Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (47 page)

The films, though, match up precisely in their pivotal dramatic sequences. In
Test Pilot,
Jim’s plane catches on fire in the National Air Races in Cleveland, but another flier, Greg Benson—Jim’s replacement for Drake—crashes his plane and is killed. Of course, all the competitors later celebrate at a bar. As they sing “If I Had the Wings of an Angel,” a businessman proposes two champagne toasts. The first, to Jim, is wildly popular, but the second, to the late Benson, gets the businessman pushed from the saloon. The men say they’ve never heard of Benson; Jim says he must have crashed because he wasn’t good enough for “the girl in the blue dress” and she slapped him down.

In
Only Angels Have Wings,
the aviators react exactly the same way when Jean Arthur’s chorus girl expresses shock that the station chief, Cary Grant, would eat the steak that another pilot ordered before he was killed in a crash. They say they never heard of the man; Grant has already said he crashed because he wasn’t good enough for the job.

Both these anti-wakes depict fliers asserting their right to honor their own dead in a way that enables them to get on with the business of cheating death. But in attitude the two films couldn’t be more dissimilar. In
Test Pilot,
Jim then tumbles into a four-day multi-city bender; it’s the start of the narrative runway that leads to his retiring from flying and taking up a new career as a pilot instructor. (In one of Fleming’s favorite moments, he gives half his prize money—$5,000—to Benson’s widow, played by Gloria Holden. She’s now a widow with three children, just as Fleming’s mother had been after his father’s death.) In
Only Angels,
the scene instead begins the heroine’s education. She must learn that a pilot needs a gal who can bear the pressure and “stick.”

Hawks may have tried to outdo Fleming with the same scene as part of their friendly rivalry. It would not be the last time he took a dramatic idea from a peer and made it say what
he
wanted it to say: the entire plot of
Rio Bravo
(1959) emerged from his disdain for Fred Zinnemann’s
High Noon
(1952). But Hawks went further with
Test Pilot,
saying he wrote the original story and some lines for the movie when he was at MGM, even though he’d left the studio in 1934. He also
insisted
that everything in
Only Angels Have Wings,
no matter how outlandish, was “absolutely true.” If so, that resonant death scene may have been part of a truth that he and his friend Fleming had perceived together.

In
Test Pilot,
Fleming used Benson’s crash, staged at the Van Nuys Airport, to indulge in an operatic stroke. When an ambulance picks up Benson’s body and drives away, he shows the bent, awkward body of his widow running across a field to catch it. The visual eloquence compensates for the dramatic non sequitur. (Everyone knows the widow and the children are there; wouldn’t someone stop the ambulance until the driver knew her wishes?) Before Holden’s scene with Gable, Fleming kept her in tears for fifteen minutes. He may have misjudged her casting and performance—then best known as Mrs. Zola in
The Life of Emile Zola,
now best known for the title role of
Dracula’s Daughter,
she’s a little bit undead herself—but the anecdote conveys his commitment to the performance and the material.

What startles contemporary audiences about the sequence at the National Air Races is the spectacle of pilots speeding in aerial circles, like Nascar stars. Some will find in it a transporting quality that Nascar races don’t have: spectators crane their necks to the sky instead of locking into a blur on asphalt. Planes in formation suddenly make darting moves like willful dragonflies. The money and prestige of a big MGM production enabled Fleming to send three camera crews to pick up footage from the Thompson Trophy race and to film a simulated race the next day with some of the same pilots. To make the footage in Van Nuys meld with the Cleveland footage, he elevated the camera platforms and had the cinematographer Ray June shoot down on the action to eliminate the mountains in the background.

Every aspect of
Test Pilot
allowed Fleming to test his virtuosity. On a micro level, he had Douglas Shearer record Gable with a lapel mike to capture dialogue above the rumble of the aircraft. On a macro level, for the film’s climax, he had at his disposal the entire heavy bombardment fleet of the Army Air Corps. That’s because General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, then deputy chief of the Air Corps, saw the film as an ideal public relations ploy for the Boeing B-17 Stratofortress.

