Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (64 page)

Kress dismissed the notion that cartoonists should animate the change from Jekyll to Hyde over shots of Tracy’s face, “the way they did the old flip cards.” (Kress and Saville mentioned seeking advice from Walt Disney, but a studio memo specifies tests made by “Mr. Sprunk of the cartoon department.”) Ultimately, Kress sought to direct the metamorphoses himself. He told Tracy, “I’ve got an idea. The motion picture [camera] will be locked off, steel riveted to the stage floor so nobody can move it. Next to you we’ll have one of those old-fashioned cameras with the big plate behind it and an artist who will sketch you. I’m only going to shoot your face, it will be so effective if we can see your face changing. There will be a long makeup table, all the pieces for your changes will be laid out and you’ll be in a barber chair with wheels.” Fleming gave his blessing. But Saville, Kress recalled, said, “Young man, you’re just the film editor on this picture, this is none of your goddamn business and I’m going to have you fired!” The assistant director, Tom Andre, called Kress at home and said, “We hear you’re not on the lot, stick by the phone.”

Saville soon learned that Fleming was fiercely protective of his crew. (And before the film reached the theaters, Saville would learn how adamant Fleming was about the details of his own contract.) The director canceled the day’s shooting, though all three leads were on the set. Then he and Tracy marched into Mayer’s office and backed up Kress. The editor remembered Mayer ordering Saville’s return to England, but the producer did stay on the picture; Mayer simply barred him from the editing room and the stage where Kress and Tracy plied their magic.

Kress found Tracy “a dream to work with.” An artist sketched his position to keep him in proper alignment, Kress operated a camera by remote control, and the star went through forty-six makeup changes. Kress talked Tracy through it like a silent director: “Okay Spence, get ready, we’re rolling now, just a little grimace, a little more, you fight it, fight it, cut.” In the end, Kress was able “to make a continuous series of dissolves,” always staying on Tracy’s face. (Mamoulian had used quicker, clumsier dissolves to show March’s Hyde reverting to Jekyll.)

Franz Waxman’s score made a signal contribution, too. Like Bernard Herrmann or John Williams at their best, Waxman imbued tension music with operatic sweep. (Christopher Palmer later crafted a
symphonic
suite out of his score; Waxman was working on a full-scale opera version for the New York City Opera at the time of his death.) During one of Jekyll’s hydizations, Waxman utilizes a string of half notes that Williams duplicated, consciously or not, as the shark’s theme in
Jaws.
In the climactic scene, when Jekyll involuntarily changes back into Hyde and Lanyon shoots him dead, Tracy wanted to speak desperately through his dying action. Kress said, “We’ll do it just like a music number with playback. We’ll make the sound track first.” Tracy mouthed the words to a playback disc. For his skill and ingenuity, Kress earned an Oscar nomination; so did Ruttenberg and Waxman.

Despite his beef with Fleming over Kress and a more intense one over final credit, Saville memorialized the director with fond respect. “Victor was not only well informed, he was, above all, never hurried into making a decision that required deep thought. Although of a completely different temperament—I’ve made a few slapdash decisions in my time—I enjoyed working with him because I learned much from his profound knowledge.” As an example of Fleming’s willingness to spend “long hours to make up his mind as to how many angels can stand on the head of a pin,” Saville recalled a conference with the production designer Cedric Gibbons about the opening, set in a “fashionableWest End church.” Fleming sat silently as Saville and Gibbons discussed the scope of the scene, until Saville asked, “What’s worrying you, Victor?” “You know,” Fleming replied, “there is nothing so deadly as a hundred extras seated in pews listening to a sermon.” After another period of silence, the director asked, “Couldn’t we photograph architecture? A lot better than people.” Saville remembered, with satisfaction, “the congregation represented by four heads framed at the bottom of the picture of a beautiful Gothic window.”

There
are
dozens of extras, but the architecture does dominate the scene expressively—befitting the high-toned aspirations of the preacher. Fleming taught Saville that “impressions so often make a scene more believable than spelling everything out in detail.” All they needed for “a perfectly convincing chase,” for example, was “Tracy, with a cape flying” across a wet-down studio floor along with “a set of Palladian-type stairs, an arched bridge, a few set pieces of masonry, and a string of electric light bulbs shining through the misty night.” (The athletic Hyde was the stuntman Gil Perkins.) Even negative reviewers singled out this sequence.

