Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  When Manuel plucks Harvey from the water, then blows his conch-shell horn to signal the We’re Here, there’s magic in the dense, moist air. Fleming downplays the otherworldliness of the captain, Disko Troop (Lionel Barrymore), but he doesn’t eliminate it. Disko’s son, Dan (Mickey Rooney), says Troop “thinks like a cod.” Could there be a more pithy statement of the uncanny? Harvey’s shipboard nemesis Long Jack ( John Carradine) soon calls the boy a “Jonah.” And maybe Harvey is a maritime jinx. Disko’s reckless race against the rival Jennie Cushman to be the first ship back to Gloucester with a full load of cod causes the mainmast to snap, sending Manuel into the drink. Even before that, Harvey persists in upsetting the ship’s chemistry for a good deal of the running time.

  Mahin viewed Manuel as “half Portuguese and half black,” and Seelye puts Manuel, with his deep-tan makeup, in an American literary tradition “in which white children are assisted toward wisdom by people of color who then die or are simply removed from the scene.” Hence, he is “a fisher of men” (to Seelye) and “the latter-day saintly Uncle Tom,” even, perhaps, a relative of Huckleberry Finn’s friend Jim. (The au courant term is “magic Negro,” with examples such as Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance and Don Cheadle in The Family Man.) But what Manuel feels for Harvey is paternal fondness, and what Harvey feels for Manuel is filial love mingled with hero worship. When Manuel tells Harvey that he’ll use some of his earnings to buy a purple suit and canvas-topped shoes, and then step out with a series of ladies, he halts his musings on the opposite sex to ease Harvey’s fears of girls intruding on a boy’s world.

  If Fleming throws the focus of Harvey’s coming of age on Manuel’s unaffected surrogate fatherhood, he also accents the fisherman’s immediate goal: getting Harvey to mesh with the crew. The vignettes of men competing for the biggest catch give way to images of them forking fish and pitching them into the ship and down the hold, and chopping and hooking bait with assembly-line steadiness and momentum. You see and hear how their sea songs keep their spirits up and set a satisfying rhythm when they’re swinging knives. “They had tons of fish packed in ice, and every so often they’d have to throw it away and get a new batch in,” Bartholomew recalled. The frozen codfish came from Boston, and some live halibut were shipped in special tanks from Alaska. (Rooney said he couldn’t resist sneaking a fish or two into Bartholomew’s bunk during location shooting on Catalina Island.)

  Fleming’s achievement of complexity within simplicity on such an oversized production seems astounding, but he and Lighton fought for it every step of the way. Lighton procured a real Gloucester schooner, the Oretha F. Spinney, to serve as the We’re Here. Late in 1935, a second-unit crew logged fifteen thousand miles on it from Massachusetts through the Panama Canal to California, shooting “atmosphere” along the way. But after it arrived, the crew found that either the new construction on deck or the Pacific swells made it roll to one side. For the rival schooner Jennie Cushman, Lighton acquired John Barrymore’s former yacht, the Mariner.

  Fleming aimed to shoot much of the movie off Catalina Island, where he’d made Treasure Island. But Captains Courageous had far lengthier and more intricate nautical sequences, and marine and weather conditions that autumn made outdoor filming nearly impossible. Although in later years Rooney and Carradine insisted they were at sea for weeks, a contemporary profile of Tracy states the principal cast “set sail” for a mere three days. (Tracy got some extra nautical experience when Fleming took him to Balboa for coaching from Fred Lewis, whose Stranger was then the official training vessel for California Sea Scouts.)

  The first day of filming on the Catalina waters started with a 5:00 a.m. wake-up call. By 6:30, an equipment barge had set out for the We’re Here so Hal Rosson could supervise the construction of a camera platform on the side of the ship while the principal actors studied their lines on deck. A Gloucester fisherman taught the supporting cast how to chop and hook bait, while the voice coach Arthur Rosenstein instructed a second team in sea chanteys. Shooting began at 1:00 p.m., after lunch, but the fog needed for the scene lifted at the wrong time, a wind came up, and at 4:30 Fleming was forced to wrap for the day, having put only a take or two in the can.

