Yet even if she looked askance at Norma and Vic’s fling, Edie must have been euphoric over their cinematic liaison. Howard Hawks said, “When Lasky saw the finished picture, which Victor Fleming made, I thought he’d break both legs getting out of the projection room to sign her.” Norma’s performance propelled Thalberg, newly ensconced as Louis Mayer’s production chief at MGM, to cast her in a prestigious film, He Who Gets Slapped (released later in 1924). Fleming, too, won praise, for directing the stock story in (as the Los Angeles Times put it) “a breezy, refreshed style.” Fleming himself marveled at its ease of production: In 1944, he pictured “a group of people on a river bank in Yosemite National Park in 1924. In the group are Norma Shearer and Jack Holt, our principals; a cameraman, a couple of automobile drivers, a bit player or two, and myself . . . Less than ten people in the production unit to make that picture! Contrast that with the huge resources Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and other major companies put behind a production today! More than ten persons will be engaged in the research alone if it is a big production.”
Despite his later reputation as a “man’s director,” Fleming launched or cannily revamped a host of female stars from the 1920s on. As Shearer rode the crest of her Empty Hands success, she was happy to be seen in Fleming’s company. The Los Angeles reporter Grace Kingsley, running into her one afternoon in October, praised the star’s elegant taste and noted that her companion, Fleming, “seemed quite devoted.” But the affair between Shearer and Fleming didn’t affect the director’s eye for the potential of his next leading lady, Pauline Starke. In The Devil’s Cargo and Adventure (both 1925—and both lost), he turned Starke from a long-suffering starlet into a happy hell-raiser. And she thrived under his guidance. Photoplay once asked her to name the moment when movie producers found out that she had sex appeal. She credited The Devil’s Cargo: “For the first time in my life I had a role that meant something, and I loved it.” She plays a gambler’s daughter and casino chanteuse during the Sacramento gold rush of 1849 who falls for a crusading newspaper editor and ends up uniting with him against vigilantes and a drunken steamboat stoker (Wallace Beery). Starke carried the picture with the critics and the public—from then on, she’d win comparisons to the robust, erotic Gloria Swanson. Fleming rebuilt Old Sacramento on the Sacramento River and filled it with a couple hundred cast and crew, slaking his growing thirst for the epic. The erstwhile mechanic in Fleming listed among his requests to Paramount’s props chief “a stern-wheel river steamboat of the type used in 1850” and “a Washington hand press.”
In Fleming’s 1925 Adventure (based on a Jack London novel of the same name), Starke played a maverick globe-trotter who enters into partnership with a plantation owner on the Solomon Islands and defends him against usurers who covet the hero’s land and stir up the locals. (Wallace Beery again pops up as one of the bad guys.) Hawaii’s Olympic swimmer Duke Kahanamoku made his first appearance for Fleming in this movie and said he “nearly drowned” after swimming four hundred yards with Starke to a ship and then, on the return swim, getting tangled in seaweed. Critics took Adventure for what it was—as The New York Times put it, “a compact serial.” Its most influential scene was “a table duel.” Two men place a loaded revolver, a lit cigarette, and a match on a table in the middle of a room; only when the burning end of the cigarette starts to ignite the match can the men jump for the gun. Fleming mastered ritualized machismo—and directors would emulate him for decades.
Fleming also began talking like a studio employee, telling a Paramount flack that a typical 1925 picture was a “staple article,” yet “a staple article of superlative quality.” He might have been thinking of his third 1925 movie, A Son of His Father, another lost Western, which Variety dubbed “one more of Harold Bell Wright’s handsome hero and dirty villain stories.” Wright’s best-selling celebrations of frontier virtues included The Shepherd of the Hills, frequently filmed (most famously by Fleming’s former assistant Henry Hathaway, with John Wayne in 1941) and still performed today as an outdoor play in Bran-son, Missouri. Paramount hoped that A Son of His Father would start a series of Wright adaptations, and chose Fleming to launch it based on his success with Zane Grey. Fleming’s female lead, Bessie Love, remembered in her memoir that after the production, when she “asked him, frankly, why he had agreed to make such a bad film,” Fleming “asked me, frankly, if I knew how much money the film had made.” Of course, Love had met Fleming on the set of The Good Bad Man nine years before. It was on A Son of His Father that she “got to know him pretty well; he was as big as a bull moose and one of my beaux.” Yet Love thought “he could be cruel.” Fleming’s crew warned him not to fire a gun near an electrician who suffered from shell shock, but the director went ahead and did it anyway. “I asked him why he’d been so cruel—of course, he didn’t think he was. I suppose he felt the man had been through a war, he could take it.”
