Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Schmidt recalled a tempestuous Saturday conference on the second floor of his Rodeo Drive store, with David and Myron Selznick, Fleming, Gable, Gable’s agent, Phil Berg, and the costume designer Walter Plunkett. It was not specifically about wardrobe: “It was an easy place for them all to meet with nobody else getting involved. And that’s when they started talking about it, and well, of course, they talked about the wardrobe, too, you know.” In Schmidt’s recollection, Fleming told Selznick, “I’ve seen what’s been shot, and if I’m going to do this picture, I’m going to start from the beginning.” Selznick replied, “My God, it’ll cost a fortune.” Fleming moved to leave and said, “You know, I have two other commitments,” and Gable chimed in, “If Flem walks down those stairs, I’m going to follow him, and you can replace me.” It was up to Myron to say, “For God’s sake, either let them make the picture or forget the subject.”

  Fleming didn’t get to shoot the picture in continuity, as he’d wished, but Schmidt’s firm stitched all of Gable’s costumes. “We had about six people working on the weekend to make that red suit with the white stripe. I’ll never forget that one as long as I live.” Like Garland’s in Oz, Gable’s body needed restraint, but in a different area. Schmidt’s crew shaped Gable’s suits around a light corset he wore to maintain his heroic profile. “It was very short and tight,” Schmidt says. “He had a good-size fanny on him, know what I mean? He was a big guy, you know, and he did that purposely, just for that picture.” Schmidt’s tailors cut Gable’s trousers to fit snugly and his jackets to hang loosely as they fashioned nearly two dozen costumes. “We doubled up on the white outfit, because he’d get them soiled very quickly, and that one where he carried her up the stairs, we made a couple of those.”

  Selznick completed his reorganization of the project when he replaced the cinematographer Lee Garmes with Ernest Haller; it would be Haller’s first color film, and he chose to light it as if it were black and white. The result is an overall look that’s delicately shaded except at its expressionist extremes. (Technicolor had developed a film twice as fast as the stock used on The Wizard of Oz and required only half as many lights.) Fleming and Haller worked well together. One reporter found the director impersonating an Atlanta streetlight so the cinematographer could line up a shot, causing a propman to circle Fleming’s feet in chalk and then advise the grips, “Here’s where she goes, boys—and try to make it look like Mr. Fleming.” (Fleming’s frequent cinematographer Hal Rosson shot retakes without credit that autumn.)

  Fleming knew the film would require generalship—maybe that’s why he came on so strongly to the assistant directors Ridgeway Callow and Eric Stacey. He sent them a barbed double message when he greeted them: “They tell me that you’re supposed to be the best team in the picture business. But I’m going to put both of you in the hospital before this picture is over.”

  It was up to Fleming to make sure that Menzies’s intricate storyboards worked in propulsive movie terms—and that his sophisticated visual strategies didn’t overwhelm the performers. Fleming succeeded. When asked why Menzies spent more time with the fill-in director Sam Wood than with Fleming, the assistant director Callow said, “I think he felt that Sam Wood simply needed him more than Fleming.” The old 1.33:1 ratio of width to height (compared with today’s typical 1.85:1) was often called the “golden ratio.” In Gone With the Wind, you see why. There’s a satisfying balance between the actors and their surroundings, which makes the moments when history floods the screen and engulfs the characters more potent.

  Fleming came in like a lion on the first day of March and started directing the picture’s first scene—the opening, with Scarlett making “war” sound like “woah” as she drawls to the Tarleton boys (Fred Crane and George Reeves), “War, war, war: this war talk’s spoiling all the fun at every party this spring.” (After taking a couple more stabs at it in June, Fleming got it right in mid-October.) Rewrites from Selznick arrived daily, on sheets of pink for the first and blue for the second. Fleming made an initial effort to shield the actors from the backstage anarchy: on March 8, the script supervisor Barbara Keon wrote Selznick, “I am not sending out pink pages, because they are simple changes and Mr. Fleming mentioned today that pink pages scare the actors.”

