Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (72 page)

Johnson returned to
Joe
in late June—but not before MGM diplomatically judged his camera readiness by handing him a walk-on in
Madame Curie.
“They wanted to see how the scar would photograph,” Johnson said. He passed the test with the help of makeup and diffused lighting. And he ended up appearing with Dunne in two movies simultaneously,
Joe
in the afternoon and Clarence Brown’s
Mrs. Miniver–
esque
The White Cliffs of Dover
in the morning. “Which one am I in now?” Dunne would ask Johnson before each take. On September 19 the
New York Times
reported that
Joe
had been prolonged a total of thirteen weeks, attributing the delays to Johnson’s accident, the difficulty of finding and shooting planes,
and
Dunne’s assignment to
The White Cliffs of Dover—
which actually might have been shrewd double scheduling on MGM’s part.

Everett
Riskin’s brother Robert spent the war in the overseas branch of America’s propaganda arm, the Office of War Information. A small part of the OWI, the Bureau of Motion Pictures, reviewed Hollywood movies from every studio except (for the most part) Paramount between 1942 and 1945. The BMP’s primary mission was to advise filmmakers on how to report and maintain the war effort. It also counseled them on how to present an image of America consistent with the Four Freedoms at the center of FDR’s New Deal—freedom of speech and freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear. The BMP
never
liked the ending of
A Guy Named Joe.
The chief of its review and analysis section, Dorothy B. Jones, complained about it even before the Production Code did. Apparently it was all right to promulgate racist stereotypes in a Warner Bros. cartoon like
Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips,
but having Dunne commit suicide by ammo dump would sully America’s wartime goals.

It may sound astonishing today that a government agency, determining that an Irene Dunne movie would damage civilian morale, brought its full force to bear on changing the film’s ending. Yet that is exactly what occurred. Here’s the scene as Fleming originally filmed it that September:

The script shows Dorinda thrusting the bomber’s control stick as Pete shouts, “Look, Drinda, hear me. You always wanted us to fly together—remember? Well, we’re flying together now, Drinda! I’m right here—I’m with you—and you’ve got to let me through—you’ve got to hear me!” Dorinda puts the bomber into a dive over the ammunition dump.

INTERIOR PLANE—CLOSE SHOT—PETE AND DORINDA

PETE: Pull out, Dorinda! You’ll never make it! Pull out and let the Army do this job!

Dorinda seems to hesitate, but quickly overcomes the impulse and continues on her course.

PETE (
shouting
): Dorinda! Pull out!

FULL SHOT—SKY AND SEA AND CLOUDS AND ISLAND

From
the island come puffs of anti-aircraft shells, aimed at the rapidly diving plane.

INTERIOR PLANE—CLOSE SHOT—DORINDA AND PETE
Through the front window, we can see the sickening approach of the cove. The ship shudders and bounces from AA shells exploding around it, illuminating the cabin weirdly.

PETE (
despairingly
): Back up on the stick, Dorinda. Nose up, girl. Up—nose up—up—up—UP.

CAMERA moves through smoke to:

EXTERIOR ISLAND—NIGHT—FULL SHOT

As the plane plummets into a mass of buildings, going sideways just enough to slip under an enormous craggy ledge which protects the dump from ordinary bombing. The SCREEN is completely enveloped in smoke.

PETE’S voice (
over scene
): Up, Dorinda—up.

CLOSE SHOT—FIGURE

Standing as if on a little eminence. The smoke is so thick that the figure can’t be made out. The scene lights up gradually to reveal Pete. He is looking down, calling.

PETE: Up, Dorinda . . . up . . .

The scene becomes suffused with light. The smoke changes into sunlit mist. Up the brow of the incline we see Dorinda walking—first her head, then shoulders, then waist—with Pete beckoning her up.

PETE (
infinitely tender
): Up, girl . . .

Dorinda comes up to him, proud, erect, smiling. They do not embrace. Instead, they clasp each other’s hands, stand silently for a moment looking into each other’s faces.

DORINDA (
with a kind of delicious sigh
): Pete!

