Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Nonetheless, for the Production Code chief, Joseph Breen, the tag scene was unacceptable because in effect “Dorinda commits suicide.” (It wasn’t until early 1944 that Japanese fliers began their kamikaze suicide missions.) What Breen saw as the self-destructive amorality of Dorinda’s decision made him suggest an alteration: Dorinda would “take on a dangerous job that might result in disaster for Ted, then loses her life in the attempt.” After a subsequent reading, Breen extended his proposal to the specific detail of Japanese anti-aircraft fire shooting her down. “The point,” he wrote, “is to get away from the definite suggestion that she deliberately goes out in a heroic way to commit suicide.” It wasn’t a big problem: the ack-ack fire was already in the script. But this ending ultimately took a ninety-degree turn that pleased audiences—if not critics or the film’s creators.

  In the early 1940s, Irene Dunne was at the midpoint—and apex—of her triplicate career as a musical star, a comedienne, and the dramatic center of many a prestige studio picture. She rarely gave a better serious performance than she did as Dorinda. Underneath the studio makeup, she’s just a workingwoman having hard times in love and war; when Pete wins her over after a spat by presenting her with a glamourous dress, her exclamation, “Girl clothes!” takes her from moodiness to delight in seconds. Her character gets torn up in the action, and Dunne doesn’t shy away from the ecstasy or ravages of true love. Even more than Tracy’s peerless tough-tender turn, Dunne’s rippling presence grounds the film in reality. Her evocation of a lover who loses her moorings in mourning had its roots in the volatility of the set.

  “I suppose the film that I thought was most difficult was A Guy Named Joe,” Dunne recalled thirty-five years later. In February 1943, she hated the midwinter dreariness that periodically settles on Los Angeles. She’d drive herself to work in early-morning darkness and pouring rain. There she’d come up against the challenges of a shifting crew (there were two top cameramen, George Folsey and Karl Freund, and, Dunne remembered, multiple makeup people) as well as a director surprisingly prone to ailments and a star intent on “calling the shots.” Dunne, who had hero-worshipped Tracy before she went to work with him, thought her co-star “got the idea that I thought he wasn’t a hero anymore. Which was not true. But he had this big mental thing, and there was even talk of taking me off the film.”

  “This big mental thing” had a history she never knew about. While at Columbia, Everett Riskin, in 1938, had produced the exquisite Holiday for Cukor and Katharine Hepburn. He later tried to cast Hepburn in another picture, and she’d turned him down “rather nastily” (says his son Ralph). So Riskin wasn’t about to cave in when Tracy demanded Hepburn be cast as Dorinda. According to Ralph Riskin, “Dad said, ‘Screw you, Spence,’ so Tracy was pissed off from the beginning, and Mr. Mayer was pretty tough to go through with it. There was always trouble on the set. It was pretty tough when they had to play a love scene in front of a fireplace.”

  Ralph says Fleming would call his father whenever Tracy acted up. “He’s doing it again,” Vic would say. “You’ve got to come down to the set.” On the jungle site with the field headquarters and the P-38 parked in the background, Fleming announced they’d “take ten,” and Riskin put his arm around Tracy and walked him behind the backdrop. “As soon as they were out of sight, my father grabbed him by the lapels and backed him against the soft, padded wall of the soundstage. Then he said, ‘Make her cry one more time and I’ll beat the shit out of you.’ My father and his brother [the screenwriter Robert Riskin, co-inventor of the wised-up whimsicality that became known as the Frank Capra touch] were tough guys from the Lower East Side. They knew how to take care of themselves.”

  Convinced that whenever she and Tracy worked closely together things were going to get uncomfortable (one story accuses him of crude sexual come-ons), Dunne made the ultimate threat: she’d break the story to Louella Parsons. She also decided she would be performing at her peak: when Mayer reviewed the rushes, he’d see her at “my best—my best, my best, my very best.” She made the right decision. When Mayer viewed an assemblage in early March, about five weeks into shooting, he came out saying, “If we’re going to replace anybody, let’s replace Tracy.” It sealed Dunne’s respect for Mayer. “And,” said Dunne, “we ironed everything out, Tracy and I.”

