Great Victor Fleming Article

[rain Bard]

Sragow's biography, mentioned as one of the major sources of the information in the article, is a terrific read too.

[FilmFan720]

This is a fantastic article...a good read is also the play Moonlight and Marigolds, a comedy from a few years ago that fictionalizes the writing session of Gone With the Wind touched on in this article.

[The Original BJ]

The Real Rhett Butler

The forgotten man behind two of Hollywood’s most enduring classics.
by David Denby May 25, 2009

Howard Hughes, whose acumen outside certain areas of expertise (aeronautics and the acquisition of beautiful actresses) was rarely sound, once said something intelligent about the relative merits of two movie directors. The remark was delivered in early 1939, when George Cukor had been shooting “Gone with the Wind” for about three weeks. An adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s thousand-page blockbuster novel, from 1936, about the Old South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, the movie was the largest and most expensive production in Hollywood up to that time, with a huge cast, massive sets (the city of Atlanta was burned down and then rebuilt), and hundreds of unshaven and bandaged extras trudging across the landscape. As half of Hollywood maliciously cheered, the production slipped into disaster. The script could be kindly described as a mess, and the star—Clark Gable—was in turmoil. The initial rushes displeased David O. Selznick, the legendary, manic producer who dominated every aspect of the film, and he suddenly fired Cukor, who, he later said, couldn’t have handled the more spectacular elements of the movie. In Cukor’s place, Selznick hired Victor Fleming, who was then directing the other big picture in town, “The Wizard of Oz.” Fleming was a vigorous and resourceful man, but few people considered him an artist. The change pleased Gable but distressed the two female leads—the young stage and film actress Vivien Leigh, just arrived from England and not yet a star, and Olivia de Havilland, who was then Howard Hughes’s girlfriend. Both women depended on Cukor, who was known as a “woman’s director,” and de Havilland brought her troubles to Hughes, who advised: “Don’t worry, everything is going to be all right—with George and Victor, it’s the same talent, only Victor’s is strained through a coarser sieve.”

Hughes was almost correct. Fleming’s talent was not “the same” as Cukor’s, yet he was definitely the right man for “Gone with the Wind,” and he did inventive and powerful work on “Oz.” But in the seventy years since the release of those films, Fleming, whose talent flowed not smoothly or subtly, but roughly, in surges of energy and feeling, has been largely forgotten. The auteur-theory critics who, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, went wild over Cukor, Hitchcock, Preminger, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Capra, and many other directors of the late silent and early sound periods, ignored Fleming, though he had made a number of entertaining movies in the nineteen-twenties and thirties and his two super-productions of 1939 are very likely the most widely seen movies in American film history—not just good pictures but films that have entered the unconscious of generations of moviegoers. “Gone with the Wind,” with its happy plantation slaves—emblems of Noble Toil—posed against reddening skies, has its enraging and embarrassing moments; the racist kitsch is, regrettably, part of the nation’s collective past. What remains remarkably modern in the film is the central combat of wills between Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara and Gable’s Rhett Butler, each seeking the upper hand in and out of bed. Margaret Mitchell set up the conflict, but it was Fleming who got the two actors to embody it. As for “The Wizard of Oz,” the movie’s version of the magical land of Oz, in its combined freedom and unease, happiness and fear, has become a universally shared vision of the imagination itself. Since Fleming was the element common to both movies, it’s time for his contribution to be lifted out of the shadows.

The seventieth anniversary of these two classics has seen deluxe new (and expensive) versions on DVD, and the appearance of two good books: “Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master” (Pantheon; $40), a full-scale biography that shines up the director’s reputation, by Michael Sragow, the film critic of the Baltimore Sun, who has written for this magazine; and “Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone with the Wind’ Revisited” (Yale; $24), by Molly Haskell, whose 1973 study “From Reverence to Rape” remains a standard text on women in movies. Haskell has lived in Manhattan for more than forty years, but she grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and as a girl she became obsessed with Margaret Mitchell’s rebellious Southern belle, Scarlett, as personified in the movie by Leigh—a selfish, greedy, flirtatious yet sex-hating, intractable green-eyed demon who is every inch and flounce a heroine.

