Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (83 page)

Bergman’s behavior kept jolting the long-suffering Lindström during the autumn of 1947. One night, when she said she would be staying at Ruth Roberts’s apartment, Lindström arrived there unannounced. “At first, Ruth mentioned that Ingrid had locked herself up in a room to work there,” Lindström recalled. “I searched the apartment. There was no Ingrid there, and Ruth had to admit that Ingrid had gone out for the night with a boyfriend. A few days later, [Lu] came to me and said, ‘You must help me! My husband has got to stop this relationship!’ ” (It was the reverse of the scene between Lionel Atwill and Luise Rainer in
The Great Waltz.
) Lu huddled with Lindström, but he understood that the only solution to
his
problem was divorce. “I was never perfect and the marriage was anything but ideal,” Lindström told Bergman’s biographer Donald Spoto. “One of my many mistakes was
that
I did not proceed with the divorce I firmly proposed. She pleaded with me and assured me that she was changing her life.” She counter-proposed that they have another child following her next picture for Hitchcock (
Under Capricorn
). Lindström said he agreed, and made plans to expand their house.

The affair did cool, though Fleming tried to put a happy face on his and Bergman’s movie partnership. “She’s not superhuman,” he said. “She can be stubborn, but her stubbornness is based on an instinct for what makes the best picture.”

“Except for
Joan of Arc,
” said Alfred Hitchcock, the man Selznick once groomed as his next Victor Fleming, Bergman “could never conceive of anything that was grand enough.” (She chalked that comment up to the pressures of making
Under Capricorn.
) Sympathetic and skeptical observers alike thought Bergman was torn three ways: she had overidentified with Joan, she had personal ambitions to (in Hitchcock’s words) “appear in masterpieces,” and she was also a partner in Sierra Pictures. Fleming was screening David Lean’s
Great Expectations
when Stallings noted “a magnificent crane shot” following the boy Pip through Miss Havisham’s mansion. “I spoke of Fleming’s great take on the carpet of Rhett Butler’s stairway which won Hattie McDaniel an Academy Award. ‘But the cost,’ Ingrid said. ‘Think of the cost!’ ” (The screening may have led to the apt casting of Lean’s Mr. Jaggers, Francis L. Sullivan, as Joan’s show-trial antagonist, Cauchon.)

Fleming had made movies with lovers before, but never with one who knew her own force as a producer-star. It was not a dilemma a man like him could readily “talk out.” On the surface she seemed gracious and appreciative. Bergman later said,

Vic Fleming wore himself out on the picture. He was here and there and everywhere. I loved just to watch him; he moved beautifully, he was so graceful, and he had this great warmth toward everyone, always pleasant and helpful . . . Union practices very often got on his nerves. He could never wait for the man who was to come and do it to arrive; if a plug had to be put in, he put it in himself; if something needed carrying, he carried it. They were all union jobs, but he did them himself, and got away with them, so obviously they all liked him. But it was a very tight budget we were working on, and it was difficult because there wasn’t much belief in Hollywood that the picture
was
going to be any good . . . Nobody thought there was any box office in a young girl saving her country, especially with no love story.

The budget tight? Only because the ambitions were spectacular. At $4.65 million, few pictures would rival it, most notably
Duel in the Sun
(the final cost of that Selznick epic was $5.25 million), and this was no “Lust in the Dust.” Not much belief in Hollywood that the picture was going to be good or successful? Hedda Hopper was Fleming’s biggest fan; the life of a saint was Louella Parsons’s type of picture; and at one time or another it seemed as if every major independent producer or director in Hollywood wanted his own Joan picture, preferably with Bergman, the most popular female star. “I think the pressures got to Victor Fleming,” Bergman said. “He was so anxious to make this a great success because he knew I was in love with Joan and her story.” She left the ultimate pressure unsaid: Fleming’s love for her.

The schedule
was
tight: a costume worker and machine operator strike hit Hollywood in August—one reason, along with the script problems, that the film was moved to mid-September. And the work space
was
cramped; the Hal Roach Studios were nothing like the quarters Fleming used to inhabit at MGM. The flu took Fleming out of commission for a week. Doncoeur observed:

He came, wrapped in blankets, to direct the set with a fever. I admire the courage of someone who, six days a week, does not allow himself an hour of rest. Most often, he doesn’t even come to the commissary. I have seen him at noon eating a sandwich brought to him in paper, staying all alone on the sound-stage . . . In her bungalow, Bergman eats a wedge of cheese from Holland with pumpernickel bread. That’s all, with a cup of coffee. She just had a cook, a Christian Scientist who as soon as she entered the house said, “I did not come here to cook, but to accomplish my mission.” It was as worrying to their stomachs as it was to their spirits.