PETE
(
almost with reverence, quietly
): Dorinda!

DORINDA: So it was you . . . all along.

PETE (
very gently, smiling
): Of course, darling.

DORINDA (
with a kind of reminiscent yearning, almost a whisper
): Oh, Pete—I’ve been so lonely. You’d no idea how lonely I’ve been!

PETE (
shaking his head slowly, smiling
): But not any more . . .

CLOSE SHOT—DORINDA

As she looks around at her new surroundings. Her expression is not one of bewilderment or confusion, but rather one of pleasant discovery and joyfulness.

CLOSE SHOT—PETE

Watching her.

MEDIUM SHOT—THE TWO

As Dorinda heaves a delicious sigh, snuggles her arm into his.

DORINDA: Oh, Pete . . . it’s wonderful.

Pete nods. Both of them have on their faces an expression which indicates great joy, as if life were just beginning for them. As Pete nods in reply to her last line they start out of the scene.

ANOTHER ANGLE—FULL SHOT

Arm in arm they move away from the camera, walking with heads up, steps brisk. The mist grows lighter, the light brighter, as they recede from our view.

FADE OUT.

THE END

Perhaps anticipating that audience sniffles, if not outright bawling, might drown out the dialogue, Trumbo also wrote an alternate of that ending with no dialogue, with Dunne and Tracy conveying all the emotion on their faces.

While this ending placated Breen and the War Department, the BMP—shrewdly, it turns out—held its fire. As
Joe
slogged through its extended production period, the BMP acquired more Hollywood
clout.
When Congress cut the domestic budget of the OWI in July 1943, Ulric Bell assumed command of the Hollywood review office. He’d been the Washington bureau chief for the
Louisville Courier-Journal
and had chaired the interventionist group Fight for Freedom. He quickly pushed the BMP beyond its original advisory role. The wartime Office of Censorship now banned topics such as class conflict and rationing from American movies and imposed public morality more severely on film plots: lawlessness, for example, could never go unpunished.

When Bell’s office denied overseas sales to B pictures like
Hillbilly Blitzkrieg, Sleepy Lagoon,
and
Secret Service in Darkest Africa,
the impact on the studios was slight.
A Guy Named Joe,
however, was the quintessential “major motion picture.” When Bell’s review staff watched a cut of it in November, they were delighted
and
appalled. They admired the movie’s emphasis on combining individual expertise and teamwork and its demonstration that “every human being can contribute his measure to the building of the free world.” What they didn’t admire, in the words of Lillian R. Bergquist, was the movie’s failure “to tell the important story of the women throughout the world who are losing men in this war and who are making the difficult adjustment and going on—instead of hysterically sacrificing themselves as Dorinda did.” She closed the group’s report by saying that with the film still being scored and edited, “It might be possible to persuade the studio to re-shoot the ending, with the heroine deciding to accept her responsibility as a human being, to live and marry the young flier when he successfully completes his dangerous mission.”

Bell wrote directly to Eddie Mannix’s assistant. “All I am entitled to say on behalf of the overseas OWI is that were the ending different, nothing we have seen—not one picture that we can readily recall—could make as great a contribution to the war job as
A Guy Named Joe.
” Bell cabled Robert Riskin in New York that the film “would be perfect but for Hollywood ending.” No direct threats, but the message was clear. “The entire ending . . . was reshot as a result of OWI’s criticism,” said the BMP’s analysis chief, Jones, years later, acknowledging it was unusual for any studio “to go to such lengths (and expense) to comply with OWI suggestions.” In fact, it was unique.

How the orders went down is lost to history, but the incredibly swift Trumbo wrote a new ending in days, completing it on November 6. MGM called Dunne back from a Mexico City vacation for retakes that were shot and sent to the Production Code by November 9. At
least
it wasn’t as square as the BMP suggestion. Dorinda, not Ted, explodes the Japanese ammo dump—only this time she lives. Bosley Crowther of
The New York Times
spoke for many critics and possibly the filmmakers themselves when he wrote, “The ending negates the whole thesis and the romantic ending is sour.”

