Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (14 page)

Actually,
When the Clouds Roll By
does more than cover up the “conventional Fairbanks situations.” It subverts them. Fairbanks plays the kind of character he helped reform in
Down to Earth.
He’s the willing victim of a depraved psychiatrist-neurologist. This persuasive quack uses Fairbanks, a lowly employee in his uncle’s New York investment firm, to establish how easily psychological tricks can destroy a man. Knowing that Fairbanks harbors self-destructive superstitions, the mad doctor mercilessly augments them by prescribing awful diets and sabotaging every aspect of the young fellow’s existence, including his apartment’s plumbing. When Fairbanks bumps into an equally superstitious beauty from Oklahoma, played delightfully by Kathleen Clifford, love has a chance to conquer all, but Clifford’s boyfriend from back home comes east to bilk her dad in an oil-grab scheme, with help from Fairbanks’s uncle. Clifford does choose Fairbanks over her old beau. The doctor, though, connives to bring the Oklahoman and the uncle to the couple’s wedding party—and Fairbanks is accused of fraud. Roused beyond the power of superstition, he chases after Clifford when she leaves New York on a ferry and a train. His first reward comes when insane-asylum orderlies unmask the doctor as an escaped inmate. But it takes Fairbanks’s bravery during a sudden catastrophe—a flash flood that swamps the train and an entire town—for him to expose the Oklahoman as a creep and assert his own worth when he rescues Clifford.

The movie boasts two scintillating fantasy scenes. At the start, the quack’s accomplice serves Fairbanks a late supper of onions, lobster, Welsh rarebit, and mince pie. Fleming dresses up actors as these foods—they could be the progenitors of the Fruit of the Loom clowns—and depicts them knocking around boisterously inside Fairbanks’s stomach. In his ensuing marathon nightmare, Fleming springs one surprise after another. A hydrocephalic stranger reaches for Fairbanks in his bed. When Fairbanks slaps him down, he falls and bounces back like a tin figurine in a pinball game. White shadowy hands cover the room. Fairbanks escapes them by catapulting out of bed and through a closed door, landing in a ladies’ club—shades of the GIs
imagining
themselves at a garden club in John Frankenheimer’s
Manchurian Candidate.
(Appearing before proper middle-class women must be a showbiz primal fear.)

Escaping through a painting of a pool, Fairbanks quickly lands in and clambers out of a real pool, only to find his four-course dinner chasing after him. In slow motion he makes his frantic getaway, hurdling a few fences before pulling off a somersault and a flying mount onto a waiting horse. Breaching yet another wall, he goes through one more time-space warp into a house that’s cut away like the crime hive in
His Majesty the American,
permitting viewers to see the action inside as on a theatrical set. Fairbanks strolls up walls and across the ceiling and does a handstand upside down. The return of the attacking foods leads to a hundred-yard dash over rooftops. The sequence arrives at its breathless end as Fairbanks plunges into a chimney and winds up in a metal canister, subjected to merciless drumming. As he wakes up, we realize that one of the doctor’s goons has been stomping around outside Doug’s window, impersonating a janitor, and hurling two garbage cans and a bucket.

Technically and imaginatively, the sequence is a tour de force. In 1919, “slow motion” was not a common term, let alone a typical device. (Fleming’s experience with high-speed photography in the Signal Corps had obviously given him ideas for its application to comedy.) The wall-and-ceiling walk caused such a sensation that
Literary Digest
exposed the mechanics behind it—basically, “a room open at one side and revolving on an axis like a squirrel cage” and a camera positioned to revolve alongside as Fairbanks kept his balance on the ceiling, walls, and floor. (A pair of Stanleys would embellish the same trick for future generations: Donen in 1951’s
Royal Wedding,
and Kubrick in 1968’s
2001: A Space Odyssey.
) With crazed bursts of pop poetry, this sequence announces and then brings home the movie’s point. When his mind gets tossed off balance, Doug’s exuberant physicality becomes subordinate to his warped thoughts and feelings.

Seeing Fairbanks display his athletic abilities through a Lewis Carroll looking glass magnifies their
emotional
power even as it makes them disconcerting. If any film punctures the criticism that Fairbanks exists in his own closed system, it’s this one by Fleming. Throwing the usual Fairbanks universe topsy-turvy allows Doug to make deeper connections with the audience and the other characters. Few Fairbanks courtship scenes are as beautifully balanced as the ones here, in which
Clifford
matches her leading man’s every nervous tic and gesture with her own fluttery, oddball grace.

