Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (49 page)

Alfred Hitchcock had made a Strauss movie,
Waltzes from Vienna,
in Britain in 1934; he later referred to it as “the lowest ebb” of his career. But
The Great Waltz
was a smash and set a trend for fictional composer biopics that ransacked entire oeuvres, rearranged works musically and chronologically, and pretended that an artist’s life—a make-believe account of his life, at that—was a direct inspiration for those works.
A Song to Remember
(Chopin),
Song of Scheherazade
(Rimsky-Korsakov),
Song of Norway
(Grieg), and
Song Without End
(Liszt) followed.

Duvivier, not Fleming, deserves the credit—and the blame—for many of the form’s stock scenes, which here have a spurious freshness. In one
Fantasia-
like sequence, the chattering of birds, the irregular clopping of a carriage horse, the piping of nearby shepherds, and the sounding of a post horn combine to give Strauss and Carla the inspiration for “Tales of the Vienna Woods.”

Near the end, Duvivier does pull off a remarkable
coup de cinéma.
When Poldi enters the Imperial Opera House for the debut of Strauss’s first opera, the director ratchets the camera back, not in a smooth tracking shot, but in a cannonade of individual images. This swift series of “shock cuts” takes in the grandeur of the theater and leaves her a tiny figure in the distance. Paradoxically, by making us experience Poldi’s feelings of smallness, it creates an operatic flourish exactly when the action needs it most.

Fleming
remade one large-scale scene: student revolutionaries demonstrating to a Strauss march, led by a line of little drummer boys. Their sunlit assault on Count Hohenfried’s house takes the place of Duvivier’s more violent and foreboding nocturnal sequence, in which clutches of rebels at various barricades cheered the sight and sound of the singing marchers and upended a patriotic statue. In both versions, Strauss shrewdly rescues Donner from the mob by proclaiming her a friend to the rebels, but he can’t save her from the soldiers who pile the protesters into tumbrels.

Again, it’s hard to figure how the Duvivier version would have clicked tonally when the sequence always ended with Schani and Donner in one tumbrel and two of Schani’s musicians, Dudelman (Leonid Kinskey) and Kienzl (Curt Bois), in another, communicating through a game of charades. The two jokers stage a Three Stooges–like fight in order to distract their guards and let Strauss and Donner escape. This was all more in Fleming’s vein, anyway; he always had a healthy affinity for low comedy, from his silent days with Fairbanks to his repeated use of the Three Stooges’ mentor, Ted Healy. In
The Great Waltz,
when he isn’t deploying Kinskey’s Dudelman and Bois’s Kienzl as a baggy-pants short-tall comedy team—a sort of Muttski and Jeffski—he exploits Hugh Herbert, as Strauss’s bartering music publisher, Julius Hofbauer, for excitable or dyspeptic burlesque effects. Herbert looks as if he’d spontaneously combust if he didn’t let out the “Woo
-hoo
!” that had been his vocal signature since his vaudeville days.

Mahin rewrote Hoffenstein and Reisch’s script both to tighten its focus on an artist divided between first love and mature love and to give the dialogue the pith it would have in the libretto to a musical comedy. “I thought of you ever since that night,” says Schani. “And you walked away, proud and angry,” says Carla—dispensing with a half page of verbiage in the previous script. Yet the interchange still falls into cliché.

The Great Waltz
gave Fleming a chance to display his film smarts, not his artistry. He and Mahin knew how to maintain a robust emotional through line up to an audacious resolution, with Carla simply announcing to Poldi after her performance in Strauss’s opera that he and the singer love each other and that he’s going with her to Budapest.

Too bad the filmmakers can’t overcome the anticlimax built into the pseudo-inspirational material. In the best Duvivier-shot scene, Count Hohenfried calls on Poldi at the Strauss residence and urges her to fight for her man. As the count, Lionel Atwill movingly blends ardor
with
mortification, and Rainer shows gracious strength as she tells him he has her “greatest respect.” But when the grandeur of the opera world defeats her, she gives up. It was right for Fleming and Mahin to delete Poldi’s saying to Carla, “I came to kill you,” and to make Carla so bold in her claims on Strauss. You do get caught up in the momentum of mad love. Yet then the lovers turn impossibly high-minded, and Carla reads Johann’s mind as they banter in the carriage ride to the boat. She states that Poldi would always be a presence in their lives, coming between them. She sings “One Day When We Were Young,” assured that Strauss wrote it for her and that she’ll always have a piece of his art and heart. Not long after her boat floats up the Danube, the melancholy Strauss gets his wind back. In a pallid replay of the Vienna Woods ride, the sights and sounds of the river rouse Strauss to create “The Blue Danube.”

