Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Freed said he eventually focused on Fleming because “that man was a poet. Probably one of the great unsung men of this business . . . I knew he was the right man, from having coffee in the morning and feeling out his mind and the kind of things that he liked.” LeRoy agreed and would later say he was “instrumental” in hiring Fleming. “I wish I was as good as he was,” LeRoy told George Stevens Jr. “He was a kid at heart.”

  Some accounts have LeRoy and Mayer calling on Fleming at the director’s Balboa beach house. Others have LeRoy taking Fleming to Mayer’s home in Santa Monica—which, given Fleming’s intransigence, would have been like the Mahatma going to the mountain. On November 1, the news went forth that Fleming was hired. “We got along like a couple of kids,” LeRoy told the critic and filmmaker John Gallagher.

  It was hardly Fleming’s biggest payday; he had been paid $63,333.34 for Treasure Island and (in his last year at Paramount) $72,000 for The Virginian. For his compressed, intense three-and-a-half-month stint on Oz, the studio paid Fleming what had become his usual rate—$3,000 a week—and the director followed his normal process. Fleming’s first move was to sign up Mahin for rewrites. They immediately struck a pricklier and more dramatic tone for the movie. Under Thorpe, Oz was to open with a limp, coquettish mid-American pastoral featuring a smiling Dorothy gamboling on a pony and chattering to a scarecrow, as if she were blasé over villainous Miss Gulch’s threat to Toto. Mahin replaced it with Dorothy scrambling home to tell Uncle Henry (Charley Grapewin) and Auntie Em (Clara Blandick) that because Toto went after Miss Gulch’s cat, Miss Gulch “hit Toto right over the back with a rake”—and Toto bit her. (This tale foreshadows Toto’s ill-timed capering in the climax: he leaps from the Wizard’s balloon and chases an Emerald City feline, causing Dorothy to scramble out after him and miss the flight back to Kansas.)

  Mahin and Fleming provided Uncle Henry and Auntie Em with a reason for ignoring Dorothy—they’re busy trying to fix a faltering five-hundred-chick incubator—and also added a farmhand named Zeke for Bert Lahr to play. With two other hands already in place, Ray Bolger’s Hunk and Jack Haley’s Hickory, each of Dorothy’s Oz friends now had a counterpart in Kansas.

  Thorpe, according to LeRoy, had developed such an affection for Toto (the cairn terrier’s real name was Terry) that he threw the whole movie to the animal. Fleming decided to treat the dog more casually and shrewdly. Toto is a catalyst of disaster, and his scruffy flashes of spontaneity ground the action. He never stops being a dog, not a fake sidekick. When he enters into the choreography, whether in “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” or in the Tin Man’s first woozy steps after derusting, the effect is euphoric and funny.

  Fleming also demanded changes of focus and design in both Oz and Kansas. (King Vidor shot the Kansas scenes after Fleming and Mahin reconceived them.) Thorpe’s Yellow Brick Road was made of ovals. Fleming remade them to resemble proper rectangular (albeit brightly hued) paving bricks, and also had the Yellow Brick Road curbed, turning it into something more like a Yellow Brick Street, such as those in the Los Angeles of his youth. (Before the automobile age, cities generally used paving bricks—often yellowish beige—instead of concrete and asphalt surfacing.) The curbing may have been a way of keeping the yellow color from bleeding into the rest of the scenery, or, in Fleming’s realistic logic, paving bricks meant a street, and a street had to have a curb.

  Without Fleming there would have been no Yellow Brick Road song, either. Three weeks before the scheduled wrap of the Munchkin scenes on December 30, Fleming decided there should be more musical punch to Dorothy’s farewell to Munchkinland. He commanded Harburg and Arlen to send Dorothy off to the Emerald City with a bang—and with their usual panache, they delivered “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.” (Freed may have suggested they make the song “a directive,” but it was Fleming who saw the need for it and gave the order.) Aljean Harmetz, author of the groundbreaking and essential The Making of “The Wizard of Oz” (1977), writes, “The primer provided by Harburg’s lyrics must have been something of a relief to Victor Fleming . . . a man with a rough-hewn masculine effect and little musical delicacy.” Evidently, these lyrics were “a relief” because Fleming, who had the musical delicacy to request them, saw how effective they could be in the hands of an alert director.