The most flamboyant sequences are the montages depicting
impulses
darting through Jekyll’s mind as he morphs into Hyde. Saville
did
take credit for these audacious surges of symbolism. “Robert Louis Stevenson, in his short story, talked about Plato’s ‘Twin Horses of the Soul.’ I had read and reread Stevenson looking for something I could clue into the film. So, I materialized Plato’s thought of the Twin Horses. We made a montage of fantasy with Tracy as a charioteer with lash, driving in harness Bergman and Turner, with windswept manes. It was a good piece of symbolism
—Life
magazine reproduced, in its two center pages, each frame of the montage.” The scholar Christopher Falzon has noted the sole parallel in Stevenson’s text: Hyde emerges from a horse-drawn cab as “these two base passions [fear and hatred] raged within him like a tempest.” Falzon rightly sees that Saville and Fleming transform the “Platonic image of reason in control of the other parts of the soul” into a “metaphor for the unleashing of Jekyll’s desires for sexual possession and domination.”

Of course, the Production Code forced the filmmakers to “delete all scenes where Tracy is shown lashing the two girls”—Jekyll couldn’t be shown with a whip in his hands. But the suggestion of the whip remains. Not so another montage, referred to in
Life,
depicting the myth of Leda and the swan (Zeus, as a swan, raping Sparta’s queen Leda, presumably Turner) and apparently containing suggestive images of a stallion and a girl (presumably Bergman). Joseph Breen requested that Fleming excise two shots of Bergman’s “unduly exposed breasts” as well as her closing line to Jekyll, “Next time you look at a girl, make up your mind.” For the Palace of Frivolities, Breen ordered Fleming, “Delete the crotch shot of the dancing girls.”

The hallucination of the stallion would have echoed Freud’s comparison of the ego and the id to a rider and his steed. But what’s wonderful about the movie is that it contrasts animal urges and rational conduct without any clinical categorizing. The expansive performances and surreal episodes explode formula. Fleming’s depiction of Jekyll’s second hallucination pictures Bergman and Turner in champagne bottles against volcanic backdrops; the uncorking of her bottle seems to decapitate Bergman, but she appears healthy and sexy in the very next shot.

In the March version, there’s something too post-Freudian about the way Hyde proclaims himself “free,” just as there’s something too earthbound about his declaration to his absent, moralizing enemies, “If you could see me now, what would you think, eh?” He goes through a
gavotte
of confusion over his new state before giving in to giddiness. Fleming’s emphasis is on Jekyll’s immediate gaiety at his transformation. Tracy doesn’t make himself jump when he shows up as Hyde, the way March does; his Hyde is delighted—ready to spend a night on the town.

And that interpretation fits Stevenson’s perfectly: “There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.” Jekyll was astonished to be “conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This too was myself. It seemed natural and human.” In Fleming’s movie, Tracy asks, after his first hydization, “Can this be evil?”—then, in relief or disbelief, laughs.

Tracy’s Jekyll is juicy enough to cast spells on underclass and upper-crust women alike, and Hyde, as his outgrowth, is charismatic enough to hold Ivy in his sway even after she comes to fear and loathe him. In Fleming’s film, Jekyll’s desires grow convincingly into Hyde’s monstrous perversions.

Tracy demanded a closed set because of the film’s athletic and emotional demands (which engendered more than the average amount of griping), but George Cukor requested that a celebrated friend, the author and playwright Somerset Maugham, observe the filming anyway. While Tracy threw himself into Hyde’s sadistic excesses, Maugham, with his stutter, asked Cukor, “Wh-which one is he doing now?” Expecting applause at the end of the take, Tracy heard laughter—and this tale has often been told as a reason for Tracy’s disillusionment with the role. But contemporaries viewed Maugham’s quip as nothing more than a slick witticism. Tracy even spread it around in the movie’s publicity handbook. He said Maugham kept him cued into the closeness of good and evil in the dual character. (As Vladimir Nabokov put it, the doctor’s potion left “a halo” of Jekyll resting over Hyde.) Tracy contended that he’d wanted to play Jekyll and Hyde for years, and there’s no reason to doubt the desire of a tortured character like Tracy to play the ultimate divided personality.

