Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  A great story, but is it true? For one thing, Mayer later launched a cartoon series about a cat and mouse, Tom and Jerry. It was Nicholas Schenck in New York, the head of MGM’s parent company, Loew’s, who nixed a Disney deal with Metro for the Mickey Mouse cartoons. And the way Marion told it, the disastrous meeting with Mayer took place in 1928—a year before Disney went to work on the Silly Symphony shorts. On the other hand, Disney did try to broker a deal with MGM again in 1930, when Fleming was on the move from Paramount and might have been looking for a deal from Mayer himself. Mickey was fresh on Fleming’s mind when he filmed his next picture (and last with Douglas Fairbanks), Around the World in Eighty Minutes—and included a cameo appearance by Disney’s plucky rodent.

  Fleming noted of the Fleming-like director in Bombshell and the screen personalities he’d created, “If it were not for him they would not be where they are.” Fleming knew what made a star—whether it was a tiny animated mouse or a tall drink of water like Gary Cooper.

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  Creating Gary Cooper

  On July 14, 1928, Paramount announced that Fleming would direct Paramount’s “first all-sound picture” from the hit show Burlesque, with Nancy Carroll signed for the role Barbara Stanwyck created on Broadway as the long-suffering mate of a drunken dancer. Fleming left the picture because the studio delayed production, reluctant to cast the stage lead, Hal Skelly. Two months later, Fleming heard Paramount was shooting its first all-sound picture, but it wasn’t Burlesque. The studio had mandated Roy Pomeroy, its despotic special-effects boss, to move Paramount into talkies, and the first film designated to get the Pomeroy treatment was a William Powell vehicle called Interference. (The director Lothar Mendes had already done the silent version.)

  Fleming told Henry Hathaway, “Come on. Let’s go and see what the hell this is, making a sound picture.” When a cop at the soundstage door barred their entrance, under orders not to let anyone in (it was “guarded like the Bank of England,” quipped Hathaway), Fleming marched straight to B. P. Schulberg and asked, “Are you only going to have one director for sound? What the hell is this, Ben?We’re all going to have to know about it. This son of a bitch [Pomeroy], he can’t direct all the pictures.We’ve gotta make more, we’re all going to have to get into it; it’s here to stay. So let’s find out about it.” ( John Cromwell made Burlesque in 1929—with Carroll and Skelly—under the title The Dance of Life.)

  Fleming’s next Paramount film at least had singing interludes, but even without them Wolf Song (1929) would have been a smash. For the first time since he worked with the Fairbanks team, Fleming molded a fresh male performer for maximum star impact, doing for Gary Cooper what he did for Shearer in Empty Hands and Bow in Mantrap and Pauline Starke in The Devil’s Cargo. In Wolf Song, Fleming’s eye detonates Cooper’s sensuality while giving him a nude bathing scene like the one he gave Bow in Hula. It helped turn Cooper into the It Boy.

  Cooper had blamed Fleming for his breakup with Bow. Asked why he didn’t marry her, Cooper said, “Too late,” then muttered that she had “a fellow [Fleming] she’s flipped for.” Lupe Velez, Cooper’s co-star, had been the lover of both Fleming and the crooner Russ Columbo, who also appeared in the movie. Of Fleming, she had said, “He’s on everybody’s love-list!” Cooper was on everybody’s love list, too—and Velez fell for her leading man. Cooper admired Fleming as a director. “Coop loved him,” said Joel McCrea, a friend of Cooper’s and a wily cowboy and comedy star himself. “I know he adored Victor,” said Cooper’s wife, Rocky. The ever-professional Fleming, without hesitation, turned Coop into a sex object.

  Fleming understood Cooper without being much like him. Victorian gentility was a big part of Cooper’s background. The son of British transplants to Montana—a lawyer from Birmingham who became a judge, a mother from Kent who yearned for the old country—Cooper had hoped to be an editorial cartoonist, but newspapers didn’t accept his work. He stumbled into movies as a stunt rider. In person, he shared Fleming’s immediate sensory impact. Like Fleming, he was a womanizer and not an exploiter.

