Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Indeed, nearly everything Fleming played for laughs in Bombshell he played for melodrama or poignancy here, and his heart wasn’t in it. Nor did he have the instinct for backstage byplay that he had for soundstage hustle and flow. Bombshell, though broadly satirical, boasts a veracious edge. Reckless is stagy, even for a film about the stage.

  Fleming was at his best in the modest moments of Reckless. Mona and Bob play out their madcap courtship on a merry-go-round and in a fun house. Ned is charming when he backs a lemonade stand for little Eddie (Mickey Rooney), whose street-corner rival has begun selling peanuts. It’s the movie’s glitz that dulls. The title number is a surreal mini-epic that follows Mona from a high-society cruise to a wild dance in a cantina with a flamboyant bandit who exits, Fairbanks-like, on a swinging rope after she’s shot dead. There’s no exuberance or lift beneath its nuttiness. The most amusing aspect of the other big number, “Everything’s Been Done Before,” is the way the choreographers position the chorines. In glittering sheaths with big bows across their breasts, they regularly block out the star in order to maintain the illusion that it’s Harlow and not her double executing the high kicks.

  The rest of the movie sets out to prove, without any farcical or histrionic fizz, that there’s nothing worse than a mistaken marriage for everyone surrounding the bride and groom. Ned gets as depressed as Bob. Mona’s public turns fickle, even though a coroner’s inquiry clears her and Ned. After she gives birth to Bob’s son and seeks full custody of the child, she relinquishes any claims on the Harrison family fortune. In a twist out of Common Clay, that gesture wins over her snobby father-in-law, but she still must face down a jeering audience during her Broadway comeback. She wins them over with a heartfelt plea for understanding. As a result, despite the potentially snappy ambience, this film is even more stupefying than The White Sister.

  “Mr. Fleming was a real gentleman,” said Rosina Lawrence, one of the chorus girls. Maybe Fleming’s focus was on keeping an even keel while striving to get the picture done at all. There were minor delays due to Ted Healy’s tonsillitis and the wrestler Hans Steinke walking off the set when the director ordered the 310-pound Man Mountain Dean to sit on him. (Another wrestler, Ernie Haynes, replaced Steinke; in the bit that’s in the film, Dean executes a fierce throw-down and then simply pins Haynes.)

  Midway through, the hair specialist Marcel Machu answered an SOS to save Harlow’s overbleached locks from “falling out all over the place.” (Selznick installed Machu in a bungalow at the studio.) Fleming, Machu said, “almost killed himself when he found out the picture might not be finished.”

  At least Powell displays his specialty of being simultaneously seductive and satirical. He mutters, “All in good time, my pretty,” before springing Mona from a woman’s detention center. He’s boyishly debonair when bantering with Rooney about his lemonade stand doing better than Ned’s sports-promotion business. And Fleming shows his knack for making female performers sparkle by getting a gracious performance out of the often-grating Russell as Bob’s jilted Jo. And because Fleming made Russell relax, she helped him put an unusually tense Harlow at ease in Jo’s scenes with Mona.

  The still photographer Ted Allan noted on Bombshell that when Harlow “was working with Franchot Tone she felt she could compete with his stage training by flaunting her body.” That’s not apparent in Bombshell, but it is in Reckless, where Tone plays all-out pathos, and for keeps. Nonetheless, “Harlow was fun, and nice,” said Robert Light, who played Jo’s brother. “I remember she was doing pirouettes in front of a mirror to see how she looked . . . Someone said, ‘Hey, Jean, you don’t have anything on underneath.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I know.’ That was her!” Fleming’s partnership with Harlow ended with Reckless. In two years, she was dead of acute nephritis.

  Although Reckless disappointed Harlow’s and Powell’s fans, MGM proposed a three-year contract for Fleming’s services at a $3,000-a-week salary. He never signed it. As the legal department put it, “Pursuant to an understanding . . . with Mr. Mannix”—Eddie Mannix, Mayer’s troubleshooter—Fleming continued working picture to picture. ( June Caldwell, a former secretary to Mannix, recalled that Fleming, unlike other directors, never stopped by the office; instead, Mannix visited Fleming on the set.) When Fleming went to Fox for The Farmer Takes a Wife, it was a freelance assignment, not a loan-out from MGM. Set in 1853, this leisurely, elaborate, and romantic Americana unfolds on the Erie Canal, before the railroad stole much of its importance as an avenue for westward expansion.