When summoned by Selznick, Fleming hadn’t read Mitchell’s novel, but he took a look at the screenplay and immediately told the producer, “Your fucking script is no fucking good.” Selznick had owned the property since the book’s publication, and in 1936 he had hired the East Coast playwright and screenwriter Sidney Howard to do an adaptation. Howard turned in a faithful but overlong version, and Selznick began fiddling. At one time or another, as many as fifteen writers worked on the movie, until finally, in early 1939, as production stalled and hundreds of salaried people sat around idle, Selznick turned to Ben Hecht, the greatest and most cynical of Hollywood screenwriters. Hecht agreed to work on the script as long as he didn’t have to read the book. Selznick told him the plot, but he couldn’t make any sense of it, so Selznick retrieved Howard’s version, and, as Hecht listened, Selznick and Fleming read it aloud, Selznick taking the role of Scarlett, Fleming reading Rhett.

In this manner, the three men worked eighteen or twenty hours a day, sustained by Dexedrine, peanuts, and bananas, a combination that Selznick believed would stimulate the creative process. On the fourth day, according to Hecht, a blood vessel burst in Fleming’s eye. On the fifth, Selznick, eating a banana, swooned, and had to be revived by a doctor. Many good Hollywood movies have been saved by last-minute revisions, but this ill-fed, hazardous, all-male acting-and-writing marathon must be the strangest of all interventions. Oddly, it may also provide a key to the movie’s success: Selznick, an epic (and often hapless) Hollywood womanizer, nevertheless had, Molly Haskell claims, genuine and delicate insights into women’s feelings, and, in some crucial way (strengthened, perhaps, by his reading her part), he identified with Scarlett. Fleming, tall, strong, and startlingly handsome—Selznick ruefully called him “the most attractive man, in my opinion, who ever came to Hollywood”—did not chase women; they chased him. The director was considered by everyone to be a “man’s man”—shrewd, funny, but bluff and demanding—and he was close in temperament to the hard-nosed character of Rhett Butler. It’s possible that the extraordinary balance between Scarlett and Rhett was sealed at this moment.

Gable had been worried all along about his ability to play Rhett, an emotionally demanding role, and he yearned for Fleming’s support. He had worked with him before, in 1932—in the deliciously entertaining sex-in-the-jungle romantic drama “Red Dust,” in which he co-starred with Jean Harlow—and he had taken a lot from Fleming’s manner of brusque masculine humor. Cukor, however, as people noted at the time, made Gable nervous and angry. Gable was afraid that Cukor might swing the movie toward its actresses, especially Vivien Leigh. In recent years, a more piquant speculation has surfaced: that Gable, in his early days in Hollywood, had been a gigolo and had had a few gay encounters. In this telling, someone in Cukor’s circle had been gossiping about Gable’s past, and Gable, jealous of his reputation as the hetero “king” of Hollywood, grew alarmed.

Fleming’s presence restored the star’s self-assurance. After Hecht edited Sidney Howard’s script (in the end, Howard got sole credit), the production got under way again, and Gable, once more imitating Fleming’s manner (Sragow calls the director “the real Rhett Butler”), wound up doing the best, most expressive acting of his career. The actresses did well, too. De Havilland provided the movie with a moral center, and Leigh, though hardly fond of Fleming, gave one of the most electrifying performances in the history of movies. As Fleming pulled together Selznick’s monster production during the day, he supervised the editing of “The Wizard of Oz” at night. He may have been an artist after all.

Victor Fleming’s mother was of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction (the longtime Hollywood rumor that Fleming was part Cherokee is nothing more than that); his father was from Missouri. The family went west, and Fleming was born, in 1889, near Pasadena, then a hamlet so primitive that his father, a citrus rancher, helped lay the public water-supply system. He died of a heart attack, in a familymanaged orange orchard, when Fleming was four. Years later, the director wrote, “There is little room in my life for sentiment and soft words,” which is the kind of statement that tough American men in the nineteen-twenties and thirties often made to cover a deeper current of feeling. Dropping out of school in his mid-teens, Fleming became fascinated by speed and by the new machines that produced it, cars and airplanes, as well as by the new machine that captured it, the motion-picture camera. In his early twenties, he briefly tried his hand at car-racing, but wound up a chauffeur in Santa Barbara, where he fell in with the pioneer movie director Allan Dwan. Taking over as a cameraman on Dwan’s films, Fleming found a trade. A photograph of him from this period reveals an almost unnervingly forceful young man with hostile eyes and a wedged pompadour. He looks less like a movie person than like a young officer out of uniform.

