Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  At best, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat is a merry chaos. Fleming’s movie is one, too. Fleming may have considered an all-Hispanic ensemble; he tested Desi Arnaz and Ricardo Montalban for Danny and tried to borrow Rita Hayworth from Columbia. But with Tracy as Pilon, Fleming needed a commensurate star, like John Garfield, for Danny, and Hedy Lamarr became a natural choice for Sweets: she and Tracy had scored a giant hit in Boom Town (1940). The picture’s ultimate urban-ethnic cast, with its maelstrom of accents, would have suited a grown-up version of a Dead End Kids comedy. The whole movie is full of jolly incongruities. The collection of hangdog character actors mirrors the collection of reformed mutts and strays that follow around the most likable character, the Pirate, a dog lover and cutter of kindling. When the Pirate and his dogs witness a miracle, the scene itself is a miracle—the kind of far-fetched fantasy that Fleming pulled off repeatedly throughout his career.

  The movie’s genesis was haphazard. A former story editor at Paramount, Benjamin Glazer, persuaded the studio to buy screen rights for the novel in 1935, the year of publication, for a mere $4,000. Despite its best-seller status, Tortilla Flat acquired Hollywood heat years later, from the prestige of two other Steinbeck properties, Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), both best picture Oscar nominees and the latter a great popular success. By then, Glazer had left Paramount and bought the rights back from the studio, then sold them to MGM for (reportedly) $65,000. Steinbeck had no love for that studio. During his most recent attempt to launch a film of The Red Pony, MGM had refused to grant the author total script control as well as a ton of money and the right to work at home.

  When an MGM story editor attempted to interest Steinbeck in helping adapt Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck proposed extortionate terms. The movie’s producer, Sam Zimbalist, set a meeting with Steinbeck at a Monterey bar. Mahin, who had already prepared a script from Glazer’s draft—in eleven days, he told one interviewer—came with Zimbalist. They put across the message that they needed assistance; Steinbeck remained noncommittal. Then Tracy joined in. He and Zimbalist said they’d try to persuade MGM to hire Milestone, who’d done a superb job on Of Mice and Men, to direct the picture. But it wasn’t to be; Milestone had long been in Mayer’s doghouse. Steinbeck read the working draft, pronounced it a screwup, and wrote to his stage and screen agent, “I’ve planted all the seeds of uncertainty I could and then got out. They must hate Milestone because they offered me John Ford and they hate him too.” In the MGM publicity account, Zimbalist and Mahin gave him the script one night in Monterey, “and when he returned it, to their amazement, he said it was all right.” According to Mahin, Steinbeck thanked him for taking “all the drama and message out of it,” expressing the wish that Kirkland had done the same in his flop play. And the final choice of directors suited him: Steinbeck felt friendly enough toward Fleming to socialize with him later in New York.

  Maybe the friendliness of the finished movie got to Steinbeck; its affable air is its most seductive quality. At 105 minutes, it goes on fifteen minutes too long, with one redemption too many. And Fleming by now had begun to overvalue his own studio wizardry. The re-creation of shantytown Monterey in Culver City generated reams of publicity: “Its single dirt street meanders down to the bay flanked by shacks and outhouses in exquisite disrepair. Here a rusted iron bedstead serves as a gate; there a porcelain washbowl, once planted with flowers, sprouts weeds; geraniums in tin cans and clusters of abalone shells cling forlornly to fences or sag to the ground with them.” But even with an infiltration of chickens, goats, and dogs, as well as pigeons that reportedly clocked themselves flying into a cyclorama, it never stops looking like what it is: a set. It’s sorry indeed compared with the seamless blend of studio and location work in Captains Courageous.

  Yet from the moment Pilon (Tracy) and Pablo (Akim Tamiroff) convince the jailer Tito Ralph (Sheldon Leonard) to parole Danny ( John Garfield), it shows off what Fleming could do without breaking a sweat. He frames groups of men so naturally that you can tell their emotional closeness by the slump of their postures and the tilt of their heads. He conjures a sense of real-life leisure through a mixture of shambling inaction and vivid action. The men perk up an already virile, bubbly atmosphere when they take off into song, regularly. Fleming draws a stripped-wire performance out of a normally impassive actress, Hedy Lamarr. And he fully realizes an outrageous episode that would give other directors agita: Saint Francis visiting Pirate and his dogs.

