Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  It was probably harder to laugh off the knowledge that Fleming was indirectly responsible for Dix’s breakup with Wilson. On To the Last Man, Wilson said, “Vic Fleming wanted to go to the Grand Canyon for some scenic locations. We were camped on the floor and had to ride these small but wiry little mountain ponies up a steep path carved out of the side of the canyon wall. There was scarcely enough room for one horse; one slip, and horse and rider would plunge over the side.” Dix didn’t want her to make the ride, but Wilson enjoyed it. “I don’t think I could love a woman who wasn’t afraid of a thing like that ride,” Dix said. She replied, “You can’t love me, because I wasn’t afraid.” The romance fell apart before they made their next picture, The Call of the Canyon.

  It’s particularly cruel that these two Zane Grey Westerns have been lost, along with Fleming’s later epic The Rough Riders. (The only surviving copies are said to be at Gosfilmofond of Moscow, but repeated inquiries there haven’t turned them up.) They were the movies Fleming was most likely referring to when he spoke of silent directors winging their productions from novels instead of just shooting scripts. (A location still from To the Last Man, reprinted in 1944, shows him directing the actors book in hand.) These movies are also tantalizing predecessors to Fleming’s Virginian.

  Zane Grey had followed Owen Wister’s lead as a novelist of the West who depicted frontier heroes evolving in chivalric directions under the influence of Eastern women. To the Last Man took off from a real-life feud between cattlemen and sheep ranchers, but The Call of the Canyon was an out-and-out “flapper Western” about a World War I vet (Dix) who goes West to regain his health and summons his Jazz Age sweetheart (Wilson). Motion Picture News called it “a picture ‘that kills two birds with one stone.’ It has society life in the effete East, jazz (marathon) dances of the ‘400’ and striking feminine fashions for the folks who like these ingredients in their film fare and it has red blooded western scenes, thrilling physical combats, wonderful shots of the Arizona canyon country, a terrific prairie storm.”

  Ranchers living outside Flagstaff might have taken it as a portent of the apocalypse when they saw thunderbolts spring up from the ground one September night. These sheets of lightning were actually fifty arc lights on a train rattling through Arizona for the sequence depicting jim-dandies from the East partying their way to the West. But the “terrific prairie storm” the press loved so much was a masterpiece of carpediem moviemaking, not special effects. Right after Zane Grey and Jesse Lasky visited the company’s main Oak Creek Canyon location, real lightning, rain, and hail inundated northeast Arizona, wreaking havoc on the unpaved road between Oak Creek Canyon and Flagstaff. For several days, cast and crew lived with the threat that the flood might fill the canyon. The cook emptied his pantry, and the men emptied their pockets in nonstop poker games, and the women huddled together for warmth and sleep. The cinematographer James Wong Howe shot several hundred striking feet of film. Then the company made it out to Flagstaff.

  Howe shot both of Fleming’s Zane Grey films (the first with the help of Bert Baldridge), and Hathaway took care of props and assisted Fleming. Hathaway said Fleming once used a tin cup as a reflector to get the right amount of eye light on a Wilson close-up, and Howe went even further. When Fleming said he wanted “a silhouette picture of Dix under the tree” and then decided he needed a close-up, too, Howe ordered Vic and the grips to hold a bank of tin coffee cups so they could reflect “the light off them onto Dix. And they shook a little so it looked just like the shadows of tree leaves coming on the guy’s face. Just like Burnett Guffey, when he shot Bonnie and Clyde and he picked up a Coke bottle to shoot through.” On one of the Zane Grey pictures, Howe remembered Fleming showing off his marksmanship:

  We were riding along the trail, about 1,500 feet up, and suddenly he rode in front and he waved his hands. He said, “Stop, everybody, get off. There’s a rattlesnake up here in front.” We got off and went down there, and there was a rattlesnake. He got a stick and he got ahold of the rattlesnake’s neck and picked it up and looked at it and finally he threw it down. He always carried a little .22 pocket pistol, and a hatchet. He used to chop his way through the woods to get cameras set up, you see. So he said, “Now, fellows, I want to show you what a good shot I am. Without looking at this snake, I’m going to turn around and I’m going to shoot this snake right through the head.” So we stood there, “Go ahead, go ahead.” So he pulled this gun out, pointed it, and he pulled the trigger and he hit the snake right through the head. My assistant, name was Archie Stout, he was there. He said, “You’re such a good shot, let me see you shoot this cigarette out of my hand.” [Vic] said, “Hold it up.” He stood about eight feet away. And he aimed and he shot, and you know what? He shot him right through the finger!