  Throughout the process, Selznick and Fleming massaged ambivalence and irony into the storytelling. Like Margaret Mitchell, they intuited that if you respect the traditions of florid romance, you can question the principles behind them more powerfully. If you glorify the courtliness of the Old South, you can also savage its dreaminess in the person of the gentleman farmer Ashley Wilkes. (Leslie Howard, who in his mid-forties was too old for the part, plays him in an often stiff, embarrassed manner as if he knows the man’s a prig.) Rhett, the realist, who gets rich running Union blockades for the Confederacy, is in effect a mustachioed Cassandra, predicting the fall of the South. The whole movie is built on matched opposites like Rhett and Ashley: workmanlike or corrupt Northerners and gallant or trashy Southerners, spoiled whites and enduring blacks (Hattie McDaniel, as Mammy, plays omniscience with an uncanny, gutsy splendor; Butterfly Mc-Queen, as Prissy, plays naïveté comically and superbly). Best of all, there’s the contrast between aggressive, headstrong Scarlett and that domestic saint, Melanie (de Havilland, in a performance of admirable conviction), who becomes Ashley’s wife. When Fleming announced that he was going to make a melodrama, he didn’t specify a simple one.

  Fleming featured the actor Rand Brooks in one of his first setups, on March 11: the dining room at Twelve Oaks where a gaggle of Southern men discuss the necessity for war. As Charles Hamilton, Brooks betrays his inexperience twice: first by insulting Rhett Butler when he gives his downbeat view of the South’s chances, and then by tumbling for Scarlett when she decides to marry him to spite Ashley. “Vic was one of my favorite people,” Brooks said. “He was really an unusually fine man’s man, a good director, very sensitive, yet very rough. He didn’t believe in phonies. I tried to be a little macho in the part, but he said, ‘No, no, you’re so in love with this girl, you’re sick about it’ . . . I was very disappointed [in the part] because I was such an ass.”

  Phillip Trent appeared in that scene, too:

  I remember thinking how well he had done his director’s homework, and how smoothly things were going given the fact that the scene had over three dozen dress extras and principal players, and the set we were working in was quite small. Fleming took a lot of time with each of us. I was lucky enough to have a line in the scene. He coached us in our action and choreographed how we should move so that we could give Gable access to the camera while he had his lines. As I recall, we shot the entire scene in one day, with several setups from different angles.

  Fleming did a favor to the entire industry with the successful filming of that scene. Natalie Kalmus, the ex-wife of the inventor of Technicolor, Herbert T. Kalmus, and the color supervisor on every Technicolor film made in Hollywood up to then, insisted that the men would fade into the beige-and-wood walls of Twelve Oaks. After Selznick screened the footage for Dr. Kalmus, Technicolor exiled Natalie to England. Though her name continued to appear on American film productions, her dictates against experimentation were henceforth largely ignored.

  Fleming also earned the trust of Susan Myrick, who had considered herself a die-hard Cukor loyalist. Writing for the Macon Telegraph, she described him as “a handsome, blondish man with keen eyes and a tendency to fire questions at you so fast that you can’t even answer them.” Myrick sensed that his “familiarity with details of Miss Mitchell’s novel . . . bodes good for the production of the movie.” She initially thought him a “sour puss,” and he certainly was when filming the Southern gentry’s response to the declaration of war. The swells swarmed out of Twelve Oaks to mount their steeds and ride off to battle, but the wranglers in charge of the horses, as a gag, didn’t cinch the saddles, so the men flew off the horses at first gallop. It was a time-honored practical joke among movie cowboys; Fleming might have pulled i
t himself back in his Flying A days. But Shep Houghton, another of the Twelve Oaks gents, said the director was livid and promptly fired one of the equipment managers. “Get him out of here,” he growled, “and then get me out of here.”

  Still, Fleming retained a brusque charm through much of the filming, and Myrick cottoned to his smile. “He grinned back of his ears the other day when he asked me if we ever had anything like this Twelve Oaks in the South. I shook my head, grinning wryly, and he said, ‘Maybe the po’ white trash would like it because they could say it was just like Grandpa’s that Sherman burned down.’ ” They came to share a running gag: Fleming would whistle “Marching Through Georgia” whenever Myrick appeared on the set. (He diplomatically failed to mention his grandfather’s service under Sherman in the Battle of Atlanta.) To Mitchell, Myrick confided, “Vic Fleming laughs at the script situation and told me the other day to write him some ad lib lines, that God knows they’d had fifteen writers [and] I’d just as well try my hand on it and probably couldn’t be worse than the others!”