Not even Fleming’s nonstop run of romances, from Valli to Shearer to Love, kept him from his family. His sister Ruth got divorced and returned to their mother’s house late in 1924. Fleming was an attentive uncle to Ruth’s daughter Yvonne. “He was at Nanny’s one day and he grabbed my chin and turned my head up and said ‘Open your mouth.’ And he hollered to Nanny, who was out in the kitchen, ‘Mother, come here!’ So he said, ‘Yvonne has to have her teeth straightened. I will take care of it, I will call you and tell you who the dentist is, and you will see that she gets to the dentist.’ So that’s how I got my teeth straightened.” Yvonne thought of him as “a precisionist.” She’d iron his handkerchiefs for him, “and if those corners weren’t exactly done, they had to be redone.”
Fleming spent every Christmas dinner at his mother’s house, with Arletta’s son Newell sitting on one side of him and Yvonne on the other. Yvonne remembered that “he would come with his pockets full of $20 gold pieces, and everyone got a $20 gold piece for Christmas.” When Ruth bought a new house of her own, Vic gave her the down payment. In 1925, he also urged his favorite sister, unsuccessfully, not to marry Dick Kobe, nine years her junior, saying, “He’s going to find another woman, and it will never last.” But it did, more than fifty years, until her death. Fleming’s largesse was the only sign of his Hollywood success. He never brought over his girlfriends, and Yvonne said, “He never talked about himself. He was very, very private.”
When A Son of His Father opened, Fleming was already nearing completion on his next picture, one that would land him an upgrade of his contract at Paramount and increase his prestige. “I have just witnessed the first two reels of Lord Jim, which Mr. Fleming is now producing,” Jesse Lasky told Moving Picture World in August 1925, “and I am certain that it is greater than anything he has ever before directed. I very deeply admire both the man and his work, and it is our aim to keep him with Paramount for many years to come.”
No major writer, James Joyce included, has been more difficult to adapt than Joseph Conrad. What makes his fiction great is also what makes it hard to film—in Graham Greene’s words, “its strange removal of action to the second hand, its shades of thought.” (Probably the best Conrad adaptations are Hitchcock’s 1936 Sabotage, loosely based on The Secret Agent, and the 1952 Outcast of the Islands, directed by Greene’s friend and collaborator Carol Reed.) When Greene wrote that the object of filmmaking “should be the translation of thought back into images” and that “America has made the mistake of translating it into action,” he might have been thinking of Fleming’s Lord Jim. Fleming and his screenwriter, John Russell, aim at concision and dispatch as they present Jim’s momentary moral blackout during a crisis at sea and his tragic attempt to work out his own salvation by restoring order and morale to a jungle village.
Watching the picture is direct and visceral, nothing like the knotty experience of reading the book. Yet Fleming imparts a remarkable amount of Conradian flavor into the look and feel of the movie. His Lord Jim wants to be a man of heroic action, but when he gets his chance to prove himself—and save the Mohammedan pilgrims on the Patna, or at least go
down with the ship—he listens to the voices of the corrupt skipper and crew, not to his conscience or to the passengers crying for help. Then he becomes a penitent, self-destructive saint: a character of mixed gallantry, which would become a Fleming specialty.
Fleming’s spruce film, like Richard Brooks’s bloated 1965 version (shot by David Lean’s photographer, Frederick Young), demonstrates how difficult it is to turn a figure with a crippled self-image into the anchor of a sprawling adventure. In Brooks’s spectacle, Peter O’Toole comes off as a neurasthenic even though the actor is at his most athletic—indeed, 1982’s My Favorite Year used O’Toole’s swashbuckling fantasies from Lord Jim to illustrate the prime of his Errol Flynn–like character. In Fleming’s, Percy Marmont seems, at first, impossibly fey—a sad reflection of early Hollywood’s Anglophilia. (Even The New York Times noted that he lives up to the part “in all except bulk.”) But Fleming, shooting on the back lot and in the Los Angeles harbor, creates a strong tissue of atmosphere and incident. He gradually extracts from Marmont’s elusive presence the sardonic humor and strength he needs to bind it together. Fleming’s own naïve and worldly background connected him to what Greene isolated as the Conradian formula—the virtues of “courage, loyalty, labour” set against “the nihilistic background of purposeless suffering.” And Fleming responded decisively to the screenwriter Russell’s skill at sifting Conrad’s themes and action to dramatic essentials. (Russell next adapted that classic action novel about deception and valor, Beau Geste, with stunning success.) The outcome is a lucid, moving film about catastrophe.
