Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master

30. Death in the Desert

30 Death in the Desert Fleming had declared that he wanted to be a director of epics ever since the late 1920s. But Joan of Arc, his one independent foray into epic territory , was a creative debacle. Time’s movie column, generally sympathetic to him, said the heroine “becomes a lifeless symbol in a pageant.” RKO found no better way of promoting the film than as a pageant. The critical reception scotched the idea of sending it out as the Americanproduced equal to Olivier’s Henry V: Crowther put the two heroicmedieval portraits head-to-head and declared Joan of Arc competitive only in its pictorial “perfection,” because Fleming, unlike Olivier, allowed “this whole drama to be played in the wide frame of a pageant, with consequent lack of real insight and intimacy.” (It’s “score one for Henry,” he quipped.) The studio hedged its bets from the start, showcasing it as a reserved-seat, road-show presentation in some theaters and a continuously run film in others. The initial returns were solid, and Wanger’s hopes of awards, despite the bad reviews, still high. But he and Fleming had misjudged their audience. Shepperd Strudwick, Joan’s idealistic bailiff, shortly afterward appeared as an idealistic doctor in 1949’s All the King’s Men, a torn-from-the-headlines melodrama based on Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. All the King’s Men ultimately became a box-office success and won Academy Awards for best picture and best actor, Broderick Crawford (a Fleming family friend), and best supporting actress, Mercedes McCambridge. That movie, with its democratic hero turning into a demagogue, boasted the kind of direct, dynamic ambivalence and street credibility postwar critics wanted. Under Bergman’s spell, Fleming had succumbed to holiday-season poster art and siphoned any bit of ambivalence out of Joan of Arc. Even its cost became a joke. Wanger accepted a Look magazine achievement Srag_9780375407482_3p_07_r2.z.qxp 10/13/08 10:37 AM Page 490 award for the film in February. When the presenter, Bob Hope, asked in his usual teasing-wheedling fashion why there’d been no role for Hope in Joan of Arc, Wanger said, in a scripted quip, “If a man has a $200 pipe, would he smoke Dr. Scholl’s foot pads in it?” It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, but won only for cinematography and costume design; Wanger shamelessly campaigned for, and received, a special award for “distinguished service to the industry in adding to its moral stature in the world community by his production of Joan of Arc.” Bergman and Ferrer, though nominated, were never considered contenders . When Wanger accepted his award, he said, “Notwithstanding this citation, I cannot accept this award except in the name of my partners , Ingrid Bergman and Victor Fleming, who made this great picture possible.” By then Sierra Pictures was mired in debt, and Bergman had run off with Roberto Rossellini, leaving her daughter, Pia, behind with Petter Lindström. And Victor Fleming was dead. “We had the same dentist, or my husband did at least, and the dentist , I was convinced, killed Vic—gave him too much Novocain or took out too many teeth and weakened him,” said Leonora Hornblow. But Joan of Arc took more out of him than any dentist could. The mature, seductively melancholy Fleming was no longer the Beau Brummell who could laugh off broken dreams with Clara Bow. Bergman said she delighted in observing him run a set. Fleming, however, must have been in agony watching her there and in the editing room, where he could see her slipping away from his personal and professional grasp. Bergman forced Fleming to face the contradictions of his life and to consider whether sustaining his marriage for the previous dozen years had simply been a matter of marital will and parental devotion. His antidote to gloom, as usual, was action. He had dental surgery the day after Christmas, and a mere two days after that drove Lu and his daughters to the Beaver Creek guest ranch, twenty miles east of Cottonwood , Arizona. In many ways, it was a journey into his past, to the country where he’d played escalating pranks with Douglas Fairbanks and navigated perilous location scouts on horseback with Lois Wilson. He stopped to visit Lighton at his Wine Glass Ranch in Prescott. Watson Webb, who hosted the Flemings and Lightons for dinner whenever Hope and Bud came back to Los Angeles, always found...