Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Loy, typically a lithe charmer and occasionally sublime, rarely seemed as free, easy, and original in her banter as she is in these scenes. (It rivals her Thin Man badinage with William Powell.) The odd turns of phrase like “funny-looking gazebo” click because of the way Ann savors them. She glides like a corn-fed goddess who knows that even for a world-beater like Lane, she doesn’t have to push the allure. And Gable isn’t the confident seducer of Red Dust. Jim turns up the emotional heat, all right, but also lets himself be hooked.

  The scowl of Tracy’s Gunner can’t bring them earthbound when he arrives with a new oil pump. Jim has neglected preparations for the next day’s flight, and Ann’s presence is a further irritant. While Jim and Ann sweet-talk in the front seat of her car, Fleming frames Gunner brooding in the back. It’s a perfect composition for a romantic triangle—and the entire film can be read that way, since Gunner’s life focuses on Jim. After Jim takes off, Gunner tells Ann that she’ll realize his departure is a good thing in the end, but flying over the baseball field, Jim gets an ache that grounds him again. He returns to the farm, warns Ann she’ll be sorry, then sweeps her up in the air. They marry (offscreen) in Indianapolis.

  These long yet chipper opening scenes stir up roiling complications. Ann loves Jim’s untutored instinct. When anything takes him by surprise, he turns his head and glares—“like a big bear,” she says, or “like a cross between an Indian and a gazelle.” (She likes those “ga” words.) But she’s stumbled into an improvised life that’s as scary as it is exhilarating. Once Jim returns to New York, he refuses an assignment, and Drake fires him. So Ann, Jim, and Gunner begin looking for shared digs. The chemistry among the three is sensational. The movie is always fresh because Jim and Gunner constantly befuddle each other.

  Fleming meshes the human and mechanical stories as cunningly as David Lean does in Breaking the Sound Barrier and Philip Kaufman does in The Right Stuff. Indeed, when Levon Helm’s Ridley hands Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager a piece of gum before each flight in The Right Stuff, he’s echoing Gunner and Jim’s good-luck ritual of pasting a wad of gum on each test plane’s fuselage. And when Ridley starts Kaufman’s movie with his talk of that demon that lives in the sky, he’s carrying on the tradition of Jim Lane, who talks of that “girl in the blue dress” who teases and taunts him and tries so hard to slap him down that he slaps her back. Ann says she wants a blue dress; she even says she wants to be slapped. Loy pulls off a portrait of love that includes everything, including a streak of masochism.

  Gable is part id, part kid. Tracy is like a high-school idealist, struggling to keep his best friend the star athlete in fighting trim. Gunner is sympathetic to Ann when he sees that she loves Jim as deeply as he does. Yet what moves her isn’t what Gunner says—being a test pilot is “death every time you make a move”—but the break in his voice and the tears streaming down his face when he says it. Ann articulates what she sees as her three choices: She can try to get Jim to drink sarsaparilla with her instead of booze with the boys, knowing it won’t dull his shrieking nerves. Or she can try to ground him altogether, which would make him hate her and make her hate herself. Or they can go on as is, pretending they’re both happy and at peace, until at last he falls to earth. After that declaration, Gunner and Ann take turns melting down.

  Tracy is at once urgent and at ease. He delivers a great silent performance as a man whose powers of feeling and understanding dwarf his limited eloquence. That gap accounts for some priceless big-mug comedy. When Ann playfully insists that Jim buy her a nightgown without her help, Gunner becomes Jim’s model. Marginally less clueless about women than Jim, he suggests that they can’t go wrong with pink.

  The deep and genuine affection between the men, and role-reversal scenes like this one, have caused insightful critics like John DiLeo to ask, “Spencer Tracy as a gay man in love with his straight best friend?”—and answer in the affirmative. If you watch this movie with that question in mind, it can be simultaneously gripping and campy, like the scene of Montgomery Clift and John Ireland hefting each other’s pistols in Hawks’s Red River. There is a homosexual element to the bond between Gunner and Jim, and neither Tracy nor Gable is afraid to bring it out. But there’s less of a physical spark between them than there is between Clift and Ireland. On the airfield, they’re a team, and off it Gunner has absorbed himself into the most tough-minded kind of hero worship—the kind that recognizes his hero would be nothing without him.

