Appreciating Victor Fleming

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind

“It’s amazing: you ask people as a trivia question ‘Who directed Gone with the Wind?” and nobody knows; you give them a second clue – it’s the same guy who directed The Wizard of Oz – and they say Mervyn LeRoy. Victor Fleming was either a wonderful director or the luckiest son of a bitch in the world.”  – Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Among the big studio-era Hollywood filmmakers whose sturdy masculinity – an affinity for Westerns and other kinds of action pictures, a love of robust characters (both male and female), a comfortableness with the physical and the outdoors, a skill for shaping the distinctive qualities of all-American movie stars – Victor Fleming has traditionally been shortchanged. John Ford has been glorified, partly because he made the most consciously pictorial movies; he was always after art, and at his best he got it, in Young Mr. Lincoln, The Long Voyage Home, How Green Was My Valley. Howard Hawks, who worked in every genre, parlayed a love of raucousness and sass and tossed-off professionalism into a hard-boiled character ethic that infused all his work, whether he was making a gangster picture like Scarface or an aviator actioner like Only Angels Have Wings or a newspaper movie-cum-romantic comedy like His Girl Friday; his movies were companionable and often so speedy (the overlapping dialogue) that they felt wired. Fleming doesn’t get the same kind of respect. One reason may be that he did his best work in the thirties and very early forties and was dead by the end of the decade, whereas Hawks and Ford continued to make movies for another couple of decades; they were still around and working, if not at the height of their talents, when the film studies programs started operating in the sixties. Another reason, ironically, is that the two most famous projects Fleming was attached to, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, came out the same year, 1939, and because they were vastly different and he wasn’t the only director who worked on either – King Vidor directed the Kansas footage in the first after Fleming prepared it, and Fleming replaced George Cukor in the latter – Fleming has been saddled with a reputation as a hired gun.

Mank: No High Comedy

Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz in Mank. The film is now streaming on Netflix.

This review contains spoilers.

Pauline Kael’s essay “Raising Kane” advanced the idea that Herman J. Mankiewicz had written the screenplay for Citizen Kane, for which he shared screen credit – and a screenwriting Oscar – with the film’s director, Orson Welles. By the time she wrote the piece (which was published in The New Yorker in 1971 and later released in The Citizen Kane Book, side by side with the shooting script), Welles was in the habit of appearing on TV talk shows and protesting that he was the real author of the script – that all Mankiewicz had come up with was the “Rosebud” mystery, which Welles claimed he’d never cared much for anyway. But though “Raising Kane” infuriated Welles enthusiasts who wanted to believe he was the hero of the project, especially those who subscribed to the auteur theory of film criticism that rejects the notion that movies are a collaborative art form, Kael didn’t write it simply out of a desire to correct the misperception about the importance of Mankiewicz’s role in the making of the movie – and she certainly didn’t write it, as the filmmaker and Welles idolater Peter Bogdanovich and other have insisted for years, to denigrate Welles. (Anyone who thinks so ought to check out her review of his 1967 Falstaff, a.k.a. Chimes at Midnight, in her collection Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.) The essay, an astonishingly perceptive and densely detailed piece of film scholarship and film criticism, argues that Citizen Kane is the most enjoyable of all great American movies because of the collaboration of two sensational artists, an iconoclastic prodigy making his first picture and a witty veteran who were both liberated by the subject matter to do glittering, audacious work. (Welles was twenty-five, Mankiewicz forty-three.) Welles, who came from New York theatre and radio and didn’t know the rules for making a Hollywood movie, went right ahead and broke them gleefully, and with the help of another pro, the extraordinary cinematographer Gregg Toland, he came up with fresh, innovative ways of using the camera. Mankiewicz, one of the many gifted east-coast playwrights and fiction writers the studios imported when sound came in, wrote a script that, Kael argues, is the culmination of the era, roughly the first decade of talking pictures, when the funny, clever contributions of Mank’s circle -- which included many of the most brilliant New York transplants, like George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur -- flavored movies in every genre but especially those that were tailored specifically for the talkies, like the newspaper picture. (One of the first newspaper pictures adapted Hecht and MacArthur's fabulous hard-boiled stage comedy The Front Page.) That’s what Kane is, and its subject, the newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, is transparently William Randolph Hearst, who began an empire by popularizing journalistic writing. Kane is a film à clef that everyone in America could unlock from the opening sequence, set on a Gothic southern-Californian estate called Xanadu that anybody who read the papers could identify as Hearst’s San Simeon. What made the movie even more daring was that, while Kane dies in the opening moments of the movie, Hearst was still very much alive.

Movie Love: Ty Burr’s Gods Like Us, David Thomson’s Moments That Made The Movies and Sophie Cossette’s Sinemania!

I may not be particularly enamoured of the movies much of late – their overall quality is abysmal and they just don’t seem to have the cultural cachet they used to have – but I can still appreciate the enthusiasm of those that are still enthralled by the art form and, more so, enjoy the different approaches they take to expressing their love of cinema. Three recent books all find a way into the movies that is both atypical and idiosyncratic. They’re entertaining and informative in equal measure, fine tributes to the movie love that so many people still possess and a timely reminder of why I fell for the movies in the first place.