Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  PETE (infinitely tender): Up, girl . . .

  Dorinda comes up to him, proud, erect, smiling. They do not embrace. Instead, they clasp each other’s hands, stand silently for a moment looking into each other’s faces.

  DORINDA (with a kind of delicious sigh): Pete!

  PETE (almost with reverence, quietly): Dorinda!

  DORINDA: So it was you . . . all along.

  PETE (very gently, smiling): Of course, darling.

  DORINDA (with a kind of reminiscent yearning, almost a whisper): Oh, Pete—I’ve been so lonely. You’d no idea how lonely I’ve been!

  PETE (shaking his head slowly, smiling): But not any more . . .

  CLOSE SHOT—DORINDA

  As she looks around at her new surroundings. Her expression is not one of bewilderment or confusion, but rather one of pleasant discovery and joyfulness.

  CLOSE SHOT—PETE

  Watching her.

  MEDIUM SHOT—THE TWO

  As Dorinda heaves a delicious sigh, snuggles her arm into his.

  DORINDA: Oh, Pete . . . it’s wonderful.

  Pete nods. Both of them have on their faces an expression which indicates great joy, as if life were just beginning for them. As Pete nods in reply to her last line they start out of the scene.

  ANOTHER ANGLE—FULL SHOT

  Arm in arm they move away from the camera, walking with heads up, steps brisk. The mist grows lighter, the light brighter, as they recede from our view.

  FADE OUT.

  THE END

  Perhaps anticipating that audience sniffles, if not outright bawling, might drown out the dialogue, Trumbo also wrote an alternate of that ending with no dialogue, with Dunne and Tracy conveying all the emotion on their faces.

  While this ending placated Breen and the War Department, the BMP—shrewdly, it turns out—held its fire. As Joe slogged through its extended production period, the BMP acquired more Hollywood clout. When Congress cut the domestic budget of the OWI in July 1943, Ulric Bell assumed command of the Hollywood review office. He’d been the Washington bureau chief for the Louisville Courier-Journal and had chaired the interventionist group Fight for Freedom. He quickly pushed the BMP beyond its original advisory role. The wartime Office of Censorship now banned topics such as class conflict and rationing from American movies and imposed public morality more severely on film plots: lawlessness, for example, could never go unpunished.

  When Bell’s office denied overseas sales to B pictures like Hillbilly Blitzkrieg, Sleepy Lagoon, and Secret Service in Darkest Africa, the impact on the studios was slight. A Guy Named Joe, however, was the quintessential “major motion picture.” When Bell’s review staff watched a cut of it in November, they were delighted and appalled. They admired the movie’s emphasis on combining individual expertise and teamwork and its demonstration that “every human being can contribute his measure to the building of the free world.” What they didn’t admire, in the words of Lillian R. Bergquist, was the movie’s failure “to tell the important story of the women throughout the world who are losing men in this war and who are making the difficult adjustment and going on—instead of hysterically sacrificing themselves as Dorinda did.” She closed the group’s report by saying that with the film still being scored and edited, “It might be possible to persuade the studio to re-shoot the ending, with the heroine deciding to accept her responsibility as a human being, to live and marry the young flier when he successfully completes his dangerous mission.”

  Bell wrote directly to Eddie Mannix’s assistant. “All I am entitled to say on behalf of the overseas OWI is that were the ending different, nothing we have seen—not one picture that we can readily recall—could make as great a contribution to the war job as A Guy Named Joe.” Bell cabled Robert Riskin in New York that the film “would be perfect but for Hollywood ending.” No direct threats, but the message was clear. “The entire ending . . . was reshot as a result of OWI’s criticism,” said the BMP’s analysis chief, Jones, years later, acknowledging it was unusual for any studio “to go to such lengths (and expense) to comply with OWI suggestions.” In fact, it was unique.

  How the orders went down is lost to history, but the incredibly swift Trumbo wrote a new ending in days, completing it on November 6. MGM called Dunne back from a Mexico City vacation for retakes that were shot and sent to the Production Code by November 9. At least it wasn’t as square as the BMP suggestion. Dorinda, not Ted, explodes the Japanese ammo dump—only this time she lives. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times spoke for many critics and possibly the filmmakers themselves when he wrote, “The ending negates the whole thesis and the romantic ending is sour.”

