Korjus had battled with Duvivier. In fact, Korjus’s daughter, Melissa Wells, a former U.S. ambassador to Estonia, remembers her mother berating the director in Russian and German and declaring, “I don’t care, I’m going back to Germany!” She threatened to walk off the movie as long as Duvivier was directing. But when MGM put Fleming on it, he called her “Angel” (he would call Ingrid Bergman that, too), and she nursed hopes that he would direct her in a film about the nineteenth-century soprano Adelina Patti, with Toscanini conducting. When the columnist Sheilah Graham observed Korjus taking direction from the producer Reinhardt in German, Fleming was likely using Reinhardt to help him communicate with someone who had just learned English.
Alfred Hitchcock had made a Strauss movie, Waltzes from Vienna, in Britain in 1934; he later referred to it as “the lowest ebb” of his career. But The Great Waltz was a smash and set a trend for fictional composer biopics that ransacked entire oeuvres, rearranged works musically and chronologically, and pretended that an artist’s life—a make-believe account of his life, at that—was a direct inspiration for those works. A Song to Remember (Chopin), Song of Scheherazade (Rimsky-Korsakov), Song of Norway (Grieg), and Song Without End (Liszt) followed.
Duvivier, not Fleming, deserves the credit—and the blame—for many of the form’s stock scenes, which here have a spurious freshness. In one Fantasia-like sequence, the chattering of birds, the irregular clopping of a carriage horse, the piping of nearby shepherds, and the sounding of a post horn combine to give Strauss and Carla the inspiration for “Tales of the Vienna Woods.”
Near the end, Duvivier does pull off a remarkable coup de cinéma. When Poldi enters the Imperial Opera House for the debut of Strauss’s first opera, the director ratchets the camera back, not in a smooth tracking shot, but in a cannonade of individual images. This swift series of “shock cuts” takes in the grandeur of the theater and leaves her a tiny figure in the distance. Paradoxically, by making us experience Poldi’s feelings of smallness, it creates an operatic flourish exactly when the action needs it most.
Fleming remade one large-scale scene: student revolutionaries demonstrating to a Strauss march, led by a line of little drummer boys. Their sunlit assault on Count Hohenfried’s house takes the place of Duvivier’s more violent and foreboding nocturnal sequence, in which clutches of rebels at various barricades cheered the sight and sound of the singing marchers and upended a patriotic statue. In both versions, Strauss shrewdly rescues Donner from the mob by proclaiming her a friend to the rebels, but he can’t save her from the soldiers who pile the protesters into tumbrels.
Again, it’s hard to figure how the Duvivier version would have clicked tonally when the sequence always ended with Schani and Donner in one tumbrel and two of Schani’s musicians, Dudelman (Leonid Kinskey) and Kienzl (Curt Bois), in another, communicating through a game of charades. The two jokers stage a Three Stooges–like fight in order to distract their guards and let Strauss and Donner escape. This was all more in Fleming’s vein, anyway; he always had a healthy affinity for low comedy, from his silent days with Fairbanks to his repeated use of the Three Stooges’ mentor, Ted Healy. In The Great Waltz, when he isn’t deploying Kinskey’s Dudelman and Bois’s Kienzl as a baggy-pants short-tall comedy team—a sort of Muttski and Jeffski—he exploits Hugh Herbert, as Strauss’s bartering music publisher, Julius Hofbauer, for excitable or dyspeptic burlesque effects. Herbert looks as if he’d spontaneously combust if he didn’t let out the “Woo-hoo!” that had been his vocal signature since his vaudeville days.
Mahin rewrote Hoffenstein and Reisch’s script both to tighten its focus on an artist divided between first love and mature love and to give the dialogue the pith it would have in the libretto to a musical comedy. “I thought of you ever since that night,” says Schani. “And you walked away, proud and angry,” says Carla—dispensing with a half page of verbiage in the previous script. Yet the interchange still falls into cliché.
The Great Waltz gave Fleming a chance to display his film smarts, not his artistry. He and Mahin knew how to maintain a robust emotional through line up to an audacious resolution, with Carla simply announcing to Poldi after her performance in Strauss’s opera that he and the singer love each other and that he’s going with her to Budapest.
