Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Selznick announced the same day that Sam Wood, a competent and sometimes better-than-competent director (Goodbye, Mr. Chips), would spell Fleming. Wood was not in the same league as his predecessors, but, wrote Scott Fitzgerald, he “takes things a little less hard” than Cukor or Fleming. All the news reports indicated that Fleming would return in a week to ten days, but his absence did stretch into two weeks. During his recuperation, Selznick, Gable, and Leigh visited the director at his Balboa beach house. Selznick even offered Fleming a piece of the profits as part of his salary. But this risk-averse son of a citrus rancher responded with “What do you take me for, a chump?” On May 2, Charles Cotton, hoping to lift Vic’s spirits, paid him a visit, and for that he did dress up and perk up, as caught in the Fleming family’s home movies.

  Gavin Lambert’s perceptive yet frustrating GWTW: The Making of “Gone With the Wind” (1973) recounts a Selznick-oriented version of Fleming’s departure in which the producer discovers from Fleming’s doctor that the breakdown was “feigned”—“a protest against what he considered David’s domination of the picture.” In this skewed rendering, the collapse is a tactic conceived “under the false impression that Selznick would promise to reduce the pressure if he came back,” and the hiring of Wood a ploy on the producer’s part to rouse Fleming to his senses. Some members of Selznick’s team, such as Rabwin, suspected Fleming of faking his illness—but Selznick’s own intuition in the April 14 memo and the testimony of Myrick and Fleming’s daughters back up its reality.

  Wood shot the troublesome Belle Watling scene until early morning, then returned a few hours later to shoot Mammy helping Scarlett make her famous green-velvet-curtain dress. Working with the first unit and later with an alternate first unit (known simply in Selznick’s memos as “the Wood unit”), he filmed many scenes with Leigh, including Scarlett’s marriage to Frank Kennedy. (He directed for sixteen days when Fleming was out and eight more with his “Wood unit.”) But Gable didn’t warm to Wood. Although a May 3 Selznick memo says, “Mr. Gable has just told me he has withdrawn his opinion about Sam Wood and is very happy with him,” after Fleming resumed shooting May 15, Selznick steered Wood toward scenes centered on Scarlett and Ashley. The producer’s memos increasingly reflected his high evaluation of Fleming: Wood was being “very slow and obstinate,” and Fleming was keen at catching miscues such as Union artillery speeding over a bridge too quickly while Scarlett is hiding underneath. (Fleming, like Selznick, was obviously reviewing all the footage, not just scenes he’d shot himself; Menzies had taken the first swipe at the bridge scene.) Selznick also grew to appreciate Fleming’s feel for physicalizing drama: he liked Fleming’s “addition of Scarlett throwing the dirt in Wilkerson’s face,” though he thought it needed some improvements.

  Selznick eventually concluded that Fleming should “direct everything, however seemingly unimportant. Vic is more relaxed now and also is very hopped up about the picture, and I think we should have the extra quality that he can give even to these seemingly unimportant bits.” Fleming also made an effort to show his approval of Leigh’s performance, congratulating her instead of shouting “Cut!” after she enacted Scarlett’s sobbing at Rhett’s exit.

  Not everyone found Fleming more relaxed. When Canutt, who had done stunts on The Farmer Takes a Wife, showed up to complete his scenes as the lowlife who attacks Scarlett on a bridge, he “was amazed at the difference in [Fleming’s] appearance and behavior. He was cranky as all get out and seemed to have aged years. The first take on my scene with Scarlett was cut before I had hardly opened my mouth. Fleming stalked over to me and sneered, ‘All right, ham it up!’ He then went back to the camera, leaving me bewildered. Whatever his disposition, it certainly did not affect his talent for making great pictures.” Yet the bit player William Bakewell, an old friend of Fleming’s (possibly from Pickfair days) who portrayed the Confederate cavalry officer advising Scarlett that she “had better refuge South,” said he “got a warm greeting” for “one of the briefest parts I’ve ever had.”

  Fleming’s first scene on his return was of Scarlett, ravaged by hunger and desperation, digging up a radish and declaring, “I’ll never be hungry again!” It was an all-nighter; the crew, Leigh, and Fleming arrived in Lasky Mesa, near Agoura, after midnight so they’d be set up to catch the first rays of the morning sun. The scene in the film as Scarlett beats the earth with her fists is the fifth take, Leigh’s exhaustion and anger real. A Leigh biographer wrote, “All the way back to town in the director’s car she sulked with rage,” but she apologized to Fleming the next day.

