Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Granger wrote up Tracy’s version of the episode nearly twenty years after Tracy’s death, and it may not be reliable in its details, which are flattering to Tracy, with Fleming putting him up at his Cove Way home. Tracy said Fleming fetched him from a Los Angeles drunk tank, “squared the press, the police and the studio,” had his Filipino servant clean him up, and had his own doctor examine him:

  I was lying there feeling like death when Vic came in with a case of Scotch. He put it down beside my bed and went to the door. Turning back, he said, “Spence, I’ve just talked to the doctor. He tells me one more bash like that and you’ll be dead. I want you to do me a favor. Drink that whole case of Scotch. It’s the last time you’ll see me, Spence, I’m through,” and he went out and left me alone. I was dying for a drink but I knew it wouldn’t be just one. I knew that I’d lost my last friend and there would be nobody left to give a damn about me. Either I took Vic’s advice and drank the whole case or I shouldn’t take another drink, ever. I decided to give it up.

  That’s not quite how it happened, though, says Edward Hartman. He remembers the emergency phone call that came in one mid-September evening. Fleming told Hartman’s mother, Gladys, “We’re missing Spencer. Can you help us find him?” He also had enlisted his sister Ruth, and she, Gladys, and Clyde Hartman went in different directions. “They had some list of these places where he went, where he was known to go.” Some details after that, including who found Tracy, are in dispute, but in the Hartman version Gladys got him bundled into a cab and put him in Good Samaritan Hospital. There he kept “screaming, yelling, pawing the walls”—and doctors threatened to place him in restraints unless Gladys stayed with him overnight. (She did, but Edward says she “was pretty disgusted with him.”)

  Fleming’s next step: shrewdly stashing Tracy away in San Dimas, a dry town far from prying eyes and studio gossip, at Ed and Mamie Hartman’s house. Fleming’s aunt and uncle “wanted to make sure they got some food in him,” says Edward.

  The additional delay kept Fleming’s tensions close to the skin. It didn’t require much of a remark from Jules Furthman—probably a crack about Tracy—to set off the director during lunch in the MGM commissary. George Sidney, who began at MGM that year in the shorts department, was a month shy of his twentieth birthday when he saw the outburst. “Vic sat at one end of the table with [Furthman] in the commissary and got into an argument; Vic pulled him out of the chair and dragged him out of the commissary and started hitting him; then they made up and sat down and had lunch.”

  Despite his self-doubts, Tracy had been developing a performing style that suited the Lighton-Fleming mode: “to capture a single, strongly felt human emotion” in a vigorous, unostentatious way. “Spencer does it, that’s all. Feels it. Talks. Listens. He means what he says when he says it, and if you think that’s easy, try it,” said Humphrey Bogart. Tracy told Phillip Trent, who played his son in The Power and the Glory (1933), “Always remember, the camera’s picking up what you’re thinking.”

  Tracy liked to discuss acting with reporters far less than he did with other actors. But in 1962, making Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, he tossed out a couple of nuggets about his approach: “That business of not being typecast, that just bores me. I’ve always played the same character. Larry Olivier says the way to act is, learn your lines and get on with it. I’m Spencer Tracy with some deference to the character. When a person says he’s an actor—he’s a personality. The whole idea is to show your personality. There are people who are much better technically, but who cares? Nobody cares.”

  “Fox had him playing villains,” Mayer said, “and he probably would never have been anything more than a good character actor if I hadn’t seen something about his face—something more important than his acting ability. We signed him, found just the right stories for him [before 1940, all of Tracy’s MGM scripts were chosen for him] and he became Spencer Tracy the star, not Spencer Tracy the actor.” In 1936, Tracy had enjoyed critical success under Fritz Lang’s direction as the target of a lynch mob in Fury; he’d also been in a blockbuster, but only as the second male lead under Gable in the period romantic melodrama San Francisco. In Captains Courageous, he would be the center of what Variety aptly labeled “a big money picture of the sea,” comparable to MGM’s Mutiny on the Bounty. He became the focus of Fleming’s effort to contain Kipling’s anecdotes in a well-knit narrative about shifting friendships on a Gloucester schooner, the We’re Here—culminating in a race between that vessel and its longtime rival, the Jennie Cushman.

