Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  In August 1954, when MGM first rolled out Gone With the Wind in wide-screen and stereophonic sound, Selznick held a bash at Ciro’s, Louella Parsons reported. Gable didn’t come, nor did Vivien Leigh, who was still recovering from a bout of bipolar disorder. Selznick’s guests included Charles and Shirley Temple Black, Merle Oberon and Dr. Rex Ross, “and sitting sadly out of the range of the photographers’ flashing bulbs was Mrs. Victor Fleming.”

  “She never recovered from [the death],” Victoria says. “She stayed in the house. She took to her bed and began drinking, which she had never done, and smoking, which she had never done. She just went to pot.” As the family downsized, all but three of Fleming’s movie scrapbooks were lost. Lu gradually dispensed with Vic’s collection of hunting rifles and a menagerie of safari trophies: one leopard skin, zebra skins, a mounted cheetah, and a boar skull.

  While Lu was getting rid of those mementos, Fleming’s pals and coworkers were bringing back their buddy’s hunting days in two different movies that came out in 1953. John Wayne conjured one of his most invigorating star turns as the title character in Hondo. While the star was scouting Utah locations for the gritty Western, Fleming had been on his mind. Wayne told an Ogden reporter, “For a girl to get into the movies, I’ll use Vic Fleming’s size-up: ‘To take in the movies, a girl must have a challenge in her face.’ I think he was about right.” (That certainly applied to his Hondo co-star, Geraldine Page.) A U.S. cavalry scout in Indian country, Hondo dreams of nothing more than to return to a scruffy ranch outside San Dimas. The reference to San Dimas appears only in James Edward Grant’s screenplay; it is not in Louis L’Amour’s original short story or his later novel based on the screenplay. For that matter, San Dimas didn’t even exist in the 1870s, the setting of the story. But the mention of it does hark back to the Duke shooting small game with Fleming in the San Dimas Wash. And Hondo as a man has Flemingesque charisma, with an instinct for emotional truth that makes him irresistible to the widowed rancher-woman played by Page, even though Hondo is the man who widowed her. Wayne essayed a Westerner making his rules up as he goes along and sticking to a code of strength and honesty and teaching Page’s son a thing or two with tough love—all lessons out of the Fleming playbook.

  At the same time, Zimbalist and Mahin were cooking up Mogambo, a remake of Fleming’s first smash for MGM, Red Dust, for Wayne’s favorite Western director, John Ford. Astonishingly, it once again starred Gable as the supercompetent hero torn between a good-time gal and a lady. Gable had actually planned to go big-game hunting with Vic in Africa in 1939, before Gone With the Wind dragged on. Mahin may have known about that aborted trip: Gable had boasted that he’d purchased a .50-caliber elephant gun. So this time, instead of a rubber-plantation manager as he was in Red Dust, Gable played a Great White Hunter, but one devoted to trapping animals and sending them off to zoos, not slaughtering them. (Fleming would sometimes say, later in life, that he regretted the killing he did just for sport.)

  Mahin rewrote Gable’s character for a star then in his early fifties, not the smoldering thirty-one-year-old of Red Dust. Mahin acknowledged the older Gable’s mellower if still undeniable appeal, but gave him some of Fleming’s youthful traits and oddities, from smacking around incompetents to turning a boa constrictor into a pet. Gable’s co-stars would be Ava Gardner as an international playgirl (a considerable social upgrade from Jean Harlow’s prostitute) and Grace Kelly as the wife of an anthropologist who’s gone to Africa to study gorillas (the Mary Astor role). In this movie they each embodied, in different ways, the cosmopolitanism that would increasingly take hold of postwar high-end escapism. Both were nominated for Oscars. Gardner delivered and possibly provoked the best line in the movie—after a bull elephant lifts its trunk, she says, “That reminds me of someone.”

  “He’s a very attractive burglar,” Gardner later says of Gable’s thief of hearts. In this picture, Gable represents something timeless: a man whose years of adventure have poeticized as well as hardened him. He falls into a clinch with each woman only after she succumbs to the heady sights of his environment. He doesn’t make romantic conquests—he gives in to them. The Gardner character appreciates his experience: he’s been around the way she has. The Kelly character appreciates his freshness: to her eyes he’s a natural phenomenon, like the African sunsets and waterfalls. In the end, he realizes that the playgirl understands him better—and the wife is better off with her husband. He only pretends not to feel the pain.