  When Rhett finally proposes marriage to Scarlett, it’s with the questions, “Did you ever think of marrying just for fun? You’ve been married to a boy and to an old man; why not try a husband of the right age, with a way with women?” But the courtship is far from triumphant. Scarlett says she’ll marry him, but at least “partly” for money, and she won’t say she’s madly in love with him. A change comes over Rhett; he can no longer be his authentic self until he goes as far as he can with his love for Scarlett, even into faithful matrimony. His air of gaiety at her untamed liveliness, including her covetousness and greed, can’t quite camouflage his longing for her to love him absolutely.

  Rhett’s hidden nobility comes to the fore in his devotion to Melanie and Mammy—each, in different ways, a pillar of rectitude. The romantic and domestic ideals beneath Rhett’s amorous deal making emerge as the anchors of the movie. That’s why it was so crucial for Fleming to get Gable to cry when Rhett feels that he has brought on Scarlett’s miscarriage. The movie needs this cathartic revelation of Rhett’s frustration at being unable to make his marriage work and his guilt over masking his marital pain with sarcasm and bravado. Afraid of the emotional exposure, Gable balked.

  Rand Brooks, who wasn’t present for that scene, summed up what the other actors believed: Fleming “got Gable drunk to get that crying scene. He would call him every name in the book, say you can’t act worth shit, every name under the sun, go in and do it right or I’ll go off and leave you. Gable was a consummate technician, but didn’t have much range. But after that he did some very emotional things. You are what your directors tell you, and Fleming could say what he wanted to Gable, there was so much affection and respect there.”

  De Havilland, who was there, recalls no drunkenness or verbal abuse:

  Clark did rebel against crying in the scene . . . In the culture of that time, men were not permitted to cry. To weep was regarded as an act of ultimate unmanliness, a sign of unacceptable weakness. No wonder Clark rebelled. This reigning view (plus, perhaps, a fear that he might not be able to summon the tears—technically a difficult thing to do) explains Gable’s resistance. The idea of crying not only embarrassed him as a man but was unsuitable, so he thought, to his career. He did not want to disappoint or alienate his vast and admiring audience. Victor insisted, of course, that it was essential to the scene and to the film that Gable weep. When Gable reluctantly agreed to film a weeping Rhett, not only Victor but also I tried to reassure and encourage him. Then, just before the scene began, we sensed that Gable had at last committed himself, and when the cameras rolled, the tears were there and Clark was wonderful.

  Fleming actually shot the scene twice—once with tears, once without—so Gable would feel more at ease knowing he had a fallback. The journalist Gladys Hall observed that afterward, “Clark crept to his bungalow via the back porch of the sound stage, slithering across the yard as though afraid that someone would see him, would speak to him. He wasn’t himself for the rest of the day.”

  Selznick’s story editor Val Lewton, later known as RKO’s master of low-budget horror filmmaking, conceived the most elaborate and expensive crane shot ever made: the camera pulling back and up to show Scarlett picking her away among hundreds of wounded Confederate soldiers in the Atlanta railroad yards. “I clearly remember my father talking about it,” says Val Lewton Jr. “He said he wrote the scene as a joke, knowing it would be impossible to shoot.�
� (Lewton had tried to dissuade Selznick from buying Mitchell’s novel.) But if Lewton thought it up and Menzies designed it, on May 20, Fleming was the one who called “Action!” on this staggering vignette of the wages of war, ending on the tattered battle flag of the Confederacy. Mitchell had described Scarlett seeing the wounded remnants of the Confederate army “lining the tracks, the sidewalks, stretched out in endless rows under the car shed. Some lay stiff and still, but many writhed under the hot sun, moaning.” What makes it breathtaking in the movie is that you never lose sight of Leigh as the stunned, groping Scarlett maneuvers among the wounded and the dead—consisting of extras, dummies, and, for a jolting dose of realism, amputees from Sawtelle Veterans Hospital.