  Fleming knew something about how a struggling farm should feel; he told an assistant director to toss away Auntie Em’s costume-department apron and buy a cheaper one at Woolworth. And throughout the film, he revamped decor so he could position the actors more dramatically, both simplifying it and spooking it up. He made the Wicked Witch’s giant crystal central to her throne room, then turned her throne around so that a stone buzzard adorning it dominated the scene.

  Harburg and the South African–born screenwriter Noel Langley, who received final script credit along with Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf (once a vaudeville sketch writer for Morgan), locked in many concepts before Fleming took charge. But the director let in the requisite fresh air. Just as he used sound unself-consciously and freely in The Virginian, he made the gigantic Technicolor camera pirouette in The Wizard of Oz—his first color film—though then it was a novelty on the scale of the Emerald City’s buffing machine.

  The film overflows with visual and staging coups. Several Munchkins hide in gardens and flower beds, then seem to sprout from them. The five Sleepy Heads awaken from broken-eggshell beds in what looks like a bird’s nest with an ominous saltshaker next to them. In the wake of the Wicked Witch, Munchkinland officials and citizens seek shelter from her fire and brimstone in a whirl, as if, like Dorothy, they were caught in a cyclone. And the Emerald City offers a tough kid’s view of divine decadence—its citizens are like pampered, overgrown children devoted to novelty and pleasure. The one big “Merry Old Land of Oz” number is ripe and jolly enough to do the metropolis justice. (Even in the surviving stills, a deleted march of triumph through the city after Dorothy melts the Wicked Witch of the West looks uninspired and cluttered.)

  The decision to contrast the pewter and white Sepiatone in the Kansas scenes with the Technicolor in Oz came before any script. LeRoy took credit for the idea. (A sweet, silly Wizard of Oz cartoon had the same idea in 1933, but the short went unreleased because of legal problems with Technicolor.) Still, the psychological slant Fleming espoused to the MGM Studio News sounds like him and not a publicist, and turns the transition from sepia to color into a gimmick of genius. In the 1946 A Matter of Life and Death, which strongly resembles Fleming’s 1943 A Guy Named Joe, the director Michael Powell depicts earth in Technicolor and heaven in black and white. (In 1942, Powell paid MGM $200 for use of an Oz song line, “Because of the wonderful things he does,” in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, released the next year; in his memoirs, he praises Fleming as first among directors who made Mayer and Selznick look good.)

  An awkward 1925 Wizard of Oz film also had farmhands doubling as a teenage Dorothy’s friends, but the cyclone simply whisked these fellow Kansans away to Oz with her—and once there they donned disguises as the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion to hide from Oz’s evil ruler. (Oliver Hardy, as the Tin Man, was wasted.) That version had a dream framework, too, but the whole movie was a mess, aimed mostly at showcasing the slapstick talents of the star-director-writer, Larry Semon, as the Scarecrow.

  The screenwriter Langley said his jumping-off point was a nightmare in the magical 1917 Mary Pickford comedy-drama The Poor Little Rich Girl, directed by Maurice Tourneur. In that film, the heroine’s drug-induced bad dream puts various family service providers in fantasy guises that reveal their true natures. And there are other parallels to Oz, such as the way the child takes cliché metaphors literally, so that a two-faced woman actually bears two faces in Pickford’s dream, just as the Emerald City’s Horse of a Different Color changes into six different colors.

  The Wizard of Oz has only one child in it, and she’s played by an adolescent. The sixteen-year-old Garland is bound and corseted to appear all of twelve—well
, maybe fourteen. Yet Garland, like Pickford in the earlier film, is wonderful at creating a poetic intensification of childhood. On its own rousing musical-comedy terms, Oz connects directly to a child’s underlying fears and desires, and to an adult’s childlike ones. In 101 minutes, it packs as much unruly humor and adventure, and indefinable sensuality, as a full year (or several) of childhood. It reassures kids about their own burgeoning feelings and reminds adults of youth’s odd blends of melancholy and elation.

