Sunday in The Sun: Michael Sragow on Victor Fleming
This Sunday in The Baltimore Sun, read Diane Scharper's review of Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master. The book is by Sun flim critic Michael Sragow, who described it in this Read Street interview; he'll also be the guest on the WYPR's Midday show Monday at noon. Here's an excerpt from the review:
In filmmaking as in any art, God is in the details. If that’s not the point of Michael Sragow’s definitive biography of Victor Fleming (1889-1949), it’s one of them. Another is that Fleming, a great though mostly forgotten film director, was a detail man — par excellence.
Take the scene in which Clark Gable cried in Gone with the Wind, one of Fleming’s hits. Gable rebelled when Fleming directed him to cry. Believing that the movie needed "this cathartic revelation," Fleming tried various means of persuasion, some nice and others — such as getting Gable drunk, cussing him out and insulting him — not so nice. Although there are discrepancies as to what transpired, in the end Fleming won. Gable cried. Gone With the Wind garnered several Academy Awards — including one for Gable as best actor and one for Fleming as best director.
While almost everybody recognizes the name Clark Gable and remembers his masterful performance in GWTW, very few know Fleming, the director responsible for Gable’s triumph and the movie’s fame. ... That’s wrong, according to Sragow, who believes that Fleming was one of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers.
Sragow likes his subject and writes about Fleming in a reader-friendly style, which is difficult to do if one is sharing insights into filmmaking techniques. Discussing Lord Jim (1925), for example, Sragow points out that Fleming "excels at the poetry of disaster." The film becomes "direct and visceral, nothing like the knotty experience of reading the book." To keep the text from becoming too heavy, Sragow includes apt — at times juicy — quotes. Fleming emerges as not just a consummate director but also as a colorful character, who had an eye for the actresses he directed — as they did for him. As one of his daughters said, "If there’s ever a question of whether Daddy and some woman did or they didn’t, assume they did."
Sragow keeps readers hooked by balancing the history of Fleming’s career with anecdotes from his private life. Using a loose narrative structure, the book offers an absorbing look at a filmmaking artist able to "translate thought back into images," instead of merely action as most American directors do. Sragow even tries to get inside Fleming’s head and often succeeds, although Fleming left behind few personal papers.
