Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  When the Clouds Roll By established several hallmarks of a Victor Fleming production. It was technically innovative in its stagecraft and use of artificial lights. “We had even passed an era old-timers remember as something preceding Noah’s flood—the day of the overhead mercury lights which gave everyone a ghastly green appearance,” Fleming reminisced, years later. “But because we didn’t yet understand all we needed to know about light, our actors wore blue, pink or yellowish shirts. This was to cut down the halation.” Along with cunning sets, the movie boasted brawny location work. Vic shot some of it at Seal Beach, California, and, for the flood, built a reservoir and a town at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. He mixed the full-scale action with miniatures. He aimed to escape stage blocking and photographed Fairbanks from unconventional angles away from “stage center,” hoping, he said, “to give the action a more ‘real’ quality.”

  He also demonstrated his willingness to do anything to get what he needed from performers. A publicity item noted that Clifford “couldn’t make her tear ducts work” when she was supposed to weep over her character’s apparent breakup with Fairbanks, “so Director Fleming, when he had her rehearsing on the set, deliberately berated her. Finally the temperamental little girl became so worked-up and nervous that she burst forth in great heart-rending sobs, and then the fiendish director yelled, ‘Shoot, camera,’ and laughed finally at her because he had secured just what he desired.” According to the publicity, it was hard for Fleming to make Clifford believe that “he was only getting her to play a crying part” until they screened the scene together “and they realized the harsh methods had obtained excellent results.” Clifford’s nephew, the stage actor Micky O’Donoughue, says he doubts she would have needed the berating. Hardly a “little girl” at age thirty-two, and experienced in British theater and on Broadway, she came from “a wild and unusual family of incredible talents.”

  Clifford and Fleming began a four-year romance with her moving into his new place on Gardner Street. A zesty brunette with large, expressive eyes, Clifford was a former chorus girl turned vaudevillian. In 1921, a besotted critic called her “intensely unselfconscious about everything that she does. I’ve seen her breeze into a musical comedy with an opera glass in one hand and a pretzel in the other. She ate the pretzel as unhesitatingly as she looked over the members of the chorus with the opera glass and passed opinions upon them.”

  Born Kathleen O’Donoughue in Ireland and raised as part of a traveling theatrical troupe in England, Clifford had performed in America since 1902 and, at just five feet one inch and 101 pounds, created a male-impersonation act called “The Smartest Chap in Town,” wearing formal male duds, including top hat and monocle, or a newsboy’s outfit with cap, performing songs she’d written herself. (Such acts, long popular in vaudeville, were rooted in nineteenth-century British music halls and made famous by the often-imitated Vesta Tilley.) She was cute enough for Irene Castle to suspect, in 1913, that she might steal the heart of Vernon Castle before their dancing team had even begun.

  Clifford had the same blithe, roguish quality as Fairbanks. She went from (in her nephew’s words) “running out of money in Ireland and having to urinate in a bottle so her mother could sell it as medicine” to performing in musical comedies with Al Jolson in New York, and later hitting the vaudeville circuits with her “Smartest Chap” turn; she broke into motion pictures in a 1917 Paramount serial. Her mother hawked patent medicines as “Madame Clifford”; that’s where Kathleen got her new last name. She also created a new history for herself. Her publicity stated she’d been born in Charlottesville, Virginia, because, according to her nephew, “someone had told her that the courthouse in Charlottesville had burned down during the Civil War, so she gave that as her birthplace because she didn’t think there was any way it could be traced!”

  In New York to direct Constance Talmadge in Woman’s Place, Fleming writes Clifford in 1921: “Right now I want you to understand that I am not having a ‘great time’ or ‘lots of fun’ or enjoying myself greatly, as you seem to think. I’m not at all happy—having a thoroughly miserable time and wish I were with you, ‘where I belong.’ Now just what do you think of that.” The following year he addresses her as “Dear Pie” from the Algonquin Hotel. “Just another day away from you, that is about all it amounts to,” he writes, saying he’s going to the world-championship light-heavyweight bout between Benny Leonard and Lew Tendler the next night, and he’s “seen no shows and the pictures are rotten.”