  The exotic setting puts into stark relief the mixture of firsthand knowledge, shrewdness, resilience, and hard-knocks lyricism that audiences around the world, thanks to Fleming movies like The Virginian and Red Dust and Captains Courageous and Test Pilot, recognized as quintessentially American. In Mogambo, Mahin and Zimbalist called this character Vic.

  AFTERWORD

  A Great American Movie Director

  “Someday someone’s going to bring up what Fleming meant to this business,” Arthur Freed said in 1974. More than twenty years later, Todd McCarthy conjectured in Variety that a biography of Victor Fleming would be “highly unlikely” because he left no extensive letters or memoirs and had not “given lengthy interviews or been prone to undue self-promotion.” As McCarthy observed, “The modern reputations of some filmmakers from Hollywood’s golden age are directly related to how long they managed to live, and whether or not they lasted long enough to be enshrined through career interviews, biographies and honorary awards.”

  Luckily, Fleming left his mark on everyone in his personal and career orbit, including a succession of columnists and reporters who chronicled his every professional move. And many of the world’s top moviemakers, from Philip Kaufman and Steven Spielberg to David Lynch and Guillermo del Toro, have never ceased to look to him for inspiration. Spielberg, himself a prodigy of reinvention, calls Fleming “one of the great chameleons. He reinvented himself every time he took on a new project. He was what I call a general-education director—meaning that rather than specialize in and master a single subject, or exercising simply one muscle, he threw himself into all these different categories.”

  Fleming found creative satisfaction wrestling with material that was fresh to him. He worked in every style, from the plainspoken lyricism of The Virginian to the outlandish musical fantasy of The Wizard of Oz and the rousing spectacle of Gone With the Wind. No wonder America’s leading proponent of the auteur theory, the critic Andrew Sarris, put Fleming in his “Miscellany” category in his seminal The American Cinema (1968). Unlike Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford, Fleming didn’t place his signature on a favorite genre. And unlike Hawks, he didn’t concoct variations on the same brand of group chemistry whether in a comedy or a Western or an aerial adventure.

  Fleming didn’t distance himself from his more single-minded colleagues, nor did they from him. They all labored to put out first-class entertainment. The novelist and screenwriter Daniel Fuchs memorialized men like “William Wellman, Howard Hawks, Sam Wood, Clarence Brown, Victor Fleming” as “a gaudy company, rambunctious and engrossed. What they produced, roistering along in those sun-filled, sparkling days, was a phenomenon, teeming with vitality and order, as indigenous as our cars or skyscrapers or highways, and as irrefutable. Generations to come, looking back over the years, are bound to find that the best, most solid creative effort of our decades was spent in the movies, and it’s time someone came clean and said so.”

  In failure or success, Fleming’s movies were not predictable. Most popular artists contend with commerce and accommodation—or, as Fleming memorably put it, the “blank blank blank blanks” on the third floor of the Thalberg Building—as they build a body of work. Until Fleming’s misguided love letter to Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc, his films, however uneven or compromised, were rarely boring. Sarris conceded, “This mysterious figure probably expressed more of Hollywood’s contradictions than did most of his colleagues. Yet, aside from Cukor, he was the only Metro director who could occasionally make the lion roar.”

/>   “Mysterious” became the word for Fleming after his death because so little effort was made to preserve his legacy. He left behind a shattered widow and two young daughters, no journals, few letters. Before film preservation became an artistic cause, many of his silent pictures turned to dust or celluloid soup, including the Oscar-winning The Way of All Flesh and the epic The Rough Riders. Before the rise of classic movie channels on cable TV, it was difficult to see his landmark films like The Virginian, Red Dust, and Bombshell.

  Fleming’s supporters, such as Kevin Brownlow, wondered about the wild trajectory of a career that oscillated between spirited masterpieces like Mantrap and leaden studio properties like Abie’s Irish Rose. Critics enamored of Hawks and Vidor couldn’t see that these genuine old masters were still working out old rivalries or bitterness when they spoke of their friend Fleming. And other writers may have found it hard to believe that a self-tutored boy from San Dimas could have been part of so much general history (the use of film for military training, intelligence, and propaganda) and film history (the changes from independent two-reelers to studio features, from silence to sound, from black and white to color). All the while, Fleming contributed key images to the American photo album, from Woodrow Wilson in his top hat to Gary Cooper on a horse—and Judy Garland tentatively stepping into Munchkinland and realizing that she’s not in Kansas anymore.

