Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (26 page)

Walter Huston’s Trampas, a black-clad horse thief with a mustache made for twirling, soon tries to horn in on a three-way flirtation among Steve, the Virginian, and a senorita at a saloon. The Virginian suggests that Trampas back away. Trampas responds, dead seriously, “When I want to know anything from you I’ll tell you, you long-legged son of a . . .” The Virginian sallies back, with lethal humor, “If you want to call me that . . . smile!”

Trampas isn’t ready for a showdown, but the herding, the birdcall,
and
the dare reverberate through the film (and through film history). A train whistle signals the near arrival of Molly the schoolteacher, but first cows must be cleared from the tracks. Steve helps her off her car and into town, but when the railroad steam spooks a little girl’s cow into a trot, Molly panics; and before Steve can tell her there’s nothing to fear from the mild animal, the Virginian lifts Molly out of the street and onto his horse. He exploits his own picturesque heroism, but Molly sees through his deception in a minute. She also knows that he’s sounded a mating call.

The Virginian represents the aggressive drive of the West and Molly the force of Eastern civilization. The Virginian has a childish side. He cajoles Steve into helping him mix up the babies waiting to be christened at the community’s meet and greet for Molly, then pins the misdeed on Steve. But he does it to get closer to Molly; we hear her chime in to his laughter, off camera, as she begins to succumb to his silliness. Howard Estabrook’s screenplay (from an adaptation credited to Grover Jones and Keene Thompson) opens up the stage play with dialogue by Edward Paramore and a snatch or two by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, writing his first lines to be spoken on-screen after a few years writing titles. Mankiewicz, who thought Fleming “a very,
very
attractive man,” told his son Tom, “It’s amazing: you ask people as a trivia question ‘Who directed
Gone With the Wind
?’ and nobody knows; you give them a second clue—it’s the same guy who directed
The Wizard of Oz—
and they say Mervyn LeRoy. Victor Fleming was either a wonderful director or the luckiest son of a bitch in the world.” And Fleming was at an early summit of luck
and
talent in
The Virginian.

In the scene Mankiewicz took credit for, Molly compels the Virginian to discuss
Romeo and Juliet.
Comically and admirably he says he feels that Romeo should have stridden through the front door and settled things with Juliet’s father, man-to-man. That’s how the Virginian operates. As a ranch foreman, he has become a man of authority, unlike his friend Steve, who simply wants to keep rambling unattached through life, even if it requires thieving off other men’s stock. (Trampas is like Steve’s evil twin: he shows up at Molly’s party “in the cool of the evenin’, when the food and women and liquor is ready.”)

Fleming proves as deft with sounds as with images. In a prime piece of foreshadowing, the Virginian catches his friend putting a brand on a ranch’s stray calf, and Steve rides off singing, “Bury me not on a lone prairie.” (Even “a lone prairie” instead of “
the
lone prairie”
feels
right and rough and real.) Steve will be buried, but not alone, for he joins Trampas in a large-scale rustling job and the Virginian tracks the gang down. What follows is one of the most wrenching cowboy lynchings ever filmed, because the victims
are
guilty and according to the hero’s code deserve this punishment. Steve and two other rustlers
will
face the rope; the only question is whether the Virginian’s gang will catch up with Trampas and a couple of other culprits in time to string them all up simultaneously. An unobtrusive pan slowly isolates the Virginian from the lynching party and those about to be hanged. Deliberately ignoring his old friend, Steve gives away his goods and hands his gun to Eugene Pallette’s Honey to deliver to the Virginian, first tucking a note inside the holster: “I couldn’t have spoke to you without playing the baby.” Two whistling quails startle Steve and the Virginian into looking at each other. Then Steve does his quail whistle—and the rope snaps.

It was Steve who made the clean break, by joining up with Tram-pas. Molly doesn’t see things that way until the town matriarch compels her to compare the Virginian’s posse with her own pioneer forebears, and Molly realizes that what
should
concern her is how killing Steve affected the Virginian. But the coil of vengeance doesn’t stop. While escaping the posse and hiding high on a cliff, Trampas had already nearly murdered Molly’s man by shooting him in the back. The day that our hero and Molly ride into Medicine Bow to get married, Trampas declares, “This town isn’t big enough for the both of us,” and says he’ll kill the Virginian if he doesn’t leave by sundown. As the critic Robert Warshow wrote,

What is needed now to set accounts straight is . . . the death of the villain Trampas, the leader of the cattle thieves, who had escaped the posse and abandoned the Virginian’s friend to his fate. Again the woman intervenes: why must there be
more
killing? If the hero really loved her, he would leave town, refusing Trampas’ challenge. But the Virginian does once more what he “has to do,” and in avenging his friend’s death wipes out the stain on his own honor.