  Playing a cowboy, he stole The Winning of Barbara Worth from its stars, Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman. He did a couple of quickie Westerns, including one for Fleming’s pal Arthur Rosson, before Wellman gave him an attention-getting bit in Wings as a fatalistic cadet who nibbles a chocolate bar and announces, “Got to go and do a flock of figure eights before chow.” He tells the heroes (Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers), “Luck or no luck, when your time comes you’re going to get it,” then saunters out of their tent—and crashes. This cameo alone made him a romantic hero. Imposingly lanky, with a long, thin face and features whose impassivity intensified any inkling of thought or emotion, Cooper didn’t need a female co-star for women in the audience to go crazy for him. He had a torrid liaison with the camera.

  He did, however, need a decent script and an ounce of inspiration. After a half-dozen or so forgettable vehicles, Wolf Song gave him both. Under Fleming’s direction, Cooper displayed elemental ardor. Soon, he began to base his acting career on stoic power, on holding in more than giving out. Fleming helped him perfect that style, too, in their subsequent film, The Virginian (1929). But before an actor can make understatement eloquent, he must learn the power of direct statement. That’s what Cooper did as Sam Lash in Wolf Song, “the tall silent boy from Kentucky,” who heads out for St. Louis instead of marrying a girl back home and raising a family on his father’s land. Sam thinks he’s not “the marryin’ kind.” It’s 1840 when we meet him picking his way down from the Rockies with two other trappers, Rube Thatcher (Constantine Romanoff) and Gullion (Louis Wolheim). In a flashback, we learn that they met at a St. Louis bar when Thatcher and Gullion got into an eye-gouging, bottle-breaking fight over a girl, and Sam made away with her—which impressed rather than antagonized them. By now they’ve traveled together for three years. When the two grizzled older guys talk about the pretty gals in Taos as they head into that town, they wonder whether Sam will get in trouble with a woman just like he did in Albuquerque.

  Fleming introduces Taos with a turbulent vignette—elders of the Spanish elite interrupting a cockfight when they nab a peasant boy and girl rolling in the hay. Lola Salazar (Velez), the local don’s daughter, bites her knuckles in excitement as she looks on from her window. The other trappers decide to “likker up” before they attend the town ball. Instead, Sam goes bathing in a river. The sun glints off the water, and the camera frames him low on his waist to show that he’s not wearing anything. His pals warn him that one of these days a girl will get him and drag him down. At the ball, Sam proclaims, “I want a gal to dance with me.” Lola, smoldering, volunteers.

  Edith Head was almost a decade away from becoming Paramount’s chief costume designer. In her posthumously published autobiography, she recalled that Fleming “wanted Lupe to be so sexy that most of the time her bosom would be hanging out. I went to Mr. Fleming and said, ‘Don’t you think that’s a little inconsistent? Women did not uncover their bosoms in those days.’ He told me, ‘Edith, if no woman had ever shown her bosom in those days, you wouldn’t be here.’ ” And Fleming didn’t stop there: his camera comes up so close to Velez’s Lola that we see her heart heaving in her chest. (Off-screen, Fleming didn’t take Velez so seriously. Tom Mix, the cowboy star who was Velez’s current lover, phoned her nightly—perhaps guessing she was changing from “his Mexican spitfire to Coop’s little lamb.” Velez demanded quiet whenever Mix called her, but Vic would cry out, “Kees Tony for me, Tom!”—referring to Mix’s horse. One observer noted, “Lupe never complained.”)

  Sam wins Lola against her father’s wishes, but the film’s real contest is waged between their love and the call of the wild. The Western writer Harvey Fergusson’s novel drew on frontier New Mexico and the author’s own troubled marriage; John Farrow’s script follows the book, dramatizing the explosive consequences of a mountain man settling down and exchanging male partners for a wife. The key creative ingredient, though, was Fleming’s ma
stery of ambivalence. Sam leaves Lola to hunt and trap again, but he feels her against him when he tries to sleep on the trail. Fleming deploys slow dissolves and superimpositions to conjure her ghostly presence next to Sam’s body.

  The guy can’t take it; he heads back to his wife, only to be wounded in an Indian ambush. His painful trek to Taos takes on the feeling of a sexual mortification. Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets, but at significant cost. Fleming and his cast are adult enough to mix ecstasy with anguish, and romantic victory with personal defeat; Sam is not the same man at the end, and if he’s more open and vulnerable, he’s also scarred and weakened. Reviewers damned the picture as an attempt to broaden the base of a routine Western with florid amour. But Fleming’s movie is about the clash between a trapper’s wandering ways and his love life. Wolf Song anticipates Peter Fonda’s marvelous The Hired Hand by forty-two years as it captures confounding erotic fluctuations.