By 1915, he was shooting the films that Dwan made with Douglas Fairbanks, and, four years later, Fleming became Fairbanks’s director. They made just three movies together—“When the Clouds Roll By” (1919), “The Mollycoddle” (1920), and the mock documentary “Around the World in Eighty Minutes” (1931)—but they became lifelong friends. Fairbanks’s movies often had a satirical bent: the smiling young man, throwing himself around the set and showing off his skills as a gymnast, outraged the boors and the stuffed shirts. Off the set, the two men carried on in the same way. They jumped over chairs and couches in hotel lobbies, swung through trains by holding onto overhead racks; they leaped from a twelve-foot height (in one version of the story, from a burning hayloft), first Fleming and then Fairbanks, and each broke an ankle.

In the early twenties, Fleming became close to Howard Hawks, and, in the same spirit of macho competitiveness, they took up aviation, building and flying ramshackle planes that smashed their landing gear on hitting the ground. The risk-taking shenanigans, the strenuous, dangerous fun, were an essential part of the carefree ethos that found its way into countless movies and that formed, for better or worse, a good part of the American masculine ideal in the twentieth century.

Sragow is immensely attentive to Fleming’s films, and he traces in detail the fortunes of all the people connected to them, but his book is held together by what can only be called the romance of movie-making in the studio era—the large, free, hard-drinking life that the men (but rarely the women) enjoyed when movies were still made quickly and relatively cheaply, craft was spoken of with respect, and art was barely mentioned. Some of the episodes in Fleming’s life play like scenes from the movies of the time—for instance, his killing a charging rhinoceros in East Africa an instant before it slammed into one of his friends. Or his showing up with a case of Scotch after the alcoholic Spencer Tracy had gone on a bender and had failed to report to the set of Fleming’s 1937 film “Captains Courageous.” According to Tracy, Fleming told him to drink up the entire case—he was through with worrying about him. Abashed, Tracy sobered up and got back to work. Fleming, in effect, administered the reviving smack that figured in so many movies of the period (including his own)—the slap across the kisser that brought people to their senses.

As Sragow points out, Fleming had learned something essential from his capering association with Douglas Fairbanks—how to position a performer within the frame and time his performance in such a way that the camera brought out his temperament and his strength. This would seem an essential skill for any filmmaker, yet a surprising number of directors, obsessed with visual expressiveness, are inattentive to it. Fleming didn’t give detailed instructions to his actors; rather, he talked about the character, and located and enlarged a set of defining traits—a strain of feeling or humor—in whomever he was working with. Then the actors, working intimately for the camera, performed what in effect were idealized versions of themselves, creating a persona that connected with a widespread public fantasy. Fleming, along with such directors as Ford and William Wyler, had the star-making skill that Hollywood has now lost.

It was Fleming, directing the canonical Western “The Virginian” (1929), who shifted Gary Cooper’s minimalist stoicism into a subtly but steadily revealing undercurrent of emotion. In “Captains Courageous,” he helped Tracy focus his threatening manner into a single strong shaft of feeling with the slightly off-center rhythm that became Tracy’s signature. Gable, Cooper, and Tracy all produced variations on the ideal of a courageous, goodhumored American male, and they all borrowed, to some degree, from Fleming. What they found in him was ease and authority. What women found in him, apart from good looks, fun, and romance (he had affairs with many of his actresses, including Clara Bow and Norma Shearer), was a current of self-confidence that they could draw on. “Despite his later reputation as a ‘man’s director,’ ” Sragow says, “Fleming launched or cannily revamped a host of female stars from the 1920s on.” The hot-wired Bow did her sexiest, best work for him, in “Mantrap” (1926), and he got sensationally funny performances out of Jean Harlow in “Red Dust,” “Bombshell” (1933), and “Reckless” (1935). The sacred male companionships of seventy years ago did not have the effect of downgrading women—anything but. Fleming, along with his friend Hawks, created women onscreen who were resourceful, strong-willed, and sexual—the kind of women they wanted to hang out with, partners and equals who gave as good as they got. For a while, they, too, were an American ideal.