It was the public’s first glimpse of the four-engine bomber that would go on to distinguished service in both theaters of World War II. To emphasize its size, Fleming showed two mechanics struggling to polish the bottom of one wing. While
Test Pilot
was being made, the Air
Corps
had just thirteen of the aircraft; they were still considered experimental, and Congress had not fully funded production. The Air Corps flew twelve of them to California and put nine in the air at a time for Fleming’s second unit at March Field. The innovative aviator and technical director Paul Mantz co-engineered the impact of the flying scenes. Not since Wellman’s
Wings
and Howard Hughes’s
Hell’s Angels
had a filmmaker shot such a fleet with so many cameras and from so many angles and positions on the planes.

In a scenario unimaginable today, General Arnold enthusiastically took part in the movie’s publicity, appearing on the Maxwell House
Good News
program—MGM’s radio house organ—to salute test pilots as “the unsung heroes of this flying game.” Arnold told the radio audience that the Flying Fortresses “are the culmination of the work of these masters of the air,” and the ones in the film were the same that had recently completed an eleven-thousand-mile round-trip from Miami to Buenos Aires.

Fleming did not accurately portray the details of testing military planes. He smudged the facts on purpose: these planes’ specifications were military secrets (as mentioned in the prologue). For instance, the Air Corps never tested the diving capabilities of pursuit aircraft, as Lane does, and the B-17 is said in the film to have a five-thousand-mile range, when its actual range was less than two thousand miles.

Fleming committed other inaccuracies strictly for dramatic effect. In the climactic Flying Fortress crash, the sandbags doubling in the test for bombs are not only piled too high; they’re also put in a position to crash the bulkhead and knock out Tracy. Then Gable heaves sandbags over the side at a point when, as one real-life test pilot observed, the “plane, spinning like a top, should have shot him into space by centrifugal force alone in ten seconds.”

Test Pilot
nonetheless popped the eyes of the public and reviewers alike, from the trades (“One of the outstanding successes of the year,” the
Hollywood Reporter
wrote) to the major dailies (“A bang-up aviation drama,” said
The New York Times
). Even National Socialist reviewers in Germany praised the film’s technique and dramatic force as well as Gable’s valor, although “many critics were shocked that it represented a man in such a serious position as a test pilot as drunken and irresponsible.”

It was the second Fleming picture in a row to win multiple Oscar nominations—for picture, editing, and original story but again not for
direction.
Tracy won his second straight Academy Award not for Gunner but for his Father Flanagan in
Boys Town.
Maybe the sacrificial element of
Test Pilot
seemed too close to Manuel in
Captains Courageous.

Even Tracy’s young daughter, Susie, asked Fleming at the premiere, “Don’t you like my papa? That’s the second time you’ve killed him.” Actually, with
Test Pilot,
he fashioned a lasting tribute to friendship. Saul Bellow told fellow author James Salter that after he saw the film, he turned to his wife and asked, “Why don’t we have friends like that?”

20

Salvaging
The Great Waltz

In April 1938, the
Hollywood Reporter
mentioned that Fleming “almost cracked up in his own cabin plane, a few days after
Test Pilot
trade raves.” Nothing else seemingly went wrong for Fleming in the spring of 1938.
Test Pilot
and Warner Bros.’
Adventures of Robin Hood
were the only new hits packing theaters; throughout the first half of the year, exhibitors desperate to fill seats rebooked old favorites like
Dracula, The Count of Monte Cristo, King Kong,
and Fleming’s own
Treasure Island.
MGM was still pressuring him to sign a contract, but he continued working on a handshake deal with Mannix.

His beloved Victoria, “Missy,” was three and Sally one. He was pouring more energy and effort into his Bel-Air home, including now a sizable pumpkin patch, which he was using to set up his land for an eventual orchard. Around this time he wrote:

I am the only farmer in Bel-Air, which is supposed to be a rather exclusive residential colony in Hollywood. My neighbors are famous stars and executives. Carey Wilson, the writer and a studio colleague, is one. Gene Raymond and Jeanette MacDonald, Carole Lombard, Clark Gable and W. C. Fields are others. So far none of them has entered a protest against my own two acres under cultivation. Under the peculiar law of the state, I get special water rates as a farmer. It costs the rest of them more to sprinkle their lawns than I pay for irrigating my farm. And furthermore, if they want homemade pumpkin pie, they come to me for the pumpkins. Mine are the best in this section of the country.