  The script elevates a minor character, Manuel, a warmly rugged Portuguese fisherman, into the protagonist. It also adds some Christian spirituality to the redemption of the spoiled rich boy Harvey Cheyne. (The adapters tailored the part to Bartholomew, four years younger than Kipling’s callow youth; about the only Kipling dialogue in the film is the remarks by sailors calling Harvey a “Jonah,” a harbinger of bad luck.) One thing Mayer must have seen in Tracy’s face—the soulful magnetism of his eyes—anchors Manuel’s guidance of Cheyne into young adulthood. Tracy had scored with audiences and critics as a priest in San Francisco, and he’d go on to win a second Oscar for playing Father Flanagan in the lachrymose Boys Town (1938). The moviemakers reconceived Manuel to exploit Tracy’s capacity for muscular Christianity—make that muscular Catholicism. (He played Flanagan again in Men of Boys Town and a priest evacuating children from a hospital in The Devil at 4 O’Clock.)

  Marc Connelly and Dale Van Every, as well as John Lee Mahin, got screen credit for the script. Mahin did the final draft and shepherded it through filming. Two-fisted Catholicism came naturally to this non-Catholic screenwriter; twenty years later he wrote John Huston’s island-set World War II fable, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, with Deborah Kerr as a nun who helps a Marine played by Robert Mitchum find the faith to fight the Japanese who occupy the island. (The nun and the Marine agree they “both belong to pretty tough outfits.”)

  But Mayer was the one who made Christian symbolism with a Catholic overlay part of MGM’s house style. He wrapped a clerical collar around Tracy before Warner Bros. did it with Pat O’Brien for Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) or Paramount did it with Bing Crosby for Going My Way (1944). He was indulging his appetite for (in his grandson Daniel Selznick’s words) the “pomp and respectability” of the Roman Catholic Church. He also inoculated his studio against the Catholic morality police. In January 1934, before the Production Code clamped down, Archbishop John J. Cantwell of Los Angeles had summoned Mayer, Sheehan from Fox, and J. J. Murdock from RKO to discuss morality in pictures and hint at a possible nationwide Catholic boycott. In March, Joseph Breen, about to become the Production Code chief, wrote to the archbishop of Cincinnati, John T. McNicholas (soon to help found the National Legion of Decency), “Most of the men and women who write the film stories are pagans. Of course, these write film stories that are based upon pagan philosophy and the result is that we are slowly making our audiences pagans. How could it be otherwise?”

  Still, it’s doubtful that any of Fleming’s creative team saw the Catholic reworking of Captains Courageous as either a compromise or a sop to studio critics. Christian salvation entered his films again and again, often in his stiffest pictures, such as The White Sister, Adventure, and his strangled Joan of Arc, but also in livelier entertainment like Tortilla Flat. (Even in Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara fears hell.) And Garson Kanin, a prime builder of the posthumous Tracy myth, wrote that the star told him he’d felt drawn to the priesthood while a boy attending a Jesuit prep school, Marquette Academy: “The priests are all such superior men—heroes. You want to be like them—we all did.”

  Lighton and Fleming had become powers at Paramount during an era when studio executives considered producers, and directors who could function as producers, the crucial arbiters of a script. They worked that way at MGM, too. Studio legal files connect fourteen writers to Captains Courageous. But even an early “temporary incomplete” script reflects Lighton
and Fleming’s decision to make Manuel emerge as the principal figure in Harvey’s transformation.

  Kipling’s novel offers a fictional commentary on the United States depicted in Theodore Roosevelt’s book of speeches and essays on civic philosophy, The Strenuous Life (1900). The novelist-critic John Seelye, who writes with command and affection about both novel and film, says that Kipling’s Harvey embodies what Roosevelt saw as “America’s faults: [he is] spoiled, lazy, corrupted by his father’s prosperity and his mother’s indulgence.” Seelye goes on to argue that when the movie depicts Harvey with the cod fleet, Fleming (unlike Kipling) “concentrates on an aspect of American culture that puts a heavy emphasis on immersion in a primitivistic environment as a means of attaining wisdom. Harvey is redeemed not by hard work but by love, a Christian burden lacking the Protestant ethical dimension. It is more in the spirit of Eleanor than Theodore Roosevelt.”