  For Fleming, Riskin, and Tracy, the original ending had been one of the production’s bragging points; they thought it gave them a satisfying resolution to a lopsided triangle. All through the film, the genuine romance centers on Pete and Dorinda—Ted is the pale reflection of a ghost, a point the filmmakers bring home when he adopts one of Pete’s nervous tics and starts plucking at his eyebrows. The War Department reader was right: it was a clever twist to have Dorinda end up in Pete’s arms like an Everyman and Everywoman version of Cary Grant and Constance Bennett in Topper. “And even if it does fizzle,” Tracy told a reporter early in production, “you’ve got to admit it is a good try.”

  The filmmakers struggled to approximate that romantic feeling while letting Dorinda live in the government-approved ending. They kept Pete in the cockpit and had her sense his rightness when he says (in Tracy’s realistic mussing up of Trumbo’s text), “You’re afraid of living—you’re afraid of life—and that’s double-crossing a lot of guys who are out there fighting for it.” With Pete directing the mission like a macho angel and a backseat driver, Dorinda pulls the mission off and gets back safely.

  En route back to the base, Pete tells her, “You’re going to have a wonderful life”—a prefigurement of Trumbo’s next assignment, an unproduced Cary Grant version of The Greatest Gift, the story that eventually became, yes, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Fleming’s movie, unlike Capra’s, clicked with audiences—and later, with Steven Spielberg, who cried over it when he was twelve. Spielberg produced a 1989 remake, Always, miscasting Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfuss in the Dunne and Tracy roles and, in Van Johnson’s, Brad Johnson. (Was this nonactor cast for karma, because of his last name?)

  Spielberg transposed Fleming’s movie to a wilderness firefighting force; amazingly, the blockbuster auteur stuck to the revised flight plan that ends with the heroine alive. “Now that Spielberg is no longer twelve,” asked Pauline Kael, “hasn’t he noticed that there’s a voyeuristic queasiness in the idea of playing Cupid to the girl you loved and lost, and fixing her up with the next guy?”

  That’s exactly what those old pros Trumbo and Fleming wanted to avoid in A Guy Named Joe. It remains an audience favorite, but Ralph Riskin confirms that the forced ending irked his father, Fleming, and Trumbo. “My dad and Mr. Trumbo and Mr. Fleming all wanted the original ending, which was a romantic and satisfying ending for the audience—that she get back to her beloved.” Trumbo told an interviewer, “It had three endings, until we decided what to do with it.” (According to his copy of the script, Trumbo cranked out six endings.)

  In a proposal James Agee wrote for Life, he said “a good director like Victor Fleming” could serve as his model for a story about a “reliable journeyman.” That didn’t stop Agee from critically savaging A Guy Named Joe: “The picture will serve as well as two hours spent over the Women’s Home Companion.” Agee returned to the subject, and Happy Land, too, several months later, recognizing that these movies had touched a war-wounded populace. Agee invoked Joyce’s “The Dead” when describing the jealousy of a living character for a dead one over the love of a woman. “The emotions a ghost might feel who watched a living man woo and cajole his former mistress seem just as promising to me,” he elaborated, and “the paralysis and slow healing of a bereaved woman is not a bad subject, of itself. But to make such a f
ilm—above all, at a time like this—would require extraordinary taste, honesty and courage.” Agee bluntly decreed that “the makers of A Guy Named Joe” had only the courage of “a moral idiot.”

  Sergei Eisenstein was the movie’s biggest highbrow fan. He loved the film’s “American inventiveness and skill at extracting from situations a range of possibilities—from lyricism to farce, from low comedy to tragedy.” Eisenstein felt that “the idea that the hands of each trainee would be guided by the thousands that perished before him attains the height of pathos.” The Soviet artist and the patriotic agents of the BMP loved the movie for the same reason: because of Lionel Barrymore’s spectral flying legions, “the chain of experience passed down is uninterrupted. And each flight is the creative action of all, collectively.”