  Fleming removed any taint of kiddie-matinee pandering. This is the opposite of fantasies that try to hook preteen audiences with heroes and heroines just like them. It’s a plus that Garland’s pressed-down bosom doesn’t adequately disguise her age. Her teen fervor helps make Dorothy seem as ripe for risky exploits as J. M. Barrie’s Wendy in Peter Pan. And for today’s young viewers, it gives her unexplained orphan status poignancy akin to Harry Potter’s. Dorothy’s unhappiness on her guardians’ farm conveys desperation akin to Harry’s, too. Oz is Dorothy’s Hogwarts School, even though her aunt and uncle, unlike Harry’s, love her. In Baum’s original book, Dorothy carries a mark on her forehead—the circle of a good witch’s kiss. Harry carries a lightning-bolt-shaped scar on his forehead from his duel with Voldemort.

  Baum purists object to the Kansas bookend material in the film, saying that it undercuts the imaginative integrity of Oz as a real if bizarre realm and dilutes Baum’s resolve to move fairy tales beyond the gloomy, spook-laden moral fables of Europe into pure entertainment and invention. That analysis denies the actual experience of the movie: the audience registers Dorothy’s exploits with an immediacy and depth that don’t fade when Fleming reveals the dream nature of Oz. And the whole movie testifies to Hollywood ingenuity and high spirits at their peak.

  Harburg, likewise, protested the film’s emphasis on Kansas as Dorothy’s true heartland—and his objection makes some sense. “Over the Rainbow” yearns for the antithesis of a bleak Midwestern landscape. Harburg and Arlen were intent, with their score, on parodying or at least toying with European music-theater notions of rural innocence and corrupted court sophistication.

  But the Dorothy of Baum’s book does say, “No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live [in Kansas] than any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.” The movie’s power depends on an enveloping nostalgia whose source can’t be pinned down. After Dorothy proclaims the Scarecrow and Tin Man “the best friends anyone ever had,” she says, “I feel as if I’ve known you all the time—but I couldn’t have, could I?” The shiver she summons in even the most jaded viewer has something to do with the way her dream oscillates between fantasy and reality. It also comes from the movie’s eerie, comical grasp about how we create our own destinies wherever we go, often replicating what we think we’ve left behind. For us, and for Dorothy, Oz becomes the second home that makes us appreciate our first home all the more. Margaret Hamilton said that “home” as expressed in the film is “the place where we belong, where we are welcome, where there is love and understanding and acceptance waiting for us when we come. Home, where we can shed our cares and share our troubles and feel safe and protected.” The mesh of prayer and desire in “Over the Rainbow” expresses simultaneously Dorothy’s urge to escape and her need to get back to where she once belonged.

  That song, along with the others, demanded a vocalist with chops. Although Temple had a perky way with a tune and Jane Withers could pack a musical-comedy wallop, neither could compete with Garland as a singer. Indeed, Freed’s musical mainstay, Roger Edens, declared Temple’s vocal limitations “insurmountable.” From the outset, Freed, a vaudeville-bred lyricist, thought of Garland. So did LeRoy. Freed wrote that Garland would be perfect for “an Orphan in Kansas who sings jazz”—a description that also makes clear how much irreverence and invention he expected from the score.

  Freed contemplated hiring Jerome Kern and the lyricists Ira Gershwin and Dorothy Fields, but Kern was too weak from a recent heart attack. MGM also considered the teams of Mack Gordon and Harry Revel and then Al Dubin and Nacio Herb Brown; Freed made a critical hire when he signed Arlen and Harburg instead. Based partly on a musical structure set out by Edens, they aimed to salute three things: the potency of illusions, the liberation that comes with the power to see through them, and the force that positive illusions can retain even after a sound debunking. Their score lays down a satisfying through line. It’s riotous and upsetting when Toto pulls back a curtain and reveals the awe-inspiring Wizard to be a fraud. But when the Wizard, in a variation on Baum’s climax, gives the Scarecrow a diploma and a doctorate in Thinkology, the Tin Man a heart-shaped watch and a testimonial, and the Cowardly Lion “the Triple Cross Medal” and membership in the Legion of Courage, they embrace those symbols and feel transformed. Yes, the Wizard is a humbug, but in the end his rhetoric and prizes are authentic. He knows how to make Dorothy’s pals recognize their own virtues. Although Dorothy contains all their qualities, and the Wizard’s wisdom, too, she doesn’t require certification; all she needs is a pair of ruby slippers. She lucks into them when she inadvertently kills the Wicked Witch of the East; she earns them when she saves the Scarecrow from the Wicked Witch of the West.