  In another love letter that fall, Fleming writes, “Darling, my love, I have been coming home for several evenings expecting a letter from you and no luck. Always met by Old John Disappointment at the desk. Do you think that is a nice way to treat a perfectly good husband who loves you, do you?” He tells Clifford of a rained-out day on location (for Dark Secrets) forty miles out from New York City on Long Island, with no interiors ready to take up the slack. He reports, “Tom [Geraghty] and everyone liked my last picture,” Red Hot Romance, and hopes his new one (Anna Ascends) will be better, “but I don’t see how it can knock the world dead,” and asks her if she’s seen James Cruze’s Old Homestead, which he hears is “a great picture.” He signs the note, “Worlds of love, Victor,” with a P.S.: “And please do write. Love thee.”

  What’s most revealing about this letter is its easy, affectionate tone with a worldly beauty who was actually two years older than he (despite the press calling her a “temperamental little girl”). Fleming’s conquests would be legion, but they always spoke of him as a man who took good care of them.

  If he and Clifford had been romantically involved throughout the filming of When the Clouds Roll By, Fleming might still have yelled at her or nudged her to make a point if there had been any lull or hesitation in the filming. Even if a performer can eventually deliver on a part’s requirements, Fleming learned early that a director needs results on demand. He was acclaimed for what he wrought. A New York Times reviewer, after stating that When the Clouds Roll By and the next Fairbanks-Fleming production, The Mollycoddle (1920), have “extraordinary scenes,” declared, “That as Victor Fleming directed both ‘When the Clouds Roll By’ and its successor he is entitled to [take credit for] much of the cinematic works.”

  The Mollycoddle is as refreshing and pleasurable, though neither as far-out nor as iconoclastic, as When the Clouds Roll By. (The title is nineteenth-century slang for a milksop or a mama’s boy.) It offers a more intense and stylized version of a Wild and Woolly adventure. Here Fairbanks isn’t even a Western fan when the action picks him up: he’s what the Times review and his leading lady call “a foreign American”—a Europeanized dandy at play in Monte Carlo. Cultivated beyond his native wit and instincts, Doug’s mollycoddle character has lost the frontier-taming vitality of his Arizona forefathers. But a trio of “American college boys” named Patrick O’Flannigan, Ole Olsen, and Samuel Levinski—a melting pot on six legs—discover that despite his cane, monocle, and cigarette holder, Fairbanks is an American, not an Englishman. They resolve to crack his overrefined veneer and see if there’s a true Yank below. They shanghai him onto the boat of the rich Dutchman (Wallace Beery) who’s been hosting them on an Old-Europe-to-Wild-West vacation tour, not realizing that Beery has been smuggling diamonds from a mine in Hopi Indian country for cutting and finishing on the Continent and that Beery suspects Doug of spying on him for the Secret Service.

  Only one of the Fab Three’s lady companions, played by Ruth Renick, comes right out and says of Doug, “He has the makings of a man.” (She turns out to be the real secret agent.) But all approve as he toughens up with duties in the stokehold, and the guys give him a new tweed outfit: “Suit by O’Flannigan—Cap by Olsen—Shoes by Levin-ski.” By the time the mollycoddle leaves the ship, Renick has revealed her identity (and Beery’s) and enlisted Doug in her crusade. Once he finds his way to Arizona, and sheds his sensible tweeds for cowboy duds, the stirring fragrance of western zephyrs wafting off the Apache Mountains and successiv
e bouts of do-or-die action change this mollycoddle into a real man—and, once again, his father’s son.

  What makes the movie so appealing is the way it touches on the common desire of ordinary men and women to shuck all traces of comfort and etiquette and to sharpen reflexes and senses in the great outdoors. Doug’s attempt to join an Indian dance may trigger alarms on P.C. meters, but even the orthodox should see that his I’ll-try-anything attitude is disarmingly democratic. Doug the revitalized frontiersman displays a good-humored noblesse oblige both to the Hopi and to the college boys, far removed from the cutthroat ethos promulgated in twenty-first-century wilderness adventures. The famous Fairbanks smile suggests not inherited arrogance or smarminess but a gleeful acknowledgment of his own luck.