Warshow goes on to say that no stain can be “truly wiped out” and that the movie “is still a tragedy” because the hero confronts “the ultimate limit of his moral ideas.” But the Virginian fills out that limit
with
grace and honors his code without apology or explanation. In a gesture full of significance, he kills Trampas with Steve’s gun. In the movie’s final image, the hero and Molly clasp each other as she says, simply, “I love you.”

“I was extremely impressed with Fleming as a director,” wrote David Lewis. This producer whose credits would range from
Dark Victory
(1939) to
Raintree County
(1957) wrote in his book,
The Creative Producer,
“He was far and away the best I had any contact with. I later visited his set a couple of times. He seemed inarticulate, but knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it. He was a powerful, handsome, overwhelming man. He had a great rapport with Gary Cooper and Richard Arlen. He later was known as a man’s director, but he did very well with the women in the cast, too. He was the first really fine, creative director I saw at work.” Fleming knew how to help the invaluable Eugene Pallette—with his growly voice and doughy yet doughty presence—look at home in the rugged landscape and get the homey wit out of his declaration to buy a quart of liquor “and get off in a corner and kind of slowly strangle it to death.” Mary Brian, spirited and charming underneath too-heavy makeup, said Fleming “was serious when he needed to be, but he had a funny sense of humor. I think the good directors at that time knew that our hours were so long and tedious, that they must give us time to play a little bit.”

Walter Huston faced as much pressure as his younger co-stars. The Broadway icon had starred in only one stilted sound feature (
Gentlemen of the Press
) and a handful of shorts when he landed in the Sonora locations of
The Virginian.
“The air was chilly when I was introduced to Gary Cooper and Dick Arlen,” he recalled. “They thought I was another bohunk who had come out to show the hicks how it was done.” Fleming asked Huston if he could ride a horse. “Now I was in a pretty pickle. I had never ridden even a mule in my life. If I said I couldn’t they would laugh at me, and if I said I could and fell off they would laugh much harder.” So to “a sprinkling of slightly derisive laughter” he said he hadn’t ridden since he was a kid.

“Well,” Fleming said, “you’ve got some riding to do in this picture. Maybe you’d better get your hand in.” Huston had an hour to learn his lines for his first scene and to master riding a horse:

After three or four tries, I managed to get into the saddle, but my perch there was precarious to say the least. Fortunately the
horse
was a gentle beast . . . Striking a nonchalant pose, I said, “Get up, Joe,” and walked him across the field, headed for an oak tree. I dismounted there, tied the reins to the tree and sat down to study my lines. I was reading when I heard an eerie sound I had never heard before. It emanated from a rattlesnake. I leapt away, snatched up a rock and bashed the head in.

In his first scene as Trampas, Huston and his horse had to climb to the crest of a hill to give some orders to his gang:

As they scampered off, I was to break into song, roll a cigarette, and make an exit by riding off downhill. I managed to get to the top of the hill all right, but in my anxiety to give my movement haste, I made the mistake of spurring my mount. He was standing on a rocky ledge and, in rearing, slipped on the hard surface and fell. I stepped off him in time and did not get hurt. During the making of the scene I was not the slightest bit nervous, but after Fleming yelled “Cut!” I realized what I had been through and had difficulty concealing my nervousness. Seeing the rushes, I was surprised to see that during the entire scene I had continued to smoke a cigarette . . . I was Trampas just as sure as if I had been born of his fictional mother. I acted as he would under the circumstances. It is a strange truth—an actor will do things that his own character would never do.

His efficient dismount of the falling horse “gained me admittance to the esoteric circle of stunt men.”

