Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Knockabout crewmates like Vic were a crucial part of Doug’s creative equation. And of course, Fairbanks was the perfect figure for Fleming to hook up with at this point of his life. As a star and pop philosopher, he was, like Teddy Roosevelt, committed to combining the most vigorous aspects of America’s regional cultures, rubbing shoulders with cowboys and the theatrical crowd at the Algonquin. “Fairbanks and I both preferred laughter and fun at any cost,” Fleming remembered. “He was the sort who would play leapfrog over the stuffed furniture in a Broadway hotel lobby and I was likely to join him, although it was never possible for me to jump so high, or to shinny up a polished marble pillar with equal agility.”

  Fairbanks turned his own physique into the epitome of modernization. His body was one of the machine age’s prime examples of a well-tuned device that with proper maintenance responds to its owner’s every whim. The escapist comedy adventures that Fairbanks made with Dwan, Emerson, and others connected with contemporary audiences because they contained within their fantasy a comprehension of real life. In February 1917, Fairbanks broke off with Griffith and formed his own Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation at Adolph Zukor’s Artcraft Pictures. A prestigious special distribution arm of Paramount, Artcraft operated like the “boutique” companies of today—except its mainstays were two superstars, Fairbanks and the Pickford Film Corporation’s Mary Pickford.

  In 1939, the trailblazing American film historian Lewis Jacobs wrote that Fairbanks’s action comedies “called for a degree of intellectual appreciation and their huge success at this time signified how perspicacious both audiences and film makers were becoming.” If one wants to understand the blockbuster appeal Fairbanks had between 1916 and 1922, the best place to start is Alistair Cooke’s astute, penetrating 1940 essay “The Making of a Screen Character.” (Perhaps the middlebrow taint Cooke acquired as host of Masterpiece Theatre has kept it out of anthologies.) Drawing on his memories of watching Fairbanks movies “as a small and absorbed child,” Cooke declares that Fairbanks

  was the abnormal norm of the man in the street, and his audience never mistook him for a Don Juan, a character actor, or a comedian or acrobat simply. He was a muscular itinerant preacher sailing gaily into the social novelties and the occupational neuroses of a new era dizzy with growing pains. He could do this without any doubt of his popularity because Fairbanks had the feel of the popular pulse—he knew to a degree the median limits of romance, prejudice, social conservatism; he knew them instinctively because they were his own.

  Emerson and Loos gave Fairbanks the right framework for the wonderment of normality made lively and writ large, handing him outlandish roles that he could fill out to perfection. He popularized the expression “Gee whiz!” His heroes were walking, vaulting, somersaulting flights of fancy, but with frontier-Yankee traction to them. By the time they finished an hour’s worth of exploits, they managed to clear the air of hypocrisy and cant and publicize the power of positive thinking—no, positive action—without losing their self-satiric smile.

  Fairbanks’s effortless straddling of these qualities has to do partly with the wit of Emerson and Loos and Dwan and partly with the bravado of Fleming and other men like him in Fairbanks’s company. These strapping fellows placed little value on their own hides and would risk them for a laugh or a dare. Fairbanks must have responded to Fleming’s magnetism. “Uncle Vic had the kind of charisma that arrived in the room ahead of him and lingered for a while after he left,” says Edward Hartman. “He seemed to radiate something.” In one of his first assignments at Triangle, Fleming shot a Dorothy Gish vehicle called Betty of Greystone under Dwan’s direction. The cast included Norman Selby, who’d been known in the boxing ring as Charles “Kid” McCoy and was famous for his “corkscrew punch,” which felled opponents with an abrupt, devastating snap. Dwan remembered that Kid McCoy/Selby taught Fleming how to throw that punch (at Vic’s request) and that Fleming later knocked a “whole damn crew cold with it.” The crew Fleming knocked cold may have been the company Dwan assembled for Fairbanks’s The Good Bad Man. “Doug wasn’t that fond of fighting,” Dwan said. “Matter of fact, he always walked away from trouble; but he was always eager to see new things, find new thrills. The three of us had a lot of fun.”