  Garfield’s Danny enters marital bliss and Tracy’s Pilon cheers him on his way—a far cry from Danny’s descent into alcoholic depression and death in the book. But the film’s ending is not as crippling as the book’s, since Fleming and Mahin adopt a more emotional stance toward their characters. They embrace the slacker romanticism behind the Arthurian allegory. The Sweets Ramirez of the book, a Portuguese woman of highly variable charms, reacts with materialistic glee to Danny’s gift of a vacuum cleaner. In the movie she becomes an equally virtuous and voluptuous Lamarr (at her most high-Fahrenheit), and she does end up marrying Danny. The New York Times paraphrased the producer, Zimbalist, saying that Danny’s “fate in the picture is worse than death,” and that after he becomes a husband and “a solid citizen,” he “is as lost to his friends as if he had died.” But there’s no evidence of that in the movie: the wedding is unreservedly joyous. If Danny and Sweets drive toward a separate fate than Pilon and friends, the feeling is not sorrowful—just bittersweet.

  Tortilla Flat prefigures Italian movies like Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni and Gabriele Muccino’s Last Kiss and Barry Levinson’s American classic Diner as tales of arrested adolescence. It’s a natural outgrowth of Fleming’s studies of male bonding from The Virginian through Test Pilot—not a summation, but in some ways a goodbye to all that. Fleming told the Los Angeles Times that it was something new for movies, a study more than a narrative, and that he even “tried to slow down his filmic tempo, proportionately.” He wasn’t blowing smoke. When Major T. C. Lee, a Chinese airman, toured the set, the “tall and patrician” Fleming vented his worries that the film “would fail critically and financially.”

  For a studio picture of that time, or even this time, Tortilla Flat is refreshingly loose and anecdotal. Fleming and Mahin treat the paisanos as a mass character, as Steinbeck did. The moviemakers also build up two catalysts for change: Sweets, of course, and the Pirate—that devout, aging man who cuts kindling for two bits a shot and saves his money for a gold candlestick to dedicate to Saint Francis. Sweets and the Pirate expose the limits of a male commune built on cheerful irresponsibility. The filmmakers saturate the material with emotion, but don’t soften it—certainly not the cockle-warming story of the Pirate. He had promised Saint Francis that he would buy a gold candlestick if the saint saved one of his dogs from illness; then, the Pirate admits, a truck struck and killed the canine anyway. But the Pirate retains his gratitude while piling up quarters, and in his passion the film touches the sublime.

  Frank Morgan brings the Pirate to life in all his humility, hopefulness, and awe, and the canine flock that surrounds him never gets overly cute—these dogs are as wild and woolly and expressive as Toto. They’re just like the ones in the book, from houndish Enrique and brown curly Pajarito to Rudolph, “of whom passersby said, ‘He was an American dog.’ Fluff was a Pug and Señor Alec Thompson seemed to be a kind of an Airedale. They walked in a squad behind the Pirate, very respectful toward him, and very solicitous for his happiness. When he sat down to rest from wheeling his barrow, they all tried to sit on his lap and have their ears scratched.” Garfield was half-right when he said, “I tried to steal scenes from Hedy, Hedy tried to steal them from Spencer Tracy, Tracy tried to steal from Frank Morgan, Morgan tried to steal from me, and the dogs stole the show.”

  Garfield was selling himself short: he and Lamarr were also a bright and engaging spectacle. For Garfield, the loan-out from Warner Bros. to MGM was a working vacation, and the cast and crew of Tortilla Flat were good company. Major
Lee thought Garfield “relaxed and clever” on the set. Fleming made him so, with his usual combination of rough hazing and humor. The director stopped Garfield in the middle of his first scene and declared, “For Christ’s sake, Garfield, you have to do better than that. I fought like hell to get you in this picture, so don’t make me look like a fool.” Tracy laughed—he knew what would come next as Garfield asked Fleming for more guidance. Fleming responded, with a roar, “You want me to tell you how to act, Garfield? Hell, I don’t know how to act, and I’d be making more money if I did. You’re the actor, you have the reputation; now I just want you to be better.” Yet when Garfield did get better, Fleming took him aside and said, “Take it easy, Garfield; don’t get too good. A lot of your scenes are with Hedy Lamarr. She’s not what you call un-outclassable, and we can’t let that happen. Let’s take it again. Be better than you were the first time, but worse than the second.” As Garfield biographer Larry Swindell puts it, Fleming “liked to keep a picture moving. He thus would create an atmosphere in which actors could respond to his own style of pressure.”

  Tracy, as Pilon, with an accent as variable as Manuel’s, works hard at being lower-depths casual—and, paradoxically, the audience rewards him for his effort. But Garfield really is at ease here. Although the film doesn’t draw on his ability to express shades of feeling, it’s a relief to see him so agreeably intense, and he’s at his contentious sexual best with Lamarr, who is sensational. “It was an honest part and I was glad to get away from glamour,” Lamarr told Hedda Hopper in 1951. She portrays so energetically a woman at war with herself that her conflicts make her more captivating. She and Garfield get at the underlying attraction that’s needed to inflame the surface antagonism of an Apache dance. “John Garfield was wonderful to work with,” she said in 1971, nearly twenty years after his death. Watching the film, you believe her.

  Fleming’s theory that a love scene is a fight scene gets one of its most seductive workouts during the courtship of Danny and Dolores. When Danny comes on too strong to her, she swings a knife at him, yet that doesn’t keep Danny from going straight to Sweets for goats’ milk when he and his friends take on the cause of a traveling widower with an ailing infant. Dismayed at Sweets and Danny’s closeness, Pilon engineers a romantic spat that propels Danny into the hospital. As penance, Pilon promises to buy Saint Francis another candlestick if Danny recovers, then signs up to cut squid for a Chinese man, Chin Kee (played by Willie Fung, the houseboy from Red Dust). Luckily, a kindly priest says that buying a boat for Danny would be a better act of redemption. Henry O’Neill plays the cleric, who becomes a paternalistic Anglo-Saxon in the movie; the choice is especially jarring since the source character in the book is named Father Ramon. This Classic Comics priest contrasts with Fleming’s startlingly effective and unexpected use of Jack LaRue as the priest in Captains Courageous. Here, the joy-riding director occasionally takes his hand off the wheel.

  MGM did reckon correctly that Tortilla Flat would be an all-around success, and Zimbalist wanted credit for producing it. On February 20, 1942, Benny Thau advised Floyd Hendrickson of MGM’s contracts department that Fleming had concurred. A back-and-forth culminated in the following pointed exchange:

  For my records, I am dropping you this note to confirm the fact that you were kind enough to agree that Sam Zimbalist may be given credit as the producer of “TORTILLA FLAT,” but this, of course, does not apply to any other picture.

  With kindest regards, I am

  Sincerely,

  F. L. Hendrickson

  A week later, Fleming replied.

  On February 25, 1942 you sent me a note regarding my kindness in permitting Mr. Sam Zimbalist to put his name on “TORTILLA FLAT” as the producer of the picture.

  So as to keep the records straight, you should know that it was no particular kindness on my part, but rather, the other half of a deal I made with Mr. Thau, that in exchange for the permission I am permitted to take an additional three months per year vacation together with the three months per year called for in my contract, making a total six months per year off without any extension of my contracted time.

  Despite this insistence on protocol and status, and the incursion of sanctimony near the end of the film itself, Tortilla Flat siphoned something deeply congenial out of Fleming’s nature. His work would never be so lighthearted again.

  26

  World War II with Tears:

  A Guy Named Joe

  Before his death in 1936, Billy Mitchell, one of America’s aviation heroes, had been predicting a Japanese air assault on the American fleet. The aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought Fleming some embarrassment along with the same fear of an impending assault on Southern California shared by everyone else. Sid Deacon, who had suffered a stroke the previous year, wrote President Roosevelt to offer his services at discovering Japanese submarines off the California coast. “I think he had a special tip on his witching rod for that,” Edward Hartman recalls. The White House didn’t take him up on his proposal. The year before, Deacon had asked the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors for permission to dig on the grounds of the Hollywood Bowl for the treasure known as the Patriot Cache, supposedly buried by Mexican families in the 1860s for use against the French-appointed Austrian emperor Maximilian. But the supervisors turned him down, too. “That was a shame,” Hartman says. “If they’d have let him dig, he may have found something. He was old, but he wasn’t crazy.”

  The military swiftly adopted more conventional means for defending the waters outside California, including the appropriation of large yachts. Fred Lewis’s Stranger had become a minesweeper earlier in 1941, and Frank Morgan’s Dolphin likewise was painted gray and pressed into service. Fleming did not throw himself directly into the war effort, but it is possible that, like many other watercraft owners, he proposed some help to the Office of Naval Intelligence. Any services he might have rendered remain secret. John Ford did do some amateur spying on Japanese trawlers before he joined the Navy, but at fifty-two Fleming was six years older than Ford and had more than a decade on the other top-rank directors who went overseas to shoot documentaries.

  As America’s studios joined the information war, MGM enlisted its most consistent moneymaker in the cause. Fleming was preparing and shooting Tortilla Flat when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, then advanced to Wake Island the next day for a battle that raged until the twenty-third, forcing an American surrender. On February 25, 1942, even before they settled on the credits for Tortilla Flat, Fleming and Zimbalist began developing a project called Wake Island, using the battle as the background for “a Gable-Tracy” story. They assigned MacKinlay Kantor to write it. James Agee noted that Kantor was “beloved by some” for “boiled-and-buttered native corn, fresh from the can.” Indeed, MGM had found a berth for Kantor when he supplied the source novel for a successful dog picture, The Voice of Bugle Ann. (He would later garner acclaim as the author of Glory for Me, the verse novel that became William Wyler’s Oscar-winner The Best Years of Our Lives, and Andersonville, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historical novel about the notorious Confederate POW camp.)

  The Wake Island script went nowhere. But on March 5, Kantor and Fleming, in Kantor’s words, “drifted away from an unproductive story line” and “started talking about Buffalo Bill, since both of us remembered having seen him and his circus in our respective boyhoods.” Zimbalist (“who had a city-vaudeville-stage background”) blurted out, “Jesus Christ, why are we talking about this other silly picture when there is such a thing as Buffalo Bill?”—and Fleming “immediately stood up, roaring with enthusiasm.” Kantor, “digging deep into all Buffalo Bill sources available” and promising Fleming “a director’s field day if you ever had one,” delivered a treatment that had him “all ready to call up Central Casting.” For the lead role there was no question: they intended to use Gable.

  Zimbalist said, “By God, I’ll see Eddie Mannix tonight, kidnap him and take him to dinner if necessary.” B
ut when Zimbalist called him back to the office a week later, he reported the sad news that MGM executives felt there was “no money to be made out of Buffalo Bill . . . They say that Buffalo Bill tried to make a picture about his own life, and it was a flop.” Kantor responded, “Good lord, everybody knows that; the old idiot even tried to get some of the same Indians against whom he had fought, and have them in the picture. The poor old guys were limping around, and people were shooting off cap pistols, and it was a general mess. What’s that got to do with our picture?”

  Kantor later recalled, “About that time there was a dreadful rumble from the deep couch behind me, and I turned to see Victor arising from where he had been stretched out. He said, ‘For blank blank blank blank’s sake, let me tell you about the whole picture business as it’s run at Metro. Don’t you know that there are a whole bunch of blank blank blank blanks up on the third floor who would rather sit around and blank blank each other’s blank blanks than make good pictures?” (Kan-tor provided the “blanks.”)

  In 1943, Kantor left MGM to work for the Saturday Evening Post as a war correspondent, and William Wellman began preparing Buffalo Bill to star Joel McCrea at Fox. MGM knew the Fox film was already in the works, and Warner Bros. was flirting with the subject, too. Wellman later admitted that he’d started a Buffalo Bill script in 1940, debunking the scout, hunter, and Wild West show impresario as “the fakiest guy that ever lived,” until his initial writer, Gene Fowler, had second thoughts about defacing a hero’s image and burned the screenplay. Wellman wound up filming a rah-rah version of Buffalo Bill’s life, depicting him as a frontiersman at odds with civilization. “When that poor little crippled kid at the end stands up and says, ‘God bless you, too, Buffalo Bill,’ I turned around and damn near vomited,” Wellman confessed. “And then Zanuck turned around and told me it was the second biggest moneymaker we’ve ever made.” (The Pasadena-born McCrea, grandson of a stagecoach driver and son of a utility executive, would have been a good fit for Fleming. In 1946, he nearly redeemed a flaccid Technicolor version of The Virginian.)