Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  It was Steve who made the clean break, by joining up with Tram-pas. Molly doesn’t see things that way until the town matriarch compels her to compare the Virginian’s posse with her own pioneer forebears, and Molly realizes that what should concern her is how killing Steve affected the Virginian. But the coil of vengeance doesn’t stop. While escaping the posse and hiding high on a cliff, Trampas had already nearly murdered Molly’s man by shooting him in the back. The day that our hero and Molly ride into Medicine Bow to get married, Trampas declares, “This town isn’t big enough for the both of us,” and says he’ll kill the Virginian if he doesn’t leave by sundown. As the critic Robert Warshow wrote,

  What is needed now to set accounts straight is . . . the death of the villain Trampas, the leader of the cattle thieves, who had escaped the posse and abandoned the Virginian’s friend to his fate. Again the woman intervenes: why must there be more killing? If the hero really loved her, he would leave town, refusing Trampas’ challenge. But the Virginian does once more what he “has to do,” and in avenging his friend’s death wipes out the stain on his own honor.

  Warshow goes on to say that no stain can be “truly wiped out” and that the movie “is still a tragedy” because the hero confronts “the ultimate limit of his moral ideas.” But the Virginian fills out that limit with grace and honors his code without apology or explanation. In a gesture full of significance, he kills Trampas with Steve’s gun. In the movie’s final image, the hero and Molly clasp each other as she says, simply, “I love you.”

  “I was extremely impressed with Fleming as a director,” wrote David Lewis. This producer whose credits would range from Dark Victory (1939) to Raintree County (1957) wrote in his book, The Creative Producer, “He was far and away the best I had any contact with. I later visited his set a couple of times. He seemed inarticulate, but knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it. He was a powerful, handsome, overwhelming man. He had a great rapport with Gary Cooper and Richard Arlen. He later was known as a man’s director, but he did very well with the women in the cast, too. He was the first really fine, creative director I saw at work.” Fleming knew how to help the invaluable Eugene Pallette—with his growly voice and doughy yet doughty presence—look at home in the rugged landscape and get the homey wit out of his declaration to buy a quart of liquor “and get off in a corner and kind of slowly strangle it to death.” Mary Brian, spirited and charming underneath too-heavy makeup, said Fleming “was serious when he needed to be, but he had a funny sense of humor. I think the good directors at that time knew that our hours were so long and tedious, that they must give us time to play a little bit.”

  Walter Huston faced as much pressure as his younger co-stars. The Broadway icon had starred in only one stilted sound feature (Gentlemen of the Press) and a handful of shorts when he landed in the Sonora locations of The Virginian. “The air was chilly when I was introduced to Gary Cooper and Dick Arlen,” he recalled. “They thought I was another bohunk who had come out to show the hicks how it was done.” Fleming asked Huston if he could ride a horse. “Now I was in a pretty pickle. I had never ridden even a mule in my life. If I said I couldn’t they would laugh at me, and if I said I could and fell off they would laugh much harder.” So to “a sprinkling of slightly derisive laughter” he said he hadn’t ridden since he was a kid.

  “Well,” Fleming said, “you’ve got some riding to do in this picture. Maybe you’d better get your hand in.” Huston had an hour to learn his lines for his first scene and to master riding a horse:

  After three or four tries, I managed to get into the saddle, but my perch there was precarious to say the least. Fortunately the horse was a gentle beast . . . Striking a nonchalant pose, I said, “Get up, Joe,” and walked him across the field, headed for an oak tree. I dismounted there, tied the reins to the tree and sat down to study my lines. I was reading when I heard an eerie sound I had never heard before. It emanated from a rattlesnake. I leapt away, snatched up a rock and bashed the head in.

  In his first scene as Trampas, Huston and his horse had to climb to the crest of a hill to give some orders to his gang:

  As they scampered off, I was to break into song, roll a cigarette, and make an exit by riding off downhill. I managed to get to the top of the hill all right, but in my anxiety to give my movement haste, I made the mistake of spurring my mount. He was standing on a rocky ledge and, in rearing, slipped on the hard surface and fell. I stepped off him in time and did not get hurt. During the making of the scene I was not the slightest bit nervous, but after Fleming yelled “Cut!” I realized what I had been through and had difficulty concealing my nervousness. Seeing the rushes, I was surprised to see that during the entire scene I had continued to smoke a cigarette . . . I was Trampas just as sure as if I had been born of his fictional mother. I acted as he would under the circumstances. It is a strange truth—an actor will do things that his own character would never do.

  His efficient dismount of the falling horse “gained me admittance to the esoteric circle of stunt men.”

  Lighton and Fleming “had an almost wordless communication; they were decidedly on the same wavelength,” wrote Lewis. Arlen once said that Lighton almost fired Cooper because he was somnolent and disengaged. If so, Lighton never referred to it. In a Yuletide letter to his family back in Arkansas, he labeled a spate of films he’d done in his new position, including The Virginian, as “some fairly good pictures, in spite of the newness of it all. The satisfaction of that is a fair recompense for the amount of work. They’re not nearly good enough—but they’re at least stepping-stones . . . That’s enough to ask, I expect—that the work comes out all right.”

