Read Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Online
Authors: Michael Sragow
Frank Morgan brings the Pirate to life in all his humility, hopefulness, and awe, and the canine flock that surrounds him never gets overly cute—these dogs are as wild and woolly and expressive as Toto. They’re just like the ones in the book, from houndish Enrique and brown curly Pajarito to Rudolph, “of whom passersby said, ‘He was an American dog.’ Fluff was a Pug and Señor Alec Thompson seemed to be a kind of an Airedale. They walked in a squad behind the Pirate, very respectful toward him, and very solicitous for his happiness. When he sat down to rest from wheeling his barrow, they all tried to sit on his lap and have their ears scratched.” Garfield was half-right when he said, “I tried to steal scenes from Hedy, Hedy tried to steal them from Spencer Tracy, Tracy tried to steal from Frank Morgan, Morgan tried to steal from me, and the dogs stole the show.”
Garfield was selling himself short: he and Lamarr were also a bright and engaging spectacle. For Garfield, the loan-out from Warner Bros. to MGM was a working vacation, and the cast and crew of
Tortilla Flat
were good company. Major Lee thought Garfield “relaxed and clever” on the set. Fleming made him so, with his usual combination of rough hazing and humor. The director stopped Garfield in the middle of his first scene and declared, “For Christ’s sake, Garfield, you have to do better than that. I fought like hell to get you in this picture, so don’t make me look like a fool.” Tracy laughed—he knew what would come next as Garfield asked Fleming for more guidance. Fleming responded, with a roar, “You want me to tell you how to act, Garfield? Hell, I don’t know how to act, and I’d be making more money if I did. You’re the actor, you have the reputation; now I just want you to be better.” Yet when Garfield
did
get better, Fleming took him aside and said, “Take it easy, Garfield; don’t get
too
good. A lot of your scenes are with Hedy Lamarr. She’s not what you call un-outclassable, and we can’t let that
happen.
Let’s take it again. Be better than you were the first time, but worse than the second.” As Garfield biographer Larry Swindell puts it, Fleming “liked to keep a picture moving. He thus would create an atmosphere in which actors could respond to his own style of pressure.”
Tracy, as Pilon, with an accent as variable as Manuel’s, works hard at being lower-depths casual—and, paradoxically, the audience rewards him for his effort. But Garfield really
is
at ease here. Although the film doesn’t draw on his ability to express shades of feeling, it’s a relief to see him so
agreeably
intense, and he’s at his contentious sexual best with Lamarr, who is sensational. “It was an honest part and I was glad to get away from glamour,” Lamarr told Hedda Hopper in 1951. She portrays so energetically a woman at war with herself that her conflicts make her more captivating. She and Garfield get at the underlying attraction that’s needed to inflame the surface antagonism of an Apache dance. “John Garfield was wonderful to work with,” she said in 1971, nearly twenty years after his death. Watching the film, you believe her.
Fleming’s theory that a love scene is a fight scene gets one of its most seductive workouts during the courtship of Danny and Dolores. When Danny comes on too strong to her, she swings a knife at him, yet that doesn’t keep Danny from going straight to Sweets for goats’ milk when he and his friends take on the cause of a traveling widower with an ailing infant. Dismayed at Sweets and Danny’s closeness, Pilon engineers a romantic spat that propels Danny into the hospital. As penance, Pilon promises to buy Saint Francis another candlestick if Danny recovers, then signs up to cut squid for a Chinese man, Chin Kee (played by Willie Fung, the houseboy from
Red Dust
). Luckily, a kindly priest says that buying a boat for Danny would be a better act of redemption. Henry O’Neill plays the cleric, who becomes a paternalistic Anglo-Saxon in the movie; the choice is especially jarring since the source character in the book is named Father Ramon. This Classic Comics priest contrasts with Fleming’s startlingly effective and unexpected use of Jack LaRue as the priest in
Captains Courageous.
Here, the joy-riding director occasionally takes his hand off the wheel.
MGM did reckon correctly that
Tortilla Flat
would be an all-around success, and Zimbalist wanted credit for producing it. On February 20, 1942, Benny Thau advised Floyd Hendrickson of MGM’s contracts department that Fleming had concurred. A back-and-forth culminated in the following pointed exchange:
For
my records, I am dropping you this note to confirm the fact that you were kind enough to agree that Sam Zimbalist may be given credit as the producer of “TORTILLA FLAT,” but this, of course, does not apply to any other picture.