  In his script notes, Fleming suggested that Gunner act “very motherly” toward Jim, but in the playing the two conjure an intense adolescent relationship with the undefined, generalized yearning that accompanies it. Gunner also clicks with Ann as a kindred spirit; they’re like an older brother and kid sister. He loses himself in Ann’s analysis of the futility of domestic life with a test pilot—it hits him hard as he watches them cavort at an amusement park, where Jim admonishes Gunner, “Why don’t you be gay for once and give yourself a shock.” But he doesn’t merely wallow in self-pity. He’s judging the potential wreck of all three lives if Jim plays his string out to the end. (Indeed, one reviewer in 1938 thought Gunner’s big dark secret was that he carried a torch for Ann.)

  Gunner is fatally injured in Jim’s final test flight of a B-17 bomber. As he’s dying, he says the one blessing of going first is that he won’t have to tell Ann that Jim has died. Of course, Jim is uppermost in his mind: he has been the most important person in Gunner’s life. With heartbreaking simplicity, Gunner says Jim didn’t know how good Gunner was: “You just loved me.” And when Jim begs him to hang on “for my sake,” Gunner answers, “That’s all I’d come back for, if I could.”

  It may be Tracy’s finest moment on-screen—and under Fleming’s direction, Gable matches him. For Mahin, Gable was the “amazing” one. Jim never says, “I love you or something,” back to Gunner, the way Mahin recalled, but Gable has the power to get across grief and a fear of what life will be like without his best friend. He wasn’t afraid to shed tears over a male friend, though he would balk at crying over Scarlett’s miscarriage in Gone With the Wind. (Shot for several days on the MGM back lot, the scene, with a studio-built shell of a B-17 set ablaze, attracted such attention that gawkers in private planes often disrupted filming.)

  Terrific working partners though not off-set pals, Gable and Tracy, Loy wrote, “had a lively exchange, which actually seldom went on with many people during filming.” Maybe Tracy also sensed how well he would come off in the film. He approached it with his usual intensity. “I remember him working out this business of nut cracking,” to be performed during one of Gable’s big scenes, “which he worked out very carefully all night long,” Joseph Mankiewicz said. “Christ, he used up five pounds of nuts, and then he pretended on the set it had just occurred to him. It was perfectly timed so he would never crack a nut on Clark’s line, but you would always have to cut to him.”

  Brinksmanship aside, Tracy and Gable had the kind of rapport that, used properly, sharpened both. The MGM publicist Howard Strickling thought, “Tracy would give his right arm to be Gable: loved, worshipped, respected,” while Gable “would give his right arm to be recognized as an actor’s actor, like Tracy.” Gable told Mahin he always wanted to be able to nail a scene on the first take: “Start fooling around and [Spence will] kill me.”

  Generally, good-natured goading ruled. Fleming surmised to the Hollywood Reporter that he might end the film “with a long shot of Gable’s ears flapping in the wind.” Gable referred to them all by nicknames: of course, he was King and Loy was Queenie, but Tracy was the Iron Duke, and Fleming the Monk. (The MGM publicity whiz Frank Whitbeck came up with Tracy’s moniker as if to extend the studio’s royal family.) On Gable’s birthday in February, Carole Lombard sent her man two tickets to a sightseeing blimp that circled Los Angeles, and the special entertainment was the studio’s up-and-coming juvenile musical star Judy Garland, who sang satirical lyrics about Gable’s recent dud Parnell. (She had sung “Dear Mr. Gable: You Made Me
Love You” on the radio a year before; in three weeks she would be signed to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.)

  Loy thought it all “got a little out of hand” one day at March Field in Riverside, when officers tried to persuade both male stars and Fleming to fly to Catalina Island in one of the B-17s. Tracy resisted, despite the other men’s merciless taunts, and confided to Loy, “The first thing they’ll do, they’ll head for a bar. You know I can’t do that.” Loy, not knowing Fleming’s history with Tracy’s drinking, accepted that explanation. She thought Tracy took his revenge when he failed to show up the next day, making everyone think he’d gone on a bender. Then, “a few minutes before noon, Spence strolled nonchalantly onto the set, bid everyone a jaunty good morning, and went to work.” Loy helped dissipate the tensions by scolding the actor and Fleming.