  It was a gutsy move for Mayer, a smart one for both stars. Despite the unfair vilification of his Jekyll and Hyde, Tracy was the male actor on the MGM lot. He certainly was for Barry Nelson. “I used to go to the studio even when I wasn’t needed just to see what he would do with certain lines,” said Nelson. Tracy taught Nelson the importance of what Tracy called “the versatility of thought”—assuming a character’s internal life and using it to convey feeling and attitude, rather than relying on “makeup or a special look.”

  Fleming knew what an artist he had in Tracy. “Spencer never acts,” he told a reporter while making Test Pilot. “He’s smart; he understands what he’s supposed to be and while playing a scene he is that person.” Fleming illustrated what he meant with a Test Pilot scene “in which he was supposed to falter. We made it—and it was so real that I thought he had forgotten his lines. It couldn’t have been more natural—and it was a real performance for that very reason.”

  At quitting time one night, Fleming approached the young actor Don DeFore, who played one of ghostly Pete’s unknowing students of flying. “I looked at the schedule and you’re not going to work until tomorrow afternoon,” Fleming said, “but I want you here at nine o’clock. I want you to watch something that you’ll remember.” The event was Tracy filming a demanding monologue that Pete recites while Dorinda, weeping, holds his picture and ponders her feelings about her new fiancé, Ted, and the dead flier whose memory she can’t shake. Tracy had to recite a soliloquy that both sums up the selflessness of an unsung hero’s life and—in Fleming’s cut, anyway—compels Dorinda to reunite with her great love. The result was a lesson in naturalistic acting and wise, appreciative directing.

  Fleming hadn’t lost the taste for spontaneous invention he’d carried with him from the silent days, even after he fell in love with studio work and storyboarding. Trumbo had written, in a page and a half, a masterly compendium of bittersweet romantic kitsch: “I wish I told you how cute your nose is—the way it goes up all of a sudden at the end . . . how good the smell of your hair is . . . the way your eyes shine when you laugh . . . and I never thought for a minute to tell you how your voice sounds—like music, kind of . . . and how you fit into my arms . . . just as if you were made to fit in there.” Tracy put over its melancholy essence and made it soar by mussing up the diction and collapsing some of the sentences and losing the bit about music, which would have jarred with Pete’s personality. He sped it up and savored it (“just as if you were made to fit in there” became the quicker, more natural “just as though you belong there”). His physical performance, caught mostly in a tight two-shot, with Pete standing in profile as Dorinda sits at her desk, simmered with pent-up passion. When Pete talks about the smell of Dorinda’s hair, Tracy emphasized the point with the slightest downward movement of his head. He did all this in one take.

  For DeFore, it was an inspiration. “And I thank Vic Fleming for that,” he said, “because it was a great, great study in what to do in front of the camera, and what to do personally about yourself, and to know what you’re going to do. Tracy was the epitome of knowing the technique of motion pictures.” The scene gains immeasurably from Dunne’s own understated and movingly tremulous performance, which, given her history with Tracy, was a triumph of commitment over chemistry. Indeed, Tracy remained a truculent presence on the picture. Trumbo recalled, during rushes of a Pete-Dorinda love scene, “a voice rumbled back from the darkness of the front row: ‘Look at that pair of overage destroyers!’ It was, of course, the incomparable Tracy in a moment of discontent.”

  That soliloquy ends with Pete saying, “Goodbye, Dorinda. We’d have made a great pair.” Then Van Johnson’s Ted walks in. He
and Pete know something Dorinda doesn’t: Ted is prepared to go on that suicide mission to bomb a Japanese ammo dump. So it’s not insensitive, merely tragically ironic, that she picks this moment to tell Ted how she really feels: that Pete will always be her one and only. What she had with Pete was “real love—like food and drink and air and water!”—and she’d only be able to give Ted “a cheap imitation.”

  As Ted, Johnson glances at his watch and says, “I wish I could stay and talk with you” and walks out to a certain death. As himself, Johnson left the set in February and would not finish that scene until November. By then, he’d acquired scars, and a steel plate in his head, from a near-fatal motorcycle crash.

