Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Although the Signal Corps was founded in 1861 to take charge of all field communications, it had not kept up with technology and had trained its officers and soldiers mostly in semaphore flags and telegraphy. Still photographs had no place in the Signal Corps of the Civil War, and prior to World War I the Army used motion picture photography only for isolated events, like the Wright brothers’ flight in 1907 at Fort Myer, Virginia. But on July 21, 1917, it designated the Signal Corps “the bureau which will obtain the necessary photographs to form a comprehensive pictorial history” of the war. Fleming would become a member of the fledgling Photographic Section.

  Once he put on the uniform, Fleming hoped to be in the thick of the action. He later said that what he really wanted to become in the war was a machine gunner or an aviator, but the Army rejected his efforts to enter the field of battle. Even officers far removed from Hollywood recognized Fleming’s importance as the chief cameraman for Fairbanks, the most inspiring producer-star of his day and a phenomenal wartime fund-raiser and morale booster. And Fleming “found compensation in the knowledge that motion pictures had served a great many purposes in the war, apart from their ordinary utility as entertainment.” He would use his unique experience to serve his country first as a maker of training films, next as an instructor, and ultimately as a cameraman for military intelligence.

  The Army intended to use Fort Sill as the base for its school of land photography, probably because it had already become a center for instruction in multiple fields, including gunnery and aviation. It was an apt spot for a private from the Wild West Division. Fort Sill dated to frontier days and had been the prison holding the Apache chief Geronimo before his death in 1909. Starting in September 1917, its School of Fire trained field artillery officers in the thousands, peaking at two hundred a week. Fort Sill also turned out one hundred air service observers a week. The ranks were a lot thinner for the Photographic Section. In August 1917, it numbered only twenty-five men, with cinematographers especially scarce; it could field only four motion picture cameramen as late as March 1918. Fleming answered to a couple of scholarly captains, Olin O. Ellis and Enoch Garey, and under their command did breakthrough work, creating some of the first military training films. “These films were used to demonstrate . . . the whole machinery of the guns,” he recalled. They “gave recruits about everything there is in gunnery except the feel of hot metal and the smell of powder.” Sadly, a series of arson fires in the 1920s incinerated those films. But the experience grounded Fleming and his colleagues in wartime reality. “It was my first consideration of the camera as a weapon of warfare and it was highly impressive.”

  Fleming nonetheless viewed Fort Sill as just a step along his way. In a telegram to his mother sent on Christmas Eve, he says, “Everything is fine” but he expects “to get somewhere soon.” He didn’t have long to wait. Late in 1917, the Signal Corps hierarchy realized that equipment for the Photographic Section would be easier to acquire in New York. In January 1918, Fleming was making gunnery films at the School of Fire at the rate of one or two every couple of days. He and twelve others from the 251st Aero Squadron got their orders to transfer from Fort Sill to the new photography school at Columbia University. Standing out in the group was the wiry, six-foot-five twenty-five-year-old Ernest B. Schoedsack, the co-creator of the epic documentaries Grass (1925) and Chang (1927) and then the epochal fantasy King Kong (1933). Within a month, Fleming had finished the last of his fifteen training films and was Manhattan-bound.

  In his February 9 letter of recommendation for Fleming, Captain Ellis suggested that Fleming and two others receive commissions “should their work at Columbia prove satisfactory.” The letter testifies to Fleming’s ability to impress people in a matter of weeks; it also points up the stature of his civilian connections. “Private Fleming was Douglas Fairbanks’s cameraman. In fact, we have found him to be more than a cameraman. He understands the motion picture game from the ground up, and he has ingenuity, conception and imagination, which made him a most valuable man in our work.”

  The U.S. School of Military Cinematography established at Columbia taught six-week courses in motion picture and still photography. Although more than seven hundred men would attend its classes and enjoy the many off-base diversions of Manhattan, the Army treated the school as a military secret. It hid in plain sight at 116th Street and Broadway, and went public only after the war ended.