The auteurist critics look for recurring patterns, the incandescent joining of visual style and idea. You can’t find such patterns, or even a consistent visual motif, in Fleming’s movies. But you can find a powerful grasp of fable—the emotional progression of a small number of clearly drawn characters through a decisively shaped tale, leading to a series of wrenching encounters and a satisfying climax. In “Captains Courageous,” a brilliant but snotty American rich kid (Freddie Bartholomew) falls off an ocean liner. Tracy’s Portuguese fisherman pulls him out of the sea and throws him in with the crew of his trawler, who knock him into shape. As Sragow points out, what the boy becomes is not a decent jolly fellow but the superior young man he was bred to become. The movie is less sentimental than it at first appears, as was Fleming’s “Treasure Island” (1934), starring Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, which caught the scariness and the strangeness felt by a boy cast among thieves and scoundrels. In these two movies, growing up is a trial—a passage through fear, a test of character.

In retrospect, it seems hard to imagine anyone but Fleming directing “The Wizard of Oz,” the greatest childcentered movie of all. Yet he wasn’t the first choice on this film, either. In October, 1938, the film began shooting at M-G-M under Richard Thorpe, a journeyman who had directed a Tarzan picture in 1936. Thorpe’s footage was flat, and the producer, Mervyn LeRoy, threw it out. (Bizarrely, Cukor also briefly worked on “Oz.” After Thorpe was fired, Cukor dropped in, changed Judy Garland’s makeup and hair style, and fled; the material didn’t interest him.) LeRoy then turned to Fleming, who initially said no, as much of the production, including the screenplay and the sets, was already in place. By this time, however, Fleming had got married—to Lu Rosson, who had been the wife of a close friend—and he was the father of two little girls, whom he adored. He left few memos or letters, but, from what he wrote about “Oz” for an internal M-G-M publication, one gets the impression that he changed his mind because he wanted to make an entertainment that both adults and children could see.

The screenwriters Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf adapted “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” L. Frank Baum’s classic 1900 novel, and they made two momentous changes. In Baum’s book, Oz is a wondrous place, but it’s real—Dorothy, still in her house, is carried there by a raging cyclone. In the movie, Dorothy (Judy Garland), conked on the head during the storm, spins into Oz in a dream, and Oz becomes the blossoming of her unconscious, populated by strikingly familiar faces joined to weird bodies: her intimidating neighbor Miss Gulch shows up as the lime-green Wicked Witch of the West, and the farmhands employed by Dorothy’s stern Auntie Em become her sweetly despondent companions with missing parts—the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) and the Tin Man (Jack Haley). Fleming, working with his favorite screenwriter, John Lee Mahin, added a third farmhand, Zeke, who became the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr). He also reconceived the Kansas scenes, giving them a sharper edge. He changed what had become (unbelievably) yellow ovals in Thorpe’s production back to the immortal yellow bricks, and commissioned the signature song “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” from Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen. Fleming did not direct the Kansas scenes, which were shot in black and white. They were scheduled for the end of the shoot; by that time, he had gone off to work on “Gone with the Wind,” and they were done by the director King Vidor. But the main body of the movie, from the moment that Dorothy opens the door to Oz and the screen turns to brilliant Technicolor—a stunner in 1939, and still exciting today—belongs to Fleming.

Dorothy’s immortality, in the person of Judy Garland, was not easily achieved. Garland, who had been fussed over and bullied by M-G-M since she had signed with the studio, in 1935, was a very self-conscious, uncertain, but blazingly talented sixteen-year-old, playing a girl of about twelve. Her eagerness and tenderness are still touching, as an idealized portrait of a child, but Fleming wanted Dorothy to be tough as well, and the neurotic star gave him fits. In one scene, Garland bops Lahr’s Cowardly Lion on the snout, and Lahr’s blubbering was so funny that Garland cracked up, and then lost control of herself, laughing hysterically through take after take. She stood behind a synthetic tree, saying to herself, “I will not laugh. I will not laugh,” but, when she ruined yet another take, Fleming slapped her across the face and said, “All right, now. Go back to your dressing room.” (The slap was something of a Fleming trademark, onscreen and off.) She came out some time later and got on with the rest of the movie. In the end, her Dorothy, an orphan raised by a Depression-era aunt (her uncle hardly exists), turns out to be surprisingly strong. The way Fleming directs her, Dorothy has a clumpy farm girl’s grit—she’s a literal-minded kid fiercely clinging to her hopes and desires among witches, blue-faced flying monkeys, and squeaking little people. She undergoes a journey of epic proportions, only to arrive back in Kansas, where she finds that her true self was there all along. It’s an ending that Salman Rushdie, in an affectionate short book he wrote about the movie, deplores: Dorothy, he says, no longer needs the inadequate adults in her life; she’s ready to go out on her own. Yet we assume—don’t we?—that Dorothy, though she stays home, has been changed by what she has imagined. In her dreams, she has faced down demons, overcome a loss of faith—she has been tested, just like Fleming’s child heroes in “Treasure Island” and “Captains Courageous.”

