Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  In his unpublished notes on Fleming, Kevin Brownlow rightly puts this movie in the category of silent-star vehicles of the mid-1920s that are comparable to star-oriented network-TV series. But seen fresh, the movie has a flighty charm. Fleming didn’t stint on craftsmanship. “We worked down on the Lucky Baldwin place,” Hathaway remembered, “now the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia. Beautiful location. That big old wooden house there and the lake around it, palm trees. We used the Queen Anne cottage [it also appeared in the TV series Fantasy Island] for one of those plantation-type wooden houses.”

  Fleming taught Hathaway that “it’s better to have one tree in a cross or back light than a forest in flat light.” Hula is lush and lively, like Mantrap, but with less satiric edge and more florid romance. A tropical wilderness movie, Hula embraces the Bow image minted in Mantrap and cemented in It and takes a giant step into the primal. The heroine doesn’t grow out of the urban erotic renewal of jazz babies and flappers, though she would appeal to them. Her untamable sexiness represents how any normal red-blooded girl would feel in Hawaii, a state of nature if not yet a state. Hula’s dad (Albert Gran) hangs out with boringly dissolute Westerners. One of the harshest laughs of the movie comes when Fleming pans around this gluttonous, inebriated crowd the way he did around the teetotalers in Mantrap.

  Hula’s guiding light proves to be a half-Hawaiian, half-Caucasian cowboy (Agostino Borgato). In its own not-so-naïve way, the movie ridicules the negative concept of “going native.” By the end, the uptight Brit gets the message that native is better. Forget the machinations of the rotter who lusts for Hula, the female rotter who lusts for Haldane, and the ultimate villainess, Haldane’s wife (Patty DuPont). What’s memorable about the film are precisely the scenes that made it disreputable: Hula’s opening skinny-dip, where she flicks at a flower with her toes only to have a bee sting her on her thigh (yes, silent-film lip-readers, the legend is true: you can distinctly see her mouth form the words “Oh, fuck!”); her rump-first meet-cute with Haldane in his room, where she’s gone to fetch her scruffy dog from under Haldane’s bed; her grass-skirt hula (more of a soft-shoe dance than authentic Hawaiian hip wriggling), which she does at a wingding of a luau, instinctively knowing it will drive her loathsome admirer wild and jolt her proper-gentleman hero into action. They all build to the moment when she visits Haldane in the shack he’s set up next to his dam site and puts her toothbrush next to his. Never has the urge to “shack up” been so economically expressed.

  Fleming’s affection for his star—and her sensitivity to it—keep the film light and limber. It’s a cinematic love letter written in the eyes and torso of the respondent. The whole thing would collapse if there were anything coy about it, but Fleming doesn’t exploit his lover; he leads her toward an irresistible performance. Her boldness is unconstrained. She rides her horse into her dining room; she admits she set off dynamite to bag her man. Her movements have a speedy grace, whether she’s showing off her bee-stung thigh or fingering the cleft in Haldane’s chin. Brook later said, “For all the acting I did, they might as well have poured me out of a bottle.” But Brook is a perfect foil for Bow—if this bit of British sterling melts before her, no one has a chance when she puts her mind to it. According to Budd Schulberg, B. P. Schulberg had a fallback plan to ballyhoo White as a “blonde Clara Bow” if Hula flopped. But Hula was boffo. And White ended up being remembered, in Lew Ayres’s phrase, as “a poor man’s Clara Bow.”

  William Kaplan, a Paramount propman, said Bow was just a conquest for Fleming on Mantrap, but by the time they made Hula, “Vic was fascinated with her. It was a very serious thing.” (Kaplan thought Fleming was juggling White and Bow during Mantrap.) Was Vic looking for Lu Rosson’s approval when he dined with the Rossons on June 12, possibly with Bow? In mid-July he helped Bow seal her new Paramount contract: he had her take out the morals clause, as he later did with his own contract at MGM. And on July 24 he took her to a college-themed night at the Montmartre Café, where they joined the “special dance contest” late in the evening and were “noted as graceful dancers on the floor.” Shortly afterward, without Bow, he accompanied the director Herbert Brenon on a trip to London, where Brenon was doing exteriors for Sorrell and Son. Fleming had no role in the shoot—the cameraman was James Wong Howe—so he might have gone for personal reasons, to test Bow’s maturity and loyalty. In his development notes on Bombshell five years later, Fleming said of the director-hero’s relationship with a Bow-like star named Lola, “He went out of town on location for two weeks, and that ended things between Lola and him. She couldn’t stay true to him twenty-four hours.”