  Another time Arlen said that Velez distracted Cooper when she showed up on location for a few days, especially since she had been one of Fleming’s lovers, too. But these anecdotes sound like carryovers of the Virginian and Steve’s joshing from the film, or Arlen, Cooper, and Buddy Rogers’s carryings-on in the months right after Wings, when this trio was so close others dubbed them the Three Musketeers. Cooper’s performance has a brilliantly calculated stutter to it. Some of the pauses were even written into the script, and his stalwart sort of stammer meshes beautifully with Arlen’s effusiveness, just as it clangs eloquently against the verbal steel of Huston’s Trampas.

  “The most underrated actor I’ve ever worked with was Gary Cooper,” Henry Hathaway said. He remembered Cooper forgetting his words only once on The Virginian. The actor then looked up from under his hat “to see if Fleming was mad at him, and both the look and the hesitancy in his speech came from that one scene.” Estabrook agreed that this cautiousness became part of his interpretation of the role: “Cooper was so hesitant, so diffident about his approach to the characterization that it became marked on the screen. He was so perfect, he didn’t even realize what he was doing, but he had infinite courage and the ability to carry himself through.” Estabrook thought it was ideal that “in this case, his acting was tinged with alarm and apprehension.”

  Cooper gave pride of place to The Virginian, calling it “a sort of exclamation point in my career,” in an eight-part as-told-to series that ran in the Saturday Evening Post in February and March 1956. “Well, It Was This Way: Gary Cooper Tells His Story” had a summing-up feeling to it, as if Cooper knew the many ailments and operations he’d had were catching up to him. (He’d die five years later, of cancer.) He self-mockingly blamed The Virginian for pinning him with his ultra-laconic “yup” and “nope” image. But he also reported it as his moviemaking great adventure:

  It was the first major talkie ever filmed outdoors and well do I remember our awe at the size of our production setup. Before sound came in we only had to wind up the camera and we were in business. Now, moving to our location near Sonora in the High Sierras, we were accompanied by a caravan of trucks, cranes, tractors and enough mobile generators to light up a small town. We had telephone linemen, road builders and track layers. We had radio engineers, sound directors, dialogue directors, voice
coaches and sound-effects men. And off to one side, feeling obsolete, we had some old-fashioned actors and an old-fashioned movie director . . .

  The camera was now enclosed within a four-wheeled, soundproofed structure built like a brick smokehouse, so its whirring gears wouldn’t disturb the microphone. The microphone itself, a fearsome bucket full of charcoal granules, was suspended from a small crane mounted on a dolly, the whole assembly looking like a steam shovel.

  To see the camera and microphone in action, imagine a small ridge down which plank tracks have been laid. Over the ridge I come, driving ahead of me a herd of bawling cows, crowding them as close to the microphone as I can get. As I pass the brick smokehouse and the steam shovel, their drivers start down the track, keeping pace with me. The cows, seeing these weird contraptions, grow a mite nervous and pick up speed. Pretty soon we are really high-tailing it, the smokehouse and the steam shovel careering along beside us. This, of course, only encourages the cows. The smokehouse and the steam shovel, already out of control, need no encouragement. By the time they sail off the end of the track in a cloud of dust, I’ve got a junior-grade stampede on my hands. The equipment stops, relatively intact, but some of my cows never come back.

  Aside from difficulties with our “portable” equipment, we had a battle of another kind. Fleming clung to the old-fashioned notion that he was making a picture with voices. The sound director . . . supported by his army of electronic engineers, was convinced he was making a radio program with faces. There was little fraternizing, and nothing much in the way of a co-operative exchange of ideas. What is more, on their impressive sound stages in Hollywood, surrounded by all their abracadabra and awe-inspiring gear, the sound moguls had been getting by with it. Up here on his own stamping ground, Fleming grew less and less impressed. Trouble brewed.

  There came finally the scene in which I caught my old friend Steve, played by Dick Arlen, with a rustled herd of cows. We were to play it in semi-closeup, squatting on the ground, with the camera shooting across Dick’s shoulder into my face. My opening line was, “Ah’m sorry, Steve, that ah had to come up with you at a time like this.”

  We took our places. The steam-shovel operator lowered the boom and nearly scalped both of us with the bucket of charcoal. There was one more formality, because it was no longer enough to hold up a slate in front of the camera on which would be chalked, “The Virginian, Take 147.” The sound track had to be cued in, too. For this purpose they had invented the slapstick. The boy would hold the slate up in front of the camera, cueing it in, and then he would bring the slapstick down on top of the slate. Clack!

  I watched the take boy nervously. He held the slate in front of my nose, brought the stick down with a violent slap, and wham, he blew my lines right out of my head. After three attempts, I thought I was all right, but that was only my opinion. If I got my lines across to the satisfaction of the sound director, Fleming complained that I looked like a schoolboy making his first public recital. If I pleased Fleming, the sound director . . . would claim I came through the microphone like something abandoned by a soap opera. With this heckling I began to disintegrate fast. Finally I couldn’t even remember my line, let alone act it out. Fleming and the sound director weren’t speaking to each other when that day’s work went into the ashcan . . .

