Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (84 page)

Fleming seized on one detail from the trial to provide some fleeting humorous counterpoint. Historically, Cauchon asked Joan whether her saints had hair, a question that Anderson put in the mouth of another august questioner and framed to mock the pseudo-dignity of Cauchon’s court. (Although for fifteenth-century Catholics, it was a reasonable query: they wanted to know just what emanations of faith
would
look like in the flesh.) Fleming, however, had the question posed by yet another cleric, Jean de la Fontaine, played by Corey’s friend Aubrey Mather (the police inspector in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
). Mather was a British character actor with a slick bald pate. When
he
asks the question about hair, it contains a comic element of yearning.

Though Fleming could choreograph a rousing vignette of Frenchmen rising to Joan’s cause, the scenes of her with her closest military supporters are leaden when they should be steely. Kevin McCarthy had
played
Dunois, the Bastard of Orléans, onstage; to this day he hasn’t seen the film. When I told him Leif Erickson got his part, he laughed and said, “That’s not bad.” But Erickson lacks personality in the role, and you have to concentrate even to notice Hurd Hatfield as Joan’s chaplain. John Ireland offers little more than a few sardonic or regretful glances as Jean de la Boussac, and Ward Bond does his standard bumptious military-man turn as the profane La Hire.

It would have taken considerable conviction and a less love-struck director to elicit performances that could have survived the soldiers’ discus-shaped hairpieces and their historically correct, pictorially clumsy helmets, whose uplifted visors look deadlier than any riposte Anderson and Solt give to the men. These actors resort to masculine heartiness the way most of the trial’s ecclesiastics succumb to bitchery. “That fell apart before it even started,” sneered Ireland. “I was paid $15,000 a day and would have done it for $1,000. I think all I did was raise my mask and say something once.”

Although the rap on the film is that Fleming filled it with pageantry and battle scenes, there’s only one war sequence, depicting Joan’s victory at the Battle of Orléans. Fleming had assigned Stallings to work on it with the montage master and second-unit director Slavko Vorkapich, who, after Fleming’s death, took full credit, except for the intercut scenes of Joan being wounded and then rallying her troops. “Fleming wanted to direct those, too,” said Vorkapich, “so I was there to suggest how it would fit into the rest of my battle.” He criticized Fleming as well as Bergman for the film’s conventionality and reverence. “Fleming wanted to make her sweet and all that. She was very tough; I read that in some French history. Preparing the battles, I read about her. She knew about military things and so on. She even swore.” Vorkapich blamed Fleming for making “a virginal Holy Mary out of her. He was not up to the thing.”

The man who shot Vorkapich’s segments disagreed: Winton C. Hoch, one of Hollywood’s great cinematographers, then at the start of his career. Hoch got his first big break on
Joan of Arc
and ended up sharing a best cinematography Oscar for it with the top-billed Joseph Valentine and the Technicolor expert William V. Skall.

I started on second-unit work on
Joan of Arc,
and then they had all this battle stuff on the stage and Slavko Vorkapich was directing that. When I met him, he had sketches. He was a pretty good artist himself. He had some sketches of what he
wanted
to get on the camera. He was going to show Victor Fleming the sketches, and I gulped when I saw them. I said, “Vorky, you’re not going to get these in the camera. You’ve cheated on perspective. Before you show them to Fleming, let’s get a still camera and go out on the set and demonstrate exactly what we can get.” Which we did, and then he revised his sketches, so we didn’t promise Fleming something we couldn’t deliver, which I thought was quite important.

Fleming called Hoch back to work on the first unit and gave the cinematographer his usual practical-joke hazing. Fleming demanded Hoch pull off “a dolly shot that went through the rafters of the church to a close-up of Joan” without “winging the (boom) tracks,” that is, “when the camera has gotten into a certain position you smooth the tracks back into position so you can keep going.” When Hoch protested, Vic walked away as if he didn’t hear him. Of course, Hoch told the head grip, “Wing it back.” (It would become the film’s elegant opening shot.) Hoch grew to appreciate Fleming’s showmanship.

