Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  The affair did cool, though Fleming tried to put a happy face on his and Bergman’s movie partnership. “She’s not superhuman,” he said. “She can be stubborn, but her stubbornness is based on an instinct for what makes the best picture.”

  “Except for Joan of Arc,” said Alfred Hitchcock, the man Selznick once groomed as his next Victor Fleming, Bergman “could never conceive of anything that was grand enough.” (She chalked that comment up to the pressures of making Under Capricorn.) Sympathetic and skeptical observers alike thought Bergman was torn three ways: she had overidentified with Joan, she had personal ambitions to (in Hitchcock’s words) “appear in masterpieces,” and she was also a partner in Sierra Pictures. Fleming was screening David Lean’s Great Expectations when Stallings noted “a magnificent crane shot” following the boy Pip through Miss Havisham’s mansion. “I spoke of Fleming’s great take on the carpet of Rhett Butler’s stairway which won Hattie McDaniel an Academy Award. ‘But the cost,’ Ingrid said. ‘Think of the cost!’ ” (The screening may have led to the apt casting of Lean’s Mr. Jaggers, Francis L. Sullivan, as Joan’s show-trial antagonist, Cauchon.)

  Fleming had made movies with lovers before, but never with one who knew her own force as a producer-star. It was not a dilemma a man like him could readily “talk out.” On the surface she seemed gracious and appreciative. Bergman later said,

  Vic Fleming wore himself out on the picture. He was here and there and everywhere. I loved just to watch him; he moved beautifully, he was so graceful, and he had this great warmth toward everyone, always pleasant and helpful . . . Union practices very often got on his nerves. He could never wait for the man who was to come and do it to arrive; if a plug had to be put in, he put it in himself; if something needed carrying, he carried it. They were all union jobs, but he did them himself, and got away with them, so obviously they all liked him. But it was a very tight budget we were working on, and it was difficult because there wasn’t much belief in Hollywood that the picture was going to be any good . . . Nobody thought there was any box office in a young girl saving her country, especially with no love story.

  The budget tight? Only because the ambitions were spectacular. At $4.65 million, few pictures would rival it, most notably Duel in the Sun (the final cost of that Selznick epic was $5.25 million), and this was no “Lust in the Dust.” Not much belief in Hollywood that the picture was going to be good or successful? Hedda Hopper was Fleming’s biggest fan; the life of a saint was Louella Parsons’s type of picture; and at one time or another it seemed as if every major independent producer or director in Hollywood wanted his own Joan picture, preferably with Bergman, the most popular female star. “I think the pressures got to Victor Fleming,” Bergman said. “He was so anxious to make this a great success because he knew I was in love with Joan and her story.” She left the ultimate pressure unsaid: Fleming’s love for her.

  The schedule was tight: a costume worker and machine operator strike hit Hollywood in August—one reason, along with the script problems, that the film was moved to mid-September. And the work space was cramped; the Hal Roach Studios were nothing like the quarters Fleming used to inhabit at MGM. The flu took Fleming out of commission for a week. Doncoeur observed:

  He came, wrapped in blankets, to direct the set with a fever. I admire the courage of someone who, six days a week, does not allow himself an hour of rest. Most often, he doesn’t even come to the commissary. I have seen him at noon eating a sandwich brought to him in paper, staying all alone on the sound-stage . . . In her bungalow, Bergman eats a wedge of cheese from Holland with pumpernickel bread. That’s all, with a cup of coffee. She just had a cook, a Christian Scientist who as soon as she entered the house said, “I did not come here to cook, but to accomplish my mission.” It was as worrying to their stomachs as it was to their spirits.

  No matter how great his fortitude (and hers), it was proving impossible for Fleming to manage his last romantic fling with a business and artistic partner. Never before had he been heard to say “the reins have been snatched from my hands.” Pride and fiscal responsibility wouldn’t permit him to walk away as he had on The Yearling. And Wanger had laid another weighty mantle on the director’s shoulders. Wanger always conceived of this film as his and Fleming’s counterpart to Olivier’s Henry V. Given the success of Anderson’s play, Wanger might have reasoned that its messages of idealism and compromise would hit home with postwar audiences the way Olivier’s puissant patriotism did in wartime. But Anderson, Solt, and Stallings were not churning out Shakespeare, and Henry V, though a box-office phenomenon for an import, grossed only $1 million as it traveled from town to town, first as a road-show presentation and later in general distribution. Wanger wanted the same rollout for Joan of Arc.