Gravet said that Josef von Sternberg, not Fleming, was brought in to direct everything from here to the end, and the dancer Dorothy Barrett backs him up. The movie cascades into a montage of Strauss’s melodies winning the hearts of waltzers across the Continent and beyond as his sheet music pours off the presses; Barrett was the dancer from Spain, in a dress that Jeanette MacDonald originally wore as a Spanish spy in
The Firefly.
Von Sternberg “did all the montage shots . . . all the little intricate shots and trick shots,” Barrett says. (You can also spot Barrett in
The Wizard of Oz,
as the pretty brunette who opens the door to the Emerald City’s Wash & Brush-Up Co. at the close of “The Merry Old Land of Oz.”)

To gild a rather wilted lily, Carla gets to reprise “One Day When We Were Young” at the scene of Poldi’s climactic triumph. After Poldi has shepherded her Schani through the shoals of temptation and temperament for half a century, Franz Josef himself leads all Vienna in celebrating its Waltz King. From the imperial balcony we see Carla in the clouds, warbling soulfully away. Although Fleming’s revisions proved critical in making the movie
play,
the press exaggerated their extent, and the picture remained a piece of musical marzipan.

Joseph Stalin, however, found it incomparably tasty. After he saw it in 1939, he canceled awarding a series of medals struck for Soviet filmmakers. “When they learn to work like the Americans,” he said, “then they’ll get their medals.” Partly because World War II curtailed the importing of current foreign films and the return of old ones, Soviet projectors wore out their prints of
The Great Waltz.
The pianist
Dmitry
Paperno wrote that it provided “a dazzling contrast to our strictly regulated lives, not to mention the terrible things that were going on in the background, and that the grown-ups tried to keep us from.”

When word of
The Great Waltz
’s popularity in the Soviet Union spread after World War II, Korjus, who became a regular host to Soviet émigrés, told her daughter, “I am Stalin’s favorite actress”—and Melissa responded, “Please don’t tell anybody else about this!” The Bolshoi ballerina Maya Plisetskaya saw it so often that she knew the subtitles by heart. She met Korjus in Los Angeles in 1966 and wrote, “She never did fully believe me when I told her that she had been an inaccessible goddess for an entire nation, a beautiful extraterrestrial, a ray of happiness in the hardest years of the slave state.” Korjus’s son, Richard Foelsch, says émigrés told his mother a story that originated in Stalin’s screening room at the Kremlin (the scene of Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1991 film,
The Inner Circle
): whenever the dictator saw her singing “One Day When We Were Young” at the finale, “he would rise from his seat, place his head against the wall, and weep like a baby.”

21

Putting Oz into
The Wizard of Oz

The spate of work Fleming did in the late 1930s drained his resilience and on occasion nearly cost him his sanity. But it also sparked his talents and elevated his stature as both an artist and a Hollywood professional. Sometimes directors, like actors, take on aspects of their greatest creations. Francis Ford Coppola was never more of a film-industry godfather than he was after
The Godfather.
Fleming would never be more of a wizard than he was after
The Wizard of Oz.

Oz
would have been a complex, iffy production under any circumstances—and Fleming shouldered it with little preparation, after one director was fired and another came on simply to readjust the costumes and makeup. Yet Fleming, drawing on his experience in all genres, including comic fantasy, displayed a clear vision and command of the project from the outset. As he told Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s intra-corporate newspaper, the
MGM Studio News:

You may wonder how we make an audience believe there is such a thing as a tin man, a straw man and a cowardly lion which talks. A little psychology was all that was necessary.

