Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Joan of Arc led directly to Hoch’s celebrated partnership with Ford on 3 Godfathers and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (which won him a second Oscar).

  Fleming’s direction of Bergman, though, was more pictorial than dramatic. It would be bad enough if she were merely playing to an unseen God all the time; she’s also playing to theatrical posterity. Bergman interprets Joan with such an actorish notion of single-minded purity that her idealism seems like narcissism. The battle sequence clicks not just because of Vorkapich’s dynamic diagonals and skewed angles but also because it tests Joan’s certainty in the most direct way. Again, fleetingly, the strength of the material saves the filmmakers. The script follows the legend of Joan ordering Sir William Glasdale (Dennis Hoey) to abandon his bastille and return to England, because if he does not, she says, she will “make such a hahay among you that it will be eternally remembered.” She demands surrender for their sake. Glasdale calls her a harlot. The conquest begins with an impressive display of spears and arrows and siege machines but reaches its emotional apex when Joan takes an arrow in her shoulder and then rallies her troops. She comes face-to-face with Glasdale, who refuses to surrender and meets a fiery end on a collapsing drawbridge.

  Otherwise, the audience yearns for any emotional intensity or spontaneity. Young Pia Lindström provides a glimpse of it—she’s a beautiful blond child waving and smiling at Joan and urging her to save herself when she momentarily abjures her visions in hopes of entering a church prison and getting female guards and chapel privileges. “I was paid a hundred dollars and was paid in pennies, which I thought was funny,” says Lindström. “Of course I would see [Fleming]. I would sit on the camera boom with him, play with the other children on the set. He was a very handsome man, a very elegant and rather imposing figure. Of course, a director has a great psychic connection with his actress. I guess I was vulnerable to my director, too!” Despite her identification with her betrayed father, she laughs at the memory. “Gentle, I would call him. I don’t remember meeting Maxwell Anderson. He probably wasn’t as good-looking as Victor Fleming!”

  Columnists fanned advance publicity with their accounts of the celluloid Joan’s conflagration, which Fleming started filming shortly after sunrise on a chilly mid-December day in 1947, on the RKO medieval set that famously hosted the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Fleming took a microphone and intoned, “This is May 30, 1431, and Joan of Arc is going to be burned. You are excited.” Among the 350 extras calling for Joan to burn was a future president of Disneyland, Jack Lindquist. The twenty-one-year-old son of an RKO purchasing agent had played bit parts for the past five years. “I was just part of the rabble coming out for the burning,” he says. “I remember being reminded that [we didn’t have] the luxury to put that event in perspective. We were just a bunch of peasants watching a woman burn at the stake . . . Like any other film, it was an all-day thing, but in spurts and bits.” All morning he and the rest of the extras jeered at Joan as a cart carried her in chains to her fate, and punctuated the reading of her death sentence with howls and wails. A double replaced Bergman as Joan’s executioners lit the tinder, then a dummy replaced her double on the stake as the kerosene-fed flames licked the sky.

  A week later the home front heated up. A Cartier gold necklace with gold dragons that Fleming had ordered for Bergman came to Moraga Drive by mistake. “Daddy had never bought my mother much of anything jewelry-wise,” Sally remembers. “Mother came across it in a closet we used to keep gift boxes in,” Victoria recalls. “Mother tore up the whole house after that, looking for whatever.” It may well have been a lover’s gift, or merely a token of friendly reconciliation. For this was also the time when the columnist Jimmie Fidler was asking, “Wotzis about a red-hot feud between Ingrid Bergman and Victor Fleming?” The necklace never reached Ingrid’s neck; it was disposed of in the trash at the Bowmans’ house in Santa Monica.

  When principal photography ended on December 18, the movie entered the phase when expectations remain out of this world and the various participants divide their concentration between postproduction and launching their next project. Even the title was haggled over. Despite Anderson’s objections that it would make the film seem like a schoolbook assignment (exactly what it turned out to be), Sierra officially bought the title Joan of Arc from Selznick for $25,000 (to be paid after the negative cost was recouped). In doing so, RKO and Sierra followed their own poll and ignored an independent poll that showed the title would be less immediately popular for a Bergman vehicle than Joan or Joan of Lorraine.

