Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (77 page)

MGM first considered mounting a movie version of
The Anointed
in 1938, to star the age-appropriate Freddie Bartholomew, but the studio announced the film in 1941 as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy. Three years later a battery of writers, including John Huston’s then-favorite co-writer, Anthony Veiller, conspired with Fleming and the producer Sam Zimbalist to turn Harry Patterson from a wandering teenage naïf into a take-charge merchant marine boatswain fit for Gable. The adaptation was difficult, and the process made Vic think, seriously this time, of retirement. Fleming’s contract ran out on December 31, 1944, and MGM couldn’t get him to renew it. The production executives were so eager to retain one of their most expert and consistent moneymakers that they extended the contract to March 15, 1945, and then continued to pay him at his highest contract rate while he worked on
Adventure.
Word may not have trickled down to each guard on the MGM lot. Early in April, an MGM gate cop stopped him from entering the studio and asked for his pass. Fleming, insulted, turned around and went home. Vidor sympathized with
this
kind of gruffness. When you worked as hard as Vic did at MGM, Vidor said, “You felt like you built the buildings.” When asked for his name or a pass, Vidor “would continue on and try to get where I was going, but [Vic] would just go home.”

On April 5, Vic packed up and moved out everything in his office. He stayed home for at least a week and a half. Then he went to Balboa for two days of boating with Spencer Tracy. He returned to MGM on April 20 and met with a financial executive in Zimbalist’s office four
days
later to discuss the retirement plan but “gave no indication as to whether or not he was going to continue to render services.” Actually, Fleming, an expert at tweaking studio bigwigs, worked with Zimbalist on the movie as soon as he returned. The capper to his bitter joking was asking Clyde Hartman to make a sign marked “Personal Parking for Victor Fleming” that he could plant across the street from MGM’s executive offices.

As usual with Fleming, once he settled on making the picture, he went all out. If even a Mahin polishing job couldn’t fix this script, the production itself would retain Fleming’s new brand of energy and swank. At this point in his career, what this director wanted he got. No one experienced his insistence more directly than the rising actress Audrey Totter. “He was very stubborn,” she says. “I had just come to Metro and made a few little motion pictures. He decided he wanted me to play this bit. I didn’t want to be associated with such a small part and was mad at him because he was insisting.” Gable advised her, “This is what you do: when the camera comes to you, turn your back to it.” No one could spot her in the finished picture.
Adventure
opened to big business and shriveling reviews: it became one of those profitable movies perceived to be a bomb because so many people hated it. Totter was having lunch in the commissary when Vic stopped at the table and said, “I guess, Miss Totter, you knew something we didn’t know.”

Bosley Crowther would muse, in his withering review, “If you ask us, we’d guess that Metro simply said, ‘Oh, boy—a Garson-Gable film! It can’t miss!’ ” Yet
Adventure
has all the earmarks of a personal project. Fleming had such a major influence on the script that he was credited in the studio files as a co-writer, and its preoccupations reflect the changes in his life. Gable’s version of Harry Patterson goes Vic or Doug Fairbanks one better: Harry doesn’t just say “Action is the word,” he says that action is everything. But he falls hard for Garson’s San Francisco librarian, Emily Sears, who represents emotional commitment as well as book learning. After battling for a reel, they clinch under a tree in back of her dead parents’ farm house. They get married, but Harry ships off again, and before he goes, Emily demands a divorce—she knows he isn’t ready to leave the peripatetic life of a boatswain any more than Vic would have left the peripatetic life of a movie director in the footloose 1910s and 1920s. “It has everything except Little Eva floating up to heaven,” wrote the
Chicago Tribune
’s Albert Goldberg. Actually, it almost has that, too. Only the final-curtain near death of his just-
delivered
infant son—Harry wills him back to life, commanding him to breathe—matures Harry as a man.