  With this movie, Fleming once again introduced a future star—Henry Fonda—while connecting or reconnecting with several talents who drifted in and out of his career. The play, taken from the novel Rome Haul, by Walter D. Edmonds (best known today for Drums Along the Mohawk), was written by Frank B. Elser and Marc Connelly (who would contribute mightily to Captains Courageous), though Edwin Burke, not Connelly, wrote the screenplay. Margaret Hamilton, later the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, here plays a friend of the heroine’s. And shortly before Fonda starred in the play, which made him a Broadway marquee name, Fleming’s fellow veteran of President Wilson’s European tour Walter Wanger, still a producer at Paramount, put the actor under contract. Wanger had nothing else to do with The Farmer Takes a Wife, but he would become Fleming’s final producer on Joan of Arc.

  Jane Withers, the one surviving cast member of The Farmer Takes a Wife, proud seventy-five years later of being “the first person in B films to reach the Top 20 at the box office for two years running,” invests a comical little character named Della with her trademark exuberance. Exuding the ticklish affability of a precocious girl next door, she becomes a foil for Slim Summerville’s busybody and odd-job man, Fortune Friendly, as he explains that the Erie Canal has been the main conduit for goods and immigrants flowing from the Eastern to the Western states. Withers loved doing Farmer partly because she “loved Henry Fonda. It was Henry’s first picture, and I was there his first day. He was shaking all over; he was a nervous wreck, and my heart went out to him.”

  In later years, Fonda repeated, in different ways, “I was very fortunate in my director.” To the writer-director Curtis Hanson, he simply said, “I was in love with him before we started the picture.” Of course, Fonda was also fortunate in his role. Dan Harrow, the farmer of the title, works a canal boat so he can save money to buy a farm—and faces the jeers of canal workers who parade their contempt for farmers. He and his cook, Molly Larkins ( Janet Gaynor), fall in love. Molly adores everything about the canal, including its menfolk’s propensity for brawling. Dan has no allegiance to the Erie, and is also the first man she’s ever met who shies away from a fight. When Dan finally takes his fist to Molly’s former boatman, Jotham Klore (Charles Bickford), it’s because he thinks he must restore her honor. And even after he beats Klore into the water, he refuses to assume Klore’s position as the canal’s reigning tough guy.

  Dan possesses the unassuming rural rectitude—and the humor and checked strength—that Fonda would immortalize when he played the title role in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln four years later. Indeed, Fleming’s film made that greater picture possible. Fonda’s resemblance to Lincoln inspired Winfield Sheehan, the Fox production chief and executive on The Farmer Takes a Wife, to commission a script then called Young Lincoln.

  Fleming had already proven his ability to help an actor locate his charm for the camera with Cooper and Gable. Fonda developed a capacity for understatement similar to Cooper’s and was an even more comfortable fit than Coop for Fleming’s ideas. It had taken several years in New York—years spent sharing an apartment with James Stewart, Joshua Logan, and Myron McCormick, and wearing out shoe leather seeking work—before Fonda, at twenty-eight, landed his breakthrough role in The Farmer Takes a Wife. A month after he stopped playing Dan Harrow onstage, Fonda began re-creating the character on a movie set. Decades later, he said he thought the only difference would be working

  outdoors and there’s real dirt here a
nd there’s water in the canal and there are real horses pulling the canal boat and there’s a real fire in the blacksmith’s forge—it’s not fake, it’s real. And if it’s real that helps me, because in the theater you have to make reality out of papier-maché, so to speak. So that’s the first thing. And we’re into this scene I had with Janet Gaynor that first day and I said a line the way I had in the play. Victor stopped and I could see him sort of wondering what to say and he finally came over and sort of put his arm around my shoulder—we were friends by then—and turned me and said, “Hank, you’re mugging a little.”