  Fleming arrived on February 9. He wasn’t the sole Fairbanks cameraman on campus. Three days earlier, Harris Thorpe had arrived; he’d worked on Wild and Woolly under Fleming’s supervision. An East Coast cameraman named Harold “Hal” Sintzenich had helped develop the Columbia curriculum. Sintzenich was a seasoned veteran of New York and New Jersey studios, but in his diary he responded to Fleming’s arrival with youthful alacrity: “Vic Fleming, cameraman for Douglas Fairbanks, has been put in charge of the movie men, temporarily. An awfully good fellow.” Sintzenich and Fleming spent the next day “examining for men who are to go to France.” Ray June, who would later shoot Fleming’s Treasure Island and Test Pilot, also taught there at some time, but the “chief” or “senior” instructor of motion picture photography was Second Lieutenant Carl L. Gregory. Like Dwan and the other film pioneers, Gregory had earned a college degree in another field—chemistry, from Ohio State University. Then he worked briefly as a cinematographer for the Edison Company in 1909 and became a jack-of-all-trades (including writing and directing) for the Thanhouser Film Corporation of New Rochelle, New York. Tending the egos of movie-industry vets became a sizable task for Gregory, their supervisor. Schoedsack, for example, who would scale Gotham’s heights with King Kong, brushed off his Columbia experience with the words “I taught them how to put a camera on a tripod.” But Gregory’s faculty offered students a high-level practical education in lenses, composition, and lab work as well as “news value, historical record and war caption writing.” It culminated in “lectures on work under actual field conditions in the trenches and at schools of fire located in nearby training camps.”

  Wesley Ruggles was one student who took advantage of everything he could. A former Keystone Kop, Ruggles went on to direct the first Academy Award–winning Western, 1931’s Cimarron. And there was an activated reservist named Louis (formerly Lev) Milstein, a cutting-room assistant, posted after Columbia to the propaganda division of the Army War College in Washington, D.C. He hoisted equipment for a cameraman documenting Medical Corps operations, made health films about the benefits of good posture and dental hygiene, and edited combat footage. After the war he adopted the name Lewis Milestone and directed the most celebrated of all World War I movies, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Another Signal Corps enlistee, a former worker at the World Film Corporation, got his first taste of trade-paper coverage when he was in the Army. Moving Picture World noted, “Joe Sternberg has been stationed at Columbia University, where he will be engaged in important work connected with the preparation of a film which will be used as an aid in training recruits.” Later, a Hollywood producer persuaded him to change his name, and Jonas Sternberg became Josef von Sternberg, the director who made Marlene Dietrich an international star in a string of poetic melodramas.

  Young women from Barnard happened by now and then, but the U.S. School of Military Cinematography was a wholesome enclave at the edge of a New York scene heady with its own exploding cultural vitality. This was a time when Broadway was considered a barbaric camp at the barricades of proper etiquette and study. A contemporary music professor at Columbia, Daniel Gregory Mason, complained that “Jewish tastes and standards, with their Oriental extravagance, their sensual brilliance and intellectual facility and superficiality,” had corrupted Broadway. But Broadway hadn’t yet infiltrated Mason’s—and Carl Gregory’s—campus. Sintzenich’s diary entries of his time at Columbia read like a training camp fit for Fairbanks. Calisthenics and military drill followed reveille; then it was time for practice with twin semaphore flags and the single-flag signaling system
known as wigwag. The cinematographers scrimmaged on Columbia’s football field between afternoon classes and lectures on cameras and lighting, fitness and health. For a bit of spice, female instructors taught French. To conserve time, Central Park, rather than nearby Army schools of fire, hosted semaphore classes as well as field trips that were meant to echo battlefield conditions.

  Even the boys’ nights out were salubrious. On March 13, Sintzenich recorded, “In the evening went down to the Strand with Wruggles [Wesley Ruggles] and Fleming to see Mary Pickford.” The film was Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley. It must have been a kick for Fleming to watch his pal Fairbanks’s paramour, Pickford, as directed by his even older buddy Marshall Neilan. The next week Hal and Vic plunked down their money to see “Terrible Teddy” Tetzlaff’s onetime co-star Mabel Normand at the height of her comic-dramatic prowess in The Floor Below.