  Decades later, Howe explained to Norman Lloyd that Fleming knew the snake would fasten on the gun glittering in the sun and fix on the position of the barrel, giving Fleming a clean shot.

  Also on the Canyon set was the future producer of The Wizard of Oz, Mervyn LeRoy. He had a small acting part in the picture; Wilson said he was “just a very attractive bright boy who would do anything the director asked him to do to help the picture along.”

  Fleming was beginning to feel his clout in and out of the picture business. On November 9, 1923, an Orange County judge slapped him with a $25 fine for driving his Duesenberg over thirty-five miles an hour in a Seal Beach speed trap. Earlier that year the California legislature moved to abolish speed traps, but some communities like Seal Beach had ignored the ban. So Fleming appealed. He lost in superior court, but his lawyers, from the Automobile Club of Southern California, won a reversal in the Second District Court of Appeal—“a judicial knockout”—and a stunning vindication when the California Supreme Court overturned the law and dismissed Fleming’s case.

  Fleming made no public statements on the matter himself, but when he was quoted, about moviemaking, he was beginning to sound august. Suddenly Fairbanks’s seat-of-the-pants creative sidekick was advocating film schools. “The finished photoplay of today,” he said at the time of The Call of the Canyon, “is as different from the two-reeler of ten years ago as Egyptian hieroglyphics are from modern paintings.” Whereas a decade earlier a budding director could pick up what he had to know from hanging around a studio, “it is questionable whether he can learn through ordinary channels now how to make a super-production of 1924.” Audiences “demand art, subtlety and realism in photoplays. Pictures can only be made with these qualities by specialized training.”

  The two Zane Grey pictures were box-office successes; Paramount would film more than half a dozen Grey titles in the 1920s and remake them in the 1930s. And studio executives realized that in Fleming they had a major creative commodity. Paramount would proudly declare his next picture, Code of the Sea (1924), “A Victor Fleming Production,” right on the opening title card.

  8

  Courage and Clara Bow

  Bravery under stress was a natural theme for “outdoor” directors, and as a man and a professional Fleming had a bone-deep feeling for it. He’d wandered into a profession that enabled him to turn one of his ruling appetites—voracity for action—into a creed. Physical bravery was integral to his sportsmanship. It also fed his yen for knockabout jokes and urge to complete any task swiftly. Artistic and existential bravery were significant for him, too, but here the quality became more complicated. Fleming had dared big by leaping into a quicksilver creative and social life. He’d had help from Dwan and Fairbanks, Emerson and Loos, but he was a self-made man in a self-made industry and a freewheeling town.

  The zest of early moviemaking came from its participants’ unselfconsciousness—they thrived on happy accidents and turned whatever made them work into rules of play. The gifted recognized principles that clicked for them and stayed on the lookout for new ones. Fleming never lost his sense of directing as a job, but it was a job he practiced with the intensity of an artist. At times he did movies that he’d dreamed about; at o
ther times he took on assignments. So he was a creative force and a hireling, alternately and often simultaneously. His personality usually came through, and it had a homegrown sophistication: heartfelt and crusty, yet sometimes brashly satirical.

  His personal life had the same brand of complexity. Though he became a sought-after figure socially, he kept one foot in Hollywood and one foot out. He was a ladies’ man and, from all accounts, an honorable one. His leading women fell in love with him on location, but they also spoke well of him back in Hollywood. Given his mix of pride, curiosity, and practicality, it’s not surprising that the overriding characteristic of Fleming’s work is its variety, especially in the hell-raising 1920s. That’s also when he carved a romantic chessboard out of Hollywood.