  His close friendship and working relationship with Gable have been used to delimit the director’s contribution. But as James Harvey wrote in Romantic Comedy (he puts GWTW in the category of “tough comedy”), Gable’s “apotheosis as Rhett Butler” is critical to the film’s success. “Most of the scenes,” he writes, “are focused on [Scarlett] but they are focused by him—by his bemusement, his disbelief, his final enchantment.”

  Fleming first relaxed, then vitalized Gable. “They talked each other’s language and they yelled and hollered on the set with each other,” said Adela Rogers St. Johns. “[Clark] knew what he was and what he had and I think he regarded Victor as his equal.” Gable could be clumsy or wooden when directed by Jack Conway, but as Rhett Butler he’s free as a performer. Fleming liberated him in part by treating him like Douglas Fairbanks. During the “marital rape” scene of Rhett carrying Scarlett up the tall stairs in their Atlanta mansion, technical snafus spoiled five takes. After take six, Fleming called to Gable, “Sorry, Clark! Just one more!” Gable wearily began lifting Leigh again until he heard “Cut!” followed by crew laughter. Fleming explained, “I don’t really need another shot. I just had a bet you couldn’t make it.” Other cast members joined in. De Havilland, a slip of a thing at 105 pounds, presented no obstacle to Gable’s strength when Rhett had to lift Melanie and carry her from her birthing bed to the carriage waiting to speed them out of Atlanta. But before the final rehearsal, she asked an assistant director to move a cement block under her bed and secretly tie her to it to give Gable a back-wrenching surprise. His face went red with struggle before the joke dawned on him. “He was really startled, but he was a very good sport.”

  Gable suffuses the movie’s first half with his cockiness. He’s at the apex of masculine self-confidence—his smile and scowl were rarely more appealing and seductive. When he’s still no more than a distant grin at the bottom of the staircase at Twelve Oaks, Scarlett asks who the man is “looking at us and smiling—the nasty dog,” and her friend Cathleen Calvert (kittenish Marcella Martin) responds, “That’s Rhett Butler! He’s from Charleston and he has the most terrible reputation.” Fleming slides the camera down the stairs to show Gable beaming brightly, his mint julep resting on the banister, as he swings his shoulders around to enjoy a cool, discerning look at Scarlett. He’s anything but nasty—though, as Scarlett notes, “He looks as if—as if he knows what I look like without my shimmy!”

  It’s similar to that other great male introduction of 1939: the tracking shot that ratchets into a close-up of John Wayne as the Ringo Kid in John Ford’s Stagecoach. But Ford was introducing Wayne as a star coming of age. Fleming’s direction seems to state, “Here is Gable in his prime, in the role he was born to play.” (To this day, audiences applaud Gable’s close-up.)

  Fleming’s competence would stabilize the crew, renew Gable’s sense of security, and inspire most of the male actors. “I don’t think he ‘directed’ too much,” Brooks recalled. “I think he knew the angles and he had the emotion inside, and he just talked to people about what he felt a scene should be . . . He was so strong and so well liked. It’s funny to be that way; it wasn’t the kind of strength you felt afraid of—you felt strengthened from him; not like John Ford, who was abusive. Fleming rehearsed quite a bit, but when a take came, he got it on the first or second take; he knew when it was ready to shoot, and that was it.”

  The female cast required more empathetic handling. Ann Rutherford, who played Scarlett’s sister Carreen, “just sort of snapped to attention” whenever she saw Fleming. “He had marvelous command. He was head of the table wherever he was. He was the father image. He brooked no nonsense. We respected him deeply and liked him and tried to be very obedient to anything he wished us to do.”

  His relationships with de Havilland and Leigh had to be more complicated. The trickiness of their roles and the grain of their temperaments challenged his artistry—and his probable awareness that they continued to “moonlight” with Cukor challenged his ego. De Havilland explains:

  [Cukor] not only gave us wonderful direction but also confidence in what we were doing. To be severed from him and our relationship with him was a colossal blow, and the prospect of working with anyone else too unnerving to contemplate. I continued to need the assurance and insights which George provided and . . . went to him several times on days off to consult with him about an upcoming scene. These were secret sessions about which I felt guilty toward Vivien. Long after the film was completed, I learned that Vivien had been doing the same thing—even more often than I.