Too bad the filmmakers can’t overcome the anticlimax built into the pseudo-inspirational material. In the best Duvivier-shot scene, Count Hohenfried calls on Poldi at the Strauss residence and urges her to fight for her man. As the count, Lionel Atwill movingly blends ardor with mortification, and Rainer shows gracious strength as she tells him he has her “greatest respect.” But when the grandeur of the opera world defeats her, she gives up. It was right for Fleming and Mahin to delete Poldi’s saying to Carla, “I came to kill you,” and to make Carla so bold in her claims on Strauss. You do get caught up in the momentum of mad love. Yet then the lovers turn impossibly high-minded, and Carla reads Johann’s mind as they banter in the carriage ride to the boat. She states that Poldi would always be a presence in their lives, coming between them. She sings “One Day When We Were Young,” assured that Strauss wrote it for her and that she’ll always have a piece of his art and heart. Not long after her boat floats up the Danube, the melancholy Strauss gets his wind back. In a pallid replay of the Vienna Woods ride, the sights and sounds of the river rouse Strauss to create “The Blue Danube.”
Gravet said that Josef von Sternberg, not Fleming, was brought in to direct everything from here to the end, and the dancer Dorothy Barrett backs him up. The movie cascades into a montage of Strauss’s melodies winning the hearts of waltzers across the Continent and beyond as his sheet music pours off the presses; Barrett was the dancer from Spain, in a dress that Jeanette MacDonald originally wore as a Spanish spy in The Firefly. Von Sternberg “did all the montage shots . . . all the little intricate shots and trick shots,” Barrett says. (You can also spot Barrett in The Wizard of Oz, as the pretty brunette who opens the door to the Emerald City’s Wash & Brush-Up Co. at the close of “The Merry Old Land of Oz.”)
To gild a rather wilted lily, Carla gets to reprise “One Day When We Were Young” at the scene of Poldi’s climactic triumph. After Poldi has shepherded her Schani through the shoals of temptation and temperament for half a century, Franz Josef himself leads all Vienna in celebrating its Waltz King. From the imperial balcony we see Carla in the clouds, warbling soulfully away. Although Fleming’s revisions proved critical in making the movie play, the press exaggerated their extent, and the picture remained a piece of musical marzipan.
Joseph Stalin, however, found it incomparably tasty. After he saw it in 1939, he canceled awarding a series of medals struck for Soviet filmmakers. “When they learn to work like the Americans,” he said, “then they’ll get their medals.” Partly because World War II curtailed the importing of current foreign films and the return of old ones, Soviet projectors wore out their prints of The Great Waltz. The pianist Dmitry Paperno wrote that it provided “a dazzling contrast to our strictly regulated lives, not to mention the terrible things that were going on in the background, and that the grown-ups tried to keep us from.”
When word of The Great Waltz’s popularity in the Soviet Union spread after World War II, Korjus, who became a regular host to Soviet émigrés, told her daughter, “I am Stalin’s favorite actress”—and Melissa responded, “Please don’t tell anybody else about this!” The Bolshoi ballerina Maya Plisetskaya saw it so often that she knew the subtitles by heart. She met Korjus in Los Angeles in 1966 and wrote, “She never did fully believe me when I told her that she had been an inaccessible goddess for an entire nation, a beautiful extraterrestrial, a ray of happiness in the hardest years of the slave state.” Korjus’s son, Richard Foelsch, says émigrés told his mother a story that originated in Stalin’s screening room at the Kremlin (the scene of Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1991 film, The Inner Circle): whenever the dictator saw her singing “One Day When We Were Young” at the finale, “he would rise from his seat,
place his head against the wall, and weep like a baby.”
21
Putting Oz into The Wizard of Oz
The spate of work Fleming did in the late 1930s drained his resilience and on occasion nearly cost him his sanity. But it also sparked his talents and elevated his stature as both an artist and a Hollywood professional. Sometimes directors, like actors, take on aspects of their greatest creations. Francis Ford Coppola was never more of a film-industry godfather than he was after The Godfather. Fleming would never be more of a wizard than he was after The Wizard of Oz.