Paramount boasted of employing an 881-man crew and more than 500 extras at one time in Lord Jim; Fleming keeps everything in balance. From the beginning, he uses compositions that hold the characters in clear focus while the dockside shops and piers vanish in a line that stretches into the horizon. It takes Fleming no more than a few title cards and vignettes to establish Jim as an upright English sailor who sees a top berth on any ship, even one as shabby as the Patna, as a stepping-stone to a skipper’s position. Speedily and indelibly, the director etches the casual racism of every other white man on the Patna and the equivocal position of the human cargo, Muslim pilgrims en route to the Red Sea. When the steamer hits a rock or a derelict ship in a murky night and threatens to go down, Jim’s—and our—understanding of the situation comes in an instant. There’s no way the scurrilous Cap’n Brown (Noah Beery) and his crew are going to risk their necks for eight hundred Muslims.
Fleming already knew the emotional dynamics of melodrama inside out. Where he excels in Lord Jim is in the poetry of disaster: the rustling movement of the sleeping pilgrims when the collision in the dark disturbs their sleep; the fog and mist clouding Jim’s judgment literally as Brown and his men urge him to jump into their lifeboat; close-ups that home in on Jim’s confusion just as he’s about to take that leap.
These touches display the knack for synesthesia that the best silent directors would bring into the talkies. With crack staging and timing, Fleming turns the Patna crew’s dumbfounding realization that their ship made it to port into a black-comic knockout: the Port Office master pulls open the shade on his window and there’s the Patna, docked at the pier behind him.
Inevitably, in any Conrad adaptation, some dialogue devolves into abstraction, such as when the sympathetic trader Stein says to a sailor at the Court of Inquiry that it’s futile “trying to judge a man’s soul by his actions.” But the filmmakers deploy their metaphysics much more sparingly here than Brooks did in his version, counterpointing it with earthiness and humor. After his judges cancel his seagoing certification on the grounds of desertion from duty, Jim leaves the court exactly as an onlooker is telling a mangy canine, “Get out, you cur.” Of course, Jim thinks he’s the one being called a foul dog.
Lord Jim marked Fleming’s coming of age as a creator of thinking-man’s spectacles, not only because of his mastery of intimacy within scope, but also because of his ability to meld a diverse cast into a winning hand. Jim agrees to reform Stein’s outpost in the village of Patusan, which Stein’s drunken, unscrupulous agent Cornelius (Raymond Hatton) has been running into the swamp. Duke Kahanamoku plays Tamb’ Itam, the villager who becomes Jim’s stalwart right-hand man out of love for him. (In real life he was a hero, too, winning three gold and two silver Olympic swimming medals for the United States.) Shirley Mason as Jewel, the daughter of Cornelius’s abused and long-dead native wife, conveys the underlying innocence and ardor that would attract a starry-eyed soul like Jim.
The film combines the Patna’s skipper with Conrad’s dangerous aristocratic raider, Gentleman Brown. When Cap’n Brown, a couple of Patna veterans, and the deposed Cornelius raid the village, Jim foils them but decides to give them safe passage rather than an eye-for-an-eye brand of native justice. He vows to forfeit his own life to the village leader Doramin (Nick De Ruiz) if Brown and his men slaughter any more Patusanese.
The director shows his mettle when he stages Jim’s resulting self-sacrifice. The corpse of Doramin’s son, Dain Waris (George Magrill), lies in state when Jim takes his fateful walk, idly running his hand across the vine-laden rail of a bridge, blithely demonstrating that he has no gun and has accepted his fate. Doramin shoots—and Jim totters back across the bridge and into the arms of Jewel. As promised in the opening quotation from Conrad’s final pages, Jim ends up “inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.”
Between Empty Hands and Lord Jim, a number of characteristic Fleming projects went unrealized, including a Zane Grey Western, The Border Legion, and Outcasts of Poker Flat, based on the celebrated Bret Harte story that had last been filmed in 1919. The most intriguing was a remake of the 1918 Sessue Hayakawa hit, The Honor of His House—a love triangle with a Japanese-American girl at its apex and a Japanese and an American at its corners. Fleming’s later political foes would accuse him of anti-Semitism, but the necessity for cross-racial understanding crops up often as a theme in his work.