  The print of Wolf Song at the Library of Congress contains the nude bathing scene, not the musical score and sound effects or the sequences of Columbo, Velez, and Cooper singing—which made Cooper perhaps the first singing cowboy, and definitely the first singing mountain man. But Wolf Song was never an all-out sound movie. Fleming had not yet broken into talkies, and he was growing impatient. His blowup at Pomeroy and Schulberg helped persuade the studio to open up the new technology to all directors and crews, and that decision paid off with Fleming’s next collaboration with Cooper (and with Hathaway)—a milestone in movie history.

  Cecil B. DeMille filmed Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian, in 1914; Tom Forman directed it in 1923, and even Douglas Fairbanks considered it as a starring vehicle, but finally dropped it, apologizing to Wister: “I didn’t seem to myself to physically fit it. For more than a year I looked for an actor who filled your ideal and finally gave it up in despair. Suppose I admire the character too much to find anyone to satisfy me.” Fleming’s version wouldn’t even be the first large-scale sound Western: In Old Arizona beat it to the screen in January 1929. But in the spring of 1929, Fleming and his producer, Louis Lighton (co-writer of Wings), jumped off from the 1902 stage adaptation that Wister wrote with Kirk La Shelle and managed to breathe spontaneity, humor, and unpretentious complexity back into the story. Lighton and Hope Loring had written The Blind Goddess for Fleming, but Lighton’s service as the producer of The Virginian sealed their partnership and friendship.

  They spoke the same plain language and shared tastes for similar experiences. Before his eyesight deteriorated, Bud Lighton, a college athlete, trained to be an Army flier. After World War I ended (he never saw action), he wrote for newspapers and did fiction on the side. His aviation stories caught Hollywood’s attention. Lighton and Loring collaborated on lucrative screenplays (including Bow’s career-defining It), but in her lively, bitter memoir, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood (1999), Frederica Sagor Maas, who’d worked on several Bow vehicles, including The Plastic Age (1925) and Hula, heartily disparaged them. She called Lighton’s British-born wife Loring “a manipulator and fast talker” who, in Maas’s view, knew that the “tall, handsome” Lighton “looked like a producer,” then “got him elevated to play the role.” Even if Maas’s argument were true, Loring’s shrewdness alone couldn’t account for Lighton’s success as a producer.

  The Virginian showed the Lighton-Fleming team’s ability to revivify classic stories. Once again, a ranch foreman called only the Virginian must juggle his love for a New England schoolmarm named Molly (Mary Brian), his antagonism with a cattle rustler, Trampas (Walter Huston), and his tangled friendship with his all-too-affable friend Steve (Richard Arlen). The moviemakers rose to the challenge of introducing the Virginian’s frontier code to the burgeoning youth culture of the late 1920s. “The film is about the struggle of youth at the threshold of adulthood,” writes Richard Hutson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “for the young adults have, in effect, been left to themselves to work out their lives without much interference from a more adult world.” Children and babies are a constant presence in this film’s Medicine Bow, Wyoming; boys play rustler and enforcer instead of cowboys and Indians. But the main action traces what it means to “play the baby” as a man—and what it means to act, however cruelly, as a grown-up in this frontier culture.

  The Virginian never wears its meanings on its denim sleeves. Like Captains Courageous, that other Lighton-Fleming adaptation of a beloved novel, The Virginian is a piece of “traditional” filmmaking that contains more substance than most of its “revisionist” successors. From the moment the Virginian and his crew appear on-screen, singing as they herd five hundred head of cattle, Fleming makes the audience feel part of a vital, changeable way of life. In a feat that the Coen brothers would duplicate seventy-eight years later in No Country for Old Men, there is no background music in the movie. The sound camera takes in Cooper’s assured, easy manner on a horse (“Gary Cooper on a horse—that’s a scene,” said the Western director Anthony Mann) and lets us hear the animals low and the cowboys cluck and croon. In this universe, the competence of the workingman reigns supreme; proficiency and loyalty will be primary virtues.

