Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (43 page)

Still, it’s doubtful that any of Fleming’s creative team saw the Catholic reworking of
Captains Courageous
as either a compromise or a sop to studio critics. Christian salvation entered his films again and again, often in his stiffest pictures, such as
The White Sister, Adventure,
and his strangled
Joan of Arc,
but also in livelier entertainment like
Tortilla Flat.
(Even in
Gone With the Wind,
Scarlett O’Hara fears hell.) And Garson Kanin, a prime builder of the posthumous Tracy myth, wrote that the star told him he’d felt drawn to the priesthood while a boy attending a Jesuit prep school, Marquette Academy: “The priests are all such superior men—heroes. You want to be like them—we all did.”

Lighton and Fleming had become powers at Paramount during an era when studio executives considered producers, and directors who could function as producers, the crucial arbiters of a script. They worked that way at MGM, too. Studio legal files connect fourteen writers to
Captains Courageous.
But even an early “temporary incomplete” script reflects Lighton and Fleming’s decision to make Manuel emerge as the principal figure in Harvey’s transformation.

Kipling’s novel offers a fictional commentary on the United States
depicted
in Theodore Roosevelt’s book of speeches and essays on civic philosophy,
The Strenuous Life
(1900). The novelist-critic John Seelye, who writes with command and affection about both novel and film, says that Kipling’s Harvey embodies what Roosevelt saw as “America’s faults: [he is] spoiled, lazy, corrupted by his father’s prosperity and his mother’s indulgence.” Seelye goes on to argue that when the movie depicts Harvey with the cod fleet, Fleming (unlike Kipling) “concentrates on an aspect of American culture that puts a heavy emphasis on immersion in a primitivistic environment as a means of attaining wisdom. Harvey is redeemed not by hard work but by love, a Christian burden lacking the Protestant ethical dimension. It is more in the spirit of Eleanor than Theodore Roosevelt.”

Actually, Fleming puts equal stress on love and hard work. But love
is
newly crucial to the narrative. And as Mahin followed Fleming’s orders to deepen Manuel, providing a narrative trajectory even Kipling knew was lacking in the book, the screenwriter did emphasize Manuel’s Catholicism. The cook, Doc (Sam McDaniel), clarifies the connection between Manuel and Emmanuel, the Christ, by enunciating every syllable of Man-u-el. As Seelye notes, not only does the script characterize him as “a pious Catholic,” but Manuel’s dory has the number 3—“suggesting the Trinity.” In his first scene, as he rescues Harvey, Manuel wears a large glistening crucifix that reappears only twice: when he’s lecturing Harvey about honesty and, later, just before he dies, when the
We’re Here
’s mainmast snaps and its cables rip him apart.

But
pace
Seelye, is
Captains Courageous
an allegory of any kind? Its Christianity, after all, is on the surface. The movie starts at the tail end of Easter vacation. And when Harvey waxes sympathetic about Manuel’s father “drowning out on the ocean, all alone at night,” Manuel delivers a homily based on Luke 5:1–11 but ending on a note of his own: “The Savior, he see my father all tired and wet down in the water. So he light the harbor buoy and he say, ‘Come on up, old Manuel. I so happy you come up here to help us fish.’ ”

The text is spiritual, but the subtext depicts a great chain of fatherhood connecting God’s son, the Savior, with Manuel senior, Manuel junior, and Harvey. Jesus wants good fishermen like Manuel and Manuel senior to fish in heaven. “Oh, I think the Savior, he the best fisherman,” says Manuel. “But my father, he come next!” Mahin, the sole author of this interlude, punctuates this Sermon on the Dory with Manuel hooking a huge cod and Harvey landing his first fish, an enor
mous
halibut. (Bartholomew called these rubber props “electric fish”: battery-powered windshield-wiper motors made the fake cod and halibut flop, just as they would make the wings of the flying monkeys flap in
The Wizard of Oz.
)

Harvey and Manuel employ the hand lines favored by Manuel’s father, not the trawls used by other fishermen—and this activity helps Tracy bring the speech a lifelike spontaneity. (The
New Republic
critic Otis Ferguson took aim at the inflated rhetoric of the sermon, this “backbreaker about heaven,” as he called it; then he observed, with relief, that Tracy “finally comes through all such obstacles like a bull through a picket fence.”) After Manuel’s death, Harvey confirms his manhood by using his earnings to buy twin candlesticks for Manuel’s father, as his friend wanted, and his own candlestick for Manuel. During the memorial service for Gloucester men lost at sea (when we finally learn Manuel’s last name, Fidello), Harvey tosses a wreath into the port’s waters to honor him. His father does, too, and as the current links the wreaths, the young and the older Cheynes unite with the two Fidellos. (In one of the glaring differences between the works, in the novel Harvey calls the service “a sort of song-and-dance act, whacked up for the summer boarders.”)

