Victor Fleming strides through Michael Sragow's eponymous biography with the panache of Rhett Butler -- and no wonder, since the director helped forge Clark Gable's onscreen persona with "Red Dust" and "Test Pilot" years before they reunited for "Gone With the Wind."
Appreciatively chronicling Fleming's work on these and other classic films, including "The Virginian," "Treasure Island," "Captains Courageous" and "The Wizard of Oz," Sragow -- who is a film critic at the Baltimore Sun -- portrays his subject as a man's man who enjoyed fishing, hunting, flying airplanes, riding motorcycles, driving fast cars and making love to beautiful actresses.
In Sragow's view, Fleming's extracurricular activities enhanced his stature on the set: "Actors felt energized by the sight of this tall, powerfully built figure reflexively brushing back his mane and training a sharpshooter's vision on their performances. . . . Craftsmen felt secure serving a director who could correct errors on the run, from lax ad libs to skewed camera angles."
Sragow is eager to rescue Fleming from his posthumous reputation as a studio hack. This image grew from the troubled production histories of his two most famous movies.
Fleming assumed command of both "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind" after shooting had begun. In the 1970s, Aljean Harmetz's "The Making of 'The Wizard of Oz' " and Roland Flamini's "Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands" implicitly credited producers Mervyn LeRoy and David Selznick, respectively, as the primary guiding forces of those films.
Sragow begs to differ. Indeed, by the time we get to "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind," which were shot in 1938 and 1939, he has amply made his case that the director was much more than a competent craftsman.
Fleming, born in Southern California in 1889 and raised in modest comfort in a family of citrus ranchers, quit school at 14 and soon was working as a machinist for an automobile dealer. His mechanical abilities got him into the fledgling movie business.
By 1917, he was a highly regarded cinematographer for Douglas Fairbanks, whose emphasis on physical action reinforced Fleming's understanding that motion pictures needed to move. Fairbanks gave Fleming his first chance to direct in 1919.