Apart from the scenes with the hoodoos and the winged monkeys, Fleming’s direction is earthbound, and that’s the way it should be. The picture’s veteran music-hall stars—Bolger, Haley, and Lahr—need to work on the ground; indeed, they have an intimate, virtuosic relation to the ground. When Lahr lands on his rump, his legs shoot up like a moving swing suddenly emptied of its child. Bolger does flailing, rubber-legged collapses and recoveries—he teases the ground, engaging it and then taking off from it. And Haley, in his rusting metal case, leans perilously, like a telephone pole in a storm. Academics have told me that “Oz” is a mythic structure, a descendant of the Odyssey or the Aeneid, but they look at me blankly when I say that the movie is also a summa of nineteen-thirties show business. Fleming framed his vaudevillians and musical-comedy performers as he had framed Cooper and Tracy—he brought out their individual genius as performers. He might have moved the camera more, or done some point-of-view shooting, but his square, stable, front-and-center view is essentially the right directorial strategy for this performance-dominated fantasy. Many talented people worked on “Oz,” but, as Sragow says, without Fleming’s enthusiasm and discipline “the movie would have collapsed into campy chaos.” Fleming combined the elements into an emotionally overwhelming fable, which was always his supreme gift.

Judged as an example of storytelling (if not for the story it tells), “Gone with the Wind” can’t be much faulted, either. The Civil War begins, crests, and reaches a disastrous conclusion with the destruction of Atlanta, and mournfulness holds sway through the middle of the epic. Yet, if keening over the Old South had been the movie’s sole thematic line, “Gone with the Wind,” as Molly Haskell notes, would have been forgotten, along with many mossy plantation novels and films of the period. Barbarous Rhett and Scarlett push the gracious-plantation nostalgia out of the way. A Southern-born war profiteer, Rhett doesn’t believe in “the cause” of secession, while Scarlett finds the war merely tiresome (the foolish young men run away to get killed, spoiling the parties). For all its fustian, the picture offers an enchanting idiosyncrasy: a saga of a broken nation is told from the point of view of a vain and restless girl. At the beginning, in one of the cinema’s indelible images, Leigh’s sixteen-year-old Scarlett floats rapidly across the grass and through the trees in a virgin-white layered dress. Pauline Kael once compared Leigh to a Dresden-china shepherdess, an image that captures the delicacy of her features and her body but not their mobility. As the small mouth puckers, the lynx-eyed glance, with head slightly turned, appears to see around corners. The quickness of her responses is almost frightening. Wariness and avidity, coquetry and rage, preening and despair—unrelenting egotism plays on her face like sunlight on a fast-moving stream. Amid the terrible events of the war, her Scarlett, the implacable “me,” is obsessed with nothing but her own affairs, and Fleming urged Leigh to give Scarlett’s bitchiness full rein.

Introducing his couple, Fleming gave Gable perhaps the most glamorous entrance that any movie actor has ever enjoyed. As Leigh looks down while ascending a grand staircase, Gable, broad across the shoulders and pulled in (actually girdled) at the waist, stands at the bottom and brazenly gazes up at her. She says to a friend, “He looks as if—as if he knows what I look like without my shimmy.” Gable’s appreciative stare was usually enough to make the women in his movies tumble, but Scarlett resists for a long time, marrying two men, both nonentities, before marrying Rhett, and then she does so mostly for his money. Her resistance to him even after marriage—her choice of power over sex and romantic love—fascinates Haskell.“Inside the tinkling charms of a Southern-belle saga,” she writes, “are the rumblings of a feminist manifesto.” After the war, Scarlett not only takes over America’s most famous fictional turf, the ruined plantation Tara, but scandalizes Atlanta society by becoming a hard-driving lumber entrepreneur—apparently the first female capitalist of the New South. Margaret Mitchell had enjoyed a brief fling as a flapper, and Haskell maintains that she transposed the rebellious spirit of women of the nineteen-twenties into the heart and body of a nineteenth-century social butterfly. This compositional strategy not only retrieved Scarlett from the past but projected her into the future, and Leigh, abetted by Fleming, sustained Scarlett as a perverse, good-bad heroine for our times, a shrew who won’t be tamed.