Fleming tested me there. But after that he was very pleasant to work with . . . He would drop me a cue once in a while. For instance, we had one scene when Joan was praying, and as she lifted up her face, of course, a key light here is deadly. But when your face is down, you have to have a key light. So he said when he gave me the setup, he said, “If I were you I’d hang a light over her head and bring it on as she lifts her face up.” In those days that was a no-no. You never put a light on a dimmer. But those no-no’s all have to be taken with a grain of salt. I put both key lights on a dimmer, so as she raised her head one light faded out and the other light came in. Now there was a color temperature change, no doubt about it. But in the movement and the spirit of the scene you didn’t mind or notice, you accepted it. It’s a dramatic scene; it’s not a technical thing. It’s a dramatic moment. There’s drama and entertainment you’re putting onto this technology. This is what so many people tend to forget.

Joan of Arc
led directly to Hoch’s celebrated partnership with Ford on
3 Godfathers
and
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
(which won him a second Oscar).

Fleming’s direction of Bergman, though, was more pictorial than
dramatic.
It would be bad enough if she were merely playing to an unseen God all the time; she’s also playing to theatrical posterity. Bergman interprets Joan with such an actorish notion of single-minded purity that her idealism seems like narcissism. The battle sequence clicks not just because of Vorkapich’s dynamic diagonals and skewed angles but also because it tests Joan’s certainty in the most direct way. Again, fleetingly, the strength of the material saves the filmmakers. The script follows the legend of Joan ordering Sir William Glasdale (Dennis Hoey) to abandon his bastille and return to England, because if he does not, she says, she will “make such a hahay among you that it will be eternally remembered.” She demands surrender for
their
sake. Glasdale calls her a harlot. The conquest begins with an impressive display of spears and arrows and siege machines but reaches its emotional apex when Joan takes an arrow in her shoulder and then rallies her troops. She comes face-to-face with Glasdale, who refuses to surrender and meets a fiery end on a collapsing drawbridge.

Otherwise, the audience yearns for any emotional intensity or spontaneity. Young Pia Lindström provides a glimpse of it—she’s a beautiful blond child waving and smiling at Joan and urging her to save herself when she momentarily abjures her visions in hopes of entering a church prison and getting female guards and chapel privileges. “I was paid a hundred dollars and was paid in pennies, which I thought was funny,” says Lindström. “Of course I would see [Fleming]. I would sit on the camera boom with him, play with the other children on the set. He was a very handsome man, a very elegant and rather imposing figure. Of course, a director has a great psychic connection with his actress. I guess I was vulnerable to my director, too!” Despite her identification with her betrayed father, she laughs at the memory. “Gentle, I would call him. I don’t remember meeting Maxwell Anderson. He probably wasn’t as good-looking as Victor Fleming!”

Columnists fanned advance publicity with their accounts of the celluloid Joan’s conflagration, which Fleming started filming shortly after sunrise on a chilly mid-December day in 1947, on the RKO medieval set that famously hosted the 1939 version of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Fleming took a microphone and intoned, “This is May 30, 1431, and Joan of Arc is going to be burned. You are excited.” Among the 350 extras calling for Joan to burn was a future president of Disneyland, Jack Lindquist. The twenty-one-year-old son of an RKO purchasing agent had played bit parts for the past five years. “I was just
part
of the rabble coming out for the burning,” he says. “I remember being reminded that [we didn’t have] the luxury to put that event in perspective. We were just a bunch of peasants watching a woman burn at the stake . . . Like any other film, it was an all-day thing, but in spurts and bits.” All morning he and the rest of the extras jeered at Joan as a cart carried her in chains to her fate, and punctuated the reading of her death sentence with howls and wails. A double replaced Bergman as Joan’s executioners lit the tinder, then a dummy replaced her double on the stake as the kerosene-fed flames licked the sky.

A week later the home front heated up. A Cartier gold necklace with gold dragons that Fleming had ordered for Bergman came to Moraga Drive by mistake. “Daddy had never bought my mother much of anything jewelry-wise,” Sally remembers. “Mother came across it in a closet we used to keep gift boxes in,” Victoria recalls. “Mother tore up the whole house after that, looking for whatever.” It may well have been a lover’s gift, or merely a token of friendly reconciliation. For this was also the time when the columnist Jimmie Fidler was asking, “Wotzis about a red-hot feud between Ingrid Bergman and Victor Fleming?” The necklace never reached Ingrid’s neck; it was disposed of in the trash at the Bowmans’ house in Santa Monica.