With kindest regards, I am
Sincerely,
F. L. Hendrickson
A week later, Fleming replied.
On February
25, 1942
you sent me a note regarding my kindness in permitting Mr. Sam Zimbalist to put his name on “TORTILLA FLAT” as the producer of the picture.
So as to keep the records straight, you should know that it was no particular kindness on my part, but rather, the other half of a deal I made with Mr. Thau, that in exchange for the permission I am permitted to take an additional three months per year vacation together with the three months per year called for in my contract, making a total six months per year off without any extension of my contracted time.
Despite this insistence on protocol and status, and the incursion of sanctimony near the end of the film itself,
Tortilla Flat
siphoned something deeply congenial out of Fleming’s nature. His work would never be so lighthearted again.
26
World War II with Tears:
A Guy Named Joe
Before his death in 1936, Billy Mitchell, one of America’s aviation heroes, had been predicting a Japanese air assault on the American fleet. The aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought Fleming some embarrassment along with the same fear of an impending assault on Southern California shared by everyone else. Sid Deacon, who had suffered a stroke the previous year, wrote President Roosevelt to offer his services at discovering Japanese submarines off the California coast. “I think he had a special tip on his witching rod for that,” Edward Hartman recalls. The White House didn’t take him up on his proposal. The year before, Deacon had asked the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors for permission to dig on the grounds of the Hollywood Bowl for the treasure known as the Patriot Cache, supposedly buried by Mexican families in the 1860s for use against the French-appointed Austrian emperor Maximilian. But the supervisors turned him down, too. “That was a shame,” Hartman says. “If they’d have let him dig, he may have found something. He was old, but he wasn’t crazy.”
The military swiftly adopted more conventional means for defending the waters outside California, including the appropriation of large yachts. Fred Lewis’s
Stranger
had become a minesweeper earlier in 1941, and Frank Morgan’s
Dolphin
likewise was painted gray and pressed into service. Fleming did not throw himself directly into the war effort, but it is possible that, like many other watercraft owners, he proposed some help to the Office of Naval Intelligence. Any services he might have rendered remain secret. John Ford did do some amateur spying on Japanese trawlers before he joined the Navy, but at fifty-two Fleming was six years older than Ford and had more than a decade on the other top-rank directors who went overseas to shoot documentaries.
As
America’s studios joined the information war, MGM enlisted its most consistent moneymaker in the cause. Fleming was preparing and shooting
Tortilla Flat
when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, then advanced to Wake Island the next day for a battle that raged until the twenty-third, forcing an American surrender. On February 25, 1942, even before they settled on the credits for
Tortilla Flat,
Fleming and Zimbalist began developing a project called
Wake Island,
using the battle as the background for “a Gable-Tracy” story. They assigned MacKinlay Kantor to write it. James Agee noted that Kantor was “beloved by some” for “boiled-and-buttered native corn, fresh from the can.” Indeed, MGM had found a berth for Kantor when he supplied the source novel for a successful dog picture,
The Voice of Bugle Ann.
(He would later garner acclaim as the author of
Glory for Me,
the verse novel that became William Wyler’s Oscar-winner
The Best Years of Our Lives,
and
Andersonville,
the Pulitzer Prize–winning historical novel about the notorious Confederate POW camp.)
The
Wake Island
script went nowhere. But on March 5, Kantor and Fleming, in Kantor’s words, “drifted away from an unproductive story line” and “started talking about Buffalo Bill, since both of us remembered having seen him and his circus in our respective boyhoods.” Zimbalist (“who had a city-vaudeville-stage background”) blurted out, “Jesus Christ, why are we talking about this other silly picture when there is such a thing as Buffalo Bill?”—and Fleming “immediately stood up, roaring with enthusiasm.” Kantor, “digging deep into all Buffalo Bill sources available” and promising Fleming “a director’s field day if you ever had one,” delivered a treatment that had him “all ready to call up Central Casting.” For the lead role there was no question: they intended to use Gable.