Fleming might have considered the circus movie The Mountebank (released as The Side Show of Life) beyond his range then, like the World War I service comedy Behind the Front. And he probably thought the oil-well melodrama Tongues of Flame beneath him; it went to his old pal Joseph Henabery. Though Vic’s detractors have branded him a roughneck, his studio bosses thought him qualified to follow Lord Jim with a high-society melodrama, The Blind Goddess. Fleming had to orchestrate a plot that combined courtroom theatrics with the mother-daughter suds of Stella Dallas. The cast boasted Esther Ralston, star of The American Venus, as the daughter of a New York political boss (Ernest Torrence); Louise Dresser as the mother she never knew; and square-chinned Jack Holt (Chester Gould’s visual model for Dick Tracy) as the girl’s fighting district-attorney fiancé. Holt resigns his post to defend Dresser from the charge of killing Ralston’s father. The author of the original novel, Arthur Cheney Train, was a Harvard-educated lawyer turned storyteller long before Scott Turow; Train’s most popular creation, Ephraim Tutt, was once as famous as Charlie Chan. But the scribblers who would have a lasting effect on Fleming’s career were the screenwriters on The Blind Goddess, the husband-and-wife team of Louis Lighton and Hope Loring. They and Fleming won praise from critics for “a pace that keeps the audience keyed up all the way.” Lighton would eventually collaborate with Fleming as a producer on three classics—The Virginian, Captains Courageous, and Test Pilot.
Hoping that a jolt of barnstorming energy would rev up a potentially stuffy big-star contraption, Fleming directed Ralston, on location, to jump into a big Hispano-Suiza roadster (borrowed from Jack Pickford) and race alongside a real Santa Fe passenger train carrying her fictional father. The car was known internationally for its get-up-and-go. (Luis Buñuel hailed Buster Keaton’s College for being “as vital as a Hispano-Suiza.”) The problem was that Ralston couldn’t drive. Ralston recalled that Fleming “yelped, ‘Oh, God. I hear the train coming now. Somebody put it in gear for her. I hope you can at least steer. Jus
t follow behind the camera car and stay in the road!’ ” She did, at eighty miles an hour in her recollection, until she had to wave at Torrence, who, as her father, was standing on the train’s rear platform. “I took my hands off the wheel and waved, and almost plowed into the camera car ahead of me. I grabbed the wheel and swerved to miss it, almost overturning the Hispano in the ditch. From then on, Mr. Fleming decided to use a double for my future driving scenes.”
Ralston “couldn’t squeeze a tear” in the courtroom for the character’s dead father until Dresser came over and murmured, “Esther, dear, my beloved mother is in the Hollywood Hospital, dying of cancer. They just phoned me and said if I could get right over there, I’d be able to see her once more before she dies. I can’t leave until we do this scene.” Ralston began sobbing, and Fleming ordered, “Get her closeup . . . quick.” Fleming sometimes cooked up soap operas to get what he needed from his actors, but this was no desperate ploy: Dresser did rush to the hospital once the scene was done, and her mother died an hour after she got there.
Ralston, a compact, well-behaved blonde, was Hollywood’s idea of a smart young leading lady. Clara Bow, Fleming’s next star (and next lover), was anything but. When Joseph Moncure March described a redheaded flapper in his notorious 1928 verse novel, The Wild Party, he must have modeled her on the flame-haired Bow, who was dubbed the It Girl two years earlier.
A rogue—
But her manner was gay and delicious.
She could make a Baptist preacher choke
With laughter over a dirty joke.
From 1925 to 1933, the entire moviegoing world knew this ravishing live wire as the epitome of the jazz baby: “naughty of eye” and “expressive-lipped”; “cute, lecherous; lovable, treacherous.”
Well, maybe not “treacherous”—except in the minds of scandalmongers and pop moralists. Bow was a generous and plucky gal, on and off the screen. Her multifaceted beauty was dreamy, spellbinding, and spine-tingling. She wasn’t merely a movie star but a battered Hollywood heroine. On ambition and street wit alone, she pulled herself out of Brooklyn tenements, escaping from a sexually abusive father and a murderously unbalanced mother who once tried to slit the teenage Clara’s throat when she was sleeping—catalyzing, among other repercussions, a lifelong case of insomnia. Clara’s father put her mother in an insane asylum, where she died while her daughter was appearing in a picture.
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 14