  “Get off those dummies!” Fleming snarled at the extras through a loudspeaker at anyone stepping on the mannequins as the eighty-five-foot construction crane began its ascent, with the camera operator Art Arling, the cinematographer Ernest Haller, and, of course, Fleming on the camera platform. To Leigh, he rasped, “Slower, dear—slower!” as she was “threading her uncertain path among them—past the stretcher-bearers, the nurses and the huge soup kettles.” Wrote another observer, “The camera swings up and back, up and up until the lens embraces the whole scene with the small figure of Scarlett moving from upper right to lower left through the mass of men. Finally, the camera, high in the air, shoots past a Confederate flag. ‘Cut!’ yells director Victor Fleming. And that’s that.”

  The same day Fleming doubly earned Leigh’s nickname for him, “Mr. Boom-Boom.” As for his nickname for Leigh: Arthur Tovey, a Civil War extra who also doubled for Leslie Howard, enjoyed saying that when the shot was finished, one of the amputees asked, “Is her name really Fiddle-de-dee?” He especially enjoyed telling that to Leigh.

  It was Selznick who declared to Sidney Howard, “I, for one, have no desire to produce any anti-Negro film,” and labored with the writers “to be awfully careful that the Negroes come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger.” When two bottom-feeders try to drag Scarlett from her wagon as she passes through a shantytown, it’s the “big ragged white man” (Canutt) who poses the urgent physical threat, not, as in the novel, a black man with “shoulders and chest like a gorilla” who “fumbles between her breasts” inspiring “terror and revulsion” as she’d never known. And when Scarlett’s second husband, Frank Kennedy, Ashley, and others ride out to avenge her, they’re not cloaked in the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, as in the book. Selznick noted, “A group of men can go out to ‘get’ the perpetrators of an attempted rape without having long white sheets over them and without having their membership in a society as a motive.” Fleming kept a rugged feel to the sequence in which the men return home from their raid feigning drunkenness. When Gable, Howard, and Harry Davenport (as Dr. Meade) began rehearsing “Massa’s in de Cole, Cole Ground,” he berated them for not sounding properly stewed: “That’s entirely too good! Why, you sound like a college glee club! It won’t do! Mess it up, get off key!”

  This film’s Old South is full of happy slaves contented with their lot. We’re introduced to the New South with a disdainful shot of a jolly, rotund black carpetbagger singing “Marching Through Georgia” next to the evil Jonas Wilkerson, who attempts to grab Tara when Scarlett has difficulty paying her tax bill. But the actors imbue their characters with individuality and consciousness—especially McDaniel. Thomas Cripps observes in Slow Fade to Black (1977) that the result of these compromises and contradictions is a “confused ideological view that made it conservative and somewhat avant-garde at the same time.”

  Cukor, Wood, and Menzies all did sublime work with the Kansas-born McDaniel (like the white actresses, she had to learn to drawl), but it was Fleming who shot the pivotal scene when Rhett and Mammy share a drink over the birth of Bonnie Blue Butler. It’s a testament to the film’s marvelous sense of characterization—and a tribute to Selznick, Howard, and the other screenwriters, as well as Fleming—that the scene celebrates the growing respect of Mammy for Rhett as much as it does the birth. “Who wants a boy?” Rhett asks drolly. “Boys aren’t any use to anybody. Don’t you think I’m proof of that?” A riptide of affection and approval surges through Mammy’s laugh. Maybe some of her joy springs from an offscreen practical joke sprung by Gable, who substituted real Scotch for her fake bourbon. “Had anybody else perpetrated such a stunt as Gable had managed,” Myrick later recalled, Fleming “would have hit the ceiling. As it was, he and the cast and crew had a ten-minute laugh and shooting was begun again.”

  The much-maligned Butterfly McQueen, a Broadway actress who later said, “I hate listening to that silly, stupid handkerchief head when I see the movie,” also conceded that Prissy’s signature line, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies,” gave her a sort of immortality. Even Prissy has her moments of revolt: as the Union soldiers approach Atlanta, she turns a spiritual into a covert expression of rebellion, singing to herself, “Jes’ a few more days fer to tote de weary load.” McQueen fought against stereotypes and demeaning on-set behavior. “I didn’t want to eat the watermelon”—she didn’t—and “I didn’t want [Vivien Leigh] to actually slap me.” (In the slap, filmed by Cukor, no direct contact is shown, but there is a mighty thud on the sound track.) She later recalled that during filming, “Everyone was wonderful. Olivia made us laugh . . . and Clark Gable was such a considerate gentleman.” McDaniel said, “When I’m working, I mind my own business and do what I’m told to do.” Was that a statement of compromise or artistic discipline, or both? McDaniel told McQueen, “It was better to earn $1,250 a week playing the part of a maid than $12.50 being a maid,” and urged her to be more cooperative.