  Most film chroniclers chalked up Fleming’s two most famous credits to the efforts of producers. Critics viewed The Wizard of Oz as a paradigm of big-studio artistry rather than a feat for its director. Aljean Harmetz’s essential production history The Making of “The Wizard of Oz” was taken as the final word on its subject, because the smart, skillful Harmetz was the last person to grill almost all the major participants. Yet Fleming, although long dead, rubbed Harmetz the wrong way. She vastly preferred the lyricist Yip Harburg, the production executive Arthur Freed, and King Vidor, who directed Oz according to Fleming’s game plan for only three and a half weeks as opposed to Fleming’s three and a half months. When Mahin—described by Harmetz as Fleming’s “drinking and motorcycle buddy”—told her that the director “had the fingers of an artist,” Harmetz commented, “Nothing else in his outward appearance or personality suggested an artist in the least.” Most of Fleming’s contemporaries, including seasoned, sophisticated observers such as Ben Hecht, never thought of him any other way.

  Thomas Schatz, author of The Genius of the System (1988), blithely noted, “Fleming received director’s credit on both [The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind], but each was ultimately a producer’s picture.” Fleming, though, was the only creative force on Oz who had been raised on a farm by a benevolent uncle and aunt, and the only major figure on Gone With the Wind with a family tree that boasted Civil War veterans on both sides of the conflict. Selznick’s prestige and tsunami of memos inevitably diminished Fleming’s contribution to Gone With the Wind. (And with Selznick elevated to sole auteur of that film, it became easier, in retrospect, to credit all of MGM, or sometimes just Mervyn LeRoy, with The Wizard of Oz.) Part of the reason is that GWTW influenced Hollywood in matters that ultimately may mean more to producers and film-industry historians than to directors.

  The Wizard of Oz, with its delayed-reaction TV success, heralded the phenomenon of movies from It’s a Wonderful Life to Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery achieving their greatest popularity in a home-video afterlife. Gone With the Wind instantly changed the moviemaking practices and habits of a nation. In the 1930s, Hollywood movies were at their zenith as a popular art, one that filmgoers could plan on attending as casually as going to the corner diner. In that era, only the studios’ biggest, most prestigious efforts—like MGM’s Mutiny on the Bounty—clocked in at much more than two hours (Bounty and Capra’s Columbia production of Lost Horizon were 132 minutes, Oz only 101). No producer besides Selznick dared to test audiences with an almost four-hour running time. Selznick wanted MGM to “roadshow” Gone With the Wind with limited showtimes, inflated prices, and an intermission, in the manner of silent epics like The Birth of a Nation and Ben-Hur (1925). He had to settle for (in Rudy Behlmer’s words) “a modified road-show policy,” with optional reserved seats, higher pricing for “preferred” seats, and an intermission whose length was up to the discretion of exhibitors and the local distributor’s agent. Starting with “event” films like Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), Selznick saw his strategy carry Hollywood into a new road-show era with movies like the remake of Ben-Hur (1959) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

  The studios no longer present films road-show style, but every time a sprawling, colorful costume picture, whether Amadeus or The Lord of the Rings, wins a fistful of Oscars and a gigantic chunk of the box office, you’re witnessing part of the influence of Gone With the Wind. After GWTW, producers began pulling for a giant brass ring, and audiences began lining up for movies they’d been hearing about for years in advance. Some moviemakers feel that it broadened Hollywood’s appetite for manufacturing blockbusters of any kind, regardless of cultural clout. As Spielberg says, “I think studios were spoiled the first day Gone With the Wind made more money than any movie ever. I think from that moment on, decision makers wanted movies that would be hugely successful.”

  Selznick wisely exploited a three-year plan of escalating publicity. Headlines screamed about everything from the burning of Atlanta to the casting of Gable and Leigh to the premiere in the real Atlanta. But the hoopla would have evaporated without a film that delivered the goods. Overall, its failings hardly matter—largely because it boasts Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler at its core. They remain startlingly contemporary and compelling as antiheroine and antihero. James Cameron says that when he made Titanic, “Gone With the Wind was the film to beat—it showed the path you could take to do the epic story and capture people’s hearts beyond the normal movie experience.”