No matter how great his fortitude (and hers), it was proving impossible for Fleming to manage his last romantic fling with a business and artistic partner. Never before had he been heard to say “the reins have been snatched from my hands.” Pride and fiscal responsibility wouldn’t
permit
him to walk away as he had on
The Yearling.
And Wanger had laid another weighty mantle on the director’s shoulders. Wanger always conceived of this film as his and Fleming’s counterpart to Olivier’s
Henry V.
Given the success of Anderson’s play, Wanger might have reasoned that its messages of idealism and compromise would hit home with postwar audiences the way Olivier’s puissant patriotism did in wartime. But Anderson, Solt, and Stallings were not churning out Shakespeare, and
Henry V,
though a box-office phenomenon for an import, grossed only $1 million as it traveled from town to town, first as a road-show presentation and later in general distribution. Wanger wanted the same rollout for
Joan of Arc.

Fleming genuinely adored Bergman as an actress. To Stallings he said, “Brother, she is bulletproof. There never has been another figure like her before a camera; you can shoot her at any angle, any position. It doesn’t make any difference . . . you don’t have to protect her. You can bother about the other actors on the set. But Ingrid’s like a Notre Dame quarterback. An onlooker can’t take his eyes off her!”

Jimmy Lydon, the popular juvenile who played Pierre d’Arc, Joan’s younger brother, says the director wasn’t interested in any of the other actors. He offers a snapshot of Fleming at his weakest or most distracted. “He would approach a scene like this,” says Lydon.

“Okay, we’re in the French farmhouse (or whatever), scene 27 (or whatever). You guys know this scene? Kick it around while I go talk to Joe [Valentine, the cinematographer].” He would go off for forty-five minutes or an hour with Joe while the cast would rehearse and stage the scene. Then he’d say two or three things—“It stinks,” or “Kick it around again,” or “That’s fine.” And he’d say, “Joe, put the camera there,” and that was it. Actors need guidance or encouragement; you’ve got to suggest, cajole, or pat them on the head to get them up to doing what they want to do . . . Mr. Fleming didn’t know anything about that. He depended on the marvelous people he hired. Maybe 90 percent of the time he was not far wrong. But in my experience, he never told an actor anything. We were working in cold soundstages in winter, for five or six weeks—very difficult conditions. We were all taken with Mr. Fleming’s background, but I was terribly surprised at this man who seemed to have only camera setups and visuals to attend to, and there’s a lot more to making a motion picture than that.

Lydon’s
one scene
was
a travesty of exposition, establishing the viciousness of pro-English Burgundians and introducing Joan’s uncle, Durand Laxart (Roman Bohnen), as her means of reaching de Baudricourt, the governor of Vaucouleurs (George Coulouris). Fleming remembered Rand Brooks from
Gone With the Wind
and cast him as Joan’s older brother, Jean. As Brooks said, “You couldn’t even see me.” Still, he loved Fleming:

I’ll never forget this; we walked off the set the day we finished shooting, and he says, “I’ve given you all these goddamned little parts, next time we’ll give you a real good one.” Of course for Vic, there would be no next time. I always thought actors loved him. I think he knew the angles and he had the emotion inside, and he just talked to people about what he felt a scene should be. A lot of actor-directors get into the part and have actors mimic them; that wasn’t Vic’s way.

But on
Joan of Arc,
only the most heroic scenes, or the intimate ones with Ingrid, got Fleming’s blood running. Even the admiring Doncoeur complained about the coronation of Charles VII: “Very cold, and without spirit, above all, without prayers.”

Fleming’s on-set behavior never suggested an affair with Bergman. “We were all in love with Ingrid as a professional and as a sweet and wonderful lady,” Lydon says. “But I don’t think he treated her differently than anyone else. The quality of this woman! Working at the Hal Roach Studios under difficult conditions, getting in and out of this ugly fake armor; one day she came in later, at nine, and apologized to Fleming and the cast and crew, saying, ‘I have no excuse. I’m terribly sorry. The alarm went off and I went back and I am terribly sorry for holding up the company.’ And Fleming just said, ‘Let’s go to work.’ ”

Off the set, though, Fleming was effusive: “She’s no bovine girl with cow eyes,” he told the
Saturday Evening Post.
“She’s got more warmth than anyone I know. She has temperament, but she controls her temperament. She’s never really happy when she’s not working. All her other pleasures are secondary to that. I’ve never known anyone so buoyant over a good scene or a good bit. Nor have I ever seen any human being suffer more over a bad picture. When she is in a bad picture, her fits of depression amount to actual physical nausea.”