  Actually, Fleming puts equal stress on love and hard work. But love is newly crucial to the narrative. And as Mahin followed Fleming’s orders to deepen Manuel, providing a narrative trajectory even Kipling knew was lacking in the book, the screenwriter did emphasize Manuel’s Catholicism. The cook, Doc (Sam McDaniel), clarifies the connection between Manuel and Emmanuel, the Christ, by enunciating every syllable of Man-u-el. As Seelye notes, not only does the script characterize him as “a pious Catholic,” but Manuel’s dory has the number 3—“suggesting the Trinity.” In his first scene, as he rescues Harvey, Manuel wears a large glistening crucifix that reappears only twice: when he’s lecturing Harvey about honesty and, later, just before he dies, when the We’re Here’s mainmast snaps and its cables rip him apart.

  But pace Seelye, is Captains Courageous an allegory of any kind? Its Christianity, after all, is on the surface. The movie starts at the tail end of Easter vacation. And when Harvey waxes sympathetic about Manuel’s father “drowning out on the ocean, all alone at night,” Manuel delivers a homily based on Luke 5:1–11 but ending on a note of his own: “The Savior, he see my father all tired and wet down in the water. So he light the harbor buoy and he say, ‘Come on up, old Manuel. I so happy you come up here to help us fish.’ ”

  The text is spiritual, but the subtext depicts a great chain of fatherhood connecting God’s son, the Savior, with Manuel senior, Manuel junior, and Harvey. Jesus wants good fishermen like Manuel and Manuel senior to fish in heaven. “Oh, I think the Savior, he the best fisherman,” says Manuel. “But my father, he come next!” Mahin, the sole author of this interlude, punctuates this Sermon on the Dory with Manuel hooking a huge cod and Harvey landing his first fish, an enormous halibut. (Bartholomew called these rubber props “electric fish”: battery-powered windshield-wiper motors made the fake cod and halibut flop, just as they would make the wings of the flying monkeys flap in The Wizard of Oz.)

  Harvey and Manuel employ the hand lines favored by Manuel’s father, not the trawls used by other fishermen—and this activity helps Tracy bring the speech a lifelike spontaneity. (The New Republic critic Otis Ferguson took aim at the inflated rhetoric of the sermon, this “backbreaker about heaven,” as he called it; then he observed, with relief, that Tracy “finally comes through all such obstacles like a bull through a picket fence.”) After Manuel’s death, Harvey confirms his manhood by using his earnings to buy twin candlesticks for Manuel’s father, as his friend wanted, and his own candlestick for Manuel. During the memorial service for Gloucester men lost at sea (when we finally learn Manuel’s last name, Fidello), Harvey tosses a wreath into the port’s waters to honor him. His father does, too, and as the current links the wreaths, the young and the older Cheynes unite with the two Fidellos. (In one of the glaring differences between the works, in the novel Harvey calls the service “a sort of song-and-dance act, whacked up for the summer boarders.”)

  Manuel’s Catholicism doesn’t exclude the community values and superstitions of the crew of the We’re Here, or the dynamism they share with Harvey’s father; Fleming, like Kipling, was a Teddy Roosevelt kind of guy. The entire first act is as much about Harvey’s yearning to become part of a group as it is about his father neglecting him. In the movie, Harvey’s mother is dead, and his father unconsciously gives up the responsibility of raising his son to the staff of the Green Hill School in Connecticut. Logic might ascribe the prep school scenes to the blue blood Mahin, but in fact most were Connelly’s. This Broadway playwright and sometime collaborator of George S. Kaufman had already won a Pulitzer Prize for The Green Pastures, a stage retelling of the Bible in African-American dialect (or, as it was called at the time, “Negro patois”), and had written the script for and co-directed the 1936 screen version.

  Of all the pictures he contributed to, Connelly considered Captains Courageous “the only one with which I was truly happy.” New to MGM, he misread the Lighton-Fleming relationship to the studio, seeing the director as “left pretty much alone” and concluding that was because he was “a pariah” or in “general disfavor, owing to his contempt for the jackal practices he frequently encountered in the studio world.” Connelly didn’t realize that this solitude was a hard-won prize. But he did get the big artistic picture: “Instead of the usual concoction of half a dozen channels, siftings, sievings to a final result, three men set down and tried to produce a pretty good picture—and I think we did, as a matter of fact.”