For seventy years, ever since teen-age girls started reading the novel with a flashlight under the covers, this romantic misalliance has remained a subject of speculation and debate—a pop-culture obsession serving as a template for a nation’s romantic dreams and regrets. In the famous “rape” scene, Gable, with an unwilling Leigh in his arms, surges up a crimson stairway to the bedroom, and after that point the movie, as Haskell says, astonishingly lurches from bodice-ripper to something like tragic drama. Tracking the stages of the struggle between husband and wife, Haskell discovers a conflict in her own responses: she loves Scarlett’s ambition but finds the marital disaster, which is partly produced by it, almost heartbreaking, especially since Rhett isn’t the usual villain of feminist critique—a dominating husband who wants to crush his spirited wife. On the contrary, he loves his wife for exactly what she is. Looking at the movie again, one can glean the truth from certain shadings in Leigh’s performance: her rage at Gable contains more than a hint of panic, a suggestion by the actress that, for Scarlett, sexual happiness might lead to an intolerable loss of will. In all, as a portrait of a couple at war, there’s nothing quite so intense and sustained in American movies, and Fleming sharpened it to the point of violence. No surprise: on a much smaller scale, and largely as comedy, he had done something similar in the rowdy give-and-take between Gable and Harlow in “Red Dust,” a romance in which each partner is initially too proud to admit to loving the other.

On the “Gone with the Wind” set, Fleming teased and cajoled Leigh; at times, they battled as much as Rhett and Scarlett. Walking off after a bad day, he said, “Miss Leigh, you can stick this script up your royal British ass,” a not particularly elegant variant of “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” But their dislike for each other may have kept the movie dramatically alive. In one of the scenes in which Rhett moves in on Scarlett, Fleming instructed her, “Resist but don’t resist too much.” Yet, as Gable reached for her, she slapped him. This particular blow, one imagines, may have been a retaliatory act aimed as much at Fleming as at Rhett. In any case, Fleming was very pleased with the scene (“That’s swell!”), and it stayed in the movie. The ethos of toughness was applied to Gable, too, and with unprecedented results. If Gable began the project afraid that episodes from his past life might make him look effeminate, he nevertheless gave way, under his mentor’s insistent prodding, to “feminine” emotions he had never shown before (nor after), including bafflement when a beautiful woman doesn’t want him, increasing despair, and even, at times, tearful grief.

All through the shoot, Fleming took vitamin shots to keep up his energy, and downers at the end of the day, and he became so jangled and tired, and so enraged by Selznick’s daily memos about virtually every shot, that he retreated, under a doctor’s orders, to his beach house, in Balboa. For eighteen days, the M-G-M staff director Sam Wood took over. But Fleming came back and, muttering mildly anti-Semitic remarks to friends, reshot scenes as Selznick requested, and assisted in the editing. He directed, by common estimate, about sixty per cent of the film. A few of the scenes that Cukor shot (none with Gable and Leigh alone) survived the final cut, and, after he was dismissed, on days off from shooting, Cukor coached both Leigh and de Havilland at his house, so he may be responsible for some of the nuances in those two performances. Yet it was Fleming who saved the project from dissolution and got the man-woman struggle at the heart of it down right, and he deserves a good part of the credit for the movie’s becoming the cultural monument that millions still adore.

The best movie Fleming made after his exhausting labors of 1939 was a new version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1941), with Spencer Tracy in the title roles and, as Hyde’s victim, a startlingly sexual Ingrid Bergman, who was Fleming’s last movie-star girlfriend. He died eight years later, of heart failure, in the arms of his wife, Lu, at the age of fifty-nine, and immediately slipped into obscurity. What should history make of him? He didn’t direct the entirety of either of his two classics, and he wasn’t, by definition, an auteur.

But this absence from the list of the blessed suggests a fault in auteur theory and not in Fleming—a prejudice against the generalists, the non-obsessed, the “chameleons,” as Steven Spielberg called them, who re-created themselves for each project and made good movies in many different styles. Talent, when poured through “a coarser sieve,” can assert itself in rough-and-ready humor, resilience, and all-around hardiness and strength. Cinema’s historians should celebrate, as audiences always have, not only the obsessed geniuses but also the adaptable ruffians who made many of the most entertaining movies ever to come out of Hollywood. ♦