  “Mugging” was a calculated dig—Fleming knew that for a serious New York actor like Fonda, mugging was “a dirty word.” Fleming, Fonda said, “was aware I’d done this play, of course, and he was smart enough to realize that I was probably doing it the same way. So he said, ‘You don’t have to act like in the theater,’ and pointed to the camera. ‘That big eye; that lens—that’s your audience, and it’s just as close as it is to you right there—even closer if it’s a closeup lens. So you don’t have to do anything that you wouldn’t do as you would in reality.’ ” Fonda “was in shock for a little while thinking, ‘My God! Mugging!’ So I just pulled it right back. It wasn’t too difficult. I was lucky in a director who knew how to explain it to me.” And when Fonda needed to show fire, Fleming knew how to ignite it. The director goaded him into “putting some realism” into his fight with Bickford. Fonda ended up breaking a bone in his hand. Happily, it was the last scene on the production schedule.

  Gaynor had been a box-office mainstay at Fox as well as the studio’s artistic anchor ever since she appeared in F. W. Murnau’s 1927 masterpiece, Sunrise, capturing the spark in the childlike emotions of a country wife whose husband is drawn to “the Woman from the City.” Although stereotyped as a paragon of domestic virtue, she often showed surprising range, as in Frank Borzage’s 1929 Lucky Star, where she starts out emphasizing a tough, needy farm girl’s slyness and selfishness before letting her gamine charm emerge softly and coltishly. (Gaynor won the first best actress Academy Award for her roles in Sunrise and two other Borzage films, Seventh Heaven and Street Angel.) She didn’t hold a grudge against Fleming for Bombshell, in which Alice Cole, described as a “Janet Gaynor type,” was depicted as Harlow’s wholesome opposite.

  “You know, he was a very big and rugged man, and an absolutely charming man,” she said in 1958.

  He knew exactly what he wanted. It was all worked out in his mind. But when he presented it to you, it was very simplified. He was almost inarticulate sometimes. It seemed difficult for him to explain all the things he wanted you to do in a scene, but yet you knew he knew, and before he okayed a scene, you knew what he wanted, and you did it. He didn’t create under the camera, because you see this was a talking picture. All of that went out with silence. Of course, he was creative in the rehearsals.

  Fleming mussed her image up a little. Seen today, the relationship between a canal man and a cook like Gaynor’s Molly Larkins raises questions that only the book answers. Edmonds’s novel Rome Haul decorously states that Dan and Molly have a sexual relationship from her first night on their boat. Edmonds, in effect, cuts from Molly’s “skirt lifting above her knees” and her telling Dan, “You’ve forgot to blow out the lamp,” to Dan waking up “with lazy contentment” the next day, when “his hand could still feel the warmth in the blankets beside him.” That transition might have passed muster in Hollywood’s pre-code days. Broadway allowed Dan and Molly (in Brooks Atkinson’s words) to “set up unlawful housekeeping in the best tradition of canal sociology.” By 1935, Fleming and the screenwriter, Burke, had to keep everything perfectly chaste.

  Yet the charged bitterness Gaynor brings to Molly’s complaints about Jotham Klore, her aggressiveness at pushing the virtues of the canal, and her general erotic awareness give Molly’s pursuit of Dan a pleasing hum. These two may not act on primal impulse, but their feelings are naked enough when they give each other the eye. And there’s something hazily romantic about even a minimalist love story set on a boat or a barge, on a river or a canal, as the great French filmmaker Jean Vigo sensed when he made L’Atalante with Jean Dasté and Dita Parlo the year before. The two movies share a similar emotional trajectory: a young couple in love battle their divergent impulses as they make their first joint boat trip, accompanied by an older, eccentric third hand (Summerville in Farmer, Michel Simon in L’Atalante) who reunites them after they drift apart. Fleming is no Vigo when it comes to psychological lyricism, but Dan’s slow-burning American courtship of Molly conveys steady warmth.

  In Young Mr. Lincoln, in 1939, John Ford wanted to include an encounter between Fonda’s Lincoln and a very young John Wilkes Booth, but the studio objected. Fleming got away with something similar in The Farmer Takes a Wife. Molly and Jotham Klore, en route to Rochester from Rome, swap pleasantries with the touring actor Junius Brutus Booth and his son John Wilkes. Boor that he is, Jotham tells Junius that his Richard III was difficult to understand but fine, and declaims, “My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse!” And Fortune Friendly wonders if Junius might have an ailing tooth he could remove with his newly acquired dental tools. Then young John leaps onto Klore’s canal boat and scans a paper filled with political news from Illinois, where a former congressman has declared that no Western states coming into the Union should permit slavery. When Friendly says they’ll be hearing a lot about this man—Abraham Lincoln—John Wilkes says that he expects to be just as famous someday.