  Hawks’s Ceiling Zero had been a hit a couple of years earlier, but it didn’t approach the critical and popular sensation of Test Pilot. That may have sharpened Hawks’s competitive edge when he was preparing Only Angels Have Wings in the wake of Test Pilot’s success. Hawks borrowed the most original scene from Fleming’s blockbuster, bent it to his own ends, and later implied he came up with it in the first place.

  The two movies share similar subjects but diverge in mood and theme. Only Angels Have Wings is unswervingly romantic in its presentation of mail pilots flying perilous routes through the Andes; the uncertainty of their lives adds to the intensity of their camaraderie. Test Pilot expresses the elation of men pushing their reflexes to meet the power and speed of new technology—and the tragic futility of their attempts to adjust the rest of their lives to their professional quest. Unlike Hawks’s film, Test Pilot views the daredevil life as a prolonged adolescence. Just as Fleming had done, Jim must let go of his roistering ways to raise a family and tend to the rising generation.

  The films, though, match up precisely in their pivotal dramatic sequences. In Test Pilot, Jim’s plane catches on fire in the National Air Races in Cleveland, but another flier, Greg Benson—Jim’s replacement for Drake—crashes his plane and is killed. Of course, all the competitors later celebrate at a bar. As they sing “If I Had the Wings of an Angel,” a businessman proposes two champagne toasts. The first, to Jim, is wildly popular, but the second, to the late Benson, gets the businessman pushed from the saloon. The men say they’ve never heard of Benson; Jim says he must have crashed because he wasn’t good enough for “the girl in the blue dress” and she slapped him down.

  In Only Angels Have Wings, the aviators react exactly the same way when Jean Arthur’s chorus girl expresses shock that the station chief, Cary Grant, would eat the steak that another pilot ordered before he was killed in a crash. They say they never heard of the man; Grant has already said he crashed because he wasn’t good enough for the job.

  Both these anti-wakes depict fliers asserting their right to honor their own dead in a way that enables them to get on with the business of cheating death. But in attitude the two films couldn’t be more dissimilar. In Test Pilot, Jim then tumbles into a four-day multi-city bender; it’s the start of the narrative runway that leads to his retiring from flying and taking up a new career as a pilot instructor. (In one of Fleming’s favorite moments, he gives half his prize money—$5,000—to Benson’s widow, played by Gloria Holden. She’s now a widow with three children, just as Fleming’s mother had been after his father’s death.) In Only Angels, the scene instead begins the heroine’s education. She must learn that a pilot needs a gal who can bear the pressure and “stick.”

  Hawks may have tried to outdo Fleming with the same scene as part of their friendly rivalry. It would not be the last time he took a dramatic idea from a peer and made it say what he wanted it to say: the entire plot of Rio Bravo (1959) emerged from his disdain for Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952). But Hawks went further with Test Pilot, saying he wrote the original story and some lines for the movie when he was at MGM, even though he’d left the studio in 1934. He also insisted that everything in Only Angels Have Wings, no matter how outlandish, was “absolutely true.” If so, that resonant death scene may have been part of a truth that he and his friend Fleming had perceived together.

  In Test Pilot, Fleming used Benson’s crash, staged at the Van Nuys Airport, to indulge in an operatic stroke. When an ambulance picks up Benson’s body and drives away, he shows the bent, awkward body of his widow running across a field to catch it. The visual eloquence compensates for the dramatic non sequitur. (Everyone knows the widow and the children are there; wouldn’t someone stop the ambulance until the driver knew her wishes?) Before Holden’s scene with Gable, Fleming kept her in tears for fifteen minutes. He may have misjudged her casting and performance—then best known as Mrs. Zola in The Life of Emile Zola, now best known for the title role of Dracula’s Daughter, she’s a little bit undead herself—but the anecdote conveys his commitment to the performance and the material.