  The picture is a study of what later generations would call “tough love.” The first act demonstrates why it’s necessary. In Connelly’s beautifully wrought opening scenes, Harvey hosts three schoolmates at his father’s estate (the exterior of Selznick International’s headquarters) in order to manipulate one of them, Charles (Bill Burrud), into making him a member of “the Buffalos.” Acting like a mini-Machiavelli, he thinks his only way of joining the club is to bribe Charles with a first edition of Treasure Island, then threaten him with Mr. Cheyne closing down the car dealership of Charles’s dad. With his precocious self-possession and natty hat and suit (you can’t see that he’s wearing short pants), Bartholomew has the silky wickedness of Michael Corleone. At school, Harvey’s teacher, Mr. Tyler (Donald Briggs), calms Charles and tries to talk sense to Harvey. As punishment, Harvey is put “in Coventry”—a state in which, for forty-eight hours, he receives the silent treatment from classmates before, during, and after classes, and must not speak to anyone himself.

  When Harvey persists in talking to his colleagues at the school’s newspaper office (after all, his father paid for the equipment), a weedy lad named Wellman decides that socking him in the jaw won’t break Coventry’s rules. (The references to William Wellman and Treasure Island show Fleming’s rare ability to keep his sense of humor even at grandiose MGM. At the time, Wellman was working on two Selznick pictures, Nothing Sacred and A Star Is Born.)

  This is not, as today’s viewers might infer, a Depression-era condemnation of upper-class morals. The Green Hill headmaster, Dr. Finley (Walter Kingsford), tells Harvey’s father that his goal in suspending the boy for the remainder of the year is to turn out “another splendid citizen” like Mr. Cheyne (Melvyn Douglas). What’s remarkable about Bartholomew’s performance is his skill at getting across the disconnect between Harvey’s duplicity and his untapped emotional and intellectual potential. He makes you feel that Mr. Tyler is not coddling or sentimentalizing Harvey when he says that the boy is deeply unhappy and formidably talented. You know Mr. Tyler is getting all this not simply from Harvey’s academic performance but from his racing mind’s surfeit of energy.

  Mahin said he told Fleming, “Geez, this is a beautiful kid, Vic. It seems to me you’re not getting the closeups of this kid.” And Fleming replied, “Wait till we need ’em. Wait till they have some effect . . . When he starts crying and breaking, that’s when we’ll go in to see him.” But Fleming does give us a tight close-up of Bartholomew near the beginning, coolly reading his effect on Charles, his mark.

  Mahin may have felt protective of Bartholomew’s part because he’d poured a little of his own son into it. Graham
Mahin remembered his father and Fleming taking him on their “script vacation” to a Wisconsin fishing lodge in the summer of 1936, when he was nine. They didn’t try to shelter him from rugged behavior any more than the crew of the We’re Here does Harvey. First they set him up with a guide to learn big-cast fishing while they went drinking. (“They were both pretty into drinking then,” says Mahin.) The lodge contained a slot machine that Fleming quickly figured out was fixed, and he confronted the manager, who apologetically took the machine apart, removed the slug that kept anyone from hitting the jackpot, and returned Fleming’s quarter. The director’s next pull of the lever brought an avalanche of coins, and he stuffed them all in his pockets. That day they went fishing for muskellunge (“muskies”), and Graham caught a twelve-pounder, which quickly became one of Fleming’s practical jokes. “He had it cooked for me and brought it around and everyone knew—it was the local gag—everyone knew that I wasn’t going to be able to eat it.”

  In Captains Courageous, the headmaster imagines that Harvey will be “rusticating” at home with his dad. But Mr. Cheyne, still insensitive to his son’s needs, takes Harvey on a transatlantic crossing, not realizing that the ocean liner merely gives him another grand setting in which to act like a young lord. Betting a couple of boys already sick of him that he can down a counter full of ice-cream sodas, he soon stumbles on deck and falls into the water far below. The overhead shot of Harvey tumbling into the ocean, his head scraping the top of the motion picture frame, and the connecting shot that pans up from Harvey’s bobbing head, across a span of dark and roiling sea to Manuel’s dory, are magnificently eerie. As the fog enshrouds the boy, he crashes out of “our” world—the moviegoer’s world—into an entirely different culture and also into a past decade or century; Fleming’s Kiplingesque fishing fleet is made up completely of tall-masted schooners. There are no steam-powered trawlers, or two-way radios, to be seen. Fleming’s creation of a marine world of American fable may be why many lovers of Kipling carry the memory of the film being totally true to the novel. The inventive and supremely accomplished British director Michael Powell applauded how “faithfully” Fleming caught Kipling and wrote, “The film of a book, particularly of a great book, very seldom equals it, but in this case I think it did.” (He even suggested that Canada rename the historic ship known as Bluenose II the Captains Courageous.)