  More important, there were test screenings. Wanger couched the results in compliments. A memo from early April 1948 coos that Joan of Arc is “a picture that is way off the beaten track . . . Not a formula picture of the Hollywood type . . . It cannot be cut down or speeded up like ‘Northside 777’ or a snappy DeMille spectacle.” He says that in two screenings for “regular film audiences,” in Santa Barbara and Phoenix, “both audiences were completely enchanted and mesmerized and sat from beginning to end.” He hailed “the great artistic quality of the picture from the standpoint of color and composition.” But he did feel compelled “to repeat that I think there are certain parts of the picture that could be vastly improved.” In the family breakfast scene, “the arrival of the Uncle is one of coming for a week-end,” and the discussion of France resembled an American clan’s “afternoon discussion of a Kaltenborn broadcast.” (The producer is dead right.) He complained about intrusive Americanisms, in the scenes both at Vaucouleurs and in the military camp, and reactions so broad in the battle scenes that they bordered on inadvertent comedy. Wanger, though, did appear to be sincere when he said these were all problems that could be fixed. “Can you imagine if Henry V had been previewed at Santa Barbara and Phoenix, and then turned over to the professionals in Hollywood, what they would have done to Mr. Shakespeare’s script and picture!”

  Delaying personal business, as he always had, until the end of filming, Fleming addressed the emotional aftermath of the Bergman affair only after he completed all retakes in April 1948. The following month he had his lawyer draft a separation agreement. Although it indicated, in the standard legal language, that Fleming and Lu had been living apart, according to both daughters neither one of them had moved out. Fleming settled on paying $1,000 a month in alimony and an additional 20 percent of all gross income he might receive apart from investments. He agreed to buy a house for Lu and the children if it didn’t cost more than $50,000, and (probably in expectation of spectacular profits from Joan of Arc) to create a $100,000 trust fund for Lu, so long as she remained unmarried. Fleming was to keep more than $205,000 in cash, his commercial properties in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, $20,000 in bonds, Knapp Island, what remained of his Meadowlark Ranch property, and all his stock in Sierra Pictures.

  The agreement was never signed and divorce papers never filed. That might have been the couple’s last moment of panic in the Bergman era. By summer, both Victoria and Sally agree, they had reconciled. Working with Bergman this time—and viewing the results of their joint creative effort—may have disillusioned Fleming.

  He certainly homed in on the finishing touches to Joan of Arc as if his career were at stake. In June, he was making sure his top editor, Frank Sullivan, would also supervise the dubbing. He rode herd on John Fulton’s special effects and enlisted William Cameron Menzies to create some of the opening art shots and the credit backgrounds clearly patterned after those of Gone With the Wind. Fleming compressed the introduction Solt and Anderson wrote and then sent it back for two rewrites at different lengths, forty-five seconds and a minute. Very much the director in command, he ordered Wanger to ditch the narrator, who “sounds like a radio newscaster,” and strive to find “a fine stage voice such as that of Mr. Joseph Cotten.” They settled on additional work for Shepperd Strudwick.

  Wanger was declaring to the press that Joan of Arc would take in $20 million and had RKO convinced of its assured success, too. Fleming appeared to be riding high
in the epic mode. So the producer Frank Ross considered it a coup to attach Fleming to his adaptation of Lloyd C. Douglas’s The Robe. Ross had prepared a script by Ernest Vajda and Albert Maltz; Fleming brought in his own team—none other than Anderson and Solt. Fleming cast Gregory Peck as Marcellus Gallio, the Roman tribune who supervises the Crucifixion. He wins Christ’s robe as a gambling prize and gives it up to his Greek slave, Demetrius, only to accept Jesus as his savior and the robe as a divine relic with healing powers. In June, Ross announced filming would start late in 1948 or early in 1949, possibly in Italy.

  Anderson rented a beach house in Santa Monica, but did most of his writing at Fleming’s remodeled guest house, commuting with a car the director lent him. Even more than Mahin’s testimony, Anderson’s diary provides the best evidence for Fleming as a director who cared about script and went back to literary sources. Anderson and Solt started work on June 7, and on June 8 they and Ross and Fleming decided to break down the picture into five sequences. Just three days later, the entire picture was laid out. On June 12, Fleming came by with a Bible and a copy of George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. They spent the afternoon reading the New Testament accounts of the Crucifixion and the preface to Shaw’s play.