  Bessie Love, Doug’s co-star on that picture, remembered a bet Fleming and Fairbanks made to avert the boredom of a long ride on the Santa Fe Express. They wanted “to see which of them could go from their compartment and drawing room to the dining car, without touching the floor . . . they ‘walked’ through the coaches, hanging on to anything overhead and clinging to the seats, which faced each other.” Dwan, recalling a similar stunt or the same incident in a different way, suggested that the men had been “walking” along the outside of the train, clutching lips and sills and staring in at the passengers through their windows. There is a photograph of Fleming and Fairbanks clinging to a Santa Fe caboose, with Fleming holding on to a chimney cable and Fairbanks, his legs flying over the side, hanging from Fleming with his right arm around his chest. The columnist Dan Thomas reported ten years later that they’d shout “Boo!” at unsuspecting passengers while the train barreled along at sixty miles per hour. “Vic Fleming [was] taller—could do it,” Dwan noted, but the stunt had the same punch line for both of them when they found themselves locked out of the train, praying it would stop. Railroad stunts—or variations on this one stunt—pepper both men’s stories, including a gag involving “a suitcase of valuable bonds . . . false mustaches and locked compartment doors” that Fleming told about on the set of The Wizard of Oz. If Fairbanks was the workout addict in the company, Fleming was the catalytic risk taker.

  In a story that became part of Hollywood oral history (Lewis Milestone handed it down to the musician and wit Oscar Levant, and Milestone also relayed it to the actor Norman Lloyd), Fleming once asked Fairbanks to leap from a twelve-foot height. When the actor balked, saying it was “too dangerous,” Fleming said, “I’ll show you,” and made the jump. So Fairbanks went ahead and did it—then immediately called for an ambulance because he had broken an ankle. As the vehicle was taking Fairbanks to an infirmary, Fleming turned to an assistant and said, “You better get another ambulance. I broke my ankle, too.” (In the Milestone-Levant version, it’s both ankles; in a version told by John Lee Mahin’s son Graham Lee, the jump is from a burning hayloft.)

  Fairbanks’s greatest trick is that in his action movies, as in Fred Astaire musicals, none of the perspiration shows. Credit goes partly to Fleming’s prestidigitation. In The Good Bad Man, Dwan and Fairbanks wanted to shoot the Western hero with the archetypal name of “Passin’ Through” jumping his horse over an impossibly wide ravine. Fleming’s ingenuity saved the day: He photographed Fairbanks’s approach and jump over flat land, with the paper blotting out the bottom half of the frame. Then Fleming rewound the film. He positioned his camera and composed the picture so the width of the ravine would seem to equal the distance of the jump—and exposed the film again, this time with the paper over the top half of the frame. Double exposing the film with this makeshift matte convinced audiences that Passin’ Through had nailed a formidable leap, no sweat. Similarly, in The Half-Breed, Fairbanks bends a sapling to the ground and then uses it for a vault. Dwan remembered attaching a steel rod to the sapling so it would function as a catapult, but Fairbanks’s sometime stunt double, Richard Talmadge, said the bit was done simply by reversing the film—an explanation that fits the slight inconsistencies of Fairbanks’s supposed forward motion, and becomes patently obvious when the scene is run backward.

  Fairbanks broke with Griffith in 1917 because the Great Man hadn’t paid any attention to the upstart after The Lamb and had, according to Doug, established “the names of actresses by connecting them with mine, in violation of my contract.” He made Emerson and Dwan the production heads, Loos the chief scenario writer, and Fleming supervising cameraman of the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation. Their first production was another Emerson-Loos-Fleming comedy, In
Again–Out Again (1917). By now, Fleming was living at the new downtown Hotel Stowell, a favored hangout of the young film crowd. He was such an integral part of the team that when the production needed a set built in a hurry, Fairbanks took his recommendation and hired a college-boy pal of his named Howard Hawks, who was studying mechanical engineering at Cornell. Hawks never gave Fleming credit for starting him in the film business, but it was the Fairbanks picture that led to more work for Hawks at Artcraft’s parent company, Paramount.