Oz would have been a complex, iffy production under any circumstances—and Fleming shouldered it with little preparation, after one director was fired and another came on simply to readjust the costumes and makeup. Yet Fleming, drawing on his experience in all genres, including comic fantasy, displayed a clear vision and command of the project from the outset. As he told Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s intra-corporate newspaper, the MGM Studio News:
You may wonder how we make an audience believe there is such a thing as a tin man, a straw man and a cowardly lion which talks. A little psychology was all that was necessary.
First we established the characters. Dorothy, played by Judy Garland, is a Kansas farm girl who wanted to find some place where no one gets into trouble. She runs away from home, meets a medicine man, Frank Morgan, who seems all-wise. Then she is caught in a cyclone. In a subconscious world, she goes to that dream world, Oz . . .
On her farm are three hired men. Ray Bolger is always pretending he has brains, Jack Haley meddles with inventions and talks about having a heart, and Bert Lahr is even afraid of baby pigs, but chatters about courage. So, in Oz, Bolger is transformed into a Scarecrow looking for brains, Haley into a Tin Woodman who wants a heart, and Lahr into a Cowardly Lion who hopes to find courage.
Back home, a neighbor woman was trying to have Judy’s dog, Toto, killed for biting her. She is as wicked as a witch, Judy thinks. In Oz, she is a witch. Then that great faker, Morgan, becomes the all-wise Wizard. You take that basis of reality, make things “dream fantastic,” add music throughout and adults accept the story and love it as much as children.
Louise Brooks, the cinematic sex symbol of the late 1920s who renewed her fame decades later as a Hollywood memoirist, asked Kevin Brownlow in 1969, “Isn’t Victor Fleming an inspired director of the beauty of childhood?”
In The Wizard of Oz, he not only captured the beauty of childhood but also defined it for the millions who have experienced it in theaters and in the highly publicized TV showings that began in 1956. It evokes the sometimes-terrifying exhilaration of discovering the world beyond the doorstep—and the anxiety-tinged urge to hang on to “home” before time and circumstance alter it.
The usual stories of Fleming’s reluctance to direct the picture because it would be too big a stretch do not survive cursory scrutiny. He brought off Treasure Island and Captains Courageous with fierceness and delicacy, and both were highly successful at the box office. Paramount had wanted him to direct the studio’s first talkie and first musical, Burlesque, and he did direct one backstage musical, Reckless, and a portion of The Great Waltz. And, of course, he had peppered When the Clouds Roll By with Oz-like whimsy.
What made Fleming resist Oz was what would make him hesitate to leave the picture for Selznick’s Gone With the Wind three months later: he would have to assume command of a formidably complicated and expensive production that had already started shooting. Based on L. Frank Baum’s novel first published in 1900, The Wizard of Oz was a live-action phantasmagoria that could easily flounder in the execution, like Paramount’s all-star 1933 rendition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland—prominent in Fleming’s mind since Bud Lighton produced that botch.
Fleming had squeezed in an Oregon fishing trip with John Lee Mahin following The Great Waltz before starting preproduction on The Yearling. Based on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, it boasted equally difficult, if more down-to-earth, requirements for a planned location shoot in the Florida back-country. Spencer Tracy was cast as the father, Penny Baxter, and Gene Reynolds as the son Jody, a character both dreamy and substantial. That’s when Fleming got the call for Oz.
Although his daughter Victoria says she was told her father viewed Oz as just another job, it was one with ineluctable attractions. And Fleming had a compelling private motivation to take on this potential mind fogger. He had always been a dedicated family man, giving advice and financial aid to a real-life Dorothy Gale—his niece Yvonne. Now he was a father of two.
Fatherhood is what Mahin thought attracted Fleming to the picture. “Here Vic . . . suddenly had two little girls. And all his joy was in them. I think he did it for them, for Missy and Sally. I was with him on the set and I could see his whole love for them poured into the picture.” Fleming told both Mahin and the producer Mervyn LeRoy (as LeRoy remembered it) that he wanted his daughters to see “a picture that searched for beauty and decency and sweetness and love in the world.” Making Captains Courageous and Treasure Island had been good training. In both, “beauty and decency” rise from the rude awakenings of childhood and adolescence. In Oz, Fleming finds “sweetness and love,” jagged truth and unpredictable joy, “where the wild things are.” He doesn’t stint on Baum’s loony inventions, and he hits on what makes them transcendent.