  No one is certain whether Fleming knew of this directorial intervention. But he was too smart and canny not to get a sense of it. He did connect more readily to de Havilland than to his leading lady. Both she and Leigh were born abroad to comfortable British families (de Havilland in Tokyo, Leigh in India); both were convent educated. But de Havilland’s parents had divorced when she was three. She grew up in California, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area, and had been working at that no-nonsense dream factory, Warner Bros. She practiced a steady, can-do craft that Fleming understood. When Leigh wouldn’t make retching sounds for Scarlett coughing up a radish before announcing she’d “never be hungry again,” the dubbing supervisor asked de Havilland to fill in: “I said ‘yes,’ and proceeded to retch.”

  No matter how much she had learned and continued to derive from Cukor, de Havilland gained immediate confidence in her new director’s insights during their maiden rehearsal. It was the scene when Melanie greets Scarlett at Twelve Oaks: Melanie tells Scarlett she admires her abundance of “life,” and Scarlett replies that Melanie “mustn’t flatter” her and say things she “doesn’t mean”—leading Ashley to say, “Nobody could accuse Melanie of being insincere.” Fleming thought somebody could accuse Melanie of flattery, at least as de Havilland first delivered her lines. “I responded to Scarlett’s greetings in a friendly ‘social’ way. Victor then drew me aside and said just this: ‘Whatever Melanie says, she means.’ Thus he gave me not only the key to the playing of the scene but also the key to Melanie’s whole character.” She repaid Fleming with a performance that has a preternatural calm, a quiet alertness, and an unexpected emotional flexibility that binds her to Scarlett.

  It’s undisputed that Leigh, who had a cosseted British background, was often at odds with Fleming, who preferred actresses with a bit of rough-and-tumble in them. The authorized biography of Leigh and Olivier, published in 1953 with their input, has her “at first discouraged by his seemingly gloomy disposition.”

  How often they fought, and over what, vary with the source. But a single incident—a huge breach of professional etiquette—encapsulates the conflict and suggests that it came closer to the surface as everyone grew more fatigued. Six months into the production, Fleming was preparing the scene of Scarlett almost seducing Ashley in a paddock when Leigh suggested (or demanded) on the set that Fleming screen a Cukor-directed test of it. In Leigh’s account
, she was “shocked to find herself behaving ungraciously” after she told Fleming, “For goodness sake, let’s go and see that test scene I did . . . when George was directing!” and was sorry afterward. (Fleming’s reaction was not recorded, and reports differ on whether he ever watched it; he shot the scene on June 24.) Years later, Cukor gloated at the story. “Yes, that was much better in the test, and Vivien knew it,” he said in 1970, recalling a Sunday (Leigh’s only day off) when an exhausted Leigh visited him and dozed for hours, then, upon awakening, “giggled, and told me, ‘I was an awful bitch on the set yesterday.’ They’d been trying that very scene with Ashley, and she felt it wasn’t right, so she made poor Victor Fleming trot over and screen the test. That was so typically straight-shooting of her, as an actress and a human being.”

  Some critics favorably compare that test to the more restrained version Fleming filmed. But the Cukor-Leigh Scarlett is too close for comfort—or credibility—to her Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Solid Douglass Montgomery, who played Ashley in the test, soaked up her histrionics (as he did for Katharine Hepburn as Laurie in Cukor’s Little Women), but in this operatic mode she would have made Howard’s mild, willowy Ashley look ridiculous. Blanche is what Scarlett might have become if her formidable survival mechanism had malfunctioned. Cukor did help Leigh shape her characterization—“Leigh hated Fleming [and] followed Cukor’s direction to the end,” Selznick told Crowther. But he shot fewer scenes in the picture than legend has it (notably Scarlett’s first long sequence with Mammy). And if some of Cukor’s work with her had a finer edge, going toe-to-toe with Fleming had its stiffening virtues.

  For his part, Leslie Howard, sometimes effective as a premature elder statesman in his group scenes, was not happy as a romantic ideal. “Yesterday I put on my Confederate uniform for the first time and looked like a fairy doorman at the Beverly Wiltshire [sic]—a fine thing at my age,” he wrote to his daughter. Although he was popular with the cast and assistant directors, his attitude never improved. Howard kept fumbling his lines, and Leigh once took the actor to task for not knowing his script.