  William Tuttle, part of the makeup crew on this film and later on The Wizard of Oz, remembered Fleming as “a very strong person” who didn’t tolerate “too much clowning around” but had a crackerjack sense of movie comedy, especially with Summerville and Andy Devine as an affably whiny canal character. When Devine was supposed to get a city gal drunk so Summerville’s Friendly could pull her tooth out without pain, “Vic was very tickled by it; he broke up and had the two of them do it a couple of times—it cracked up everybody. He was great at pantomime,” Tuttle noted. “He didn’t have to have words for the humor.”

  Apart from such high points as the Wilkes incident and the tooth extraction, Fleming’s Americana in The Farmer Takes a Wife is more forced than Ford’s was in those amiable down-home frolics Judge Priest and Steamboat Round the Bend and than Ford’s would be in his Lincoln masterpiece (Fox films all). Fleming places too much weight on musical and pugilistic outbursts. The atmosphere courts the soporific when the canal men aren’t brawling or breaking into song.

  The music has the double burden of brewing a spirit of community and commenting on changing times. Fleming tries to convey a huge historical shift in the transition from a male chorus singing, “I had a mule / Her name was Sal / Fifteen years on the Erie Canal,” to a similar chorus chanting, “I’ll be working on the railroad / All the livelong day.” One of Fleming’s specialties (one can see its influence on David Lean) was juxtaposing the intimate and the epic, but in The Farmer Takes a Wife there’s an unclosed gap between his engagement with his core ensemble and his broad, crude work with the supporting players and extras.

  Reviews were mixed. “The narrative starts slowly and never responds to pulmonary first aid,” wrote Variety. But The New York Times, in addition to applauding what it thought “an affectionately amusing photoplay,” singled out Fonda: “He plays with an immensely winning simplicity which will quickly make him one of our most attractive screen actors.”

  Part of the problem with The Farmer Takes a Wife is the studio ambience. Sheehan, the producer, feared a lingering winter (although production began in early April), so he wouldn’t take the company to the actual Erie Canal. He first scouted locations in Sacramento, then decided to build the canal on the Fox lot. (Fleming later did some location shots in Sonora.) A storm washed out the canal set and sank the barges; Fleming was briefly hospitalized with another kidney stone attack. By the third week of shooting, The New York Times suggested the production “seems subject to a jinx.�
�� But Fleming, according to Withers, maintained an even attitude. She was most excited to join the picture because “at that time, Fleming only did A movies and I only did B movies.” She came to “like him very much. He was very quiet, very gentle; I couldn’t stand the ones who’d yell and scream and holler. Mr. H. Bruce Humberstone [who in 1937 directed Withers in Checkers] used to yell, and I had to tell him, ‘If you keep your voice down and let people know exactly what you want, you get more.’ He thanked me!”

  One thing Withers liked was that “mugging” happened to be the only dirty word Fleming ever used on the set. “On most of my sets I’d start a swearing box where someone would put in 25 cents for every nasty word. I can’t think of how much I made that way for different organizations. But Mr. Fleming, a very handsome man, just couldn’t have been nicer. He was not gruff and not rough, and allowed no tacky language—and even though I was underage, I had been on some sets where people would really let go! Everybody was well mannered, everything went very smoothly, and I had such a good time.”

  17

  Bagging Game on Safari, Losing The Good Earth

  While Scribner’s magazine serialized Ernest Hemingway’s nonfiction novel about a safari, Green Hills of Africa, from May through August in 1935, Fleming was experiencing the real thing in the same terrain.

  Hemingway peppered his narrative with literary discussion, including his most famous proclamation: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” But Fleming, who went on the safari as his vacation after The Farmer Takes a Wife, wasn’t discussing Twain, Gertrude Stein, or Stephen Crane with his fellow adventurer, Charles Cotton. Going by Cotton’s safari diary, their cultural excitement came from whatever they could pull in on a portable radio: a cowboy program from Pittsburgh or the NBC show with the pianist-bandleader Eddy Duchin, which they got at four in the morning.