For Fleming, Riskin, and Tracy, the original ending had been one of the production’s bragging points; they thought it gave them a satisfying resolution to a lopsided triangle. All through the film, the genuine romance centers on Pete and Dorinda—Ted is the pale reflection of a ghost, a point the filmmakers bring home when he adopts one of Pete’s nervous tics and starts plucking at his eyebrows. The War Department reader was right: it
was
a clever twist to have Dorinda end up in Pete’s arms like an Everyman and Everywoman version of Cary Grant and Constance Bennett in
Topper.
“And even if it does fizzle,” Tracy told a reporter early in production, “you’ve got to admit it is a good try.”

The filmmakers struggled to approximate that romantic feeling while letting Dorinda live in the government-approved ending. They kept Pete in the cockpit and had her sense his rightness when he says (in Tracy’s realistic mussing up of Trumbo’s text), “You’re afraid of living—you’re afraid of life—and that’s double-crossing a lot of guys who are out there fighting for it.” With Pete directing the mission like a macho angel and a backseat driver, Dorinda pulls the mission off and gets back safely.

En route back to the base, Pete tells her, “You’re going to have a wonderful life”—a prefigurement of Trumbo’s next assignment, an unproduced Cary Grant version of
The Greatest Gift,
the story that eventually became, yes, Frank Capra’s
It’s a Wonderful Life.
Fleming’s movie, unlike Capra’s, clicked with audiences—and later, with Steven Spielberg, who cried over it when he was twelve. Spielberg produced a 1989 remake,
Always,
miscasting Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfuss in the Dunne and Tracy roles and, in Van Johnson’s,
Brad
Johnson. (Was this nonactor cast for karma, because of his last name?)

Spielberg transposed Fleming’s movie to a wilderness firefighting force; amazingly, the blockbuster auteur stuck to the revised flight plan that ends with the heroine alive. “Now that Spielberg is no longer twelve,” asked Pauline Kael, “hasn’t he noticed that there’s a voyeuristic queasiness in the idea of playing Cupid to the girl you loved and lost, and fixing her up with the next guy?”

That’s exactly what those old pros Trumbo and Fleming wanted to
avoid
in
A Guy Named Joe.
It remains an audience favorite, but Ralph Riskin confirms that the forced ending irked his father, Fleming, and Trumbo. “My dad and Mr. Trumbo and Mr. Fleming all wanted the original ending, which was a romantic and satisfying ending for the audience—that she get back to her beloved.” Trumbo told an interviewer, “It had three endings, until we decided what to do with it.” (According to his copy of the script, Trumbo cranked out
six
endings.)

In a proposal James Agee wrote for
Life,
he said “a good director like Victor Fleming” could serve as his model for a story about a “reliable journeyman.” That didn’t stop Agee from critically savaging
A Guy Named Joe:
“The picture will serve as well as two hours spent over the
Women’s Home Companion.
” Agee returned to the subject, and
Happy Land,
too, several months later, recognizing that these movies had touched a war-wounded populace. Agee invoked Joyce’s “The Dead” when describing the jealousy of a living character for a dead one over the love of a woman. “The emotions a ghost might feel who watched a living man woo and cajole his former mistress seem just as promising to me,” he elaborated, and “the paralysis and slow healing of a bereaved woman is not a bad subject, of itself. But to make such a film—above all, at a time like this—would require extraordinary taste, honesty and courage.” Agee bluntly decreed that “the makers of
A Guy Named Joe
” had only the courage of “a moral idiot.”

Sergei Eisenstein was the movie’s biggest highbrow fan. He loved the film’s “American inventiveness and skill at extracting from situations a range of possibilities—from lyricism to farce, from low comedy to tragedy.” Eisenstein felt that “the idea that the hands of each trainee would be guided by the thousands that perished before him attains the height of pathos.” The Soviet artist and the patriotic agents of the BMP loved the movie for the same reason: because of Lionel Barrymore’s spectral flying legions, “the chain of experience passed down is uninterrupted. And each flight is the creative action of all, collectively.”