  The score makes the characters farcically or ruefully self-conscious about feeling that they’re acting out roles. Dorothy’s first number in the Land of Oz is giddy and self-satirizing. Carried on waves of adoration, she helps the Munchkins inflate her accidental killing of the Wicked Witch of the East. Similarly, in the middle segment of the “If I Only Had a Brain/Heart/Nerve” song cycle, the Tin Man, pining for a genuine ticker, muses, in the bridge, “Picture me . . . a balcony . . . above a voice sings low,” and a female voice sings out, “Wherefore are thou, Romeo?” The use of Adriana Caselotti as the voice of “Juliet” embellished the joke for contemporary audiences. She had previously been the lead voice of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

  Fleming and his creative accomplices stumbled onto the realization that youngsters experience life with greater-than-adult intensity. Harold Meyerson and Ernie Harburg (the lyricist’s son), in their biography of Harburg, Who Put the Rainbow in “The Wizard of Oz”? (1993), note that Arlen conceived “Over the Rainbow” as a blend of mature and childish feeling: “It is a song for Nelson Eddy as well as for little Dorothy. The octave leap with which Arlen begins the front phrase, and the other graceful leaps of the first sixteen bars situate this song of yearning in emotional overdrive from the start. The challenge facing Harold and Yip was to balance the power of that emotion against the poignancy and delicacy of its childish context.” Thirty years later, his close friend Irving Berlin, working on a Friars Club tribute to Barbra Streisand, sent parody lyrics of “Over the Rainbow” to Arlen, who may have written some of his own—Berlin included a note, “This is better—at least my lawyer thinks so.” Berlin’s version, never performed, contains the line “If Miss B will sing my song—who needs people?” By then, this song may have been too resonant and revered to parody in public.

  Balancing the score’s potent longings with Dorothy’s youthful quest for identity was a challenge facing Fleming and Mahin, too. But they attack (and conquer) it head-on. The first question Dorothy hears in Oz is, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” She replies, “Why, I’m not a witch at all. I’m Dorothy Gale of Kansas.” She finds herself as she seeks her way home. The movie is about multiple quests—the Tin Man to see himself as a feeling creature, the Scarecrow as a thinking one, the Cowardly Lion as the brave King of the Forest. Even the Wizard hopes to see himself as “a very good man” if “a very bad wizard.”

  The consequences of the diverse comedy and drama is a film of unusually elastic allure, earning the allegiance of artists as different as John Waters and Salman Rushdie. This long-lived milestone of family entertainment has an enormous gay following—and not just because the Wicked Witch calls Dorothy “my little pretty” or because the Cowardly Lion embodies an archetypal “siss
y,” a tender fellow in a half-fey, half-butch package. (Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times knowingly and admiringly referred to his “artistically curled mane.”)

  Dorothy’s wondering statement, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” has become one motto of San Francisco’s Castro district. That’s because Oz is a place where all the characters become what they want to be, including Dorothy. The paradox is that she wants to be a loving, appreciative niece to Auntie Em. The Wizard of Oz is the movies’ most enduring transformation fantasy because it speaks at once to wanderlust and to the nesting instinct, to a yen for license and make-believe and to a hankering for roots. It’s become the center of sing-along screenings for families as well as camp cultists and a homing signal for American service members abroad.

  “I viewed the replacement of Richard Thorpe by Victor Fleming with great trepidation,” noted Wally Worsley, a script supervisor who aptly book-ended his career with Fleming on Oz by acting as Steven Spielberg’s production manager on E.T. “Fleming had a reputation for being irascible, quick-tempered, and, some said, sadistic. By the time he took over the picture he must have mellowed considerably, for I saw very little of those characteristics.”

  From his first day, November 4, to his last the following February 17, Fleming maintained good-humored control. If he “saw a workman sawing or nailing a board in a way he thought was inept, he would go to the man, take the tool, and do it himself. None resented this, and all found it amusing,” Worsley wrote. After working with Thorpe, he felt Fleming’s attitude “was the difference between night and day.” The makeup man William Tuttle (“So many people were involved, I couldn’t take credit for the creative part”) found the director “very gentlemanly. He didn’t put up with foolishness; he was not the most patient person. If you knew what you were doing, he respected you . . . but he would never say, ‘That’s good enough.’ ”