  In Fairbanks’s movies, if not always in his self-help books, his humor makes his most relentless proselytizing for healthy activity and good cheer palatable. It did in his off-set shenanigans, too. During the making of The Mollycoddle, Fleming and Fairbanks knocked off early one day to jaunt over to Chaplin’s studio with three of their crew members. Spontaneously, they marched through Chaplin’s offices silently and deadpan, then started running at a dogtrot, still in single file. Chaplin was working on The Kid, but they jogged straight through his set, not saying a word—and Chaplin, getting the stunt, joined right in, flapping along at the end of the line in the Little Tramp’s big shoes. With Fairbanks leading the way, they toured the entire lot, without breaking formation or uttering a peep. When they got to Chaplin’s studio swimming pool, they dived in and swam the length of it, with Chaplin bringing up the rear in his Little Tramp costume and makeup. As Fleming told the tale to a reporter a few years later, he and Fairbanks and their men got out of the pool, “started running again and drove off in perfect silence, dripping wet, and went home.”

  The Mollycoddle emerged as a marvelous follow-up to When the Clouds Roll By, with the same casual authority at mixing comedy, fantasy, and adventure. The history of the hero’s forebears begins with a tableau lifted from the painter Frederic Remington: Doug’s grandfather and a sidekick fending off Indians from a water hole. (Fairbanks pads himself out and ages his face to play the role of the mollycoddle’s ancestor; he also plays a Wild West sheriff forebear.) When Doug explains to Renick that he’s heard New York is wild, Fleming cuts with the directorial equivalent of a deadpan to Western gunslingers raising hell on Wall Street. He uses simple line and figure animation to illustrate Beery’s smuggling operation. The sequence serves as a visual palate cleanser, and also echoes later in the mind.

  When Fleming shoots some of the desert action, he uses long shots that reduce Doug’s figure to an animated speck among the buttes and ledges. And when Doug shows Renick his notes on the Dutchman’s operation, the drawings that he’s made within a flip book have a comic-strip-and-caption quality. The movie is always visually alive; there’s a brief use of subjective camera when the picture rotates with the hero’s stomach as he feels queasy in the stokehold, watching his fellow stoker shoveling coal. The killer climax is a landslide that the New York Times reviewer declared

  outdoes anything of the kind in the memory of the writer. Half a mountain, it seems, moves down the steep slope, through an Indian village and over half a dozen people protected by a thin ledge . . . [Fairbanks] even challenges the landslide to beat him at its own game and demonstrates that he and Wallace Beery, the villain of his story, can roll and tumble, and fall and slide, down a steep mountain with quite as much concentration on getting to the bottom as any rock that was ever started anywhere by the single-purposed force of gravity. The two men start fighting in a tree at the top of a mountain and are still at it after they have dived over a waterfall, several precipices, many feet of rough ground and two or three brick walls below. Camera tricks? Some of it, but none that can be noticed and more that must have been performed exactly as it is seen.

  The greatest milestone of When the Clouds Roll By and The Mollycoddle is artistic: they mark American moviemakers’ early grasp of the ineffable. They convey what Graham Greene articulated when he wrote, “Only the cinema is able in its most fantastic moments to give a sense of absurd unreasoning happiness, a kind of poignant release: you can’t catch it in prose.”

  7

  Scaling Paramount Pictures

  If Fleming had remained with Fairbanks for many more years, his career might have stumbled like Ted Reed’s. Reed stayed a Fairbanks colleague for a decade. He became a full-fledged director with The Nut (1921), the last of Fairbanks’s modern comic adventures—in part, a Chaplinesque satire of mechanical obsessions. But the success of The Mark of Zorro (1920) persuaded Fairbanks, after The Nut, to concentrate on heroic period spectacles that consumed months in production. Fairbanks turned to Fred Niblo (The Three Musketeers, 1921) and Dwan (Robin Hood, 1922) to direct these epics; Reed later served the company as a production manager on Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925) and The Black Pirate (1926). One of Reed’s lasting contributions never made it into the film history books: as the first director on I Wanted Wings, in 1941, he designed Veronica Lake’s peekaboo hairdo; Mitchell Leisen got the directing credit.

  Fleming, though, maintained his partnership with Anita Loos and John Emerson, making three of their snappy, ultracontemporary scripts in rapid succession. By then, Emerson had given up directing. When he and Loos broke with Fairbanks, Emerson gave a series of physical ailments as his public excuse. Some were genuine.

  After Emerson and Loos married and took a European tour, they adapted Rachel Barton Butler’s Mamma’s Affair as a vehicle for that deft comedienne and Loos friend, Constance “Dutch” Talmadge. They surrounded Dutch with veterans of the hit 1920 Broadway stage production. Effie Shannon repeated her crowd-pleasing performance as the mother whose psychosomatic (or hypochondriac) attacks keep her at the center of attention every time the spotlight—or her daughter—threatens to stray from her. Emerson and Loos cast Kenneth Harlan as the doctor who, at the movie’s comic pinnacle, takes one look at the family and realizes that it’s the daughter who needs to be cured of mom-induced neurasthenia.

