Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master by Michael Sragow
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Book Reviews of Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master
Book Review: Victor Fleming is an underrated Hollywood Film Director who gets his due in this definitive biography
Summary: 5 Stars
Quick! Who directed those two great masterpieces of 1939, "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind?" The correct answer is the talented Victor Fleming (1889-1949). Fleming has long deserved a full-length biography of his life and career. Baltiomore film critic Michael Sragrow has accomplished that task using vivid prose in telling the saga of an American original artist of the cinema.
Fleming was a native Californian born to poor farmers who had migrated west from Missouri. He was enamored of photography, tinkering with cars, chasing women and general old fashioned carousing with his friends. During World War I he became an officer who photographed President Woodrow Wilson during the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919 which transpired in Paris.
Fleming became known as a photographer who soon won a director's chair during the Silent Screen era. He directed and befriended the great Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Fleming was the lover of such silent sexpots as the alluring Clara Bow the famous "It" girl and several starlets. He would later go have affairs with among many others: No
Bessie Love, Norma Shearer and most famously the incandescent Swede Ingrid Bergman.
Fleming was not faithful to his wife Lu but was a good father to his two daughters. He never got past the seventh grade in school but was an autodidatic chap who knew a good deal of history, the art of film directing, mechanics and flying aircraft. His pals were such he-men as Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Henry Fonda. He was a macho Hemingway man who was handsome, well spoken, sometimes gruff and always professional on the set. His best pal was probably the irascible film genius Howard Hawks.
We remember him, of course, for the great films he directed. In aadditon to Oz and GWTW that number includes such gems as: Tortilla Flat; Test Pilot; Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Treasure Island, "The Virginian, Abie's Wild Irish Rose;Red Dust with Gable and Harlow and Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman. Fleming is notable for working in all genres from comedy to adventure to melodrama. He was the top director on the MGM lot. He had previously spent several years at Paramount.
Fleming was a tough hombre who was conservative who, suprisingly, often voted for the Democratic party. He did not care for easterners being proud of his native California heritage. He was an avid big game hunter, fisherman and loved the outdoors. Fleming was tall, handsome and well tanned. Gable based his GWTW role of Rhett Butler on Fleming's persona. He was loved by women and respected by men in the tough show business world of early Hollywood.
Sragow's biography will, hopefully lead to a renewed interest in such figures as Fleming, Wellman, Walsh, Ford and Hawks who were the men who made the movies great in the long ago golden age of Holywood.
Book Review: Exuberant biography
Summary: 5 Stars
Michael Sragow writes with great exuberance and enthusiasm. This is a great read. This is from the Los Angeles Times BOOK REVIEW--by Wendy Smith, December 11, 2008:
Victor Fleming strides through Michael Sragow's eponymous biography with the panache of Rhett Butler -- and no wonder, since the director helped forge Clark Gable's onscreen persona with "Red Dust" and "Test Pilot" years before they reunited for "Gone With the Wind."
Appreciatively chronicling Fleming's work on these and other classic films, including "The Virginian," "Treasure Island," "Captains Courageous" and "The Wizard of Oz," Sragow -- who is a film critic at the Baltimore Sun -- portrays his subject as a man's man who enjoyed fishing, hunting, flying airplanes, riding motorcycles, driving fast cars and making love to beautiful actresses.
In Sragow's view, Fleming's extracurricular activities enhanced his stature on the set: "Actors felt energized by the sight of this tall, powerfully built figure reflexively brushing back his mane and training a sharpshooter's vision on their performances. . . . Craftsmen felt secure serving a director who could correct errors on the run, from lax ad libs to skewed camera angles."
Sragow is eager to rescue Fleming from his posthumous reputation as a studio hack. This image grew from the troubled production histories of his two most famous movies.