Early on, the deranged scientist tells Fairbanks to stop smiling, because that expression “is the mark of the idiotic.” The put-down plays on Fairbanks’s advertised image as “America’s Greatest Exponent of the Smile” and presages the moment when Fairbanks’s “Sense of Humor” actually saves him in this movie. During the chaotic breakdown of Fairbanks and Clifford’s wedding party, Fleming stages another strange interlude, this time without putting the protagonist to sleep. Unable to pursue his true love, reduced to hiding in the closet when cops block every exit at the doctor’s behest, Fairbanks freezes. As he does, the camera penetrates his brain, where costumed representatives of Worry and Discord seize the throne of the fair lady Reason while an impotent jester lies at her feet. Only when the asylum orderlies unmask the doctor as a loon does the jester inside Fairbanks’s brain—the embodiment of the hero’s Sense of Humor—restore Reason to her throne. Humor does it with an ancient, still-good joke: “Have you ever heard the one about the old maid in the sleeping car?” The climactic deluge that tests Fairbanks’s strength—it’s a lot mightier than the digital flood in
Evan Almighty—
makes the world seem new enough for him and Clifford to start afresh. It’s as if God’s brain had to clear, too.

When the Clouds Roll By
established several hallmarks of a Victor Fleming production. It was technically innovative in its stagecraft and use of artificial lights. “We had even passed an era old-timers remember as something preceding Noah’s flood—the day of the overhead mercury lights which gave everyone a ghastly green appearance,” Fleming reminisced, years later. “But because we didn’t yet understand all we needed to know about light, our actors wore blue, pink or yellowish shirts. This was to cut down the halation.” Along with cunning sets, the movie boasted brawny location work. Vic shot some of it at Seal Beach, California, and, for the flood, built a reservoir and a town at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. He mixed the full-scale action with miniatures. He aimed to escape stage blocking and photographed Fairbanks from unconventional angles away from “stage center,” hoping, he said, “to give the action a more ‘real’ quality.”

He also demonstrated his willingness to do anything to get what he needed from performers. A publicity item noted that Clifford “couldn’t make her tear ducts work” when she was supposed to weep over her
character’s
apparent breakup with Fairbanks, “so Director Fleming, when he had her rehearsing on the set, deliberately berated her. Finally the temperamental little girl became so worked-up and nervous that she burst forth in great heart-rending sobs, and then the fiendish director yelled, ‘Shoot, camera,’ and laughed finally at her because he had secured just what he desired.” According to the publicity, it was hard for Fleming to make Clifford believe that “he was only getting her to play a crying part” until they screened the scene together “and they realized the harsh methods had obtained excellent results.” Clifford’s nephew, the stage actor Micky O’Donoughue, says he doubts she would have needed the berating. Hardly a “little girl” at age thirty-two, and experienced in British theater and on Broadway, she came from “a wild and unusual family of incredible talents.”

Clifford and Fleming began a four-year romance with her moving into his new place on Gardner Street. A zesty brunette with large, expressive eyes, Clifford was a former chorus girl turned vaudevillian. In 1921, a besotted critic called her “intensely unselfconscious about everything that she does. I’ve seen her breeze into a musical comedy with an opera glass in one hand and a pretzel in the other. She ate the pretzel as unhesitatingly as she looked over the members of the chorus with the opera glass and passed opinions upon them.”

Born Kathleen O’Donoughue in Ireland and raised as part of a traveling theatrical troupe in England, Clifford had performed in America since 1902 and, at just five feet one inch and 101 pounds, created a male-impersonation act called “The Smartest Chap in Town,” wearing formal male duds, including top hat and monocle, or a newsboy’s outfit with cap, performing songs she’d written herself. (Such acts, long popular in vaudeville, were rooted in nineteenth-century British music halls and made famous by the often-imitated Vesta Tilley.) She was cute enough for Irene Castle to suspect, in 1913, that she might steal the heart of Vernon Castle before their dancing team had even begun.

Clifford had the same blithe, roguish quality as Fairbanks. She went from (in her nephew’s words) “running out of money in Ireland and having to urinate in a bottle so her mother could sell it as medicine” to performing in musical comedies with Al Jolson in New York, and later hitting the vaudeville circuits with her “Smartest Chap” turn; she broke into motion pictures in a 1917 Paramount serial. Her mother hawked patent medicines as “Madame Clifford”; that’s where Kathleen
got
her new last name. She also created a new history for herself. Her publicity stated she’d been born in Charlottesville, Virginia, because, according to her nephew, “someone had told her that the courthouse in Charlottesville had burned down during the Civil War, so she gave that as her birthplace because she didn’t think there was any way it could be traced!”