  At the same time he was screenwriting The Robe, Anderson was preparing for rehearsals of his new play, Anne of the Thousand Days, for a New York opening that fall. Anderson gave Fleming a copy of Anne and recorded that the director was “very enthusiastic,” adding, “for him.” He hoped Fleming would direct the film version right after The Robe. Neither happened. The RKO chief, Howard Hughes, ended up dumping The Robe and concentrating on Fleming’s old Paramount colleague Josef von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot, featuring supersonic fore-and-aft cleavage from aerodynamic jets and a voluptuous, jump-suited Janet Leigh as a Soviet pilot. Anne of the Thousand Days wasn’t made until 1969 with Richard Burton, Geneviève Bujold, and a revamped script. But Fleming got something out of Anderson’s work on The Robe. While the writer was in town, he persuaded him to contrive a new opening speech for Joan of Arc. And if he had lived to see the producer Ross turn The Robe around and land it at 20th Century Fox, the director might have mastered one more movie milestone. The Robe became the first movie in CinemaScope, the widescreen process designed to draw 1950s audiences into theaters and away from their TV screens—and for a while the sole competitor for Gone With the Wind’s box-office crown.

  When Hesper Anderson turned fourteen on August 2, Fleming presented her with two bottles of wine “for her hope chest.” The gift touched her deeply. Maxwell Anderson noted, “On the way home she said, ‘That was about the most moving thing anybody ever did for me. He must have learned a lot about girls. I felt like just sitting there and crying.’ ” But her and her father’s feelings for Vic didn’t cushion their reactions to Joan of Arc when they saw it the following week, along with Mab, Marion Hargrove, and Andrew Solt. Anderson kept his feelings private, not even recording them in his diary. In her memoir, South Mountain Road, Hesper recalled it as a terrible, depressing afternoon, the silence in the screening room broken only by Hargrove’s crack, “It just goes to show, a woman’s place is over a hot stove.”

  Fleming sounded off to Mahin: “I don’t know what’s wrong . . . Everything is so beautiful. Ingrid is just so marvelous. I don’t know what’s wrong.” Graham Lee Mahin said his dad responded, “Well, Victor, it’s the first picture she ever directed.”

  Men of Fleming’s generation would sneer at a phrase like “midlife crisis.” But the deep humiliation of Joan of Arc aged Fleming beyond the virile grand-old-man status he’d enjoyed for more than a decade. Bergman’s high-toned ardor and sense of her own power disarmed him and damaged the movie. And their affair had thrown a wrench into the family life that he’d managed for a decade to keep out of scandal or Hollywood foolery. Alain Bernheim, the brother of Michel, thought Fleming a proper family man who seemed “very Catholic” to him. When Bernheim found out about Fleming’s romantic involvement with Ingrid, he thought it “didn’t mesh” with the rest of what he knew about him.

  Bergman wasn’t the tragicomic figure that Bow was—someone Vic could look back on with unself-conscious fondness. He was passionate about both of them, but with Bergman he had what Ward Bond in A Guy Named Joe called that “slow poison” kind of love. When it passed through his system, could it have strengthened him as a man and an artist? Fleming had been developing a reflective strand to his movie-making, similar at his best to William Wyler’s. Just as his friend Hawks had turned Hemingway’s then-worst novel, To Have and Have Not, into a first-rate escapist romance, Fleming might have turned Hemingway’s new-worst novel, Across the River and into the Trees, into a stinging summing-up.

  As Wanger set out to orchestrate the publicity campaign for Joan of Arc, Fleming returned to his mechanic roots, restoring a 1932 Ford Model A as a hot rod. “It looked stock on the outside, but it screamed. It was a really fast thing,” said Graham Mahin. Fleming’s partner in the restoration was Ormond “Red” Ruthven, a sometimes screenwriter and full-time troubleshooter for MGM. “Apparently, when Victor wanted to get away or something without going on vacation, he’d go and work on the car with Red.”