  His aura of ruggedness and stoic courage caused his peers to speak of him in Hemingwayesque terms, but Fleming’s two silent seafaring adventures focused on the redemption of cowards. Code of the Sea (1924) derives from a story by Byron Morgan, who wrote racing scripts for Wallace Reid (including The Roaring Road, Fleming’s one possible foray into stunt driving). It registers as a dress rehearsal for Fleming’s prestigious adaptation (several films later) of Joseph Conrad’s summa of gracelessness under pressure, Lord Jim (1925).

  In Code of the Sea, Rod La Rocque, who had the dark good looks of Robert Downey Jr., plays the hero, Bruce McDow, with some of Downey’s volatility (though little of his skill). Bruce carries a family curse: he’s the son of a craven lightship skipper who steered away from his post during a storm and was responsible for a passenger ship’s fatal crash. Jacqueline Logan, sweet-faced and sensible, plays Jenny Hayden, Bruce’s true love and the daughter of the man who captained the ship that piled up on the Barrier Reef. In the opening scene, Bruce loses his first berth—he succumbs to vertigo at the prospect of climbing a mast. One old salt says with a sneer that book learning has taught Bruce not merely to look before he leaps but never to leap at all. Jenny gets him a job on his father’s old lightship. There he must overcome the presumption that he inherited his dad’s yellow stripe.

  The movie may be a potboiler, but it’s involving and audacious—a premium example of Fleming’s feisty virtuosity. He’ll do anything to put over this pulpy story. He twirls the camera from Bruce’s dizzied point of view so that the masts of a ship seem to dance. He presents Bruce’s inner demons as outer ghouls—gap-toothed, scrofulous heads that encircle the hero and paralyze him, even when Jenny’s dress catches fire. Fleming doesn’t let the primal story get too far away from the elements. When Bruce decides to prove to himself that he isn’t a coward, he places his hand over a burning kerosene lamp (a gesture that anticipates Peter O’Toole’s T. E. Lawrence). These flourishes make the movie teeter on the brink of macho camp, with the masochism and rabidity common to Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone. They also give it a brute vivacity, which the picture needs, because the human characters are so humorless. Bruce’s ragged mongrel terrier provides the one effective comic counterpoint. The hero’s debonair rival for Jenny’s hand, Ewart Radcliff (Maurice B. Flynn), the heir to a passenger-ship fleet, has an aggressive bull terrier that is always putting Bruce’s mutt on the run. When Bruce finds his sea footing, the mongrel soaks up his master’s new forcefulness. (From this point on, Fleming is a maestro of doggy theatrics. His canine prowess would peak with the extraordinary scene of Frank Morgan’s Pirate, in 1942’s Tortilla Flat, re-creating a church service for a half-dozen dogs.)

  Filming began in San Francisco in February 1924, and some scenes set on Bruce’s first schooner and on the lightship were shot at sea, eighteen miles out from the Golden Gate. Fleming might have shot most of the seafaring scenes near San Francisco and the complicated climax at San Pedro, where Logan bruised her right arm and side during filming when a mooring rope broke and part of it struck her. Erratic but thrilling, the final storm sequence mixes miniatures of storm-tossed ships with location shots of real ships and depictions of men and women in peril presumably done on wet sets or in studio tanks. Fleming would become known for his fearlessness at blending different types of footage, and sometimes, as in Captains Courageous, he did it so deftly and with such an acute understanding of the audience’s attention that the stitch work is barely visible.

  The seams do show in Code of the Sea, yet Fleming displays his killer instinct for finding the red-hot center of a turbulent sea tale, even one that gets mighty spongy. Bruce McDow is in charge of his lightship, Captain Hayden is trying to skipper his ship home, and Jenny is on the Radcliff family yacht (to keep her far away from Bruce) during the climactic gale. Bruce must choose between holding the lightship’s position to ensure that Captain Hayden’s ship avoids the Barrier Reef and steering the lightship toward the yacht where Jenny fears for her life. Captain Hayden hopes that Bruce will leave his post and save Jenny. Instead, Bruce does something riskier: he tells the lightship sailors to stay put and makes for the yacht in a launch, by himself.