When principal photography ended on December 18, the movie entered the phase when expectations remain out of this world and the various participants divide their concentration between postproduction and launching their next project. Even the title was haggled over. Despite Anderson’s objections that it would make the film seem like a schoolbook assignment (exactly what it turned out to be), Sierra officially bought the title
Joan of Arc
from Selznick for $25,000 (to be paid after the negative cost was recouped). In doing so, RKO and Sierra followed their own poll and ignored an independent poll that showed the title would be less immediately popular for a Bergman vehicle than
Joan
or
Joan of Lorraine.

More important, there were test screenings. Wanger couched the results in compliments. A memo from early April 1948 coos that
Joan of Arc
is “a picture that is way off the beaten track . . . Not a formula picture of the Hollywood type . . . It cannot be cut down or speeded up like ‘Northside 777’ or a snappy DeMille spectacle.” He says that in two screenings for “regular film audiences,” in Santa Barbara and Phoenix, “both audiences were completely enchanted and mesmerized and sat from beginning to end.” He hailed “the great artistic quality of
the
picture from the standpoint of color and composition.” But he did feel compelled “to repeat that I think there are certain parts of the picture that could be vastly improved.” In the family breakfast scene, “the arrival of the Uncle is one of coming for a week-end,” and the discussion of France resembled an American clan’s “afternoon discussion of a Kaltenborn broadcast.” (The producer is dead right.) He complained about intrusive Americanisms, in the scenes both at Vaucouleurs and in the military camp, and reactions so broad in the battle scenes that they bordered on inadvertent comedy. Wanger, though, did appear to be sincere when he said these were all problems that could be fixed. “Can you imagine if
Henry V
had been previewed at Santa Barbara and Phoenix, and then turned over to the professionals in Hollywood, what they would have done to Mr. Shakespeare’s script and picture!”

Delaying personal business, as he always had, until the end of filming, Fleming addressed the emotional aftermath of the Bergman affair only after he completed all retakes in April 1948. The following month he had his lawyer draft a separation agreement. Although it indicated, in the standard legal language, that Fleming and Lu had been living apart, according to both daughters neither one of them had moved out. Fleming settled on paying $1,000 a month in alimony and an additional 20 percent of all gross income he might receive apart from investments. He agreed to buy a house for Lu and the children if it didn’t cost more than $50,000, and (probably in expectation of spectacular profits from
Joan of Arc
) to create a $100,000 trust fund for Lu, so long as she remained unmarried. Fleming was to keep more than $205,000 in cash, his commercial properties in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, $20,000 in bonds, Knapp Island, what remained of his Meadowlark Ranch property, and all his stock in Sierra Pictures.

The agreement was never signed and divorce papers never filed. That might have been the couple’s last moment of panic in the Bergman era. By summer, both Victoria and Sally agree, they had reconciled. Working with Bergman this time—and viewing the results of their joint creative effort—may have disillusioned Fleming.

He certainly homed in on the finishing touches to
Joan of Arc
as if his career were at stake. In June, he was making sure his top editor, Frank Sullivan, would also supervise the dubbing. He rode herd on John Fulton’s special effects and enlisted William Cameron Menzies to create some of the opening art shots and the credit backgrounds clearly
patterned
after those of
Gone With the Wind.
Fleming compressed the introduction Solt and Anderson wrote and then sent it back for two rewrites at different lengths, forty-five seconds and a minute. Very much the director in command, he ordered Wanger to ditch the narrator, who “sounds like a radio newscaster,” and strive to find “a fine stage voice such as that of Mr. Joseph Cotten.” They settled on additional work for Shepperd Strudwick.

Wanger was declaring to the press that
Joan of Arc
would take in $20 million and had RKO convinced of its assured success, too. Fleming appeared to be riding high in the epic mode. So the producer Frank Ross considered it a coup to attach Fleming to his adaptation of Lloyd C. Douglas’s
The Robe.
Ross had prepared a script by Ernest Vajda and Albert Maltz; Fleming brought in his own team—none other than Anderson and Solt. Fleming cast Gregory Peck as Marcellus Gallio, the Roman tribune who supervises the Crucifixion. He wins Christ’s robe as a gambling prize and gives it up to his Greek slave, Demetrius, only to accept Jesus as his savior and the robe as a divine relic with healing powers. In June, Ross announced filming would start late in 1948 or early in 1949, possibly in Italy.