  Scarlett and Rhett as well as the impact of their twisted love and marriage also are the main (but not the only) reasons Fleming, the credited director, should receive the same honor today as when the movie first went out with his name on it. Over the course of his career, he, as much as anyone, showed Hollywood how to create tarnished protagonists who still glittered. In Bombshell, Harlow’s Lola Burns resembles a burlesque version of Scarlett, supporting a sponging family and resisting the go-getting cynic who’s perfect for her, because she prefers classier gents. Directing Gable in Red Dust, Fleming brought a new sexual dimension and knowing humor to the figure of the can-do guy and anticipated the attractiveness of a wised-up fellow on a grander scale, like Rhett.

  Unlike Selznick, whose biographers portray his forays into womanizing as pathetic or laughable, Fleming, like Rhett, was a ladies’ man and a man’s man who became a devoted family man. He’d learned about the esprit and weariness of military service in the Signal Corps and observed the aftermath of war in Europe. He’d even assisted on Intolerance, D. W. Griffith’s follow-up to The Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind’s obvious predecessor. So he was a natural to connect with this material. Gone With the Wind would never have become the resplendent thing it is without Selznick, but it never would have found its voice—its bark and its bite—without Fleming. Nothing Selznick threw at him was too big a stretch. Fleming’s temperament, background, and aptitude made him more than a journeyman enjoying a stroke of luck. He was the ideal director to save and vitalize the movie.

  Years later, Dalton Trumbo, Fleming’s collaborator on A Guy Named Joe, became part of another phoenixlike production when the cocky young Stanley Kubrick took over the reins from Anthony Mann on Kirk Douglas’s production of Spartacus. Chafing at Kubrick’s highhanded alterations of his work on the set and in the editing room, Trumbo put his own track record on the line, writing to the director in a lengthy and blistering memo, “In the past I have worked with, or my screenplays have been directed by, such competent, successful, and even brilliant artists as Sam Wood, Mervyn LeRoy, Preston Sturges, Garson Kanin, René Clair, and Victor Flem
ing, whom I consider the king of them all.”

  From the point of view of a producer who thought directors were overrated anyway, Saul David asked in The Industry, “Who directed The Wizard of Oz? Mervyn LeRoy? Nope. And who directed Gone With the Wind? Selznick? Uh-uh. Both were directed by Victor Fleming—a man who never makes the auteur lists and whose work is therefore a reproach to serious cineastes. Maybe his obscurity is a bitter injustice to Fleming.” Without question.

  Acknowledgments

  Individuals whom I interviewed or corresponded with: Evangela Anderson, Dorothy Barrett, Rex Bell Jr., Alain Bernheim, Lennie Bluett, Rand Brooks, Kevin Brownlow, June Caldwell, James Cameron, Keith Carradine, Cammie King Conlon, Jeff Corey, Charles Cotton, Thomas Cripps, Jules Dassin, Cecilia DeMille, André de Toth, Ruth Duccini, Sally Fleming, Victoria Fleming, Julie Garfield, Vera Gebbert, Norman Geiger, Kathryn Grayson, Jane Greer, Andy Griffith, Jack Haley Jr., Stan W. Haley, Edward Hardwicke, David Hawks, Leonora Hornblow, Shep Houghton, Joan Kenmore, Gavin Lambert, Frank Leonetti, Val Lewton Jr., Pia Lindström, Norman Lloyd, Julian Ludwig, Sid Luft, James Lydon, Graham Lee Mahin, Tim Mahin, Tom Mankiewicz, Jerry Maren, Patricia Marmont, Barbara Hawks McCampbell, Kevin McCarthy, Karen Morley, Joan Marsh Morrill, Joseph Newman, Marni Nixon, Robert Nott, Gregg Oppenheimer, Margaret Pellegrini, Meinhardt Raabe, Luise Rainer, Maurice Rapf, Gene Reynolds, Ralph Riskin, Mickey Rooney, Ambrose Schindler, Budd Schulberg, Martin Scorsese, John D. Seelye, Vincent Sherman, George Sidney, Andrew Solt, Steven Spielberg, John Springer, Robert Stack, David Stenn, Rodger Swearingen, Larry Swindell, Bob Thomas, Audrey Totter, Susie Tracy, Phillip Trent, Christopher Trumbo, William Tuttle, Lew Wasserman, Watson Webb, Dottie Wellman, William Wellman Jr., Winnie Weshler, Danny Windsor, Ralph Winters, Jane Withers.