First we established the characters. Dorothy, played by Judy Garland, is a Kansas farm girl who wanted to find some place where no one gets into trouble. She runs away from home, meets a medicine man, Frank Morgan, who seems all-wise. Then she is caught in a cyclone. In a subconscious world, she goes to that dream world, Oz . . .

On her farm are three hired men. Ray Bolger is always pretending he has brains, Jack Haley meddles with inventions and talks about having a heart, and Bert Lahr is even afraid of baby pigs, but chatters about courage. So, in Oz, Bolger is trans
formed
into a Scarecrow looking for brains, Haley into a Tin Woodman who wants a heart, and Lahr into a Cowardly Lion who hopes to find courage.

Back home, a neighbor woman was trying to have Judy’s dog, Toto, killed for biting her. She is as wicked as a witch, Judy thinks. In Oz, she is a witch. Then that great faker, Morgan, becomes the all-wise Wizard. You take that basis of reality, make things “dream fantastic,” add music throughout and adults accept the story and love it as much as children.

Louise Brooks, the cinematic sex symbol of the late 1920s who renewed her fame decades later as a Hollywood memoirist, asked Kevin Brownlow in 1969, “Isn’t Victor Fleming an inspired director of the beauty of childhood?”

In
The Wizard of Oz,
he not only captured the beauty of childhood but also defined it for the millions who have experienced it in theaters and in the highly publicized TV showings that began in 1956. It evokes the sometimes-terrifying exhilaration of discovering the world beyond the doorstep—and the anxiety-tinged urge to hang on to “home” before time and circumstance alter it.

The usual stories of Fleming’s reluctance to direct the picture because it would be too big a stretch do not survive cursory scrutiny. He brought off
Treasure Island
and
Captains Courageous
with fierceness and delicacy, and both were highly successful at the box office. Paramount had wanted him to direct the studio’s first talkie and first musical,
Burlesque,
and he did direct one backstage musical,
Reckless,
and a portion of
The Great Waltz.
And, of course, he had peppered
When the Clouds Roll By
with
Oz
-like whimsy.

What made Fleming resist
Oz
was what would make him hesitate to leave the picture for Selznick’s
Gone With the Wind
three months later: he would have to assume command of a formidably complicated and expensive production that had already started shooting. Based on L. Frank Baum’s novel first published in 1900,
The Wizard of Oz
was a live-action phantasmagoria that could easily flounder in the execution, like Paramount’s all-star 1933 rendition of Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland—
prominent in Fleming’s mind since Bud Lighton produced that botch.

Fleming had squeezed in an Oregon fishing trip with John Lee Mahin following
The Great Waltz
before starting preproduction on
The
Yearling.
Based on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, it boasted equally difficult, if more down-to-earth, requirements for a planned location shoot in the Florida back-country. Spencer Tracy was cast as the father, Penny Baxter, and Gene Reynolds as the son Jody, a character both dreamy and substantial. That’s when Fleming got the call for
Oz.

Although his daughter Victoria says she was told her father viewed
Oz
as just another job, it was one with ineluctable attractions. And Fleming had a compelling private motivation to take on this potential mind fogger. He had always been a dedicated family man, giving advice and financial aid to a real-life Dorothy Gale—his niece Yvonne. Now he was a father of two.

Fatherhood is what Mahin thought attracted Fleming to the picture. “Here Vic . . . suddenly had two little girls. And all his joy was in them. I think he did it for them, for Missy and Sally. I was with him on the set and I could see his whole love for them poured into the picture.” Fleming told both Mahin and the producer Mervyn LeRoy (as LeRoy remembered it) that he wanted his daughters to see “a picture that searched for beauty and decency and sweetness and love in the world.” Making
Captains Courageous
and
Treasure Island
had been good training. In both, “beauty and decency” rise from the rude awakenings of childhood and adolescence. In
Oz,
Fleming finds “sweetness and love,” jagged truth and unpredictable joy, “where the wild things are.” He doesn’t stint on Baum’s loony inventions, and he hits on what makes them transcendent.

At the end of his
Oz
time, Fleming pasted credit sheets from the picture and photos of seven cast members inside two 1903 editions of the book and had the actors inscribe them to the girls. In Sally’s, one message reads:

Dear Little Baby Sister,