  On March 28, Sintzenich sketched a vignette of Manhattan hospitality that transports a reader to a more formal, gracious time. “Arrangements were made for the company to go to the theatre tonight and a supper after, of which about 100 took advantage . . . We went down in formation.” The image of a hundred men in uniform marching seventy blocks to see a hit Broadway musical, Sigmund Romberg’s Maytime, seems something out of Yankee Doodle Dandy. But it happened, and Fleming was part of it. (The following month the Columbia soldiers regrouped to see Al Jolson in Sinbad.)

  Fleming got his lieutenant’s commission and an assignment that sent him briefly to Washington, D.C., on May 13. His mother, vacationing in Long Beach, California, mailed him a postcard that elicited a revealing response. “How do you like eating everywhere and anywhere?” he wrote his mother on May 22.

  I have been doing it for so long now that it’s hard to imagine any other way—and it looks as though I shall be eating that way for some time. But some day I am going to have a house in California—wife and all that goes with it. That will be much better. I am going back to Columbia University tomorrow. Have finished my work here. It’s fearful hot in Washington. Would hate to have to stay here all summer . . . It’s much better to be an officer than a private. You are somebody and have liberties—live like a regular human being. Never felt better and had less in my life.

  Of course, almost any man, even one who signed his name as an “affectionate son,” would be circumspect about love and marriage when writing to his mother. But bringing up having a house and wife in California without mentioning Clara, whom he’d divorced for desertion just three years earlier, suggests that Fleming was capable of ruthless movement in his emotional life. His ex-lovers would always speak well of him, but not his wives. Clara Strouse is a silent part of Fleming family history. By 1918, she presumably had died; her memory seems to have expired before her. Fleming’s second marriage, fifteen years hence, would be rife with oddly mixed emotions.

  One friend he made at Columbia, Carl Akeley, would affect him as much as Fairbanks. “Akeley’s talents were spread across so many fields that he deserves the rank of Renaissance Man,” wrote Kevin Brown-low. In 1886, practicing a unique version of taxidermy that became state-of-the-art, Akeley stuffed P. T. Barnum’s elephant Jumbo. He became devoted to Africa and its animals and befriended another lover of the Dark Continent, Theodore Roosevelt. He survived a bull-elephant trampling and killed a leopard with his own two hands. He was a sculptor, naturalist, wildlife photographer, conservationist, and creator of the compressed-air cement gun. He invented the gyroscopic Akeley camera, capable of fluid movement in any direction and at any tempo.

  While his cameras were being used for aerial reconnaissance and he was attached to the Corps of Engineers, Akeley improved searchlights and remote-control devices for light projectors and placed his evolving photographic designs at the disposal of the Signal Corps. In early May, Fleming and others accompanied Akeley and Signal Corps equipment inspectors to perform tests on Akeley’s new “pancake” camera, lightweight and popular with newsreel photographers, and the next month Fleming started teaching an advanced class in its use.

  As Fleming put it in Action, around the same time “some letters reached me from California advising that someone had been conducting a strangely thorough investigation into my record. A few days later, I received orders to report to General [Marlborough] Churchill, commanding [the Military Intelligence Division] in Washington.” The Army was appropriating the new lieutenant so he could perform classified and experimental duties. A group called the American Protective League conducted the investigation of Fleming’s “loyalty, integrity and character” in June. Established by the Department of Justice in 1917 and lasting until 1919, the APL was manned by as many as 250,000 civilian secret agents. They were supposed to report suspicious activity, conduct interrogations, and make arrests. But when there wasn’t enough to keep them occupied, they turned in draft dodgers and maintained surveillance on industrial plants with defense contracts. They also raided German-language newspapers.

