Victor Fleming

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Victor Lonzo Fleming (born February 23, 1889 in Pasadena , California , † January 6, 1949 in Cottonwood , Arizona ) was an American film director and cameraman . In 1939 he made two of the most popular Hollywood classic films, The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind . He was at the Oscars 1940 in the category Best Director for Gone with the Wind excellent.

Life

The Californian Victor Lonzo Fleming - named after Victoria Sullivan, a cousin of his father - was the son of the German-born Elizabeth Evaleen (born Hartman) and her husband William Alonzo "Lon" Fleming. At first Fleming worked as a car mechanic before taking on his first smaller jobs in the film industry in 1910. Since 1911 he was involved as a cameraman in many of Allan Dwan's productions and rose to the position of chief cameraman of the Triangle Film Corporation until 1915 . During the time he was also involved in films by D. W. Griffith . After the USA entered World War I, he worked as a cameraman for the United States Army Signal Corps. He took part in the peace negotiations in Paris as the personal cameraman of US President Woodrow Wilson .

Victor Fleming (right) while filming Red Hot Romance (1922)

In 1920 he became co-director for several Douglas Fairbanks films , and in 1921 he made his first film as chief director. Since 1925 he worked for Paramount , where he not only had a stormy affair with the studio's biggest female star, Clara Bow , but also directed mantrap and hula . In 1927 the studio entrusted him with directing the American debut of Emil Jannings , the latest import from Germany based on Ernst Lubitsch and Pola Negri . The way of all flesh was typical for Jannings, who plays an honorable family father who is plunged into despair and ruin by his own greed and moral weakness. Jannings won the first Oscar for Best Actor for his performances in The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command from the following year . Shortly thereafter, Fleming took over the direction of the film adaptation of the then most successful Broadway play Abie's Irish Rose , for whose film rights Paramount had paid $ 500,000.

Fleming succeeded in making the switch to talkies at the end of the 1920s and he shot Common Clay with Constance Bennett in 1930 and went to MGM in 1932 , where his first film Jungle by Storm with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable was a great success. Fleming later made a few more films with the two stars. He led Harlow through two of her best films: Sex Bomb of 1933 and Public Opinion of 1935. In 1933 he directed The White Sister with Gable and Helen Hayes .

In the mid-1930s, Fleming was entrusted with some prestigious productions, such as Manuel based on Rudyard Kipling's novel Captains Courageous , for which Spencer Tracy received his first Oscar for Best Actor in 1937, and The Test Pilot from the following year, which describes the dramatic love story between Clark Gable, Myrna Loy and Spencer Tracy depicted against the backdrop of spectacular flight scenes. Shortly thereafter, the studio put him in charge of The Wizard of Oz . It became the studio's most expensive film since Ben Hur and made Judy Garland a star. The filming was extremely long and exhausting, so that Fleming wanted to retire for a few months afterwards. Studio boss Louis B. Mayer personally ordered that he to David O. Selznick  - was loaned to the Director in the production of - Mayers son Gone with the Wind by George Cukor to take over. Cukor and Clark Gable did not get along well as Cukor reportedly seemed to care too much about Vivien Leigh . Fleming came at a critical time when costs were escalating and the script simply wasn't going to be ready. However, he managed to almost complete the film, but ended up having a nervous breakdown. Sam Wood was responsible for the rest of the scenes . Nevertheless, Victor Fleming received the Oscar for best director .

The films that Fleming made afterwards were of varying quality. Doctor and Demon was not liked by the critics and was remembered because the sex symbol Lana Turner played the virgin fiancée and Ingrid Bergman, who had previously played virtuous roles, played a prostitute. Tortilla Flat from the following year was the film adaptation of the novel of the same name by John Steinbeck and presented John Garfield and Hedy Lamarr in the leading roles. The filming of Battle in the Clouds in 1943 was overshadowed by numerous problems. Van Johnson nearly died in a car accident, the two stars Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne didn't get along at all, and production costs escalated. In the end, the film turned out to be a hit at the box office. In 1945 Fleming took over the direction of Man Without a Heart , the comeback of Clark Gable after returning from the army. He was partnered with Greer Garson, the studio's biggest female star, and promoted with the slogan "Gable's back and Garson got him". In the end, the story of a war veteran and an old young librarian was neither an artistic nor the hoped-for financial success. Fleming left the studio shortly afterwards and made only one film. Joan of Arc , which was produced for over $ 3 million in Technicolor with Ingrid Bergman as the title character, turned out to be the biggest failure of Fleming's career in the end.

Victor Fleming's tombstone in Hollywood Forever Cemetery

A short time later, Victor Fleming died of a heart attack at the age of 59. He was married to Louise Irana Niedermeyer for the second time in 1933 and they had two children.

Style and reception

In contrast to his image as a macho with numerous affairs, he was able to get the best performance of their careers out of some actresses. In her memoirs, Louise Brooks talks very kindly about Fleming and his abilities as a “woman director”. Nevertheless, it is difficult to recognize a consistent style in his work, his own signature. It is more likely that Fleming was employed at MGM as a "troubleshooter", that is, as a director for complicated projects that needed an organizer rather than an artistic director. In this he can be compared with WS van Dyke and Michael Curtiz . At MGM during the 1930s he was a “reliable craftsman of impersonal but handsome films”, writes the All Movie Guide , for example .

On the American Film Institute's 1997 and 2007 lists of the best American films, Fleming is the only director with two films in the top ten: Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz . Nevertheless, according to Fritz Göttler in the SZ in 2018 , Fleming's name is hardly known today. F. Scott Fitzgerald , who worked on Gone With the Wind , was impressed by Fleming and noted, “It was a subtle, versatile device - it could do action in the morning with two thousand extras and in the afternoon the colors of the buttons on Clark Gable's coat and the shadows on Vivien Leigh's neck determined. "

Filmography

Films in the top 250 of the IMDb
space Movie
165 Blown by the wind

literature

  • Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 3: F - H. Barry Fitzgerald - Ernst Hofbauer. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 17 ff.
  • Michael Sragow: Victor Fleming: an American movie master , New York: Pantheon Books, 2008, ISBN 978-0-375-40748-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Sragow: Victor Fleming. To American Movie Master. The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington KY et al. 2013, ISBN 978-0-8131-4441-2 , p. 15 .
  2. ↑ Article on Victor Fleming Süddeutsche Zeitung. Retrieved October 7, 2018.
  3. ^ Victor Fleming at Allmovie
  4. ↑ Article on Victor Fleming Süddeutsche Zeitung. Retrieved October 7, 2018.
  5. ↑ The Top 250 of the IMDb (as of April 26, 2020)
personal data
SURNAME Fleming, Victor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fleming, Victor Lonzo (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film director
DATE OF BIRTH February 23, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Pasadena , California, United States
DATE OF DEATH January 6, 1949
Place of death Cottonwood , Arizona, United States