  “To direct,” Loos wrote in 1978, “John chose a newcomer, Victor Fleming.” (Fleming actually worked for the producer Joseph Schenck, who was married to Constance’s sister Norma at the time and later co-founded 20th Century, which eventually merged with Fox. Schenck also sent the director to another Broadway play, The BrokenWing, to scout it as a possible Talmadge vehicle.) Fleming’s industry and unexpected enthusiasms snared Loos’s interest. “I respected Vic’s enterprise,” she wrote, “and was intrigued by the interest he took in things outside the movies. I recall one night when Vic was bringing me home from a party and we stopped to watch a fleet of fireflies skimming about Beverly Hills. ‘Those small insects have mastered a problem that’s never been solved by science,’ Vic informed me. ‘They can produce light without heat!’ ”

  Fleming focused his attention on Talmadge. Mamma’s Affair would be no more than stagy piffle with a dynamite opening if not for Fleming’s loving treatment of his lead actress. Loos and Emerson kick off their comedy-drama with a burlesque prologue set in the Garden of Eden. Proud of this addition, the team devoted much of an article they wrote on the script to “Eve forcing Adam to let her eat the apple by throwing a fit of hysteria,” the point being “that ‘nerves’ have always been woman’s greatest weapon to secure what she wants.” The movie’s introduction exemplifies wiseacre humor circa 1921 and Fleming’s gift of putting over outrageous material without fuss. Eve is a babe in a foliage-decorated body stocking, Adam is a scrawny, thatch-haired, Keatonesque caveman, and the snake is a low-tech hand puppet with the infectious effrontery of Burr Tillstrom’s Ollie (or maybe Robert Smigel’s Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog). When the snake urges Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, Adam says, “Nix on that. We ain’t supposed to eat the apple,” and warns him to stay away from his family. So the reptile advises Eve to escalate her complaints about Adam denying her any pleasure. “I never see anything but this old garden,
” says Eve. The bit is funny and offhand in its daring. It’s as if the flight from paradise were the source story for all domestic hilarity from Aristophanes to boulevard farce to sitcoms.

  Then the stage material begins. Shannon plays Mrs. Orrin, a rich, not-so-merry widow who has tied her sweet, beautiful daughter, Eve (Talmadge), to her own solipsistic mood swings. Fleming knows where the laughs are and where the audience’s affections are, too. Eve, on the verge of going out for the first time without her mother (with some girlfriends, to the theater), decides she has to kiss her mom goodbye. Talmadge is so tragicomically vulnerable and Shannon so farcically dominating that you feel an “uh-oh” rise in your throat without the benefit of a setup. Eve cancels the theater trip and cuts short her first evening party to be home with her ailing parent. Ma Orrin and her best friend and enabler, Mrs. Marchant (Katherine Kaelred), plot to marry Eve off to Marchant’s son, Henry (George Le Guere), a bespectacled mama’s boy who resembles the epicene young Joe E. Brown, and set the date to coincide with Mrs. Orrin’s birthday. But when Dr. Harmon (Harlan) observes the melodramatically tremulous matriarch and the furtively coughing and shaking Eve, he decides the young woman must be saved—and can be saved only if he separates her from her mother. Mrs. Orrin is reluctant to lose her “prop in all life’s sorrows,” but Eve reaches what the titles call “the breaking point” with a nervous outbreak of loathing and self-loathing that ends with her fainting.

  Fleming handles Talmadge as knowingly as the doctor does Eve, but far more exquisitely. In this film she has a wholesome, quizzical voluptuousness, with a full, slightly down-turned mouth and eyes that flash out of deep triangular sockets. When she wakes up in the good doctor’s care, she exhales a delicious air of freedom. Fleming tenderly shoots her pulling a wrap around a slip or negligee, one tiny strap still showing on her shoulder. Talmadge is a fresh, spontaneous actor. When Eve mimes a fit to disturb her mother’s plans for her, Talmadge cues the audience into Eve’s fakery without wrecking the illusion—she goes as far as she can with the gag, right up to writhing on the floor like a dog chasing its tail.