  When a horse-drawn lifesaving crew gallops to the rescue, its members shoot a line out to Bruce, who ties it to his waist, leaves his wave-tossed skiff, and swims out to save Jenny. With Bruce steeling himself on the yacht’s deck, the lifesavers establish a winch to haul the passengers in a makeshift shuttle. Of course, Bruce insists on being the last man on board; the boat breaks up with him still on it; and everyone expects him to die. The documentary details of the operation, and the sight of waves hitting the passengers as they lurch to shore, are frightening, and Fleming pushes the heartbreak as far as he can without enraging the audience or deflating its hopes. As the dawn breaks, Bruce’s mother stands on the rocks and searches the horizon like one of J. M. Synge’s mournful matriarchs in Riders to the Sea. Bruce’s trusty mongrel finds him washed up on shore, alive. Jenny and Bruce embrace. And Bruce’s newly emboldened mutt gives chase to the bull terrier.

  Code of the Sea didn’t impress the critics, but it gave Fleming his best chance to flex his muscles since The Mollycoddle, and in Hollywood it increased his growing directorial star power. The director “was mistaken for the leading man on location,” stated a newspaper item for the next Fleming production, Empty Hands. “A lady visitor at Yosemite Lodge where the company put up while on location, made audible remarks anent his handsome and commanding appearance! Jack Holt was well camouflaged behind a week’s growth of whiskers at the time and enjoyed the joke on his director as much as the rest of the company, including Norma Shearer.” Shearer probably enjoyed it more. She, too, fell in love with her director.

  Shearer had wanted to act since she was a teenager. She owed her success partially to the connections and influence of her uncle (who had married an actress) and the tenacity and drive of her mother, Edith, who moved Norma and her sister, Athole, from Montreal to New York City. D. W. Griffith told Norma that she’d never make it after he used her as an extra in Way Down East, and Florenz Ziegfeld rejected her for his Follies. Shearer persisted anyway, until her made-in-New-York movies and serials earned her and her mother a trip to Hollywood with a contract waiting for Norma at the Mayer studio. She gamboled through a half-dozen pictures without creating a stir until she starred in Broadway After Dark for the director Monta Bell (who’d assisted Chaplin on A Woman of Paris) and followed it with Empty Hands (1924), made on a loan-out to Paramount. Four years from her woes as a bit player, she was on the brink of major stardom—and adult independence.

  Fleming called Empty Hands “an ‘Adam and Eve’ story.” Variety called it yet another variation on J. M. Barrie’s Admirable Crichton scheme—“desert island stuff, with a man and a woman.” Except this time the “desert island” is the Canadian wilderness, where the father of the heroine, a worn-out flapper, has dragged her away from a debauched life. Holt plays her dad’s chief engineer, who saves her from a rocky death when she’s swept down some rapids in a canoe. They end up in virgin territory: the sylvan mountains of Lake Arrowhead, in the San Bernardino National Forest. “After a few days on location in this romantic setting,” Shearer wrote in her unpublished
autobiography, “I developed a big crush on the sweet man who was the director of this picture.”

  Norma thought of Fleming as a substitute for Andrew Shearer, her father. Andrew was “a gay blade” and a “sport.” He’d “sown plenty of wild oats,” built two homes for his wife and daughters, and designed the modern hockey stick before his lumber and construction company went belly-up and he ceased to be a presence in his family’s life. Shearer wrote of Fleming:

  Because he was fifteen or twenty years older than me [eleven, in fact] I found him very endearing. His few silver hairs and kind gentle ways attracted me enormously. I supposed psychiatrists would have said my love for my father, whom I was missing so much, expressed itself in my romantic yearning for this mature man—this undoubtedly was the basis for my tender affection which must have overwhelmed me one moonlit night as we sat in a hammock on the terrace of the hotel overlooking the beautiful lake. I found myself saying, for no reason at all, “Mr. Fleming, would you kiss me?” And to my surprise he did and I loved it.

  Mother Edie disapproved of what that “sweet gentle kiss led to,” which Norma characterizes as “a most beautiful friendship.” The actress said, “I had a lovely time courting this mature man—the first I had known.” She said she loved “his amazing hands” and the way he called her “dear darling.” And Victor even knew how to throw Edie off balance. “Sports cars were his passion, and he drove a beautiful dark grey Duesenberg too fast—except when Edie was in the back seat—because she would scream ‘Victor!’ and hit him on the back and he would pretend she had knocked him off the seat onto the floor.”