  This director had a track record of adapting his methods and equipment to difficult locations. On Captains Courageous he utilized a unique rig to capture the shots of the schooner race: the “iron egg” to steady the camera (“a kind of pod strapped to the mast, stabilized by a gyroscope,” Rooney would recall) and a self-wiping windshield to keep the lens clean. But ingenuity couldn’t compete with unpredictable seas and winds, so Fleming moved most of the film to MGM’s Stage 12. “You’ll never know what he went through,” Tracy said. “Six months, mostly on a process stage, with only three sections of boat to work with—the stinking smell of fish—and Freddie Bartholomew limited to four hours of work a day—and Fleming himself sick as a dog half the time.” ( Jack Conway took over for two weeks in late January 1937 while Fleming recovered from a second operation for kidney stones, this one without complications.)

  At the studio, the filmmakers had to plan precisely and artfully to create a 3-D mosaic. Even the pivotal shot of Manuel standing in his dory as he sees Harvey floundering in the fog is second-unit work with Tracy’s double. But Fleming’s cutting of the rescue is so intuitive that the disparate visual components are indistinguishable. Ralph Winters, a top film editor for five decades, said, “Usually, when you shoot process, your camera stays pretty well anchored. Fleming would move anchor even when he was working with a process plate, and if the process image became grainy, so what? It worked all right dramatically.”

  James Havens, the “marine director,” was in charge of the background footage as well as key images of the race between the We’re Here and the Jennie Cushman. Havens shot off the coasts of Eureka, Monterey, the Pacific Northwest, and Catalina before sailing to Mazatlán, Mexico, to finish the tragic end of the race. When the Jennie Cushman tries to cut in front of the We’re Here and neither Troop nor Captain Cushman (Oscar O’Shea) gives an inch, their audacity and foolhardiness give you the shivers. And the potent studio-filmed climax of Manuel’s death merges with the second-unit footage without dropping a stitch.

  The film’s real-life tragedy involved a sailor, not a star. MGM paid $30,000 to the widow of a Norwegian sailor who was swept over the side of the Mariner during a storm off the Mexican coast. The second unit had gone looking for bad weather for a storm scene that never made it into the finished picture. “Courageous is all done until we can get a few shots at sea—whenever God sends a nice storm,” Lighton had written his family. “And we have boats scattered all over the ocean looking for that.”

  James Wong Howe, who had worked with Rosson before working with Fleming in the early 1920s, said directors like Fleming “will not move the camera unless it’s absolutely necessary to follow the actor. They play most of their shots with a stationary camera, allowing the actor to play within the frame. They’ll cut with the camera. They’ll establish the shot and let the action dictate where the cuts should be.” Captains Courageous proves how subtly mobile and expressive Fleming’s camera could be. The result is a wedding of emotion and rhythm resembling Kipling’s best poetry rather than his prose.

  Fleming and Rosson reckoned correctly that to make the movie all of a piece, the camera on the land sequences needed to be as fluid as the constantly rocking camera at sea. They track Mr. Cheyne as he departs his mansion, the sure swing of the camera movement echoing the crisp authority of his orders to his servants. The camera soon ambles through the hallways of Green Hill with Mr. Tyler as he tries to settle Charles, the target of Harvey’s attempted bribery, and talks sense to Harvey. Throughout, there’s a pleasing unity to motion and emotion, even when the scenes are still. Doc’s gentle waking of Harvey on the We’re Here has a sly, woozy wit, culminating with the cook concluding to the little braggart, “You sho’ is a tonic to yourself.” Everything that unfolds in Gloucester is magical, including the cas
ting of the normally villainous Jack LaRue as a priest. He brings a non-creepy intensity to his consolation of the boy.

  Fleming grew close to Bartholomew and gave him rides on his motorcycle. As director, he stays focused on Harvey’s actions and reactions, whether the boy is downing the chocolate sodas that make him sick or responding with shock to Disko’s slapping him (“You hit me!”). The actor rises to each moment in one of the great, unaffected child performances. The way Fleming and his team frame Harvey’s story and Bartholomew embodies it, you never consider it the tale of a brat getting his comeuppance—it’s about a boy finding out what makes him him.