  Fleming genuinely adored Bergman as an actress. To Stallings he said, “Brother, she is bulletproof. There never has been another figure like her before a camera; you can shoot her at any angle, any position. It doesn’t make any difference . . . you don’t have to protect her. You can bother about the other actors on the set. But Ingrid’s like a Notre Dame quarterback. An onlooker can’t take his eyes off her!”

  Jimmy Lydon, the popular juvenile who played Pierre d’Arc, Joan’s younger brother, says the director wasn’t interested in any of the other actors. He offers a snapshot of Fleming at his weakest or most distracted. “He would approach a scene like this,” says Lydon.

  “Okay, we’re in the French farmhouse (or whatever), scene 27 (or whatever). You guys know this scene? Kick it around while I go talk to Joe [Valentine, the cinematographer].” He would go off for forty-five minutes or an hour with Joe while the cast would rehearse and stage the scene. Then he’d say two or three things—“It stinks,” or “Kick it around again,” or “That’s fine.” And he’d say, “Joe, put the camera there,” and that was it. Actors need guidance or encouragement; you’ve got to suggest, cajole, or pat them on the head to get them up to doing what they want to do . . . Mr. Fleming didn’t know anything about that. He depended on the marvelous people he hired. Maybe 90 percent of the time he was not far wrong. But in my experience, he never told an actor anything. We were working in cold soundstages in winter, for five or six weeks—very difficult conditions. We were all taken with Mr. Fleming’s background, but I was terribly surprised at this man who seemed to have only camera setups and visuals to attend to, and there’s a lot more to making a motion picture than that.

  Lydon’s one scene was a travesty of exposition, establishing the viciousness of pro-English Burgundians and introducing Joan’s uncle, Durand Laxart (Roman Bohnen), as her means of reaching de Baudricourt, the governor of Vaucouleurs (George Coulouris). Fleming remembered Rand Brooks from Gone With the Wind and cast him as Joan’s older brother, Jean. As Brooks said, “You couldn’t even see me.” Still, he loved Fleming:

  I’ll never forget this; we walked off the set the day we finished shooting, and he says, “I’ve given you all these goddamned little parts, next time we’ll give you a real good one.” Of course for Vic, there would be no next time. I always thought actors loved him. 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. A lot of actor-directors get into the part and have actors mimic them; that wasn’t Vic’s way.

  But on Joan of Arc, only the most heroic scenes, or the intimate ones with Ingrid, got Fleming’s blood running. Even the admiring Doncoeur complained about the coronation of Charles VII: “Very cold, and without spirit, above all, without prayers.”

  Fleming’s on-set behavior never suggested an affair with Bergman. “We were all in love with Ingrid as a professional and as a sweet and wonderful lady,” Lydon says. “But I don’t think he treated her differently than anyone else. The quality of this woman! Working at the Hal Roach Studios under difficult conditions, getting in and out of this ugly fake armor; one day she came in later, at nine, and apologized to Fleming and the cast and crew, saying, ‘I have no excuse. I’m terribly sorry
. The alarm went off and I went back and I am terribly sorry for holding up the company.’ And Fleming just said, ‘Let’s go to work.’ ”

  Off the set, though, Fleming was effusive: “She’s no bovine girl with cow eyes,” he told the Saturday Evening Post. “She’s got more warmth than anyone I know. She has temperament, but she controls her temperament. She’s never really happy when she’s not working. All her other pleasures are secondary to that. I’ve never known anyone so buoyant over a good scene or a good bit. Nor have I ever seen any human being suffer more over a bad picture. When she is in a bad picture, her fits of depression amount to actual physical nausea.”

  The character actor and acting teacher Jeff Corey, who played Joan’s guard during her imprisonment and inquisition, thought that Fleming didn’t need discussions with actors and that he handled his star lovingly and gracefully. The historical adviser Bernheim emphasized to Bergman the sewer-like foulness of Joan’s cell, and she passed the knowledge along to Corey. “Fleming was happy with what I did,” Corey said. “I played the guard as a man who was hurt, who was trying to say to her, ‘I care about you,’—who had a crush on her, in spite of her smelling so badly.” There is a sensitive shot of Corey and Bergman through the cell grate, the guard staring dreamily at Joan before he moves on her and she responds aghast.