  Upon his return, Fleming and Bow were sighted at the local premiere of the Edward Everett Horton stage vehicle Going Crooked, on August 29. But that was it. Fleming wasn’t “social” or maybe “showy” enough for Bow, according to her friend and future stepmother, Tui Lorraine. And Bow was too much of a sexual gadabout for Fleming. A few years later, Bow mused that he was “too much older” and “gosh, he was too subtle.”

  In those Bombshell notes, Fleming describes his alter ego, Brogan, as “a big, handsome he-man, who has made most of Lola’s successful pictures. He falls for every new girl he works with. His ego is equal to that of a star.” When Lola was untrue to him, “he didn’t care because he had Alice Young.” Alice Young was to Alice White as Lola was to Clara. Fleming didn’t cast White in any of his pictures—even Mervyn LeRoy, not the most exacting director, said “she was never much of an actress” and couldn’t remember where to move without “an off-camera semaphore system.” But Fleming helped her secure the female second lead in Paramount’s adaptation of Anita Loos’s smash novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928). He and White looked “perfectly devoted,” according to the Los Angeles Times, at the film’s premiere, but White dismissed engagement talk. “And when Alice ‘pooh’s’ you, you certainly stayed poohed,” the reporter noted. Lu Rosson held a luncheon party for White at the Montmartre Café in mid-November, but there was still no engagement announcement, and by Christmas the relationship was over. It’s hard to tell who poohed whom. White was no more than a dalliance for Fleming, and Fleming a comfort or amusement for her.

  When Howard Hawks directed The Cradle Snatchers in 1927, he inserted a shot of a business card for “The Club 400” with the name “Victor Flemen [sic]” scrawled on it. Fleming was becoming such a hot property for Paramount that this humorous personal reference was more like an industry shout-out. After the back-to-back critical-commercial success of The Way of All Flesh and financial sensation of Hula, Paramount turned to Fleming with hopes of committing box-office larceny: transferring the mammoth stage take of the 1924 Broadway smash, Abie’s Irish Rose, to the movie box office. In the twenty-first century, that title may not set off reverberations the way it did in the twentieth, but for decades any proper Jewish boy bringing home a fetching Gentile girl was apt to hear his parents call her Abie’s Irish Rose.

  The dubious credit for that moniker goes to the playwright Anne Nichols’s ghetto-garish hunk of mawkish, stereotypical humor, in which every Jew is materialistic and every Irishman is raring for a fight. Of course, there’s a treacly sweetness behind the concept. The differences between the widower-fathers of Abie Levy and Rosemary Murphy dissolve in the sight of their children’s happiness and twin grandchildren’s beauty. The material would be more persuasive if it didn’t make you feel that the human ingredients of the melting pot were atavism, greed, suspicion, and stupidity. But the play struck a thunderous pipe-organ chord on Broadway and across the country. Paramount’s Lasky wrote, “Practically every major studio in Hollywood was bidding for Abie’s Irish Rose. In order to grab the plum for ourselves I finally offered the highest price we had ever put out for a play or book—$500,000 against 50 per cent of the profits.” To seal the deal, he succumbed to all of Nichols’s demands, including approval over “cast, screen play, wardrobe, advertising.”

  Only partial prints of the movie exist, but even in abbreviated
form it’s slow going—the equivalent of the over-elaborate stage-to-screen transcriptions produced in the wake of The Sound of Music (1965). Ernst Lubitsch, who had recommended that Warner Bros. buy The Jazz Singer, went to Paramount when Lasky won the bidding war for Abie’s Irish Rose and was reported to be favored to direct it. It would have been an insane choice—the Lubitsch touch was sophisticated, not gemütlich. But as ever in Hollywood, an expensive, supposedly “pre-sold” product backed at the highest levels of a studio exerted its own magnetism.

  The film provided a welcome career jolt for Nancy Carroll. After appearing as Roxie Hart in a Los Angeles production of Chicago and being screen-tested all over town, she needed this kind of launch to become one of the true comic sirens of her era in films like the 1930 classic Laughter. Handpicked by Nichols after she stomped off the lot, fed up by high-handed treatment, Carroll said she had “one great trouble in that picture: it was difficult for me to cry.” Luckily for her—and amusingly for social-cultural historians who major in bias and prejudice—J. Farrell MacDonald, who played her father, “stood just off the set, and talked in a low voice about being heartbroken because his little girl was going to marry a Jewish boy. He looked so exactly like my father would have looked if I had married one that I burst into volumes of tears. I cried so hard that I stained my baby face, and the shot had to be retaken.”