  As the war ground on, the constrictions it placed on home-front life strained Fleming’s appetites and patience, though the MGM commissary provided some goodies, like butter, sugar, bacon, and coffee. “I remember the bubble gum,” says Sally. “It was one of the things you couldn’t get during the war because of sugar rationing. He never said where it came from, but we always figured it came from the studio.”

  Fleming’s wanderlust took the biggest hit. He couldn’t sail his boat, and the Moraga Spit and Polish Club wasn’t enough to satisfy his yen for travel. He yearned for the freedom of hopping in his car and going wherever his spirit would take him. In 1943, before he filmed A Guy Named Joe, Vic, Lu, Hawks, and Jim Jordan (radio’s Fibber McGee) got called into federal court to testify in a black-market tire case. Fleming said he thought four tires he’d bought from Hawks were used, before the Office of Price Administration seized them. He told the judge, “What I don’t know about this tire business is plenty.” (The case was thrown out because the prosecution’s case was flawed.)

  Hal Rosson and Fleming focus on Jean Harlow as Mary Astor and Gable watch during the making of Red Dust (1932).

  (above) Helen Hayes prays for divine guidance in The White Sister (1933). (below) Fleming clowns for the chorus line of Reckless (1935).

  (above) Fleming; his new male star, Henry Fonda; and Janet Gaynor relax on the Fox set of The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935). (below) A member of the camera team checks the lighting as Fleming hovers over Vivien Leigh and Gable cools his heels in the background while they prepare to bring Scarlett and Rhett’s marriage to life in Gone With the Wind (1939).

  (left) “Gable’s back and Garson’s got him” went the tagline for Adventure (1946). Here Fleming’s got Garson in his lap while he gives direction to Gable. (below) Ingrid Bergman pays rapt attention to Fleming as Spencer Tracy, dressed as Dr. Jekyll, looks on during the first day of shooting Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941).

  Mervyn LeRoy, Judy Garland, and Fleming tower over the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Fleming, holding Toto, is looking directly at tiny Olga Nardone and Lollipop Guild member Jerry Maren. Mickey Carroll is the Munchkin next to Maren.

  (above) Gary Cooper makes courtly love to Mary Brian in The Virginian (1929). (below) Emil Jannings won half of his best actor Oscar for his role as the devoted family man who falls from bourgeois grace in The Way of All Flesh (1927).

  (above) Harlow at her comic peak, giving her dogs the run of the house in Bombshell (1933). (below) Vilma Banky snatches a door key from a fire in The Awakening (1928).

  (above) Lupe Velez worked with two of her off-screen lovers, Fleming and Gary Cooper, on Wolf Song (1928). (below) City slicker Percy Marmont falls for a frustrated Minneapolis manicurist turned rural wife, Clara Bow, in Mantrap (1926).

  Norma Shearer learns about survival (and love) from Jack Holt in Empty Hands (1924). She actually fell for her director.

  Percy Marmont forges a doomed bond with Shirley Mason in Fleming’s adaptation of Conrad’s Lord Jim (1925).

  Gable interrupts Harlow’s barrel bath in Red Dust (1932)—a scene Fleming later parodied in Bombshell.

  Douglass Dumbrille as “Ugly” Israel Hands bows to Jackie Cooper’s Jim Hawkins as Long John Silver (Wallace Beery) looks on in Treasure Island (1934).

  Ray Bolger, Judy Garland, Jack Haley, and, of course, Toto in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

  Rhett Butler inspects the hands of Scarlett O’Hara, who is wearing one of the most famous of all movie costumes in history: the green curtain dress in Gone With the Wind.

  MGM star power at its peak: Tracy, Myrna Loy, and Gable in Test Pilot (1938).

  Tracy stands up for Freddie Bartholomew (left) against John Carradine in Captains Courageous (1937).

  A really eternal triangle: ghost Tracy witnesses the wooing of his former lover Irene Dunne by Van Johnson in A Guy Named Joe (1943).

  Ingrid Bergman, flanked by Shepperd Strudwick (left) and Bill Kennedy, is led to the stake in the fiery climax of Joan of Arc (1948).