The best sequence, the bristling introduction that unfolds in Chile but was filmed in studio sets and on the back-lot shipping docks, establishes Harry Patterson as a man who believes solely in movement and energy. He enters the film in a carriage with the lovely Lina Romay as Maria, his steady girl in port. (He’s left her three times; he cracks, “That makes me a one-woman man.”) He kicks in a bar door marked “Cerrado” and swings through it with Maria on his arm. Harry’s roistering ways delight everyone, even the abused bar owner—and that’s okay with the audience as long as the film remains a roughhouse comedy. There’s a Huston-Peckinpah kind of what-the-hell nihilism to Harry’s bravado and to its contrast with the sentiment-filled Latin music that underlines his minutes with Maria. Romay had been part of the vocal ensemble for Xavier Cugat’s orchestra and had little acting experience before
Adventure,
but she brings some nectarous vibrancy to the film. If Harry’s eyes drift away from her to the bar band when she sings for him—if he can’t muster any commitment even to this sweet gal—then it may not be in his nature. They amble arm in arm to the boat, where a Chilean man (Philip Merivale) introduces the great-grandson named after him, Ramon Estado (Tito Renaldo), to the boatswain; there’s something funny and a little stirring, too, about the old Ramon entrusting the young Ramon to Harry. But Harry has no time for it. He and Maria embrace, and when Harry says he’ll be back soon, Maria says, “I’ll wait, Harry. I’ll be like a statue facing the sea—I won’t even move!”

Romay remembers that Fleming “wanted a young girl and someone with some kind of Latin background, which I had . . . I think he really wanted all that sweetness and innocence against all the others.” He expanded her role with that bar scene and gave the character a backstory that suited her: Romay would play Maria as the daughter of a diplomat; Romay was herself the daughter of the Mexican vice-consul, first in Detroit, then in New York. She says she “absolutely loved [Fleming], because he was marvelous to me!” So was Gable. During the shooting of her second sequence with Gable, where they kiss, he had his makeup man at the ready with a cup of mouthwash. “When he spit out the mouthwash,” she says, “his front bridge went with it” into the studio tank. “We had to hire a diver. And he went down, and sure enough, he found it.” That really set her at her ease. “It could have
been
a tragedy, but it turned into a comedy. He was wonderful about it.” During their clinch, Gable “was very gentle.” Off the set, he was kind. “He would follow me home every night we shot late, and he would follow me until we got to Sunset Boulevard and he turned left. He lived in the Valley, and I lived in Brentwood, and he’d blink his lights before he turned. He was really very nice to me.” If Fleming was stressed out, he didn’t show it. “He’d just say what he wanted you to do, but he was warm and affectionate about it. He’d sit and hold my hand.”

Fleming films Harry’s departure from Chile with dramatic angles that capture the dash and hustle of men shoving off to sea and the mingled pride and sadness of the people waving goodbye to them. These were images he’d carried inside him since his months in the Signal Corps and as Woodrow Wilson’s cameraman. A few oddball tropes in the onboard dialogue suggest Vic’s personal imprint, too—Harry explaining to one of his crew that iron is a “machine” made up of atomic particles recalls Fleming telling Loos that fireflies are a scientific phenomenon because they produce light without heat.

Sadly, the movie’s story revolves around what happens after the Japanese torpedo Harry’s boat. Only a handful of crewmen survive, including Harry’s best friend, Mudgin (Thomas Mitchell), and, briefly, Ramon Estado, who slips into unconsciousness and dies. Mudgin, panicking, vows to give all his money to the Church and swears off hard liquor, easy women, and using a knife in a fight (even with a bigger man). Instantly, a rescue plane appears. So when Harry and his men debark in San Francisco, Mudgin immediately tries to make good on his four promises. But Harry persuades them all to “drink down” the old ship. Before long Mudgin succumbs to a B-girl, and when a fight breaks out, he tosses his knife away, only to see it stab a man’s arm. It’s the last good scene: you can feel life closing in on Mudgin like a trap. When his friends find him sitting alone in a bar looking spooked the next morning, he says he watched helplessly as his “weepin’ immortal soul” flew straight out of his chest, like, yes, a “firefly.” Harry tries to help his buddy find a solution for his new feeling of emptiness and steers him into the library. While Mudgin dreams of heaven, the film goes to hell.

Was there ever worse romantic casting than Gable and Garson? Gable could be terrific with classy ladies like Astor in
Red Dust
and Loy in
Test Pilot,
and he and de Havilland made Rhett Butler’s bond with Melanie as persuasive as his twisted passion with Scarlett. But through
out
Adventure
he affects a desperate, alienating bravado. Part of the problem is that he’s playing a concept instead of a character. He seeks what he calls “It,” and he defines “It” pretty much as everything that makes life viscerally exciting. He’s a man of action turned into a post–World War II archetype of bottled-up vitality and restlessness. Only when, as Mudgin says, Harry “grows the thorny rose she planted in his heart” does he realize that there would be deeper thrills in marriage to Emily.