  By the third Fairbanks Corporation production, Fleming was mounting a reputation outside his circle of collaborators. “The Fairbanks photographer is hardly more than a boy and his exceptional work has often caused wide comment,” read Fleming’s first piece of personal publicity, upon the release of Down to Earth in 1917. Highlighting the film’s “extraordinary, unusual night photography,” a promotional item planted in papers on opening day described how, “with the aid of flare lights and a special photographic device, Cameraman Victor Fleming filmed a scene of the popular actor relaxing on the ground looking up at the stars.” Fleming’s utter disdain for visual orthodoxy, whether as a cameraman or as a director, makes his body of films rich and surprising simply for their mise-en-scène.

  From collaborating with Fairbanks, Fleming learned how to time and frame a portrait of a star so that audiences would have their fill of his or her personality. He also learned how to plot out a course of action so that a leap or a tumble, a smile or a tear achieves absolute persuasiveness. A lot of Fairbanks films are tales of gradual maturation that seem like quick-change character studies because the star is always in motion. It takes most of five reels for a Western lawman to remove his Eastern-outsider disguise and reveal his authentic self to his true love in The Man from Painted Post; or for an office worker in a button business to put his fantasies of European aristocracy in perspective in Reaching for the Moon. But the photographer Fleming had the film sense to put the camera in the right places to make these extended skits appear emotionally mercurial. Fleming shoots relatively unadorned acrobatic moves like Fairbanks swinging himself onto the side of his father’s chair in His Picture in the Papers or vaulting onto a horse in his Westerns the way Astaire insisted directors shoot his dance moves. Fleming presents Fairbanks full-body, in compositions that emphasize athletics and character traits like impatience and ebullience.

  It took MTV only a few years to convince filmmakers hungry to evoke sensation that they should “destroy geography” and create queasiness in the audience by not letting them know the starting point or the direction of the next fist, bullet, laser, or spear. Moviemakers like Dwan and Fleming spent their careers creating geography. Whether Fairbanks was pretending that a spit of beach was a desert isle in Down to Earth or foiling assassination attempts in the imaginary kingdom of Vulgaria in Reaching for the Moon, viewers could feel as if they were inside a fantasy—even, in these cases, inside fantasies within the fantasy. The delight comes not from shock but from settling into the contours of a fun house big enough to fit an Everyamerican’s universe, circa 1917. Fairbanks’s transformation sagas still play like perfect catch-alls for topical parodies, glorified or debunked pop stereotypes, and romances sealed in midair.

  If Fairbanks’s action heroes inspired the creation of Superman and Batman, his movies helped catalyze comic-book graphic artistry with their breakneck mixture of visual ambition and vulgar excitement. Like vintage comics, a madcap mini-masterpiece like The Matrimaniac—with photography credited to Fleming, though no credits survive on-screen—keeps producing frissons that tremble like surreal found art. This story of an elopement gone wrong contains riotous tableaux: a mule doing an impromptu hind-legs dance with Fairbanks and a parson; Fairbanks balancing on phone lines like a high-wire walker or a modern-art mobile. (The movie climaxes with a marriage ceremony performed over the phone. The day I re-watched it, in September 2004, the news carried a story of a U.S. soldier in Iraq wedding a girl back home the same way.)

  Dwan shared Fleming’s curiosity, range, and sensitivity, and the cinematographer had plenty to learn from Fairbanks’s other directors. Joseph Henabery, who worked for Fairbanks as an assistant director before taking the helm of The Man from Painted Post, was a shrewd exploiter of locations. He took a camera unit to the Yosemite Valley to shoot a brief mountain-climbing scene in the early part of Down to Earth. But a later shot of Fairbanks in full Great White Hunter regalia, commanding loin-clothed dark-skinned natives, might have been filmed anywhere from Long Island to Santa Monica. With little more than blinding light and tropical flora, it conjures a torrid spot on the equator. Most of Down to Earth hinges on Fairbanks’s ability to convince some upper-crust hypochondriacs that they’re on a desert island, not a spit of beach. It’s as if Fairbanks were proclaiming that all the world’s his studio. Fleming’s camerawork here is remarkable for its ingenuity and clarity and for the way his images abet humor and satire. When Doug directs a ship’s hand to guard the land beyond the beach from the patients, he newly dubs the seaman “a wild man from Weehawken.” This sunbaked fellow, getting the message, adopts a caveman’s pose near the top of a sandy hill in a composition that’s as startling as it is funny.