The character actor and acting teacher Jeff Corey, who played Joan’s guard during her imprisonment and inquisition, thought that
Fleming
didn’t
need
discussions with actors and that he handled his star lovingly and gracefully. The historical adviser Bernheim emphasized to Bergman the sewer-like foulness of Joan’s cell, and she passed the knowledge along to Corey. “Fleming was happy with what I did,” Corey said. “I played the guard as a man who was hurt, who was trying to say to her, ‘I care about you,’—who had a crush on her, in spite of her smelling so badly.” There
is
a sensitive shot of Corey and Bergman through the cell grate, the guard staring dreamily at Joan before he moves on her and she responds aghast.

That’s what Corey remembered when he said,

It was quite wonderful in one particular scene the way [Fleming] talked to Ingrid, when she acquiesced to the inquisition and had to realize the saints were turned against her. In the scene, she’s looking through the bars of her cell . . . Victor came close to her and said, “Ingrid, you’ve turned your back [on the saints], and they’re not listening to you, and you break down,” and he gently broke an ammonia capsule and swept it under her nose, and the medicinal tears merged with the real tears, and he very quietly turned to the crew and said, “Action.”

Corey would soon become a victim of the blacklist, and the repercussions of the Motion Picture Alliance reverberated throughout the set. Several other left-leaning actors performed in
Joan of Arc,
including the Group Theatre mainstay Roman Bohnen, Selena Royle (who, off the set, made a speech attacking HUAC while the film was being shot), and Kate Drain Lawson, the wife of the communist screenwriter and MPA opponent John Howard Lawson. Doncoeur noted that Wanger was part of a group of twenty-five producers and stars (including Charles Boyer) who purchased radio time to protest the witch hunt, invoking the First Amendment and demanding that the government and patriotic groups accuse specific people openly and halt their mass indictment of the industry as a whole.

Despite those dark clouds, Corey made
Joan of Arc
sound like an actor’s holiday: “Half my Hollywood friends—Aubrey Mather, Alan Napier, Herb Rudley, Shepperd Strudwick—all wonderful friends and very good actors I’d worked with onstage and in films, all of us enjoyed being in this all-star cast.” None of them, according to Corey, knew of Fleming and Bergman’s romantic entanglement.

Unfortunately, little of their joy infused the action; Ferrer’s proudly
shallow
Dauphin was the most amusing sideshow. (George Coulouris Jr. said that George senior, who played the governor of Vaucouleurs, “had a higher opinion of Ferrer” than of Bergman.) In the movie’s 146 minutes, there was room for only one character with any breadth—Joan—and her leading man was God. “If Ingrid hadn’t insisted on taking out all human touches and making Joan a plaster saint, the thing might have had some quality,” Maxwell Anderson complained to John Mason Brown after Brown panned the film in the
Saturday Review.
(“England’s Harry was more fortunate in his ghostwriter,” Brown noted.) “She wrecked that one,” Anderson insisted, disavowing the film’s pedestrian demotic language. “She had the power to wreck it and she did. Moreover, she’s completely unscrupulous. She doesn’t keep her word and she has no respect for a writer’s work.”

Each time Fleming stages some juicy bit of traditional Joan legendry, the movie comes momentarily to life: when Joan arrives at the Dauphin’s court in Chinon, his poet-jester (Vincent Donahue) puts an impostor on the Dauphin’s throne in order to addle and expose her and amuse the court. It’s one of the few scenes in which Bergman seems genuine—betrayed and confused—and Fleming’s camera follows her with tensile grace as she picks her way through the mingled noblemen to the true Dauphin. But, Ferrer aside, the supporting performances are too arch, especially Donahue and Gene Lockhart as the mercenary counselor Georges de la Trémouille. Also, John Emery as Joan’s supporter Jean, Duke d’Alençon, the Dauphin’s cousin, is woefully miscast: a distinguished gentleman of a certain age rather than a dashing young warrior.