Clark “was jittery the first week until we got him settled down,” Fleming told a reporter. Taking Dexedrine for weight loss was one possible cause of Gable’s shakiness. During the second week, Gable said, “I stalled as long as I could, I just couldn’t get up what it takes to come before these cameras. In uniform a guy fast develops an unbeatable sense of confidence; but when you come back you have nothing but an overwhelming sense of uncertainty.” Later, Gable told Louella Parsons, “The trouble was, I had war jitters. Like every other guy back from the service, I was nervous and restless. I was pressing too hard. We were all pressing too hard.”

Including Garson. This role model for home-front females earned five best actress Oscar nominations in a row from 1941 through 1945 (matched only by Bette Davis), and won in 1942 for embodying Britain’s stiff-upper-lip perseverance in
Mrs. Miniver.
She’d been charming in
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
and
Pride and Prejudice
(1940), but by the end of that 1941–45 run even Garson was chafing at her own nobility. Unfortunately, in
Adventure,
she’s tone-deaf and impenetrable. Her meet-cute with Harry in the library is more like a meet-ugly; think of the bookstore scene in Hawks’s
Big Sleep
without the sexiness, or “Madame Librarian” in
The Music Man
without the charm. Harry walks in snickering at everything about the library, as well as the librarian. We’re supposed to think they’re elemental opposites who deep, deep down can’t resist each other. But despite these big names signaling their characters’ intentions all over the place, all we see are two glossily photographed stars. She glares as he growls and slits his eyes.

“A good hot fight. That’s what real sex is,” Fleming told the UPI reporter Virginia McPherson. “None of this moonlight and hearts and flowers smoosh where the guy gets goofy-eyed and says ‘I love you’ and the woman lisps, ‘I love you tooooo.’ No, sir!” He was getting ready to stage the scene that takes place right after the dramatic debacle in the library. Harry tags along to dinner with Emily and her good-time gal
roommate,
Helen ( Joan Blondell), who immediately sparks to Harry. Emily, to prove that she’s brash and entertaining, like Helen and Harry, dances away with Harry’s crew and instigates a brawl. (She also crashes a plate over his head, though Harry doesn’t notice Emily is the one who hits him.) “I’ve got a lulu of a fight in this,” Fleming said. “That kind of stuff’s Gable’s meat, but Miss Garson is right in there pitchin’, too.” That theory worked in
Gone With the Wind,
when Scarlett’s and Rhett’s survival instincts meshed with their libidos. In
Adventure,
Harry and Emily simply try to out-spite each other.

Garson, too, plays a concept: the woman who must be knocked off her pedestal, then placed back on it. The script demanded the impossible—that Garson be convincing as a woman who falls in love with her man after she teams up with him to steal some chickens. It isn’t exactly Hepburn telling Bogart that she never experienced anything as thrilling as shooting the rapids on the
African Queen.
Garson may have had the right instinct to try a movie like this one, but she didn’t have the pluck to execute it. “Every time she had to work with [Gable], she wanted these black or navy blue velvet curtains all around the scene, with the directors and the actors,” Romay says. Garson found it impossible to conjure intimacy with a co-star if the crew and the sets beyond her soundstage were in her sight lines. Being shut off with an insecure leading man didn’t help her, either. “They did not get along personally at all. She was not easy to get along with.” The MGM publicist Emily Torchia got a $250 bonus for coming up with the famous ad line “Gable’s back and Garson’s got him!” Garson didn’t prefer the only alternative—“Gable puts the arson in Garson”—and counter-proposed, “Garson puts the able in Gable.” But everyone could see that wasn’t true. “He’d look at her as if she weren’t even there,” said Torchia. “It was the same with Jeanette MacDonald in
San Francisco.
With warm, earthy girls like Jean Harlow and Lana Turner, he was his usual charming self. With others he could be cold as ice.”

“
Adventure
is definitely the worst picture I ever saw in my life,” Davis, the author of
The Anointed,
wrote his son. “
Sign of the Cross
and
Sons of the Legion
were fine productions by comparison. Gable is the worst ham in the business. I feel very sick to the stomach and low. Wish I hadn’t seen it. If I had seen the thing in preview I would have demanded that they take my name off it. It’ll do me irreparable harm. And I had nothing to do with it.”