  Called upon for testimonials to his patriotism and character, Fleming showed himself to be a savvy young man on the rise, naming half a dozen people on the basis of their clout and celebrity more than their knowledge of his character. Under the category noted on the form as “known by,” he listed his friend and sometime employer Charles Cotton; the Los Angeles city official Glen MacWilliams Sr., father of the Fairbanks cameraman Glen MacWilliams Jr.; and, of course, Fairbanks. Under “recommended by” (meaning they wrote letters and/or were interviewed directly on Fleming’s behalf), Fairbanks topped the list. The others never again show up in Fleming’s story, but they included Jules Brulatour, who inspired the opera-impresario segment of Citizen Kane, and Donald J. Bell, who co-founded Bell & Howell. Brulatour distributed raw film stock for Eastman Kodak, a key position in the photo industry; he was also an occasional producer and later the agent for the actress Hope Hampton, his second wife. Brulatour gave Fleming a letter of recommendation. In a follow-up interview he said, “Fleming is very intelligent, bright, and I think he would be a very valuable man as a moving picture photographer for the government.” He added he knew Fleming “three years in a business way only,” and “whether he would make a good officer or not for the Army, I am somewhat doubtful . . . Regarding his patriotism, I do not know him well enough to speak, as I have not been in touch with him lately.”

  Bell, who said he had known Fleming a little over two years, had no qualms, calling the lieutenant “very, very patriotic . . . absolutely an American straight through.” He even backed up Fleming’s contention in Action that he had “been very anxious to get into the aviation service.” But just how well he knew Fleming is debatable. The APL delegate writes, “Mr. Fleming’s people are from Oklahoma, he thinks. Mr. Fleming’s father [Sid Deacon] is interested in oil properties out there.”

  Fairbanks, then on the West Coast (Fleming had supplied an East Coast address), appears to be the sole source for a Los Angeles report that lauds Fleming’s mechanical facility but says he “expressed considerable dislike over the prospect of being drafted, stating that he hated to be taken from his work just at a time when he was making good. When [Fleming was] recently interviewed, however, by Douglas Fairbanks in New York after having entered the service, he stated that he was supremely happy and well satisfied with his lot. That he wouldn’t get out of it for anything in the world.” The investigator’s signature at the bottom of the report belongs to Cecil B. DeMille, the head of Hollywood’s APL chapter. The shadow of DeMille and the American Protective League would loom throughout Fleming’s life, to the formation of the anticommunist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in the 1940s.

  One of Fleming’s first confidential assignments was shooting high-speed movies of exploding ordnance at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. He noted in Action that “it was delicate business and we soon learned that a charge of TNT can be as unruly at the starting point as it is on landing.” If you believe an earlier account of his life, he learned all about dynamite in San Dimas.

  F
leming underwent the security check so he could chronicle comings and goings at the port of Hoboken, New Jersey, where three million doughboys eventually shipped out to Europe. He ended up spending much of his war time in Hoboken. It was an important post. In 1914, seventeen German ships had been stopped and kept at the port under harbor neutrality acts, and the government had maintained rigid control of it ever since, seizing the piers outright when America entered the war. Naming Hoboken a port of embarkation, the United States put part of the city under martial law and shuttered all saloons within a half mile.

  For a young cinematographer with a knack for kinetic imagery and an appetite for power, filming the troops assembling at Camp Merritt, New Jersey, boarding a ferry at Alpine Landing, and then debarking at Hoboken must have been a pleasure as well as a duty. (Fleming’s footage is preserved at the National Archives.) A real-life cast of thousands provided him with a charge that may have rivaled assisting Griffith with the Babylonian hordes of Intolerance. Fleming’s main responsibility was to keep the action clear while providing evidence of military scope and efficiency, but his compositions demonstrate the understated snap that classical moviemakers achieved simply by putting the camera in the right place. The formations of the men are as memorable when they’re huddled en masse on the ground, waiting for the next move, as they are when they’re marching. In images from an epoch before people reflexively adapted their conduct for movie cameras, there’s an endearing poise in the shots of Red Cross women pouring drinks for the servicemen and handing them rations. The embarkation center footage contains purely documentary shots of officers scanning paperwork, but there are also frames that rival those in Vidor’s The Crowd: rows of female secretaries stooped over their desks and a wall-length filing cabinet stretching from the floor to some high windows. Fleming conveys the tension and drudgery in tasks like loading the Belgian relief ship Remier with supplies, and the controlled tumult of troop ferries docking at Hoboken.