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8 Courage and Clara Bow Bravery under stress was a natural theme for “outdoor” directors, and as a man and a professional Fleming had a bone-deep feeling for it. He’d wandered into a profession that enabled him to turn one of his ruling appetites—voracity for action—into a creed. Physical bravery was integral to his sportsmanship. It also fed his yen for knockabout jokes and urge to complete any task swiftly. Artistic and existential bravery were significant for him, too, but here the quality became more complicated. Fleming had dared big by leaping into a quicksilver creative and social life. He’d had help from Dwan and Fairbanks, Emerson and Loos, but he was a self-made man in a self-made industry and a freewheeling town. The zest of early moviemaking came from its participants’ unselfconsciousness —they thrived on happy accidents and turned whatever made them work into rules of play. The gifted recognized principles that clicked for them and stayed on the lookout for new ones. Fleming never lost his sense of directing as a job, but it was a job he practiced with the intensity of an artist. At times he did movies that he’d dreamed about; at other times he took on assignments. So he was a creative force and a hireling, alternately and often simultaneously. His personality usually came through, and it had a homegrown sophistication: heartfelt and crusty, yet sometimes brashly satirical. His personal life had the same brand of complexity. Though he became a sought-after figure socially, he kept one foot in Hollywood and one foot out. He was a ladies’ man and, from all accounts, an honorable one. His leading women fell in love with him on location, but they also spoke well of him back in Hollywood. Given his mix of pride, curiosity, and practicality, it’s not surprising that the overriding characteristic of Fleming’s work is its variety, especially in the hell-raising Srag_9780375407482_3p_02_r2.z.qxp 10/13/08 10:36 AM Page 99 1920s. That’s also when he carved a romantic chessboard out of Hollywood . His aura of ruggedness and stoic courage caused his peers to speak of him in Hemingwayesque terms, but Fleming’s two silent seafaring adventures focused on the redemption of cowards. Code of the Sea (1924) derives from a story by Byron Morgan, who wrote racing scripts for Wallace Reid (including The Roaring Road, Fleming’s one possible foray into stunt driving). It registers as a dress rehearsal for Fleming’s prestigious adaptation (several films later) of Joseph Conrad’s summa of gracelessness under pressure, Lord Jim (1925). In Code of the Sea, Rod La Rocque, who had the dark good looks of Robert Downey Jr., plays the hero, Bruce McDow, with some of Downey’s volatility (though little of his skill). Bruce carries a family curse: he’s the son of a craven lightship skipper who steered away from his post during a storm and was responsible for a passenger ship’s fatal crash. Jacqueline Logan, sweet-faced and sensible, plays Jenny Hayden , Bruce’s true love and the daughter of the man who captained the ship that piled up on the Barrier Reef. In the opening scene, Bruce loses his first berth—he succumbs to vertigo at the prospect of climbing a mast. One old salt says with a sneer that book learning has taught Bruce not merely to look before he leaps but never to leap at all. Jenny gets him a job on his father’s old lightship. There he must overcome the presumption that he inherited his dad’s yellow stripe. The movie may be a potboiler, but it’s involving and audacious—a premium example of Fleming’s feisty virtuosity. He’ll do anything to put over this pulpy story. He twirls the camera from Bruce’s dizzied point of view so that the masts of a ship seem to dance. He presents Bruce’s inner demons as outer ghouls—gap-toothed, scrofulous heads that encircle the hero and paralyze him, even when Jenny’s dress catches fire. Fleming doesn’t let the primal story get too far away from the elements. When Bruce decides to prove to himself that he isn’t a coward, he places his hand over a burning kerosene lamp (a gesture that anticipates Peter O’Toole’s T. E. Lawrence). These flourishes make the movie teeter on the brink of macho camp, with the masochism and...

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