In New York to direct Constance Talmadge in
Woman’s Place,
Fleming writes Clifford in 1921: “Right now I want you to understand that I am not having a ‘great time’ or ‘lots of fun’ or enjoying myself greatly, as you seem to think. I’m not at all happy—having a thoroughly miserable time and wish I were with you, ‘where I belong.’ Now just what do you think of that.” The following year he addresses her as “Dear Pie” from the Algonquin Hotel. “Just another day away from you, that is about all it amounts to,” he writes, saying he’s going to the world-championship light-heavyweight bout between Benny Leonard and Lew Tendler the next night, and he’s “seen no shows and the pictures are rotten.”

In another love letter that fall, Fleming writes, “Darling, my love, I have been coming home for several evenings expecting a letter from you and no luck. Always met by Old John Disappointment at the desk. Do you think that is a nice way to treat a perfectly good husband who loves you, do you?” He tells Clifford of a rained-out day on location (for
Dark Secrets
) forty miles out from New York City on Long Island, with no interiors ready to take up the slack. He reports, “Tom [Geraghty] and everyone liked my last picture,”
Red Hot Romance,
and hopes his new one (
Anna Ascends
) will be better, “but I don’t see how it can knock the world dead,” and asks her if she’s seen James Cruze’s
Old Homestead,
which he hears is “a great picture.” He signs the note, “Worlds of love, Victor,” with a P.S.: “And please do write. Love thee.”

What’s most revealing about this letter is its easy, affectionate tone with a worldly beauty who was actually two years older than he (despite the press calling her a “temperamental little girl”). Fleming’s conquests would be legion, but they always spoke of him as a man who took good care of them.

If he and Clifford
had
been romantically involved throughout the filming of
When the Clouds Roll By,
Fleming might still have yelled at her or nudged her to make a point if there had been any lull or hesitation in the filming. Even if a performer can
eventually
deliver on a part’s requirements, Fleming learned early that a director needs results
on
demand. He was acclaimed for what he wrought. A
New York Times
reviewer, after stating that
When the Clouds Roll By
and the next Fairbanks-Fleming production,
The Mollycoddle
(1920), have “extraordinary scenes,” declared, “That as Victor Fleming directed both ‘When the Clouds Roll By’ and its successor he is entitled to [take credit for] much of the cinematic works.”

The Mollycoddle
is as refreshing and pleasurable, though neither as far-out nor as iconoclastic, as
When the Clouds Roll By.
(The title is nineteenth-century slang for a milksop or a mama’s boy.) It offers a more intense and stylized version of a
Wild and Woolly
adventure. Here Fairbanks isn’t even a Western
fan
when the action picks him up: he’s what the
Times
review and his leading lady call “a foreign American”—a Europeanized dandy at play in Monte Carlo. Cultivated beyond his native wit and instincts, Doug’s mollycoddle character has lost the frontier-taming vitality of his Arizona forefathers. But a trio of “American college boys” named Patrick O’Flannigan, Ole Olsen, and Samuel Levinski—a melting pot on six legs—discover that despite his cane, monocle, and cigarette holder, Fairbanks is an American, not an Englishman. They resolve to crack his overrefined veneer and see if there’s a true Yank below. They shanghai him onto the boat of the rich Dutchman (Wallace Beery) who’s been hosting them on an Old-Europe-to-Wild-West vacation tour, not realizing that Beery has been smuggling diamonds from a mine in Hopi Indian country for cutting and finishing on the Continent and that Beery suspects Doug of spying on him for the Secret Service.

Only one of the Fab Three’s lady companions, played by Ruth Renick, comes right out and says of Doug, “He has the makings of a man.” (She turns out to be the real secret agent.) But all approve as he toughens up with duties in the stokehold, and the guys give him a new tweed outfit: “Suit by O’Flannigan—Cap by Olsen—Shoes by Levin-ski.” By the time the mollycoddle leaves the ship, Renick has revealed her identity (and Beery’s) and enlisted Doug in her crusade. Once he finds his way to Arizona, and sheds his sensible tweeds for cowboy duds, the stirring fragrance of western zephyrs wafting off the Apache Mountains and successive bouts of do-or-die action change this mollycoddle into a real man—and, once again, his father’s son.