  That’s what Corey remembered when he said,

  It was quite wonderful in one particular scene the way [Fleming] talked to Ingrid, when she acquiesced to the inquisition and had to realize the saints were turned against her. In the scene, she’s looking through the bars of her cell . . . Victor came close to her and said, “Ingrid, you’ve turned your back [on the saints], and they’re not listening to you, and you break down,” and he gently broke an ammonia capsule and swept it under her nose, and the medicinal tears merged with the real tears, and he very quietly turned to the crew and said, “Action.”

  Corey would soon become a victim of the blacklist, and the repercussions of the Motion Picture Alliance reverberated throughout the set. Several other left-leaning actors performed in Joan of Arc, including the Group Theatre mainstay Roman Bohnen, Selena Royle (who, off the set, made a speech attacking HUAC while the film was being shot), and Kate Drain Lawson, the wife of the communist screenwriter and MPA opponent John Howard Lawson. Doncoeur noted that Wanger was part of a group of twenty-five producers and stars (including Charles Boyer) who purchased radio time to protest the witch hunt, invoking the First Amendment and demanding that the government and patriotic groups accuse specific people openly and halt their mass indictment of the industry as a whole.

  Despite those dark clouds, Corey made Joan of Arc sound like an actor’s holiday: “Half my Hollywood friends—Aubrey Mather, Alan Napier, Herb Rudley, Shepperd Strudwick—all wonderful friends and very good actors I’d worked with onstage and in films, all of us enjoyed being in this all-star cast.” None of them, according to Corey, knew of Fleming and Bergman’s romantic entanglement.

  Unfortunately, little of their joy infused the action; Ferrer’s proudly shallow Dauphin was the most amusing sideshow. (George Coulouris Jr. said that George senior, who played the governor of Vaucouleurs, “had a higher opinion of Ferrer” than of Bergman.) In the movie’s 146 minutes, there was room for only one character with any breadth—Joan—and her leading man was God. “If Ingrid hadn’t insisted on taking out all human touches and making Joan a plaster saint, the thing might have had some quality,” Maxwell Anderson complained to John Mason Brown after Brown panned the film in the Saturday Review. (“England’s Harry was more fortunate in his ghostwriter,” Brown noted.) “She wrecked that one,” Anderson insisted, disavowing the film’s pedestrian demotic language. “She had the power to wreck it and she did. Moreover, she’s completely unscrupulous. She doesn’t keep her word and she has no respect for a writer’s work.”

  Each time Fleming stages some juicy bit of traditional Joan legendry, the movie comes momentarily to life: when Joan arrives at the Dauphin’s court in Chinon, his poet-jester (Vincent Donahue) puts an impostor on the Dauphin’s throne in order to addle and expose her and amuse the court. It’s one of the few scenes in which Bergman seems genuine—betrayed and confused—and Fleming’s camera follows her with tensile grace as she picks her way through the mingled noblemen to the true Dauphin. But, Ferrer aside, the supporting performances are too arch, especially Donahue and Gene Lockhart as the mercenary counselor Georges de la Trémouille. Also, John Emery as Joan’s supporter Jean, Duke d’Alençon, the Dauphin’s cousin, is woefully miscast: a distinguished gentleman of a certain age rather than a dashing young warrior.

  Fleming seized on one detail from the trial to provide some fleeting humorous counterpoint. Historically, Cauchon asked Joan whether her saints had hair, a question that Anderson put in the mouth of another august questioner and framed to mock the pseudo-dignity of Cauchon’s court. (Although for fifteenth-century Catholics, it was a reasonable query: they wanted to know just what emanations of faith would look like in the flesh.) Fleming, however, had the question posed by yet another cleric, Jean de la Fontaine, played by Corey’s friend Aubrey Mather (the police inspector in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Mather was a British character actor with a slick bald pate. When he asks the question about hair, it contains a comic element of yearning.