The one farmer in Bel-Air presented a formidable, stylish presence on the MGM lot. As he approached his fifties and his hair began to
gray,
Fleming began dressing almost uniformly in shades of gray as well; perhaps his only outward sign of eccentricity, it made him look like a jaunty Southern California banker. Gable sometimes adopted the style for himself, but for Fleming it was virtually a daily look, one he kept for the rest of his life. “Flem was very conservative,” says the tailor Eddie Schmidt Jr. “He was not a wild man.” Schmidt’s father made Vic look natty, and his butler, Slocum, kept his wardrobe in perfect order. His niece Yvonne marveled, “[Slocum] would tidy them up and put them at the far right end of the closet. And then the next day he would get in the left-hand side of the closet, and those would be all ready to go. It was beautifully done and he looked like a model at all times. He was absolutely a perfectionist about quality. And he said to me, this was when I was quite young, ‘Don’t ever buy two of anything. Buy one good thing!’ Which I thought was a very good idea.” The actor Norman Lloyd remembers seeing Fleming at a distance and thinking, “Now that’s the way to look in this town!”

Fleming dressed like the old-school swells Astaire and Cooper, wearing “a lot of Shetland jackets with two-button flaps and side vents,” gray trousers, “and understated ties,” Schmidt recalls. He wasn’t the man for “plaids or a bright white stripe on dark blue stripes.”

One legend had it that “he demanded the choicest dressing room and, on location, the biggest trailer.” Actually, he got them simply for being MGM’s most prominent director, just as, because of his popularity with the stock company, “an extra quota of stars . . . appeared in tribute to him” at the premieres of his movies, though another legend had it that he never attended his own premieres.

Even at his zenith, he may have felt some insecurity about rising from San Dimas into Hollywood aristocracy. One man who thought he saw a taste of this was the freelance director Edward Ludwig. He worked at MGM on
The Last Gangster
with John Lee Mahin around the same time Fleming and Mahin did
Captains Courageous,
and he later directed John Wayne in the anticommunist movie
Big Jim McLain
(1952). Ludwig had a secretary he brought from studio to studio, and he told his nephew Julian that “she would suddenly be close to tears or in tears when he came to check up on things at his office at MGM. She said this director who used to drive for her family kept ignoring her whenever she tried to say hello to him at the commissary. She’d go by his spot at the director’s table and he’d not even recognize her.” That director was Fleming. When Edward Ludwig heard the story, he explained to the distressed girl that Fleming was “quite a good director
and
probably had his mind on his next shot.” But the last time it happened, “Fleming walked right by her when she was standing in line to pay for her lunch. She just wanted to try to say hello to a guy she once knew, and all the other secretaries thought she was making a pitch for a big director.”

That insult set off Ludwig. His nephew recalled, “He went to Fleming’s set and told him something like, ‘I’ve got a part in my picture that calls for a big lummox of a driver, someone who knows about cars—you’d look like you’d be perfect for the part!’ I think they would have really gone at each other if the other people on the set hadn’t separated them.”

Ludwig may have been right the first time, when he told his secretary that Fleming had his mind on his next shot. Assuming that she was part of that wealthy Santa Barbaran Clinton Hale’s extended family, she may have wrongly presumed that Fleming retained a familiarity with, or respect for, her name. And that anecdote offers a minority report on Vic in this bustling period.

The MGM publicist Norman Geiger said he was just “a real solid guy who didn’t take any crap from anybody” and didn’t let studio politics affect him: “He knew where he was going and how he was going to get there.” Lawrence Bachmann, a junior writer at Metro in the late 1930s, remembered Fleming as “almost a legend at that time.” Joseph Newman, who started as an MGM office boy and went on to direct the sci-fi cult favorite
This Island Earth
(1955), considered Fleming to be “a man respected by everybody.” To Newman, he was not a mingler like George Hill, Woody Van Dyke, or Robert Z. “Pop” Leonard, but also not a snob: “Just a little bit aloof.” Newman said everyone knew he was “also successful [directing] women.”