  Johnson had been a real find for the studio. Billy Grady plucked him from the chorus of Broadway’s Pal Joey when the major stars were off at war. June Caldwell, a secretary for the director W. S. Van Dyke and a producer actually named Orville Dull, remembered the first time she saw him on the lot. “He was a big guy sitting with his boots stuck out, waiting for a drama lesson. I had to step over him to deliver mail. And he was beautiful! I’d never seen a guy like him. He was big and he was nice-looking and friendly, with sandy-blond hair, and just anybody would turn around to take a look at him.” His best showing before A Guy Named Joe was a brief role in The Human Comedy; Joe was going to be Johnson’s breakthrough.

  But on March 30, en route to a screening of the Tracy-Hepburn drama Keeper of the Flame, Johnson had a serious accident. Everett Riskin always told Ralph it was a motorcycle, not a car, accident, and that Johnson’s biker friend Keenan Wynn and his wife Evie covered it up because he’d promised not to ride bikes during shooting. Irene Dunne said it was a motorcycle crash, too. Johnson suffered a fractured skull. Glass cut across his face and neck. The back of his head was skinned. Bone fragments bit into his brain. Miraculously, he stayed conscious.

  “Van was lucky,” says his daughter, Schuyler, because the spill “just crushed the top of his head and left his face relatively unscathed.” When the Los Angeles ambulance came, Johnson discovered that Culver City, where the accident occurred, was just outside its jurisdiction. Johnson remembered, “I had to crawl across the road before they’d take me to the hospital.” “Van would probably have served overseas if not for that accident,” says Schuyler, who adds, “Evie [Schuyler’s mother] said he was different afterward, a personality change.”

  Doctors ordered him off the road, for years he suffered incapacitating headaches, and he became a more remote character; Schuyler says what his “cold-fish” father started, “the accident finished.” But Evie grew closer to Van after the accident. She divorced Wynn and married Johnson in 1947 at the behest of Mayer, who wanted to quash rumors of Johnson’s homosexuality. Schuyler says Evie never wanted to see Keeper of the Flame for the rest of her life.

  From the start, Johnson thought he hadn’t impressed Fleming. He told Photoplay, “They had already tested so many guys so much more important than I and when Vic Fleming, the director, introduced me to Irene I knew just how interested he was when he said, ‘Miss Dunne, this is Mr. Van Warren.’ ” But Fleming became Johnson’s hero in the aftermath of the accident. In Hedda Hopper’s adoring account, Fleming held an oxygen mask over Van’s face at the request of a nurse, then waited to the end of an emergency operation. Victor Fleming “has more heart than most folks give him credit for,” she wrote. A 1947 bobby-soxer-level biography of Johnson put Fleming “at the door of the doctors’ dressing room,” telling Van’s surgeon that he’s staying because “when a man goes through a door like that one, I think he’d like to know there’s someone standing on the other side, waiting for him.” (When the surgeon explains that Johnson is unconscious, Fleming says, “I understand that, but maybe he knows, all the same.”) Beyond the hospital doors, Tracy and/or Dunne became Johnson’s champion, refusing to continue the picture if Mayer thought of replacing him.

  The day after the accident, MGM asked the AAF to extend Major Edward Hillary’s term as the film’s technical adviser. On April 4, the studio was able to announce that the completion of the movie would be postponed “as long as possible” for the young star’s recuperation. Jimmie Fidler told his readers on April 9 that three weeks would be added to the shooting schedule; Louella Parsons declared on April 23 that Johnson would definitely return. In May, Johnson told reporters he’d be back sometime in June.

  Ralph Riskin says it wasn’t easy for his father and Fleming to rejigger the shooting schedule to fit Johnson’s recovery, but a lot of variables worked in Johnson’s favor. Second units went to work on April 7 to capture the aerial action shots. One unit spent six months hopscotching with heavy cameras from Columbia Army Air Base in South Carolina to Kelly Field in San Antonio and Drew and MacDill fields in Tampa, Florida. Another unit shot doubles for Tracy and Nelson at Luke Field in Arizona. Even with full military cooperation, it was difficult to rely on aircraft being available during wartime. The weather intervened, too, including a score of rainy days in Tampa in July. And then there was what Mannix called Fleming’s “exacting” nature. Rather than rely on canned sound effects from the War Department, Fleming wanted MGM sound teams to record planes “right from fields wherever such planes are based, or might be moving in and out.” (Fleming got his original sound effects, thanks to his old friend the pilot Paul Mantz.)