At the end of his Oz time, Fleming pasted credit sheets from the picture and photos of seven cast members inside two 1903 editions of the book and had the actors inscribe them to the girls. In Sally’s, one message reads:
Dear Little Baby Sister,
I hope this book will make you as happy as making the picture has made me.
Love and kisses from Judy Garland
“Dorothy”
The impulse for MGM to make The Wizard of Oz predated Walt Disney’s entrance into Technicolor animated features with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). But Snow White’s success revived operetta traditions (such as background choruses) that had been going out of style and gave instant Hollywood heat to musical fantasies. Disney’s mixture of innovative animation with an integrated score and story, and even specific numbers such as “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” exerted a tremendous influence. But in The Wizard of Oz, the lyricist E. Y. “Yip” Harburg and the composer Harold Arlen revive operetta and slap it silly.
Louis B. Mayer was eager to launch this pleasurable assault on family audiences in the wake of Disney’s smash. But Nicholas Schenck applied pressure on Mayer to provide star power for a lavish enterprise that ended up costing $2.777 million. So Mayer at least made a show of trying to borrow Shirley Temple from Fox for Dorothy, probably aware that Fox would refuse. When Fox did the expected, there was no new move to acquire Temple even after the production was delayed and Fleming replaced the first director.
Mervyn LeRoy, Hollywood’s “boy wonder” before Orson Welles claimed that title, was a versatile director of hits ranging from the gritty Little Caesar and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang to the opulent Anthony Adverse. He pushed for Oz to be his first super-production after Mayer wooed him from Warner Bros. in 1937 (he started at MGM in early 1938). He had long been a fan of the Oz books, starting with the first one, originally published as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. “I’d wanted to make the picture since I was a kid,” he told a journalist in 1973.
The announcement that he wasn’t directing it confirmed to industry journalists that Mayer wanted LeRoy to help fill the gaps left by Thalberg’s death the year before, and by the departure of Selznick from MGM to form his own company in 1935. LeRoy first named Norman Taurog to direct because of the understanding of a child’s mentality he displayed in Skippy (for which he won an Oscar) and Boys Town (which earned him a nomination). MGM even briefly attached Taurog to The Yearling when Fleming went on to Oz.
The studio, though, reassigned Taurog to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And LeRoy hired Richard Thorpe—a decision that dumbfounded Arthur Freed, the songwriter making his first f
oray into producing as an uncredited associate producer on Oz. (Freed had been pushing Mayer to make Oz as a musical for Garland even before LeRoy came to the studio.) Thorpe had done yeoman work on Tarzan Escapes (1936), as he would years later on Ivanhoe (1952), but those are vastly different fantasies. Thorpe’s footage was flat. “Not his fault,” LeRoy said. “He just didn’t have the feeling of The Wizard of Oz.” So LeRoy canned him, scrapped all his scenes, and went after George Cukor. (Thorpe was the one who ended up making Huckleberry Finn.)
On October 26, MGM announced that Thorpe was fighting the flu and that Cukor, “whose work is often rich in imaginative qualities,” would probably become the director. “But he wasn’t happy in what he was doing,” said LeRoy, and Cukor had been committed for years to Gone With the Wind, which was finally revving up on the Selznick lot. He stayed on Oz briefly and adjusted the look of several characters, including Margaret Hamilton’s Witch, Bolger’s Scarecrow, and, most drastically, Garland’s Dorothy, making everything from her skin tone to her hair color less glamourized and more natural.
Thorpe and the MGM makeup guru Jack Dawn had supplied Garland with a blond wig. Cukor turned to the hair specialist Sydney Guilaroff. “Parting her hair in the middle,” wrote Guilaroff, “I pulled it back from her face and shaped it into soft curls hanging down her back. It was a pretty but youthful style.” But if Guilaroff and Cukor made Garland look like Dorothy, Fleming made her act like Dorothy.
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 36