If Tracy (unlike Bergman) didn’t look back with fondness on the filming, it’s probably because even without the demands of the makeup, the role was physically exhausting. Bergman said that Tracy balked at
having
“to race up the stairs carrying me off to the bedroom for his immoral purposes.” (Actually, the only time he carries her up to her bedroom is as Jekyll, out of care for her twisted ankle.)

Once again, Fleming tried to assuage the fears of a male star by demonstrating a stunt. “Big and strong, he picked me up and ran up the stairs as if I weighed nothing. Spencer wailed, ‘What about my hernia?’ So they rigged up a sling which supported me so they could hoist me upward while Spencer hung on and raced up behind me looking as if he were carrying me.” At first, Tracy couldn’t keep up with the rig. It took nearly a score of attempts to get the timing right and, “on the twentieth attempt, the rope broke. I dropped down into Spencer’s arms. He couldn’t hold me, and we went rolling head over heels to the bottom of the stairs. How either of us was not injured, I’ll never know. It was just a miracle. But there we were at the bottom helpless with laughter, roaring with laughter, while Victor came racing up, all sympathy and concern, but really so relieved that both his stars were not hurt and could continue to work.”

No wonder Fleming called in a frequent collaborator, the stunt-man Gil Perkins. “To double Tracy as Mr. Hyde,” Perkins recalled, “I had to get into the MGM makeup department at 5:30 in the morning, and it would take a couple of hours to put the rubber mask all over my head. Then they would make up the mask, and put a wig on top of it, and fill in down around the neck.” For Perkins, it was business as usual: “Tracy did everything very professionally—he always was the ultimate professional. And Victor Fleming was one of the best directors in the business.” Despite spurious reports that the star and the director had their disagreements during the production, Perkins said, “Spence had a great respect for Vic, and they got along very well.” According to Fleming, when he and “Spence” had “differences of opinion” and the star was “mad as the devil about something,” Tracy would sit on the divan in Fleming’s office “and we’d tremble at each other without saying a word! Then, he’d get up and walk out and we’d both feel better.”

Beatrix daunted Turner. She recalled that during the scene of Jekyll calling off their marriage (because Hyde has become an indelible part of him), “I was in a happy mood that day and I just couldn’t force tears into my eyes.” Fleming summoned camphor crystals; Turner begged, “Please don’t blow anything into my eyes.” Fleming expressed frustration; Tracy accused him of being too harsh and stormed to his dressing room. After she thought “of every sad thing I could,” including a car
running
over her new puppy, Turner’s eyes stayed dry. Finally, Fleming “rushed over to me, grabbed my arm, and twisted it behind my back, where he held it for so long I feared he would break it.” She screamed for him to stop, that he was hurting her. “Out of either pain or sheer fury, I not only started crying but went on crying so hard and so long that my nose was red and my eyes were swollen. Makeup didn’t do any good. They could only shoot Spencer for the rest of the day, while I gave him my lines off-camera. I heard later that Spencer had wanted to take a poke at Fleming for being so rough with me.” Turner never wrote how Fleming shot the scene; maybe she used the sense memory of that twisted arm.

Bergman told a similar story about Fleming overcoming her inability to become sufficiently tearful with Hyde. “I just couldn’t do it. So eventually he took me by the shoulder with one hand, spun me around and struck me backwards and forwards across the face—hard—it hurt. I could feel the tears of what?—surprise, shame—running down my cheeks. I was shattered by his action. I stood there weeping, while he strode back to the camera and shouted ‘Action!’ Even the camera crew were struck dumb, as I wept my way through the scene. But he’d got the performance he wanted.” It’s doubtful whether he could have smacked her that hard and still filmed the scene without revealing any welts. In an earlier account of the filming, Bergman noted, simply, “Fleming was very mean to me. He screamed at me, hit me and shook me. Deep down I realized he was doing this to help me, but I was very hurt and embarrassed. I kept saying ‘I’m doing my best.’ Finally I burst into tears.”

It didn’t affect Bergman’s enthusiasm for the movie—or her growing passion for Fleming. Bergman confided to her diary: