Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  The actor John Frederick called the Fleming of those years “intimidating yet compassionate—reminiscent of John Ford and his bluster.” Fleming was even logging some hunting time with Ford’s protégé John Wayne; when Wayne wasn’t shooting his first MGM film, Reunion in France, for Jules Dassin, he was sometimes roaming the San Dimas area for small game with Fleming and others. Wayne had first gone on those jaunts a few years earlier, with Ward Bond along.

  Like Ford at Fox, Fleming at MGM had become the director the studio could trust with everything from kids’ adventures to gritty Americana. Right after Fleming’s Steinbeck adaptation, another California writer, William Saroyan, who had visited the Tortilla Flat set with Garfield, called on Fleming for advice. Saroyan, a bold, eccentric humanist, had written a screenplay called The Human Comedy and, with no prior film experience, hoped to direct it himself. (He also turned it into a novel that hit bookstores before the movie reached theaters.) The studio choice to direct The Human Comedy was King Vidor. Saroyan, to prove that he could make it, put together a short called The Good Job, from his story “A Number of the Poor,” about the filching of a melon from a market, then showed it to Fleming and Zimbalist. Fleming told him it was “wonderful,” but Mayer and his inner circle did not agree. Saroyan left the studio, and Clarence Brown became The Human Comedy’s director. Saroyan had asked for Fleming or Wyler.

  With Gable in mind, Fleming and Zimbalist had also been revamping Shadow of the Wing, a five-year-old script about the Royal Air Force that they turned into the story of an adventurer joining the Army Air Forces. But Gable had already decided to join the Army Air Forces in real life—and his plans accelerated when Carole Lombard, Gable’s third wife and the love of his life, died on the return trip of a bond-selling tour.

  Lombard’s plane crashed in Nevada on January 16, 1942. President Roosevelt awarded her a medal and declared her “the first woman to be killed in action in the defense of her country in its war against the Axis powers.” Gable continued to work throughout his crisis, and MGM announced in March that he would follow his role as a war correspondent in Somewhere I’ll Find You with Shadow of the Wing. But the military began courting him the day after Lombard’s January 21 funeral: General Henry “Hap” Arnold wired the forty-year-old Gable with the offer of a “specific and highly important assignment.” In August, Gable went to Officer Candidate School in Miami. In October, he received his commission and official task: to film the combat experience of aerial gunners.

  To produce Combat America, Gable pulled in Mahin, who’d been teaching combat intelligence at a base in New Mexico. Gable and his crew flew with heavy-bomber groups from the Eighth Air Force, based in England’s Midlands. After shooting nearly fifty thousand feet of film, he received the Air Medal “for exceptionally meritorious achievement while participating in five separate bomber combat missions,” as well as the Distinguished Flying Cross. Gable edited Combat America at MGM (though assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit at the Hal Roach Studios), had enough left over for a quartet of additional instructional shorts (including an officer-recruitment film, Wings Up, featuring himself ), and put together the compilation film Show Business at War. As for Shadow of the Wing—it never happened. MGM announced McCrea as a replacement for Gable after he went into the service, but by then McCrea was onto other things, including Buffalo Bill.

  Meanwhile, Saroyan went back to Broadway, where he predicted the rise of the wartime weepie, a genre that would soon sweep up his friend Fleming. Saroyan’s Get Away, Old Man parodied a Mayer-like studio mogul intent on mounting a sob story called Ave Maria. (Since Mayer’s love of Catholicism was so well-known, onstage Ed Begley played Saroyan’s Mayer figure as an Irishman.) “When the world is full of death—when men are killing one another—what do people think of?” asks the mogul. “They think of Mother.” Or, sometimes, Father. Twentieth Century–Fox was already producing Happy Land, based on a Kantor novel about a Gold Star father who, from the ghost of his Civil War grandfather, gains perspective on the death of his son.

  The real Mayer did get his blockbuster weepie when he assigned the producer Everett Riskin and Fleming to A Guy Named Joe and they got Dalton Trumbo to write the script. It’s about a guy named Pete (Spencer Tracy) and another guy named Ted (Van Johnson). Pete is a flier’s flier who dies bombing a German aircraft carrier. (The real German navy didn’t have aircraft carriers, but the moviemakers wanted to portray both theaters of war, so in this film the Germans had them.) He enters an air veterans’ version of the afterlife, becoming an unseen instructor to a novice pilot, Ted, and ultimately, at least in the finished film, the benign force that pushes his bereaved lover, Dorinda (Irene Dunne), to move ahead. He can throw his thoughts to these characters, but they never know he’s there. The plotline alone conveys one reason why A Guy Named Joe became a smash as well as a consolation to many grieving families. The movie appeals to what Joan Didion has popularized as “magical thinking”—“thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.” In the case of A Guy Named Joe, the magical thinking occurs on earth and in the heavens above. It fuels hope in a connection between at-risk or deceased loved ones and the folks they leave behind.

  The family of a flier in the movie said they experienced such a connection shortly after they saw Joe. Army Staff Sergeant Arthur J. “Bud” Swartz Jr., a dive-bombing instructor, doubled for Tracy during second-unit shooting at Drew Field (now Tampa International Airport) in Florida, then became a tail gunner in the South Pacific. On his last furlough, Swartz had urged his mother to “look up at the North Star every night at eleven,” saying he’d do the same; that way they’d know they were thinking about each other. On March 5, 1944, she woke the family with her screams. Her son’s star had fallen out of the sky. It was the day his B-25 Mitchell bomber crashed in New Guinea, the climactic setting of A Guy Named Joe.

  Premiering on Christmas Eve 1943 in New York and widening out to the rest of the country in early March (without a Los Angeles opening, it wasn’t eligible for Oscars until 1944), A Guy Named Joe ended up grossing $5.254 million. In the more than two years since Pearl Harbor, 62,312 Americans had died in combat, and the number would triple by the end of 1944. The country was smack in the middle of the war, with costly battles raging in the Pacific and D day ( June 6, 1944) still half a year away. But the reason this heartwarming hokum won the hearts and minds of audiences goes beyond timing. Fleming brought it his full commitment. Adela Rogers St. Johns, in a letter to Lu, recalled Vic visiting her house in 1944 right after she had received the personal effects of her son Bill, who had died flying for the RAF. St. Johns wrote:

  They sent me everything—pajamas that hadn’t been washed, half a tube of toothpaste, his bathrobe which I’d had made because he was 6 foot 6 and couldn’t wear the regular ones, his uniforms and great coat and flying reports. It was pretty rugged, as you know. And when Vic got there I was still choked up and shaking. I will never forget what he said to me as long as I live. He said, “You’ve got to bite on the bullet. USE everything. Use up the toothpaste, give the bathrobe to his kid brother, send the uniforms back to the RAF—they need ’em. Have the pajamas washed or wash them yourself and give them to somebody. That’s life. That’s the continuation of life. That’s what your boy would want you to do. This country was created by that spirit. They couldn’t afford to throw things away, they had to make use of everything, and they kept the usefulness of the one who was gone still part of their everyday life. You know your boy’s all right. He was a man, doing a man’s job, and he’s still doing it.”

  The producer Riskin had already mounted one afterlife hit, 1941’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan, about a prematurely dispatched boxer who finds a new body to house his soul. (It earned Oscars for best original story and best screenplay, and decades later evolved into the Warren Beatty hit Heaven Can Wait and the Chris Rock flop Down to Earth.) But Riskin had failed to come up with an acceptable script for “Fliers Ne
ver Die,” the original story of A Guy Named Joe. His son Ralph recalls a version called Three Fliers, in which a couple of brothers tutored their youngest brother from the great beyond.

  Then Riskin convinced Metro to let him hire a prolific screenwriter named Dalton Trumbo, who would earn a measure of immortality as a witty radical. As a screenwriter he’d already shown an affinity with the afterlife—his novel and screenplay The Remarkable Andrew featured the ghost of Andrew Jackson. He’d endured an unproductive stint at MGM in the 1930s, then worked at nearly every major studio, notably Warner Bros. and RKO, and published an enduring antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun, before returning to MGM, where his friends included Sam Zimbalist. By the time Riskin signed him, in the middle of 1942, Trumbo already had a reputation as a radical. He wrote the liberal journalist Murray Kempton in 1957, “The proprietors of MGM were never deceived about my political affiliations . . . I informed each producer about those affiliations before I accepted an assignment from him. There were no objections.”

  Ralph Riskin remembers his father telling him that he had to order Trumbo to knock off writing pamphlets for Communist Party front groups and finish the script; Trumbo demanded two secretaries and did the whole second half in an afternoon and an all-nighter. “And they never changed a word. It was brilliant.” There was good reason for Trumbo’s accelerated political activity. Word had gotten out that some big names at MGM were forming a Red-hunting organization called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Trumbo, “convinced there was going to be trouble,” decided to join the Communist Party. “I didn’t want to have the advantage of those years of friendship (with other writers) and then to escape the penalties. Now that may sound odd. I don’t think it’s odd at all . . . If they hadn’t been my friends, I wouldn’t have joined.” Of course, Trumbo became one of the Hollywood Ten and served a prison term for contempt of Congress.

  Fleming became a member of the MPA’s executive committee, his name emblazoned on its letterhead. But he embraced Trumbo as a creative partner. Trumbo’s playwright son, Christopher, thinks that what bonded them was their unashamed emotionality. Whatever the political differences, he says, “I know that they liked each other as men.” Fleming visited the writer on Trumbo’s “pleasantly remote” 320-acre ranch, ninety miles north of Los Angeles. Fleming would come to have drinks and gaze across a valley where nobody else lived. In a monologue out of a Robert Towne script—the kind that’s funny because it doesn’t really go anywhere—Fleming would say, “You know, Trumbo, if you want to get rich, I can tell you how to get rich. See that field over there? Go out there and have somebody dig a pit about ten feet deep; then you have him put a lid over it; then you hide that lid so only you know where it is. Then every day around this time you go out there. The first day you go out, drop a dollar bill in it. The next day you drop two dollars. And you just keep doubling it.” Christopher says his dad told the story, more than once, “because it continued to amuse him—I think it was a case of you think of the man when you think of the story.”

  As Fleming and Riskin revised the film, Pete began to look less (as one early version had it) “like Clark Gable,” more like a regular guy. The propaganda got toned down, too. Pete and his best pal, Al Yackey (Ward Bond), no longer strafed German staff cars while fantasizing that one was carrying Hitler. Pete’s best ghost buddy, Dick Rumney (Barry Nelson), portrayed at first as British, ended up solidly American like Pete. Originally, the great beyond also contained pilots from the Red Army and China, as well as a dissident German. When Pete asked the whereabouts of Nazis and Japanese, the commanding general, “with grim satisfaction,” said, “There’s a place for them.” Now the heavenly fliers were all Yanks.

  Even political enemies recognized Mahin as a formidable talent, but Trumbo’s reputation as a screenwriter has oscillated according to political and aesthetic fashion. That’s partly because Hollywood script credits, always mysterious, were never murkier than during the anticommunist blacklist of the early Cold War. Without credit or with the credit taken by “fronts” who lent their names to his work, Trumbo wrote the original scripts to such films as the harrowing 1951 noir He Ran All the Way ( John Garfield’s last picture) and the delightful 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday (which made a Hollywood princess out of Audrey Hepburn). His prominence in the Hollywood Ten colored perspectives on him even after he broke the blacklist with back-to-back credits on Otto Preminger’s Exodus and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (both 1960). Though critics blamed Trumbo for the virtuous-rebel speeches in Spartacus, the film’s producer-star, Kirk Douglas, gave Trumbo enormous credit for the movie’s ultimate wit and pace and thump. Richard Corliss, the first to write critical history from the point of view of the screenwriter, found Trumbo’s scripts fascinating “because of the disparity between a natural warmth and an imposed message”—especially in A Guy Named Joe.

  The script for A Guy Named Joe is really written, with tones and moods suggested on the fly as Trumbo advances the melodrama. But it incorporated suggestions from all over. When Tracy asked Major T. C. Lee for some tips about playing a pilot, Lee replied, “Flying isn’t tough. Crashing is tough.” In the screenplay, that’s how Pete feels, too.

  In a scene Fleming pushed to include in the finished movie (it didn’t appear until the shooting script), Pete passes five juvenile English aviation fans. Edward Hardwicke, the son of Sir Cedric Hardwicke, played a little boy in a striped shirt. He had just one line: “Pete . . . What would happen if you went way, way up high and you forgot to turn your oxygen tank on?” Pete gently explains how swiftly and thoroughly a pilot would get disoriented without oxygen. Then, prodded by his admirers, he looks around quickly to make sure no adult is watching and delivers a heartfelt description of the good kind of disorientation a real flier in his own ship can experience alone, feeling he’s “halfway to heaven . . . The earth’s so far below ya that it just doesn’t matter anymore. The sky is the thing that’s important.” Pete tells them that up there, a flier says to himself, “Boy, oh boy, this is the only time a man is really ever alive—it’s the only time he’s really free!” Hardwicke, a sturdy and virile Mr. Brownlow in Roman Polanski’s 2005 Oliver Twist, remembers Tracy as “a hugely avuncular figure; his relationship with the children in the movie is very much what it was like with him before the camera rolled.”

  Just getting the camera rolling was the first challenge—and keeping it rolling would remain a challenge. Although it was an inspirational fantasy, both the War Department and the Production Code Administration questioned the way the fantasy had been worked out. Politics weren’t the issue. Trumbo, who thought “all wars are bad and can be prevented by intelligent and compassionate leadership,” also “felt that World War II was a moral war from our point of view, and should be won.” But the film’s emotional salve was supposed to come from Pete and his lover, Dorinda Durston (another flier), uniting in the afterlife—and that climax triggered debate among military readers and censors.

  Dorinda (pronounced “Drinda”), who flies for the Air Transport Command, grows conflicted about her engagement to Ted and usurps his assignment to annihilate a Japanese ammunition dump. In Trumbo’s treatment, she drops her plane on it “straight as a plummet” despite Pete’s scolding her, “So you’re going to be a heroine, eh? You love this jerk, so you’re gonna commit suicide to save him?” In heaven, she tells Pete, “it was you all the time.” When she says, “I almost died from loneliness,” he replies, “You did. And if you weren’t my girl, I’d paddle you.”

  Only one version of the ending made it to the theaters, but it required considerable tinkering at the script stage and a reshoot after filming was completed. And even without consideration of the romantic-suicide climax, the War Department readers’ reactions zigzagged all over the map. Major Ralph Jester, in civilian life a costume designer at Paramount, applauded the script’s “redeeming Topper twist” and Pete’s “appealingly blithe spirit,” and suggested it be called “The Ghost Know
s Best.” But Falkner Heard, a by-the-book San Antonio infantry colonel, thought it gave an impression of military aviation and discipline so misguided and wrong “that no degree of supervision could make this picture a contribution to the war effort.” Colonel Edward Munson, with some justification, noted the “slightly schizophrenic character of the scenario.” Part of his concern, though, came from the few moments the script treats the terrible swiftness of combat death. (“One minute,” Ted says, in an early draft of the script, “a man is warm—alive—and then—so fast it’s like the intake of breath—he’s nothing.” In the film, that became “It doesn’t seem possible, when you stop to think about it, that they’re not here anymore and they’re not gonna be.”) Colonel William Wright, chief of the Pictorial Branch in the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations, summarized: “Because the script offers nothing constructive to the Army Air Forces, and is based upon the Mr. Jordan theme of the living dead, it is doubtful if Army cooperation would be forthcoming.”

  But the filmmakers wouldn’t give up. Trumbo, Riskin, and Fleming had built some flattery of the Army Air Forces into the scenario. Lionel Barrymore would play the heavenly general—and when Pete first sees him, he blurts out, in a Fleming suggestion for the final script, “One of the greatest guys that ever flew a ship!” (In the film, Tracy reads that as “What a flier he was!”) Contemporary audiences knew that the general was patterned after Billy Mitchell. The general has a model plane on his desk—the Martin MB-2, the bomber Mitchell used to sink two captured German battleships in 1921 and prove the military potential of airpower. MGM continued to lobby for War Department support, and the film eventually passed a new review board. The final script, according to Lieutenant John T. Parker Jr. of the Review Branch, “presents a morale-building motif for the benefit of air cadets, as well as an interpretation of air combat casualties that can be helpful and perhaps comforting to the civilian point of view.” Fleming moved to deploy his second and third units to military air bases to enlist military technical advisers.