  What startles contemporary audiences about the sequence at the National Air Races is the spectacle of pilots speeding in aerial circles, like Nascar stars. Some will find in it a transporting quality that Nascar races don’t have: spectators crane their necks to the sky instead of locking into a blur on asphalt. Planes in formation suddenly make darting moves like willful dragonflies. The money and prestige of a big MGM production enabled Fleming to send three camera crews to pick up footage from the Thompson Trophy race and to film a simulated race the next day with some of the same pilots. To make the footage in Van Nuys meld with the Cleveland footage, he elevated the camera platforms and had the cinematographer Ray June shoot down on the action to eliminate the mountains in the background.

  Every aspect of Test Pilot allowed Fleming to test his virtuosity. On a micro level, he had Douglas Shearer record Gable with a lapel mike to capture dialogue above the rumble of the aircraft. On a macro level, for the film’s climax, he had at his disposal the entire heavy bombardment fleet of the Army Air Corps. That’s because General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, then deputy chief of the Air Corps, saw the film as an ideal public relations ploy for the Boeing B-17 Stratofortress.

  It was the public’s first glimpse of the four-engine bomber that would go on to distinguished service in both theaters of World War II. To emphasize its size, Fleming showed two mechanics struggling to polish the bottom of one wing. While Test Pilot was being made, the Air Corps had just thirteen of the aircraft; they were still considered experimental, and Congress had not fully funded production. The Air Corps flew twelve of them to California and put nine in the air at a time for Fleming’s second unit at March Field. The innovative aviator and technical director Paul Mantz co-engineered the impact of the flying scenes. Not since Wellman’s Wings and Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels had a filmmaker shot such a fleet with so many cameras and from so many angles and positions on the planes.

  In a scenario unimaginable today, General Arnold enthusiastically took part in the movie’s publicity, appearing on the Maxwell House Good News program—MGM’s radio house organ—to salute test pilots as “the unsung heroes of this flying game.” Arnold told the radio audience that the Flying Fortresses “are the culmination of the work of these masters of the air,” and the ones in the film were the same that had recently completed an eleven-thousand-mile round-trip from Miami to Buenos Aires.

  Fleming did not accurately portray the details of testing military planes. He smudged the facts on purpose: these planes’ specifications were military secrets (as mentioned in the prologue). For instance, the Air Corps never tested the diving capabilities of pursuit aircraft, as Lane does, and the B-17 is said in the film to have a five-thousand-mile range, when its actual range was less than two thousand miles.

  Fleming committed other inaccuracies strictly for dramatic effect. In the climactic Flying Fortress crash, the sandbags doubling in the test for bombs are not only piled too high; they’re also put in a position to crash the bulkhead and knock out Tracy. Then Gable heaves sandbags over the side at a point when, as one real-life test p
ilot observed, the “plane, spinning like a top, should have shot him into space by centrifugal force alone in ten seconds.”

  Test Pilot nonetheless popped the eyes of the public and reviewers alike, from the trades (“One of the outstanding successes of the year,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote) to the major dailies (“A bang-up aviation drama,” said The New York Times). Even National Socialist reviewers in Germany praised the film’s technique and dramatic force as well as Gable’s valor, although “many critics were shocked that it represented a man in such a serious position as a test pilot as drunken and irresponsible.”

  It was the second Fleming picture in a row to win multiple Oscar nominations—for picture, editing, and original story but again not for direction. Tracy won his second straight Academy Award not for Gunner but for his Father Flanagan in Boys Town. Maybe the sacrificial element of Test Pilot seemed too close to Manuel in Captains Courageous.

  Even Tracy’s young daughter, Susie, asked Fleming at the premiere, “Don’t you like my papa? That’s the second time you’ve killed him.” Actually, with Test Pilot, he fashioned a lasting tribute to friendship. Saul Bellow told fellow author James Salter that after he saw the film, he turned to his wife and asked, “Why don’t we have friends like that?”

  20

  Salvaging The Great Waltz

  In April 1938, the Hollywood Reporter mentioned that Fleming “almost cracked up in his own cabin plane, a few days after Test Pilot trade raves.” Nothing else seemingly went wrong for Fleming in the spring of 1938. Test Pilot and Warner Bros.’ Adventures of Robin Hood were the only new hits packing theaters; throughout the first half of the year, exhibitors desperate to fill seats rebooked old favorites like Dracula, The Count of Monte Cristo, King Kong, and Fleming’s own Treasure Island. MGM was still pressuring him to sign a contract, but he continued working on a handshake deal with Mannix.