  Though Fleming could choreograph a rousing vignette of Frenchmen rising to Joan’s cause, the scenes of her with her closest military supporters are leaden when they should be steely. Kevin McCarthy had played Dunois, the Bastard of Orléans, onstage; to this day he hasn’t seen the film. When I told him Leif Erickson got his part, he laughed and said, “That’s not bad.” But Erickson lacks personality in the role, and you have to concentrate even to notice Hurd Hatfield as Joan’s chaplain. John Ireland offers little more than a few sardonic or regretful glances as Jean de la Boussac, and Ward Bond does his standard bumptious military-man turn as the profane La Hire.

  It would have taken considerable conviction and a less love-struck director to elicit performances that could have survived the soldiers’ discus-shaped hairpieces and their historically correct, pictorially clumsy helmets, whose uplifted visors look deadlier than any riposte Anderson and Solt give to the men. These actors resort to masculine heartiness the way most of the trial’s ecclesiastics succumb to bitchery. “That fell apart before it even started,” sneered Ireland. “I was paid $15,000 a day and would have done it for $1,000. I think all I did was raise my mask and say something once.”

  Although the rap on the film is that Fleming filled it with pageantry and battle scenes, there’s only one war sequence, depicting Joan’s victory at the Battle of Orléans. Fleming had assigned Stallings to work on it with the montage master and second-unit director Slavko Vorkapich, who, after Fleming’s death, took full credit, except for the intercut scenes of Joan being wounded and then rallying her troops. “Fleming wanted to direct those, too,” said Vorkapich, “so I was there to suggest how it would fit into the rest of my battle.” He criticized Fleming as well as Bergman for the film’s conventionality and reverence. “Fleming wanted to make her sweet and all that. She was very tough; I read that in some French history. Preparing the battles, I read about her. She knew about military things and so on. She even swore.” Vorkapich blamed Fleming for making “a virginal Holy Mary out of her. He was not up to the thing.”

  The man who shot Vorkapich’s segments disagreed: Winton C. Hoch, one of Hollywood’s great cinematographers, then at the start of his career. Hoch got his first big break on Joan of Arc and ended up sharing a best cinematography Oscar for it with the top-billed Joseph Valentine and the Technicolor expert William V. Skall.

  I started on second-unit work on Joan of Arc, and then they had all this battle stuff on the stage and Slavko Vorkapich was directing that. When I met him, he had sketches. He was a pretty good artist himself. He had some sketches of what he wanted to get on the camera. He was going to show Victor Fleming the sketches, and I gulped when I saw them. I said, “V
orky, you’re not going to get these in the camera. You’ve cheated on perspective. Before you show them to Fleming, let’s get a still camera and go out on the set and demonstrate exactly what we can get.” Which we did, and then he revised his sketches, so we didn’t promise Fleming something we couldn’t deliver, which I thought was quite important.

  Fleming called Hoch back to work on the first unit and gave the cinematographer his usual practical-joke hazing. Fleming demanded Hoch pull off “a dolly shot that went through the rafters of the church to a close-up of Joan” without “winging the (boom) tracks,” that is, “when the camera has gotten into a certain position you smooth the tracks back into position so you can keep going.” When Hoch protested, Vic walked away as if he didn’t hear him. Of course, Hoch told the head grip, “Wing it back.” (It would become the film’s elegant opening shot.) Hoch grew to appreciate Fleming’s showmanship.

  Fleming tested me there. But after that he was very pleasant to work with . . . He would drop me a cue once in a while. For instance, we had one scene when Joan was praying, and as she lifted up her face, of course, a key light here is deadly. But when your face is down, you have to have a key light. So he said when he gave me the setup, he said, “If I were you I’d hang a light over her head and bring it on as she lifts her face up.” In those days that was a no-no. You never put a light on a dimmer. But those no-no’s all have to be taken with a grain of salt. I put both key lights on a dimmer, so as she raised her head one light faded out and the other light came in. Now there was a color temperature change, no doubt about it. But in the movement and the spirit of the scene you didn’t mind or notice, you accepted it. It’s a dramatic scene; it’s not a technical thing. It’s a dramatic moment. There’s drama and entertainment you’re putting onto this technology. This is what so many people tend to forget.