Lighton and Fleming “had an almost wordless communication; they were decidedly on the same wavelength,” wrote Lewis. Arlen once said that Lighton almost fired Cooper because he was somnolent and disengaged. If so, Lighton never referred to it. In a Yuletide letter to his family back in Arkansas, he labeled a spate of films he’d done in his new position, including
The Virginian,
as “some fairly good pictures, in spite of the newness of it all. The satisfaction of that is a fair recompense for the amount of work. They’re not nearly good enough—but they’re at least stepping-stones . . . That’s enough to ask, I expect—that the work comes out all right.”

Another time Arlen said that Velez distracted Cooper when she showed up on location for a few days, especially since she had been one
of
Fleming’s lovers, too. But these anecdotes sound like carryovers of the Virginian and Steve’s joshing from the film, or Arlen, Cooper, and Buddy Rogers’s carryings-on in the months right after
Wings,
when this trio was so close others dubbed them the Three Musketeers. Cooper’s performance has a brilliantly calculated stutter to it. Some of the pauses were even written into the script, and his stalwart sort of stammer meshes beautifully with Arlen’s effusiveness, just as it clangs eloquently against the verbal steel of Huston’s Trampas.

“The most underrated actor I’ve ever worked with was Gary Cooper,” Henry Hathaway said. He remembered Cooper forgetting his words only once on
The Virginian.
The actor then looked up from under his hat “to see if Fleming was mad at him, and both the look and the hesitancy in his speech came from that one scene.” Estabrook agreed that this cautiousness became part of his interpretation of the role: “Cooper was so hesitant, so diffident about his approach to the characterization that it became marked on the screen. He was so perfect, he didn’t even realize what he was doing, but he had infinite courage and the ability to carry himself through.” Estabrook thought it was ideal that “in this case, his acting was tinged with alarm and apprehension.”

Cooper gave pride of place to
The Virginian,
calling it “a sort of exclamation point in my career,” in an eight-part as-told-to series that ran in the
Saturday Evening Post
in February and March 1956. “Well, It Was This Way: Gary Cooper Tells His Story” had a summing-up feeling to it, as if Cooper knew the many ailments and operations he’d had were catching up to him. (He’d die five years later, of cancer.) He self-mockingly blamed
The Virginian
for pinning him with his ultra-laconic “yup” and “nope” image. But he also reported it as his moviemaking great adventure:

It was the first major talkie ever filmed outdoors and well do I remember our awe at the size of our production setup. Before sound came in we only had to wind up the camera and we were in business. Now, moving to our location near Sonora in the High Sierras, we were accompanied by a caravan of trucks, cranes, tractors and enough mobile generators to light up a small town. We had telephone linemen, road builders and track layers. We had radio engineers, sound directors, dialogue directors, voice coaches and sound-effects men. And off to one
side,
feeling obsolete, we had some old-fashioned actors and an old-fashioned movie director . . .

The camera was now enclosed within a four-wheeled, soundproofed structure built like a brick smokehouse, so its whirring gears wouldn’t disturb the microphone. The microphone itself, a fearsome bucket full of charcoal granules, was suspended from a small crane mounted on a dolly, the whole assembly looking like a steam shovel.

To see the camera and microphone in action, imagine a small ridge down which plank tracks have been laid. Over the ridge I come, driving ahead of me a herd of bawling cows, crowding them as close to the microphone as I can get. As I pass the brick smokehouse and the steam shovel, their drivers start down the track, keeping pace with me. The cows, seeing these weird contraptions, grow a mite nervous and pick up speed. Pretty soon we are really high-tailing it, the smokehouse and the steam shovel careering along beside us. This, of course, only encourages the cows. The smokehouse and the steam shovel, already out of control, need no encouragement. By the time they sail off the end of the track in a cloud of dust, I’ve got a junior-grade stampede on my hands. The equipment stops, relatively intact, but some of my cows never come back.

Aside from difficulties with our “portable” equipment, we had a battle of another kind. Fleming clung to the old-fashioned notion that he was making a picture with voices. The sound director . . . supported by his army of electronic engineers, was convinced he was making a radio program with faces. There was little fraternizing, and nothing much in the way of a co-operative exchange of ideas. What is more, on their impressive sound stages in Hollywood, surrounded by all their abracadabra and awe-inspiring gear, the sound moguls had been getting by with it. Up here on his own stamping ground, Fleming grew less and less impressed. Trouble brewed.