  Johnson returned to Joe in late June—but not before MGM diplomatically judged his camera readiness by handing him a walk-on in Madame Curie. “They wanted to see how the scar would photograph,” Johnson said. He passed the test with the help of makeup and diffused lighting. And he ended up appearing with Dunne in two movies simultaneously, Joe in the afternoon and Clarence Brown’s Mrs. Miniver–esque The White Cliffs of Dover in the morning. “Which one am I in now?” Dunne would ask Johnson before each take. On September 19 the New York Times reported that Joe had been prolonged a total of thirteen weeks, attributing the delays to Johnson’s accident, the difficulty of finding and shooting planes, and Dunne’s assignment to The White Cliffs of Dover—which actually might have been shrewd double scheduling on MGM’s part.

  Everett Riskin’s brother Robert spent the war in the overseas branch of America’s propaganda arm, the Office of War Information. A small part of the OWI, the Bureau of Motion Pictures, reviewed Hollywood movies from every studio except (for the most part) Paramount between 1942 and 1945. The BMP’s primary mission was to advise filmmakers on how to report and maintain the war effort. It also counseled them on how to present an image of America consistent with the Four Freedoms at the center of FDR’s New Deal—freedom of speech and freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear. The BMP never liked the ending of A Guy Named Joe. The chief of its review and analysis section, Dorothy B. Jones, complained about it even before the Production Code did. Apparently it was all right to promulgate racist stereotypes in a Warner Bros. cartoon like Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips, but having Dunne commit suicide by ammo dump would sully America’s wartime goals.

  It may sound astonishing today that a government agency, determining that an Irene Dunne movie would damage civilian morale, brought its full force to bear on changing the film’s ending. Yet that is exactly what occurred. Here’s the scene as Fleming originally filmed it that September:

  The script shows Dorinda thrusting the bomber’s control stick as Pete shouts, “Look, Drinda, hear me. You always wanted us to fly together—remember? Well, we’re flying together now, Drinda! I’m right here—I’m with you—and you’ve got to let me through—you’ve got to hear me!” Dorinda puts the bomber into a dive over the ammunition dump.

  INTERIOR PLANE—CLOSE SHOT—PETE AND DORINDA

  PETE: Pull out, Dorinda! You’ll never make it! Pull out and let the Army do this job!

  Dorinda seems to hesitate, but quickly overcomes the impulse and continues on her course.

  PETE (shouting): Dorinda! Pull out!

  FULL SHOT—SKY AND SEA AND CLOUDS AND ISLAND

  From the island come puffs of anti-a
ircraft shells, aimed at the rapidly diving plane.

  INTERIOR PLANE—CLOSE SHOT—DORINDA AND PETE Through the front window, we can see the sickening approach of the cove. The ship shudders and bounces from AA shells exploding around it, illuminating the cabin weirdly.

  PETE (despairingly): Back up on the stick, Dorinda. Nose up, girl. Up—nose up—up—up—UP.

  CAMERA moves through smoke to:

  EXTERIOR ISLAND—NIGHT—FULL SHOT

  As the plane plummets into a mass of buildings, going sideways just enough to slip under an enormous craggy ledge which protects the dump from ordinary bombing. The SCREEN is completely enveloped in smoke.

  PETE’S voice (over scene): Up, Dorinda—up.

  CLOSE SHOT—FIGURE

  Standing as if on a little eminence. The smoke is so thick that the figure can’t be made out. The scene lights up gradually to reveal Pete. He is looking down, calling.

  PETE: Up, Dorinda . . . up . . .

  The scene becomes suffused with light. The smoke changes into sunlit mist. Up the brow of the incline we see Dorinda walking—first her head, then shoulders, then waist—with Pete beckoning her up.