  Charles “Buddy” Rogers, the co-star of Wings and later the third husband of Mary Pickford, took the role of Abie, epitomizing the Hollywood tradition of “write Jewish, cast Gentile,” even in an ethnic comedy. (“Do it this way . . . Do it my way,” Fleming would bark at him.) It makes sense that Carroll and Rogers look relaxed only in France during World War I, when Rosemary sings at a YMCA hut and Abie, impromptu, plays the piano for her. Back in the States, the avalanche of bad comic dialogue proves that you can stop the music. Variety’s pan of Abie’s Irish Rose as “two hours and ten minutes of title gags” was one of the most astute critiques the trade paper has run in its long history. It also “outed” its pseudonymous reviewer, “Rush,” with the tagline explanation, “(Rush, Al Greason, is of the Protestant faith).”

  Of course, Protestants have a pivotal symbolic role to play in Abie’s Irish Rose, too; as soon as Rosemary arrives from California and meets Abie in New York, he turns to a Methodist minister in New Jersey to marry them. It’s as if a tolerant Waspishness were the social-cultural ideal toward which all ethnic subcultures must tend. Fleming can’t separate the movie’s heartiness from its bogusness: there’s something inescapably fraudulent about the ease with which Jewish and Catholic chaplains meet on the battlefield and conclude that Jew, Christian, and Muslim all cry out at journey’s end for the same God. (The chaplains, of course, turn out to be Levy’s rabbi and Murphy’s priest.) When cultural benchmarks appear dated, it’s tempting to view them as relics from innocent times, but even as a stage piece Abie’s Irish Rose was widely reviled, and Variety was right on top of its shortcomings as a movie:

  The laborious sentimental play upon bigotry, continued reference to the brotherhood of Jew, Celt and the rest of mankind—including the Mohammedan—is wearisome, and seems for the most part to have been pushed in. Under the Constitution, and specifically in the subway rush hours, these things go without saying. There is something also not so very tactful about the elaborate technical exactitude of the Jewish and Roman customs, even to the point of assuring the audience in a program note that a real rabbi and a real priest acted as expert advisors in these details. If these things are right they will speak for themselves to such auditors as are concerned in their correctness.

  The Danish-born character actor Jean Hersholt, who plays Solomon Levy, achieves a weary authenticity. (Hersholt became better known for his altruism; Buddy Rogers, his Abie, won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1986.)

  Working again with his Way of All Flesh screenwriter, Furthman, Fleming did what he could to energize the movie under Nichols’s constraints. Apart from a few transitions—such as fading from battling schoolboys to marching troops—and some shots of the Yanks in France that have a Big Parade–like heft, Fleming’s efforts proved feeble. He may have been weakened by his first reported attack of kidney stones; propman Joseph C. Youngerman said, “I had to hold a glass of water in front of him every half hour.” When the movie opened, it was, Rush later reported, “an utter flop” as a two-dollar-a-ticket reserved-seat special. It left Lasky stunned: “I can’t understand why it didn’t do phenomenal business, since the picture was every bit as bad as the play!”—a nice quip, except that a bad play plastered on the screen makes for an even worse movie. By then, shrewder films patterned on the play, like the 1926 George Jessel vehicle, Private Izzy Murphy, might have tapped the ethnic-comedy market dry.

  Also, another stage epic of Jewish assimilation, The Jazz Singer, had opened on October 6, 1927, revolutionizing the medium and revving up audiences with a new ingredient: sound. Eight weeks after its April 19, 1928, premiere, Paramount pulled Abie’s Irish Rose out of circulation, added sound to a handful of sequences (including Carroll tap-dancing and singing “Rosemary” and “Little Irish Rose”), and shaved fifty minutes off its original 129-minute running time. Recalling the events four decades later, the cinematographer Hal Rosson confused Abie’s Irish Rose with The Jazz Singer when he told Leonard Maltin, “One of the things that we had was a death scene, and the Jewish boy’s father was a cantor (I hope I’m not mixing this up) and he sang the Kol Nidre. And when that hymn came from the loudspeaker in the projection room, it was a fantastic moment.” Actually, what Rosson shot was Hersholt chanting the mourner’s prayer, or Kaddish, for his shiksamarrying son. Al Jolson sang Kol Nidre for his dying cantor-father in The Jazz Singer—which really was the Kaddish for silent movies.