  Blacks might have chafed privately at taking stereotype dialect direction from Myrick. But whatever the underlying prejudices of cast and crew, the making of the film appears to be an instance of melting-pot cooperation. The Atlanta native Evelyn Keyes wrote that when playing Suellen, “I never thought one way or the other about black actors sitting among us, that Hattie McDaniel even had a chair of her own, that they were earning more than I (easy to do).” In the most unaffected description of the whole production, Canutt acknowledged some friction with Everett Brown as Big Sam, in the scene where Sam saves Scarlett from the rapist Canutt played. But Canutt chalked up their trouble to the predictable tensions of a hard-nosed specialist teaching the ropes to a touchy performer. “I told him to quit behaving like a temperamental actor. Stunt work and staging fights was my business. If he’d just listen, we’d get the scene shot in such a way that we could both be proud of. Brown calmed down and, after a few more rehearsals the fight was filmed in one take with two cameras.”

  The black extras didn’t automatically get that same respect. Early on, a group of them threatened a walkout unless the production removed signs marked “White” and “Colored” that had been posted over some portable toilets on an outdoor set. The pianist and singer Lennie Bluett, an extra marching with the Negro troops through Atlanta, says he and a friend kick-started the protest. He never knew whether someone put up the signs as some kind of sick joke.

  “I got with the older guys about it, and they didn’t want to rock the boat, afraid we’d be kicked off the picture if we raised the stink. So I was the instigator—and a friend of mine, about eighteen or nineteen then—and we said, listen, we got to stick together.” They worked up the nerve to knock on Gable’s dressing-room door and asked the actor to inspect the offensive signs. “He followed me out and stepped across phone lines and cables, and we walked about twenty, thirty feet to where the toilets were.” As Bluett remembers it, Gable said, “I’ll be goddamned.” He got on the phone to Fleming, who called the prop master and told him, “If you don’t get those signs down, you won’t get your Rhett Butler.” The signs came off immediately.

  Fleming was superbly caring in his direction of children—even babies. Phillip Trent’s second scene, nearly three months after he appeared in the Twelve Oaks “war room,” featured Melanie and Ric Holt as her
now-eleven-month-old son, Beau. In the original setup, Trent, as a returning Confederate soldier, was eating on Tara’s steps with a fork and a wooden spoon. But Fleming, Trent recalled, gave the spoon to the baby to play with instead:

  We rehearsed several times without the baby and it was okay, but when the cameras were rolling . . . he started crying when he was not supposed to cry. Four times Victor tried to shoot the scene, and each time the baby cried. Victor said, “He seems to think he gets a cue to cry from the camera.” He sat down on the steps next to us, he cooed and chuckled for the baby and even had orange juice brought to him because he thought the baby might be thirsty. Never once did I see Fleming lose his temper. I saw script changes brought to him all the time. I never once saw him act unprofessional.

  “First they give me a forty-year-old Ashley Wilkes, then a British Scarlett O’Hara, and now, by God, a brown-eyed Bonnie Blue Butler!” So Fleming exclaimed in a memory related to Cammie King Conlon, who played Bonnie Blue, by her mother. “Supposedly, Selznick said if we light her properly and dress her in blue, no one will notice,” says Conlon. She had already performed in a Blondie movie. Most of her recollections come from her mother, who could curl her “stick-straight hair” and teach the young actress her lines. (Eleanore King, a journalist, married the Technicolor founder, Herbert Kalmus, in 1949.)

  Fleming was usually direct and honest with child actors, but he felt compelled to pull some strings with Cammie. When she turned “bratty” one day, as her mother said, and kept muffing her lines, he knelt down to eye level and adopted a concerned parental tone: “I have a little girl your age. That’s why I come to the studio and work, so I can take care of my little girl. And you see all these men on the set? They have little girls and little boys, too. Well, when you don’t know your lines, we can’t do our work, and we won’t be able to take care of our little boys and girls.” She never blew her dialogue again.