  James Drury, the star of TV’s Virginian (1962–71), hit on one element of this character’s appeal when he said that playing the part “was the most wonderful gift for an actor.” Not having a past allowed an actor to suggest, trailing behind him, “quotes of glory that you really didn’t deserve . . . It gave an aura of mystery to the character that was irreplaceable.” In Fleming’s movie, it’s a sunny aura of mystery. As he did in his lost The Rough Riders, Fleming harks back to the Teddy Roosevelt–Douglas Fairbanks brand of hero, the cheerful self-created man of action. Fairbanks had realized that he was physically too compact and temperamentally too jumpy to play the soft-spoken, laid-back fellow who embodies Roosevelt’s injunction to tread softly and carry a big stick. Under Fleming’s guidance, though, Cooper was perfect. And Arlen was ideal as the Virginian’s lovable, malleable buddy Steve. Cooper’s Virginian falls into a slouch. Arlen’s Steve keeps pulling himself into a stretch, as if to rouse himself—the way a man does waking up in bed, only Arlen does it fully clothed and standing up. The two pals share a signature hello-and-goodbye whistle that registers like a quail call. When they first exchange it in the movie, they haven’t seen each other for about four years.

  Walter Huston’s Trampas, a black-clad horse thief with a mustache made for twirling, soon tries to horn in on a three-way flirtation among Steve, the Virginian, and a senorita at a saloon. The Virginian suggests that Trampas back away. Trampas responds, dead seriously, “When I want to know anything from you I’ll tell you, you long-legged son of a . . .” The Virginian sallies back, with lethal humor, “If you want to call me that . . . smile!”

  Trampas isn’t ready for a showdown, but the herding, the birdcall, and the dare reverberate through the film (and through film history). A train whistle signals the near arrival of Molly the schoolteacher, but first cows must be cleared from the tracks. Steve helps her off her car and into town, but when the railroad steam spooks a little girl’s cow into a trot, Molly panics; and before Steve can tell her there’s nothing to fear from the mild animal, the Virginian lifts Molly out of the street and onto his horse. He exploits his own picturesque heroism, but Molly sees through his deception in a minute. She also knows that he’s sounded a mating call.

  The Virginian represents the aggressive drive of the West and Molly the force of Eastern civilization. The Virginian has a childish side. He cajoles Steve into helping him mix up the babies waiting to be christened at the community’s meet and greet for Molly, then pins the misdeed on Steve. But he does it to get closer to Molly; we hear her chime in to his laughter, off camera, as she begins to succumb to his silliness. Howard Estabrook’s screenplay (from an adaptation credited to Grover Jones and Keene Thompson) opens up the stage play with dialogue by Edward Paramore and a snatch or two by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, writing his first lines to be spoke
n on-screen after a few years writing titles. Mankiewicz, who thought Fleming “a very, very attractive man,” told his son Tom, “It’s amazing: you ask people as a trivia question ‘Who directed Gone With the Wind?’ and nobody knows; you give them a second clue—it’s the same guy who directed The Wizard of Oz— and they say Mervyn LeRoy. Victor Fleming was either a wonderful director or the luckiest son of a bitch in the world.” And Fleming was at an early summit of luck and talent in The Virginian.

  In the scene Mankiewicz took credit for, Molly compels the Virginian to discuss Romeo and Juliet. Comically and admirably he says he feels that Romeo should have stridden through the front door and settled things with Juliet’s father, man-to-man. That’s how the Virginian operates. As a ranch foreman, he has become a man of authority, unlike his friend Steve, who simply wants to keep rambling unattached through life, even if it requires thieving off other men’s stock. (Trampas is like Steve’s evil twin: he shows up at Molly’s party “in the cool of the evenin’, when the food and women and liquor is ready.”)

  Fleming proves as deft with sounds as with images. In a prime piece of foreshadowing, the Virginian catches his friend putting a brand on a ranch’s stray calf, and Steve rides off singing, “Bury me not on a lone prairie.” (Even “a lone prairie” instead of “the lone prairie” feels right and rough and real.) Steve will be buried, but not alone, for he joins Trampas in a large-scale rustling job and the Virginian tracks the gang down. What follows is one of the most wrenching cowboy lynchings ever filmed, because the victims are guilty and according to the hero’s code deserve this punishment. Steve and two other rustlers will face the rope; the only question is whether the Virginian’s gang will catch up with Trampas and a couple of other culprits in time to string them all up simultaneously. An unobtrusive pan slowly isolates the Virginian from the lynching party and those about to be hanged. Deliberately ignoring his old friend, Steve gives away his goods and hands his gun to Eugene Pallette’s Honey to deliver to the Virginian, first tucking a note inside the holster: “I couldn’t have spoke to you without playing the baby.” Two whistling quails startle Steve and the Virginian into looking at each other. Then Steve does his quail whistle—and the rope snaps.