Fleming assumed command of both "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind" after shooting had begun. In the 1970s, Aljean Harmetz's "The Making of 'The Wizard of Oz' " and Roland Flamini's "Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands" implicitly credited producers Mervyn LeRoy and David Selznick, respectively, as the primary guiding forces of those films.
Sragow begs to differ. Indeed, by the time we get to "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind," which were shot in 1938 and 1939, he has amply made his case that the director was much more than a competent craftsman.
Book Review: One of the best film biographies I have read
Summary: 5 Stars
An excellent biography of Victor Fleming who was most famous for directing Gone with the Wind and the Wizard of Oz. Authorized by his daughters who were extensively interviewed for the book, this covers the life of a true American Master of the Film world. Fleming who died in 1949 not only left a legacy of two iconic films but was responsible for directing classics including Test Pilot, The Virginian, Red Dust, Captains Courageous, Treasure Island, and A Guy Named Joe. The author meticulously relates the backstories of the films directed by Fleming and reveals little known facts including the two endings shot for A Guy Named Joe (the what might have been ending is revealed) and Katherine Hepburn's desire to play a dual role as the two women in Dr. Jekyll's life. Fleming's earliest films starred Douglas Fairbanks, a megastar of early Hollywood. Fleming also directed highly successful "star turns" of Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy plus was responsible for Gary Cooper's first breakout emergence as a star in The Virginian (which Cooper said was his favorite film). Fleming's personal life is chronicled and his love affairs with screen legends Clara Bow, Norma Shearer, and perhaps the most turbulent of all, with Ingrid Bergman. Fleming's marriage to Lu Rosson took place in the thirties and they had two children Victoria and Sally.
Film buffs may most enjoy the chapters on the Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind and the backstories behind these films. After reading this book though, readers might want to have another look at Fleming's films.
A wonderful book that belongs on the shelves of academic and public libraries and should be on the bookshelves of film fans and historians. It is hoped TCM will collaborate with the author on a documentary about Victor Fleming.
Book Review: A Long Overdue Bio
Summary: 5 Stars
I snatched this book up at my local bookseller's the week it was released and allowed it to languish on my book shelf for 2 weeks. Big mistake!
If ever there were a case study on how to write a biography of a person who had been dead for nearly sixty years, this book is it.
I've long loved movies that were directed by Victor Fleming and knew the basic info.......Fleming was a ladies man, a competent director, someone who died when he still looked good and should have had had many good years left. It could have well been summarized by his rather unimpressive crypt at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.......here was someone who once was somebody but was now relegated to obscurity. Not so! Michael Sragow had me within the first five minutes of starting this book. Here was a guy who was larger than life......handsomer than most of the male stars he directed and more fearless, too. A real life romeo, an adventurer, a guy who could be tough when necessary and a gentleman too. Based on interviews with Fleming family members, contemporaries, archival data, analysis, Sragow was able to put together a detailed profile of Victor Fleming that was not only very informative but compelling. I wanted to know where his story was going even if I knew where it was going to inevitably end.
If you are interested in film or just interested in reading a good bio, this book is a wonderful choice.
Book Review: TERRIFIC BIOGRAPHY!
Summary: 5 Stars
I had long admired Victor Fleming, (primary) director of Gone With The Wind, and The Wizard of Oz, two movie greats. This biography by Michael Sragow is outstanding in its meticulous presentation. Origins of Fleming's early life and beginnings as a movie director, as well as a glimpse into the early silent picture era are well documented and make for a good read for those interested in the motion picture era. Interesting as well, for noting the pictures he wanted to have made and didn't, among those, "The Yearling" for reasons too obtuse to be real!
Fleming was a very sensitive artist, a director who could also have been a psychologist, as he understood and dealt with his actors in ways beyond the sterotypical factory approach among directors of the era. Also well documented are the director's various paramours (another word for girlfriends) and marriage. Although a little long, it is fascinating reading. A must for fans of Fleming and the magnificent pictures he directed, or anyone interested in the golden age of movies.