Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Mankiewicz told this story to Selden West while she was researching the life of Spencer Tracy. Fleming was not, however, a member of the isolationist group America First. Fleming laying down bets in 1940 that Great Britain would tumble before the Germans typified, as I write, “his blunt and often confounding irreverence to the political turmoil of his day.” But Spencer Tracy biographer James Curtis, on p. 417 of Spencer

  Tracy: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), quotes another story supplied by West as if to prove that Fleming was a Nazi sympathizer. Anne Revere told West that she beat out Flora Robson to play the mother in Fleming’s aborted The Yearling because Robson was British and “Fleming was violently pro-Nazi. This was ’41, we hadn’t entered the war . . . and he was violently opposed to the English and anyone who was interfering with the boys over there. So he wouldn’t have her, he was against all English.”

  This absurd explanation has since flown through the Internet and wound up on Victor Fleming’s Wikipedia page. (It mars Curtis’s generally painstaking and authoritative book.) Fleming revered Stevenson and Kipling. He worked with British talents throughout his career. He and a British producer, Victor Saville, cast most of the (continued)

  569, line 30(continued) (speaking parts in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—the film Fleming shot in early 1941, at the same time he was preparing The Yearling—with British and British Commonwealth actors. In the ten years of research for this book, none of Fleming’s surviving colleagues, friends, family members, or professional acquaintances recalled him expressing “pro-Nazi” sympathies, “violent” or otherwise. But he was contemptuous of MGM’s corporate culture—and MGM was the studio that made Mrs. Miniver, a piece of pro-British propaganda that Pauline Kael called “generally offensive . . . one of the most scandalously smug of all Academy Award winners.” Revere’s Oscar-winning turn as Velvet Brown’s mother in National Velvet (1944) proved that she was ideal for maternal roles like the one in The Yearling. Fleming was demonstrating his instinct for putting the right actor in the perfect part, not betraying a political bias. Many Americans thought England would fall to Germany. Fleming was one of the few who would take bets on it. Could Revere have misread Fleming’s impertinent brand of banter? Revere’s interview with West took place “circa 1978”; Revere died in 1990.

  Screen Classics

  Screen Classics is a series of critical biographies, film histories, and analyti-studies focusing on neglected filmmakers and important screen artists and subjects, from the era of silent cinema to the golden age of Hollywood to theinternational generation of today. Books in the Screen Classics series are in-tended for scholars and general readers alike. The contributing authors are established figures in their respective fields. This series also serves the purpose of advancing scholarship on film personalities and themes with ties to Kentucky.

  Series Editor

  Patrick McGilligan

  Books in the Series

  Mae Murray: The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips

  Michael G. Ankerich

  Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film

  Ruth Barton

  Von Sternberg

  John Baxter

  The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico

  Larry Ceplair

  Warren Oates: A Wild Life

  Susan Compo

  Jack Nicholson: The Early Years

  Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer

  Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel

  Nick Dawson

  Intrepid Laughter: Preston Sturges and the Movies

  Andrew Dickos

  John Gilbert: The Last of the Silent Film Stars

  Eve Golden

  David Luhrssen

  Maureen O’Hara: The Biography

  Aubrey Malone

  My Life as a Mankiewicz: An Insider’s Journey through Hollywood

  Tom Mankiewicz and Robert Crane

  Hawks on Hawks

  Joseph McBride

  William Wyler: The Life and Films of Hollywood’s Most Celebrated Director

  Gabriel Miller

  Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director

  Marilyn Ann Moss

  Some Like It Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder

  Gene D. Phillips

  Ann Dvorak: Hollywood’s Forgotten Rebel

  Christina Rice

  Arthur Penn: American Director

  Nat Segaloff

  Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice

  David J. Skal with Jessica Rains

  Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley

  Jeffrey Spivak

  Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master

  Michael Sragow

  Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer

  Brian Taves

  Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ordet: My Summer with the Danish Filmmaker

  Jan Wahl