-school idealist, struggling to keep his best friend the star athlete in fighting trim. Gunner is sympathetic to Ann when he sees that she loves Jim as deeply as he does. Yet what moves her isn’t what Gunner says—being a test pilot is “death every time you make a move”—but the break in his voice and the tears streaming down his face when he says it. Ann articulates what she sees as her three choices: She can try to get Jim to drink sarsaparilla with her instead of booze with the boys, knowing it won’t dull his shrieking nerves. Or she can try to ground him altogether, which would make him hate her and make her hate herself. Or they can go on as is, pretending they’re both happy and at peace, until at last he falls to earth. After that declaration, Gunner and Ann take turns melting down.

Tracy is at once urgent and at ease. He delivers a great silent performance as a man whose powers of feeling and understanding dwarf his limited eloquence. That gap accounts for some priceless big-mug comedy. When Ann playfully insists that Jim buy her a nightgown without her help, Gunner becomes Jim’s model. Marginally less clueless about women than Jim, he suggests that they can’t go wrong with pink.

The deep and genuine affection between the men, and role-reversal scenes like this one, have caused insightful critics like John DiLeo to ask, “Spencer Tracy as a gay man in love with his straight best friend?”—and answer in the affirmative. If you watch this movie with that question in mind, it can be simultaneously gripping and campy, like the scene of Montgomery Clift and John Ireland hefting each other’s pistols in Hawks’s
Red River.
There
is
a homosexual element to the bond between Gunner and Jim, and neither Tracy nor Gable is afraid to bring it out. But there’s less of a physical spark between them than there is between Clift and Ireland. On the airfield, they’re a team, and off it Gunner has absorbed himself into the most tough-minded kind of hero worship—the kind that recognizes his hero would be nothing without him.

In his script notes, Fleming suggested that Gunner act “very motherly” toward Jim, but in the playing the two conjure an intense adolescent relationship with the undefined, generalized yearning that
accompanies
it. Gunner also clicks with Ann as a kindred spirit; they’re like an older brother and kid sister. He loses himself in Ann’s analysis of the futility of domestic life with a test pilot—it hits him hard as he watches them cavort at an amusement park, where Jim admonishes Gunner, “Why don’t you be gay for once and give yourself a shock.” But he doesn’t merely wallow in self-pity. He’s judging the potential wreck of all three lives if Jim plays his string out to the end. (Indeed, one reviewer in 1938 thought Gunner’s big dark secret was that he carried a torch for Ann.)

Gunner is fatally injured in Jim’s final test flight of a B-17 bomber. As he’s dying, he says the one blessing of going first is that he won’t have to tell Ann that
Jim
has died. Of course, Jim is uppermost in his mind: he has been the most important person in Gunner’s life. With heartbreaking simplicity, Gunner says Jim didn’t know how good Gunner was: “You just loved me.” And when Jim begs him to hang on “for my sake,” Gunner answers, “That’s all I’d come back for, if I could.”

It may be Tracy’s finest moment on-screen—and under Fleming’s direction, Gable matches him. For Mahin, Gable was the “amazing” one. Jim never says, “I love you or something,” back to Gunner, the way Mahin recalled, but Gable has the power to get across grief and a fear of what life will be like without his best friend. He wasn’t afraid to shed tears over a male friend, though he would balk at crying over Scarlett’s miscarriage in
Gone With the Wind.
(Shot for several days on the MGM back lot, the scene, with a studio-built shell of a B-17 set ablaze, attracted such attention that gawkers in private planes often disrupted filming.)

Terrific working partners though not off-set pals, Gable and Tracy, Loy wrote, “had a lively exchange, which actually seldom went on with many people during filming.” Maybe Tracy also sensed how well he would come off in the film. He approached it with his usual intensity. “I remember him working out this business of nut cracking,” to be performed during one of Gable’s big scenes, “which he worked out very carefully all night long,” Joseph Mankiewicz said. “Christ, he used up five pounds of nuts, and then he pretended on the set it had just occurred to him. It was perfectly timed so he would never crack a nut on Clark’s line, but you would always have to cut to him.”

Brinksmanship aside, Tracy and Gable had the kind of rapport that, used properly, sharpened both. The MGM publicist Howard Strickling thought, “Tracy would give his right arm to be Gable: loved,
worshipped,
respected,” while Gable “would give his right arm to be recognized as an actor’s actor, like Tracy.” Gable told Mahin he always wanted to be able to nail a scene on the first take: “Start fooling around and [Spence will] kill me.”

Generally, good-natured goading ruled. Fleming surmised to the
Hollywood Reporter
that he might end the film “with a long shot of Gable’s ears flapping in the wind.” Gable referred to them all by nicknames: of course, he was King and Loy was Queenie, but Tracy was the Iron Duke, and Fleming the Monk. (The MGM publicity whiz Frank Whitbeck came up with Tracy’s moniker as if to extend the studio’s royal family.) On Gable’s birthday in February, Carole Lombard sent her man two tickets to a sightseeing blimp that circled Los Angeles, and the special entertainment was the studio’s up-and-coming juvenile musical star Judy Garland, who sang satirical lyrics about Gable’s recent dud
Parnell.
(She had sung “Dear Mr. Gable: You Made Me Love You” on the radio a year before; in three weeks she would be signed to play Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz.
)

Loy thought it all “got a little out of hand” one day at March Field in Riverside, when officers tried to persuade both male stars and Fleming to fly to Catalina Island in one of the B-17s. Tracy resisted, despite the other men’s merciless taunts, and confided to Loy, “The first thing they’ll do, they’ll head for a bar. You know I can’t do that.” Loy, not knowing Fleming’s history with Tracy’s drinking, accepted that explanation. She thought Tracy took his revenge when he failed to show up the next day, making everyone think he’d gone on a bender. Then, “a few minutes before noon, Spence strolled nonchalantly onto the set, bid everyone a jaunty good morning, and went to work.” Loy helped dissipate the tensions by scolding the actor and Fleming.

Hawks’s
Ceiling Zero
had been a hit a couple of years earlier, but it didn’t approach the critical and popular sensation of
Test Pilot.
That may have sharpened Hawks’s competitive edge when he was preparing
Only Angels Have Wings
in the wake of
Test Pilot
’s success. Hawks borrowed the most original scene from Fleming’s blockbuster, bent it to his own ends, and later implied he came up with it in the first place.

The two movies share similar subjects but diverge in mood and theme.
Only Angels Have Wings
is unswervingly romantic in its presentation of mail pilots flying perilous routes through the Andes; the uncertainty of their lives adds to the intensity of their camaraderie.
Test Pilot
expresses the elation of men pushing their reflexes to meet the
power
and speed of new technology—and the tragic futility of their attempts to adjust the rest of their lives to their professional quest. Unlike Hawks’s film,
Test Pilot
views the daredevil life as a prolonged adolescence. Just as Fleming had done, Jim must let go of his roistering ways to raise a family and tend to the rising generation.