  By the time Abie’s Irish Rose made its debut, Paramount had lent Fleming to Samuel Goldwyn for The Awakening (1928). Goldwyn designed this tale as the first solo vehicle for Hungary’s blond beauty Vilma Banky, who’d previously enjoyed success co-starring with Ronald Colman. She starred as Marie, a pure Alsatian peasant girl who rouses the anger of her countrymen when she falls in love with a German lieutenant (Walter Byron) before the outbreak of World War I. Influenced by the Lillian Gish–Colman hit The White Sister (later remade by Fleming with Helen Hayes and Clark Gable), another story with an injured soldier-hero and a heroine who enters a religious order, the movie premiered with a synchronized score, including an Irving Berlin theme song, “Marie.” (The song survives not in its original waltz tempo but in the lively Jimmy Dorsey version from the 1930s; the movie has been lost.)

  Never content to exploit one star when he could also be nurturing another, Goldwyn brought his French discovery Lili Damita to The Awakening’s set. “When I first come [to Hollywood],” Damita told Motion Picture, “Mr. Goldwyn think I am lonesome so he bring over to dinner, Victor Fleming . . . Mr. Goldwyn think maybe eef I like someone here I can forget and not want to go back right away to Paris. We have our pictures taken together on the set—we eat dinners. He ees a good man to keep a woman from being lonesome.” (Errol Flynn would marry her in 1935.)

  Fleming’s main sexual playmate at this time was the twenty-year-old Lupe Velez, who’d co-starred with Fairbanks in The Gaucho and was making Lady of the Pavements for Griffith. “And Victor Fleming!” she told Motion Picture. “I like him because he is a devil with womens . . . But I am more than a devil than he is. That is why I never fall in love with him.” Of all Fleming’s dalliances, Velez may have been the least serious. Velez said of herself generally, “I have flirt with the whole film colony. Why not? I am not serious. What harm is a little flirting? No I do not kiss many mens. But when I kiss them, they stay kissed!”

  Fleming was often seen with the author of The Awakening’s original story, Frances Marion, the former Hearst reporter who had become a favorite writer for stars like Mary Pickford and Norma Talmadge. Marion’s third husband, the cowboy actor Fred Thomson, had died on Christmas Day 1928 (of tetanus after a
kidney stone operation). Fleming, a friend for a decade, joined other pals like Hedda Hopper and Marie Dressler in bolstering the spirits of Marion and her two sons. He took her to the wedding of the actors Ruth Roland and Ben Bard in March, and later dressed up as Jack to her Jill for a Marion Davies costume party at Davies’s Santa Monica estate.

  Frances Marion and her fourth husband, the director George Hill, whom she married in 1930, figured in a story about Fleming and Louis B. Mayer that she made famous in her 1972 memoir, Off with Their Heads. The MGM film editors Blanche Sewell and Margaret Booth asked the directors and Marion to meet with a “tall, shy youth” in “a shabby suit” in a studio projection room. It was Walt Disney, who’d come to sell Mayer on the idea of distributing his cartoons. As soon as Fleming saw Disney’s Mickey Mouse short, he exclaimed, “It’s terrific!” and continued, with his long arms thrashing, “Man, you’ve got it! Damndest best cartoon I’ve ever seen! Let’s have the other one.” It was a Silly Symphony with “a garden in spring . . . a west wind blowing . . . the leaves on the trees stirring . . . then the flowers began dancing together like an exquisite ballet.” Hill and Fleming “praised it, though not with the enthusiasm they had lavished on Mickey Mouse.”

  When Marion managed to drag Mayer into the screening room, the prancing flora disturbed Mayer—and Mickey Mouse turned Mayer’s stomach. “Goddamn it! Stop that film! Stop it at once! Are you crazy! Is this your idea of a practical joke? I’ve a mind to fire all of you!” Fleming snapped, “Keep your shirt on, L.B. What the hell’s the matter with you? Got elephant blood, you’re scared of a mouse?” Mayer defended himself, saying, “It ain’t myself I’m thinking about, it’s the poor frightened women in the audience . . . All over this country pregnant women go into our theaters to see our pictures and to rest themselves before their dear little ones are born . . . Every woman is scared of a mouse, admit it. A little tiny mouse, admit it. And here you think they’re going to laugh at a mouse on the screen that’s ten feet high, admit it. And I’m nobody’s fool and not taken in by your poor judgment.” He slammed the door on Mickey, Disney, and their new director-fans.