  That night in our tent, Arlen came up with an idea. “Since I’m turned partly away from the camera in this scene,” he said, “I’ll write down your line on my chaps. When you look past me toward the camera, your line will be staring you right in the face where you can’t forget it.”

  The next morning, I took a look at the bold print on the inside of Arlen’s chaps, and away I went. Fleming applauded. The sound director looked sour.

  “He stammered. The line wasn’t smooth,” he said.

  “But didn’t you catch the expression on his face?” asked Fleming. “He has discovered his best friend to be a cow thief. Wouldn’t you stammer, too?”

  “I don’t care about the expression on his face. I was listening to the sound track, and it didn’t have enough punch . . . All right, fellows, back where you were. We’ll take this one over.”

  “Who’s directing this picture?” asked Fleming after a slow recovery. “You or me?”

  “This is sound, and sound—”

  Right then and there Fleming made a firm and violent stand, and, after that, movie directors began regaining their authority. They’ve never suffered serious competition since.

  In February 1961, just three months before Cooper’s death at age sixty, Hedda Hopper asked him if his favorite Western was High Noon. “No,” he answered, “I think it’s The Virginian.” He recalled Vic’s old nemesis Pomeroy: “He’d set up a spook joint, no visitors allowed. The sound department wanted to direct; there was quite a hassle when Vic Fleming put his foot down and said, ‘You know sound, I don’t, but I’m the director and I’m directing.’ It was a good decision.”

  Four years later, Coop’s and Vic’s old lover Clara Bow, afflicted with schizophrenia and a recluse for three decades, was watching a broadcast of The Virginian in the modest Culver City home she shared with a live-in nurse. Ninety-six minutes after Mary Brian told Cooper, “I love you,” Bow quietly died. She, too, was just sixty years old.

  12

  A Woman’s Film and a Man’s Adventure at Fox

  In 1927, six months after the spectacular success of Mantrap, Paramount raised Fleming from $1,750 a week to $2,000. But in the immediate wake of the sound revolution, the studio had neglected Fleming and other seasoned pros. His long-term contract expired before he shot Wolf Song and The Virginian. One Paramount producer who recognized Fleming’s worth was David O. Selznick. After those back-to-back hits, the director let Selznick know that Fox had offered him $3,250 weekly and that he wanted to concentrate on “epics, not melodramas.” Selznick badly wanted to reteam Fleming with Cooper, Lighton, Paramore, and Keene Thompson to follow up their stellar work on The Virginian. Despite Selznick’s efforts, Paramount didn’t make a counteroffer, and Fleming did make a deal with Fox.

  When Cooper talked about Fleming being “old-fashioned” on The Virginian, he was being complimentary and, in his clipped way, ironic. Fighting to keep the movie alive visually as well as aurally, Fleming was ahead of his time. In a memo pillorying B. P. Schulberg’s Paramount regime, Selznick wrote that Schulberg mistakenly considered Fleming “old-fashioned” and “impossible for talking pictures.” (Selznick listed among Schulberg’s sins turning down Hawks “as an absurd incompetent” and Wellman as an “incompetent, a has-been and a maniac.” Schulberg also fired Jules Furthman and mistreated other Selznick and Fleming friends and collaborators, past and future, including Lewis Milestone, George Cukor, Janet Gaynor, and Constance Bennett.) Selznick soon left Paramount to become West Coast production chief of RKO.

  Fleming’s long run at Paramount and lucrative two-picture agreement at Fox enabled him to indulge his passions and also to be exceptionally generous to his family. In August 1929, he flew Howard Hawks and the Rossons to the Cleveland Air Races in his new Travel Air, a high-end luxury model with a closed cabin. (They became part of a search for a downed plane on the return trip.) In 1930, he gave his nephew Newell Morris his Cord roadster, though the lad was only fourteen. Then he startled and delighted his niece Yvonne with a Ford roadster. “I was fifteen years old in 1931,” she said, “and he thought it was high time that I had a car . . . He just rang the doorbell one day and there he was: ‘I got your car here. Come on, let’s go.’ Of course, I’d never driven. At fifteen, you’re not supposed to be driving. He hastily taught me, and I was so glad. He was a wonderful driver.”

  Thumbing his nose at Schulberg, Fleming brought Furthman and Bennett along with him and made a property as gabby as they come for his first Fox picture, Common Clay (1930). This proved to be a commercial trendsetter, creating a new pattern for (as Variety put it) “the tragedy of the sweet, trusting young thing who goes wrong.” With Common Clay, Fleming tuned up anothe
r breakthrough vehicle for a female performer, this time Bennett, daughter of Richard Bennett and eldest sister of Joan. Constance had achieved an early vogue in silent pictures, but she took three years off in the mid-1920s to marry a playboy, Philip Morgan Plant, and frolic in Paris and Biarritz. When the Plants’ union fell apart, Hollywood beckoned: aside from a marriage into wealth, acting was the only way Constance knew to make money. She was a natural performer, but not yet a star. Common Clay would make her one.