Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master
by Michael Sragow
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael SragowEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-12-09
ISBN: 0375407480
Number of pages: 656
Publisher: Pantheon
Book Reviews of Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master
Book Review: The Real Rhett Butler
Summary: 5 Stars
I remember reading Michael Sragow's movie reviews years ago, when Pauline Kael ws still alive and Sragow was among the very first of her acolytes, the Kaelettes people used to call them. His reviews sounded like hers, though now as stimulating. However in his biography of Victor Fleming, he has developed his own voice. Occasionally it is a shrill one but on the whole it has some resonances and strengths that even Kael never had--perhaps she never bothered with them. Sragow's extended considerations of Fleming's films tell a persuasive story, though methinks he gopes too far when he decides that the lost epic, "The Rough Riders" was probably a great film because the faces of the actors in what stills survive look interesting (and, of course, because Fleming was the man behind the camera). He tells us over and over again that Fleming was the real Clark Gable (the first chapter is called "The Real Rhett Butler"), as if Rhett Butler was an interesting thing to be. Sragow builds up Fleming as handsome enough to be a movie star, so charismatic that every star (Gary Cooper, Gable, Spencer Tracy) modelled himself upon him, --and then he shoots himself in the foot by including dozens of photos in which Fleming appears as a sort of very tall nonentity with a forced smile.
He seems to have scoured every memoir written by any participant in Hollywood's studio system, looking for favorable references to Victor Fleming. Of such scattered gold dust a portrait does not appear, at least not a cohesive one. I couldn't tell whether he was a nog good son of a gun, as Henry Hathaway paints him, or a sensitive and cultured aesthete. Sragow attempts to broaden the canvases constantly, insisting that Fleming was both. He was in fact everything. The book begins with a listing of many such paradoxes, and then never really goes anywhere with them. One thing is for sure, he makes a convincing case that Fleming should indeed be named the auteur of GWTW and THE WIZARD OF OZ. What he can never really address is why Fleming's last films, ADVENTURE and JOAN OF ARC, are such indescribably bad failures. He admits it, just lets it sit there as an ignominous caboose to his glorious Fleming railroad. Was he in love too much with Ingrid Bergman to get a good performance from her? Sragow notes that Joan of Arc has more closeups of Ingrod than "Hula or Mantrap did of [Clara] Bow, The Wizard of Oz did of Garland, Gone with the Wind of Leigh, or all of them combined." And yet that can't be the answer because ADVENTURE is just as bad, and Fleming could barely conceal his dislike of its leading lady (Greer Garson).
This book was a gift to me from a wonderful American poet, Judith Goldman, now based in Chicago. I read it thinking of her all the way through, trying to see her in these pages. A funny thing happened the other dasy, we were watching the TCM documentary on Johnny Mercer, and a TV host asks Mercer how he came up with the phrase "Jeepers Creepers," and Mercer recalled watching a then current picture called THE FARMER TAKES A WIFE, where Henry Fonda says the phrase long and slow. The documentary director included the clip: it's a Victor Fleming picture, I knew that much from reading this wonderful book! And, as Sragow argues, you can get a lot more American history from watching THE FARMER TAKES A WIFE and all of Fleming's other films (including even OZ) than from reading the Congressional Record from cover to cover. Thank you, Judith!
Summary of Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master
The full-length, definitive biography of the legendary director of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.Victor Fleming was the most sought-after director in Hollywood?s golden age, renowned for his ability to make films across an astounding range of genres?westerns, earthy sexual dramas, family entertainment, screwball comedies, buddy pictures, romances, and adventures. Fleming is remembered for the two most iconic movies of the period, Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, but the more than forty films he directed also included classics like Red Dust, Test Pilot, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Captains Courageous. Paradoxically, his talent for knowing how to make the necessary film at the right time, rather than remaking the same movie in different guises, has resulted in Victor Fleming?s relative obscurity in our time.
Michael Sragow restores the director to the pantheon of our greatest filmmakers and fills a gaping hole in Hollywood history with this vibrant portrait of a man at the center of the most exciting era in American filmmaking. The actors Fleming directed wanted to be him (Fleming created enduring screen personas for Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Gary Cooper), and his actresses wanted to be with him (Ingrid Bergman, Clara Bow, and Norma Shearer were among his many lovers).
Victor Fleming not only places the director back in the spotlight, but also gives us the story of a man whose extraordinary personal style was as thrilling, varied, and passionate as the stories he brought to the screen.
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