  Meanwhile, Bergman, the star in the driver’s seat of his latest screen vehicle, was falling out of favor with the press. The columnist Edith Gwynn blamed Joe Steele’s departure. “Ingrid has always been difficult with the ‘press’ and others, taking herself too seriously perhaps. And what a job the diplomatic and hardworking Joe did, to keep most of the world from finding it out!” When fall arrived and the advance reviews began spilling out, there were indications that even the critical community was falling out of love with her. “Miss Bergman presents a splendid figure as Joan,” wrote Variety. “But her part demands long speeches amounting almost to soliloquies, and force of these is lost as spectator watches endless scenes of the trial.” The Hollywood Reporter was unqualified in its praise, especially for Fleming as “a director whose sensitivity can merge subtle characterizations and human emotions into the pageantry.”

  By the time Joan of Arc opened to the public at the Victoria Theatre on Times Square in New York on November 11, the luster was gone from the fleur-de-lis. November 10, the night of its charity premiere, was rainy, and there were few stars visible on the ground. Bergman arrived from Sweden and stood stiffly next to Fleming for photographers; Barbara Bel Geddes and Guy Kibbee were the biggest showbiz names among a phalanx of Catholic clergy. Wanger had made sure to win the approval of New York’s Cardinal Spellman and the National Legion of Decency with a special screening the month before. The RKO publicist John Springer knew movie fans were still in love with the Bergman of The Bells of St. Mary’s, and she seemed to live up to that image: she took him to St. Patrick’s Cathedral every day when they were promoting Joan of Arc. Wanger and company gave the film’s opening the old college try. Putting together Bergman and the movie’s second- and third-most-popular selling points—the spectacle of medieval battle and the spectacle of conflagration—RKO erected a huge electric sign of Bergman resplendent in Joan’s armor, surrounded by orange flames.

  In his last interview, Fleming reiterated the themes of Action Is the Word, saying, “I’m getting my history this way, to make up for quitting school in the seventh grade. It’s like a fairy land to me.” The reviews were no fairy tale. The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther wrote similar pans for Fleming and his star, saying just as “the spiritual ordeal of the maiden is confused in the pageant of the trial,” the “agony of the execution is likewise lost in the surge of the big show,” and Bergman, “while handsome to look on, has no great spiritual quality. Her strength seems to lie in her physique rather than her burning faith.”

  Adela Rogers St. Johns said, “The one time [Vic] failed, poor man, I felt so sorry for him, when he made Joan of Arc with Bergman . . . I went to see it with him one night, and he sat and cried all the way through it. That was his heartbreak.” In December, Fleming appeared at the Fox Bev
erly in Beverly Hills for the movie’s West Coast premiere. He greeted the crowd, then slipped quietly inside the theater. This time Bergman stood by Alfred Hitchcock. Robert Mitchum came, and, with Shelley Winters as his date, Farley Granger was there, too, having recently appeared in Hitchcock’s Rope. A slew of older female stars paid tribute to Bergman, including Joan Crawford, Ann Miller, Esther Williams, Susan Hayward, and, reminding Fleming of his Fairbanks days, Mary Pickford.

  The next day the hometown reviews appeared. They were shriveling. “ ‘Joan of Arc’ sprawls awkwardly, in episodic lumps,” wrote the reviewer for the Los Angeles Daily News. He also shrewdly noted, “All hands concerned would have been better off had they stuck to Maxwell Anderson’s original ‘Joan of Lorraine,’ which at least stuck to the one basic theme of faith-as-a-compromise—and from a modern standpoint at that.” As for Fleming’s direction, it was “almost insensate.”

  Two days later it was Christmas, and Fleming was at his mother’s house passing $20 gold pieces to a collection of young relatives and softly admitting to Rodger Swearingen, “It’s a disaster, that picture.”

  30

  Death in the Desert

  Fleming had declared that he wanted to be a director of epics ever since the late 1920s. But Joan of Arc, his one independent foray into epic territory, was a creative debacle. Time’s movie column, generally sympathetic to him, said the heroine “becomes a lifeless symbol in a pageant.” RKO found no better way of promoting the film than as a pageant. The critical reception scotched the idea of sending it out as the American-produced equal to Olivier’s Henry V: Crowther put the two heroic-medieval portraits head-to-head and declared Joan of Arc competitive only in its pictorial “perfection,” because Fleming, unlike Olivier, allowed “this whole drama to be played in the wide frame of a pageant, with consequent lack of real insight and intimacy.” (It’s “score one for Henry,” he quipped.) The studio hedged its bets from the start, showcasing it as a reserved-seat, road-show presentation in some theaters and a continuously run film in others.