  When Loos and Emerson stumbled at answering Doug’s demand to concoct a Western shot in the real West, Henabery and Fairbanks came up with a story of a range detective posing as a greenhorn rounding up rustlers for The Man from Painted Post. It’s the sort of square Western that the hero of Wild and Woolly would devour; it’s as if Fairbanks made his revisionist Western comedy, then decided to do the straight version. But it’s a well-paced shoot-’em-up, and a feel of fresh air courses through it. “Nice and cool up here,” Fleming wrote his mother from the Hotel Connor in Laramie, Wyoming, “and it’s rained a couple of times. We are going to camp out on the ranch where we work.” Fleming’s use of the Wyoming hills gives The Man from Painted Post a hint of grandeur.

  It was evidently as a result of the prestige and popularity of his work with Fairbanks that Fleming got his key job in the Signal Corps during World War I, which led to his assignment as chief cameraman for President Wilson’s European tour. These experiences would burnish his reputation as an American original—a self-taught virtuoso—and turn him into an even more dynamic character: a rough-hewn man of the world.

  4

  In Manhattan for the Great War

  When the United States entered the Great War in April 1917, every healthy male between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one anticipated induction by autumn and then service in the field. The twenty-eight-year-old Fleming didn’t appreciate the bump it would put in his career path; in what looks like an attempt to lower his chances of going in the first wave of draftees, he changed his birth year to 1888 on his draft card. But once he was called up, he didn’t flinch from the challenge. He wrote his mother in August that John Fairbanks arranged to have Fleming’s draft exam take place in Laramie, Wyoming, where he was shooting The Man from Painted Post. “Hope I pass it” was his comment. And he did.

  After he squeezed in one more Fairbanks picture, Reaching for the Moon, the Army inducted him “with what appeared to be the rest of Hollywood” on October 18. He arrived at Camp Lewis, outside Tacoma, Washington, on October 23. In a letter to his mother that night—“I have made up my bed and am going to hit it very soon”—his only complaint is about the crowding in the car on the way. “All the boys say it is great up here,” he adds, and “one can’t expect too much because things are so new up here they have not had time to get things running smooth.”

  His “first job in the army was to peel potatoes with a kitchen police detail at Camp Lewis,” Fleming wrote in Action. He was initially a private in the Ninety-first Division of the American Expeditionary Force, known as the Wild West Division because the bulk of its draftees came from California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The Army dammed this flood of men into the division’s 166th Depot Brigade before assigning them to units. According to Fleming,
he “had enlisted in the Officers’ Training Corps”; unfortunately, “before the commission came through, my number went up in the draft.” Had Fleming remained in the Ninety-first Division and the 316th Field Signal Battalion, he might have seen battle in France as a combat photographer.

  A few days after his arrival at Camp Lewis, Major Charles Wyman, the division signal officer for the battalion, summoned Fleming to his office. Wyman had received a telegram concerning Fleming’s enlistment, either from the War Department, as Fleming remembered it, or from the office of the chief signal officer. The way Fleming recounted the interview, Wyman told him, “We have about thirty-five hundred applications from the infantry for service in the Signal Corps. They all want to get into the photographic division. They all say they’re A-1 cameramen, or laboratory experts. What we want you to do, Fleming, is to get ten good men out of the bunch.”

  Fleming wrote that he “knew there weren’t that many cameramen and laboratory specialists in the country, but I kept my lips buttoned.” Wyman’s nephew Richard V. Wyman remarks that “Charley was not one to make up figures, and he might have said there were ‘a lot’ or ‘many’ from which to pick ten.” Wyman, perhaps unwittingly, had orchestrated an ideal match of job and soldier. After Fleming chose those men, he was transferred to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and became a soldier in the 251st Aero Squadron and the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, in part devoted to making “pictures from the air that would help the artillery locate its target.” (Eventually, the Army handed aerial photography from the Signal Corps to the newly formed Army Air Service. The Army Air Corps had temporarily disbanded in 1911.)