  By age twelve, Bartholomew had already appeared in such celebrated literary adaptations as George Cukor’s David Copperfield, Clarence Brown’s Anna Karenina, and John Cromwell’s Little Lord Fauntleroy. Born in Dublin, raised in London and onstage there since age three, he wasn’t destined to mingle well with Fleming’s raucous crew. Keith Carradine recalls his father telling him that when Fleming asked Barrymore to cuff Harvey and send him sprawling into a pile of fish, “he really did it, because the kid was being such a pain in the ass.” Mahin put a more positive spin on it. “Freddie always came in, in the morning, very hale and well and dewy-eyed. And poor old Barrymore, he had this open-sore ulcer on his leg. Mickey Rooney would come in hung over, and they’d be like, ‘Oh, gee, here he comes.’ So when [Barrymore] had to hit him in the scene, onto this big pile of fish, he says to Vic, ‘You really want me to hit him, huh?’ Vic says, ‘Yeah, make it good, because I’m only going to do one take.’ It really stunned him.” Height differences were another issue. Rooney, at sixteen, had already reached his full height of five feet three inches, but Bartholomew was hitting an adolescent growth spurt, so Rooney wore lifts to stay taller. “And so they had one woman whose only job on the set was which shoes should Mickey or Fred wear that day to keep them at the proper height,” says Bartholomew’s widow, Elizabeth. Still, Rooney considered Bartholomew “a great actor.” Gene Reynolds, who played one of the Green Hill boys, liked Bartholomew immensely and chalked up any friction between him and the rest of the cast to his British manners. Tracy said, “You never have to fake any scenes with Freddie.” When Tracy had to pull him over the side of Manuel’s dory, it “tore the skin right off his ribs. He didn’t bleat, not a bleat.”

  Bartholomew faced enormous pressures. The aunt who had brought him up accompanied him to the set and was soon to embroil him in two court fights. In 1937, his parents, in vain, tried to wrest him from her guardianship, and she strove, unsuccessfully, to get MGM to cancel his contract. But none of that impinged on the Harvey he created for Captains Courageous. Bartholomew was sturdier than he looked. He described the filming as “one long outing” and said he and the principal cast “grew very close” and “cried like a bunch of babies as we said our goodbyes.”

  “Vic had a very special manner [with Tracy],” said Edward Hartman, who visited the studio set and affirms Tracy’s recollection of the fishy stench. “He seemed to be very quiet with him, not coaching, but just talking with him in a very gentle manner.” The unusual rigors of Tracy’s role went beyond the curls and Portuguese accent, and even beyond the physical challenges of working on a wet, rocking set and standing hip deep in water for hours. It was Tracy’s first shot at solo stardom in an MGM epic, and Fleming was sensitive to his root insecurities. The special care paid off in the performance. A welter of emotion emanates from Tracy’s core. His accent does waver; it seems equal parts French, Swedish, Yiddish, and Irish. And the curls ironed into his hair for two hours every day sometimes droop because of all the working and waiting he did in and on the water. No matter. Tracy creates a sailor who carries the wisdom of the home and the world within him without making a big deal about it.

  Tracy called his performance “hammy”—but it isn’t. He imbues what could have been a figure of unmediated goodness with explosiveness and edge. According to Kazan, Lighton would say, “When a man gets angry in life, he’ll walk away. If he’s sad, he’ll conceal it. Emotion is and should be private. Actors are proud of their emotions; they show them off. When they do, I don’t believe the scene.” Tracy paraded his doubts about the role to the press, but his sheepishness about playing Manuel strengthened his acting. He told the film magazine writer Gladys Hall, “I didn’t want to play Manuel, you know. Fought against it like a steer, thought the characterization would be phony. Didn’t know how the pieces would fit together.”

  He studied dialect performances by Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni, and found a Portuguese sailor from San Diego “who was Manuel. The expression in his eyes, the way he walked, the way he sat, the way he used his hands, his knowledge of boats. Then he began to talk and—he spoke better English than I do!”

  Fleming didn’t lavish the same attention on all his players. Billy Gilbert, who was Mr. Pettibone in His Girl Friday, had an atypically subdued bit part as the soda jerk on the passenger liner who mixes Harvey’s near-fatal ice-cream sodas. He and Fleming probably disagreed on whether Gilbert should perform any of his trademark tics and sputters. “He got the dark side of Mr. Fleming,” says his sister-in-law, Fay McKenzie.