  “A very dour, sort of dry, charming fellow, but kind of a sour act,” is how King Vidor once summarized his buddy Vic. “Sort of gruff with everything and everybody. Like a big dog can be gruff or something.” One day in 1944, Fleming jumped into Vidor’s office and asked his old friend to go with him on a road trip to Arizona. Fleming said they had to meet at Ash Fork. Vidor could get there only by train. When he asked Fleming how he’d get there, Fleming replied, “Don’t start asking questions.” When Fleming met Vidor at the station, he was with his pal Sterling Hebbard, who sold ranches and was swimming in extra gas coupons. With Fleming and Hebbard in the front seat and Vidor in the back, they started east. Whenever Vidor asked where they were heading, Fleming would growl, “What are you, a woman or a wife? You want to know where you’re going? Why do you have to know where you’re going?”

  Vidor thought these interchanges reflected how Fleming had come to relate to his wife. “He was very sort of tough with his wife, [Lu] Rosson, always.” Vidor was speaking after the fact, and reviewing his comments years later, Olivia de Havilland figures Fleming “may have been in a very tense state of mind” or enduring “a hangover.” Beyond that she notes, “Actually the words were droll—it was the way they were said that upset King. And obviously, Vic had not yet decided where they were going—the whole adventure having been conceived as directionless.”

  Gradually, Vidor realized that Fleming and Hebbard “didn’t know where they were going either,” in a jaunt that stretched into a two-thousand-mile round-trip. They were “just going to look at ranches.” When they came to a town like Albuquerque, Fleming “always went in first and asked did they have a good Mexican restaurant in this town, that’s the first thing . . . I liked Mexican food about once a week or once every two weeks, but he liked it every night, every night and probably lunch if he could find it.”

  After Albuquerque they headed southeast to check out a ranch in minuscule Muleshoe, Texas. As they drove north, through New Mexico, they flirted with the idea of stopping at the ritzy Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, and Vidor got excited. He’d been to the town as a boy and wanted to see it again. But a hundred miles away Fleming decreed, “The Broadmoor Hotel—a lot of pimps and prostitutes lying around in short bathing suits around the pool. Who wants to see that? Let’s turn around and go to Taos.” They did Taos, then Santa Fe, where everyone seemed to have a good time. So when Fleming came to Vidor’s room the morning after their night out in Santa Fe and said, “Come on, get up, we’re going back to Phoenix,” Vidor stood firm: he was staying put. “But that was typical,” Vidor said. “Sort of gruff, ordering and bossy . . . But if you were a friend, that meant he could treat you this way.”

  27

  A Confounding Political Life

  George Sidney, who knew Fleming only in studio settings, said, “I can’t tell you if he was Democratic or Republican!” Others assumed that he was conservative because he befriended men like the strident right-winger Ward Bond. He maintained a blunt and often confounding irreverence to the political turmoil of his day: Joseph L. Mankiewicz recalled him laying down bets in 1940 that Great Britain would tumble before the Germans in six weeks.

  Although
Fleming was well-read, and had acquired broad firsthand knowledge of the world as well as an idiosyncratic and elegant personal style, he retained some of the naïveté of a self-taught San Dimas boy. He couldn’t gauge when a gambler’s bravado could be taken for bias or malice, and he made some inane private political moves that he thought would have real repercussions. From age thirty-five until his death, Fleming registered as a Democrat for every election except two. But Lu told their daughters that he signed up to vote in the primaries for the weakest Democratic candidates and thus help the Republicans. His bogus party affiliation didn’t stop him from continually grousing about President Roosevelt’s tax policies or, in the mid-1940s, enlisting in a Hollywood crusade against communist infiltration. And it doesn’t reveal his connection to any ideology or political platform.

  Fleming was proud of his independence, disdainful of bosses and bureaucracies. He was likely drawn to particular leaders and issues. Politics didn’t preoccupy him, but it wasn’t alien to him, either: His mother’s cousin H. H. Kinney had been the secretary to the corruption-prone Los Angeles mayor George E. Cryer. Kinney was the conduit for city jobs for the husbands of Fleming’s sisters Arletta and Carolyn, and in 1927 briefly embroiled the family in scandal when Arletta’s husband, Ralph Morris, attained a research engineer position even though he had failed the civil service examination.