Zimbalist said, “By God, I’ll see Eddie Mannix tonight, kidnap him and take him to dinner if necessary.” But when Zimbalist called him back to the office a week later, he reported the sad news that MGM executives felt there was “no money to be made out of Buffalo Bill . . . They say that Buffalo Bill tried to make a picture about his own life, and it was a flop.” Kantor responded, “Good lord, everybody knows that; the old idiot even tried to get some of the same Indians against whom he had fought, and have them in the picture. The poor old guys were limping around, and people were shooting off cap pistols, and it was a general mess. What’s that got to do with our picture?”
Kantor later recalled, “About that time there was a dreadful rumble
from
the deep couch behind me, and I turned to see Victor arising from where he had been stretched out. He said, ‘For blank blank blank blank’s sake, let me tell you about the whole picture business as it’s run at Metro. Don’t you know that there are a whole bunch of blank blank blank blanks up on the third floor who would rather sit around and blank blank each other’s blank blanks than make good pictures?” (Kan-tor provided the “blanks.”)
In 1943, Kantor left MGM to work for the
Saturday Evening Post
as a war correspondent, and William Wellman began preparing
Buffalo Bill
to star Joel McCrea at Fox. MGM knew the Fox film was already in the works, and Warner Bros. was flirting with the subject, too. Wellman later admitted that he’d started a
Buffalo Bill
script in 1940, debunking the scout, hunter, and Wild West show impresario as “the fakiest guy that ever lived,” until his initial writer, Gene Fowler, had second thoughts about defacing a hero’s image and burned the screenplay. Wellman wound up filming a rah-rah version of Buffalo Bill’s life, depicting him as a frontiersman at odds with civilization. “When that poor little crippled kid at the end stands up and says, ‘God bless you, too, Buffalo Bill,’ I turned around and damn near vomited,” Wellman confessed. “And then Zanuck turned around and told me it was the second biggest moneymaker we’ve ever made.” (The Pasadena-born McCrea, grandson of a stagecoach driver and son of a utility executive, would have been a good fit for Fleming. In 1946, he nearly redeemed a flaccid Technicolor version of
The Virginian.
)
The actor John Frederick called the Fleming of those years “intimidating yet compassionate—reminiscent of John Ford and his bluster.” Fleming was even logging some hunting time with Ford’s protégé John Wayne; when Wayne wasn’t shooting his first MGM film,
Reunion in France,
for Jules Dassin, he was sometimes roaming the San Dimas area for small game with Fleming and others. Wayne had first gone on those jaunts a few years earlier, with Ward Bond along.
Like Ford at Fox, Fleming at MGM had become the director the studio could trust with everything from kids’ adventures to gritty Americana. Right after Fleming’s Steinbeck adaptation, another California writer, William Saroyan, who had visited the
Tortilla Flat
set with Garfield, called on Fleming for advice. Saroyan, a bold, eccentric humanist, had written a screenplay called
The Human Comedy
and, with no prior film experience, hoped to direct it himself. (He also turned it into a novel that hit bookstores before the movie reached theaters.)
The
studio choice to direct
The Human Comedy
was King Vidor. Saroyan, to prove that
he
could make it, put together a short called
The Good Job,
from his story “A Number of the Poor,” about the filching of a melon from a market, then showed it to Fleming and Zimbalist. Fleming told him it was “wonderful,” but Mayer and his inner circle did not agree. Saroyan left the studio, and Clarence Brown became
The Human Comedy
’s director. Saroyan had asked for Fleming or Wyler.
With Gable in mind, Fleming and Zimbalist had also been revamping
Shadow of the Wing,
a five-year-old script about the Royal Air Force that they turned into the story of an adventurer joining the Army Air Forces. But Gable had already decided to join the Army Air Forces in real life—and his plans accelerated when Carole Lombard, Gable’s third wife and the love of his life, died on the return trip of a bond-selling tour.
Lombard’s plane crashed in Nevada on January 16, 1942. President Roosevelt awarded her a medal and declared her “the first woman to be killed in action in the defense of her country in its war against the Axis powers.” Gable continued to work throughout his crisis, and MGM announced in March that he would follow his role as a war correspondent in
Somewhere I’ll Find You
with
Shadow of the Wing.
But the military began courting him the day after Lombard’s January 21 funeral: General Henry “Hap” Arnold wired the forty-year-old Gable with the offer of a “specific and highly important assignment.” In August, Gable went to Officer Candidate School in Miami. In October, he received his commission and official task: to film the combat experience of aerial gunners.