  Now Billy really was a beloved character. They would bring him into a block comedy scene. Many times, they just needed something funny, and Billy was very inventive and could write stuff, and could give them what they needed.

  Evidently, Fleming was awful to him. He really humiliated him. And he wasn’t used to that kind of treatment. All I know is that he was furious at how he had been treated. And this is the story. They broke for lunch, and he’s sitting in the commissary, and he’s looking at the table where Fleming is seated, and he had a glass of water and was thinking he’d like to throw it at him. But then, suddenly, a glass of water flew at Fleming, and Billy looked down, quick, in his hand to see if he’d actually done it. And it scared him.

  Fleming recorded the singing of Tracy and the rest of the cast right there on the set, even though Douglas Shearer had devised sophisticated methods of prerecording and lip-synching long in use at MGM for musicals and “straight” movies alike. A musician played for Tracy out of camera sight while the actor worked a dummy hurdy-gurdy. Fleming used a wax playback track to cover medium and long shots of Manuel singing and playing. But for most of the musical scenes, the director simply shot multiple takes with two cameras to get all angles. Fleming had progressed from The Farmer Takes a Wife, in which the thundering male choruses were fit for concert halls. Here he weaves the two main tunes—Manuel’s ballad “Little Fish” and the jolly work song “Tishimingo” (with its chorus of “Oh, what a terrible man!”)—in and out of the action. They lend the film an unusual springiness for a production of its size. Harvey reaches his peak of euphoria when he’s able to contribute his own gibe against Captain Cushman:

  Oh, he might have been a grocer

  But a first-class seaman, no sir!

  Oh, what a terrible man!

  Oh, what a terrible man!

  Gus Kahn got screen credit for the lyrics and Franz Waxman for the music, but additional contributions came from Lighton and the irrepressible Mahin, who once jokingly said to Jerome Kern, “I write songs.”

  “Little Fish” comes into play as we feel the profundity of Harvey’s maturation under Manuel’s influence. Their relationship reaches crisis point when Harvey fouls up one of Long Jack’s trawl lines so Manuel can win a bet that he catches more fish with his hand lines. Manuel forfeits the contest to Long Jack when Harvey brags about his sabotage, and ignores the boy until he confesses to Long Jack. Harvey also apologizes to Long Jack for inadvertently filling the wiry seaman’s arms with fishing hooks. But the boy’s penitence rouses Long Jack to anger instead of mollifying him, and when he threatens to beat Harvey’s ears off, Manuel responds with white heat: “Don’t get me mad, Long Jack. I get all crazy and sick inside.” Indeed, an unsettling glare irradiates his face; then he goes belowdecks and comforts the mortified Harvey. “We all got be ashamed once,” Manuel s
ays, “so we don’t do things again we be ashamed of.” He sings a new version of “Little Fish,” joining the chorus, “Yeah ho, leettle feesh / Don’t cry, don’t cry,” with new words: “You’ll be a balea by and by”—“That mean beeg feesh, whale,” he explains. Fleming regarded this scene, with its close-ups of Bartholomew fighting back tears, as one of his own top three. What’s moving is not its sadness but the sight of a boy growing into himself. Tracy partners Bartholomew beautifully throughout this sequence. Early in the film, when Manuel first explains to Harvey why he sings, he says he just finds the songs in his mouth—feelings hit him like trade winds and keep coming out. But before he croons “Little Fish” after his face-off with Long Jack, he explains to Harvey, “I gotta sing every time I get mad.” His singing is a way of turning negative energy positive—and making positive energy lyrical.

  For Harvey’s odyssey to be over and for him to connect with his real father, Manuel must be sacrificed. Lighton and Fleming kept working on Manuel’s death almost to the end, striving for a balance between pathos and cruelty. What requires a willing suspension of disbelief is also what makes the scene extraordinary: Manuel knows he’s cut in two as soon as he hits the water. The snapping of the mainmast was present in the script early, but only in Fleming’s final notes do we find the inspired stroke of Manuel screaming out his horrifying condition to Doc in Portuguese, so Doc can tell Disko to cut him loose. “He’s stove in,” Doc tells Disko. “All the bottom half of him’s gone. But he don’t want the kid to know.”