Manuel’s Catholicism doesn’t exclude the community values and superstitions of the crew of the
We’re Here,
or the dynamism they share with Harvey’s father; Fleming, like Kipling, was a Teddy Roosevelt kind of guy. The entire first act is as much about Harvey’s yearning to become part of a group as it is about his father neglecting him. In the movie, Harvey’s mother is dead, and his father unconsciously gives up the responsibility of raising his son to the staff of the Green Hill School in Connecticut. Logic might ascribe the prep school scenes to the blue blood Mahin, but in fact most were Connelly’s. This Broadway playwright and sometime collaborator of George S. Kaufman had already won a Pulitzer Prize for
The Green Pastures,
a stage retelling of the Bible in African-American dialect (or, as it was called at the time, “Negro patois”), and had written the script for and co-directed the 1936 screen version.

Of all the pictures he contributed to, Connelly considered
Captains Courageous
“the only one with which I was truly happy.” New to MGM, he misread the Lighton-Fleming relationship to the studio, seeing the director as “left pretty much alone” and concluding that was because he was “a pariah” or in “general disfavor, owing to his contempt for the
jackal
practices he frequently encountered in the studio world.” Connelly didn’t realize that this solitude was a hard-won prize. But he did get the big artistic picture: “Instead of the usual concoction of half a dozen channels, siftings, sievings to a final result, three men set down and tried to produce a pretty good picture—and I think we did, as a matter of fact.”

The picture is a study of what later generations would call “tough love.” The first act demonstrates why it’s necessary. In Connelly’s beautifully wrought opening scenes, Harvey hosts three schoolmates at his father’s estate (the exterior of Selznick International’s headquarters) in order to manipulate one of them, Charles (Bill Burrud), into making him a member of “the Buffalos.” Acting like a mini-Machiavelli, he thinks his only way of joining the club is to bribe Charles with a first edition of
Treasure Island,
then threaten him with Mr. Cheyne closing down the car dealership of Charles’s dad. With his precocious self-possession and natty hat and suit (you can’t see that he’s wearing short pants), Bartholomew has the silky wickedness of Michael Corleone. At school, Harvey’s teacher, Mr. Tyler (Donald Briggs), calms Charles and tries to talk sense to Harvey. As punishment, Harvey is put “in Coventry”—a state in which, for forty-eight hours, he receives the silent treatment from classmates before, during, and after classes, and must not speak to anyone himself.

When Harvey persists in talking to his colleagues at the school’s newspaper office (after all, his father paid for the equipment), a weedy lad named Wellman decides that socking him in the jaw won’t break Coventry’s rules. (The references to William Wellman and
Treasure Island
show Fleming’s rare ability to keep his sense of humor even at grandiose MGM. At the time, Wellman was working on two Selznick pictures,
Nothing Sacred
and
A Star Is Born.
)

This is not, as today’s viewers might infer, a Depression-era condemnation of upper-class morals. The Green Hill headmaster, Dr. Finley (Walter Kingsford), tells Harvey’s father that his goal in suspending the boy for the remainder of the year is to turn out “another splendid citizen” like Mr. Cheyne (Melvyn Douglas). What’s remarkable about Bartholomew’s performance is his skill at getting across the disconnect between Harvey’s duplicity and his untapped emotional and intellectual potential. He makes you feel that Mr. Tyler is not coddling or sentimentalizing Harvey when he says that the boy is deeply unhappy and formidably talented. You know Mr. Tyler is getting all this not simply
from
Harvey’s academic performance but from his racing mind’s surfeit of energy.

Mahin said he told Fleming, “Geez, this is a beautiful kid, Vic. It seems to me you’re not getting the closeups of this kid.” And Fleming replied, “Wait till we need ’em. Wait till they have some effect . . . When he starts crying and breaking, that’s when we’ll go in to see him.” But Fleming does give us a tight close-up of Bartholomew near the beginning, coolly reading his effect on Charles, his mark.

Mahin may have felt protective of Bartholomew’s part because he’d poured a little of his own son into it. Graham Mahin remembered his father and Fleming taking him on their “script vacation” to a Wisconsin fishing lodge in the summer of 1936, when he was nine. They didn’t try to shelter him from rugged behavior any more than the crew of the
We’re Here
does Harvey. First they set him up with a guide to learn big-cast fishing while they went drinking. (“They were both pretty into drinking then,” says Mahin.) The lodge contained a slot machine that Fleming quickly figured out was fixed, and he confronted the manager, who apologetically took the machine apart, removed the slug that kept anyone from hitting the jackpot, and returned Fleming’s quarter. The director’s next pull of the lever brought an avalanche of coins, and he stuffed them all in his pockets. That day they went fishing for muskellunge (“muskies”), and Graham caught a twelve-pounder, which quickly became one of Fleming’s practical jokes. “He had it cooked for me and brought it around and everyone knew—it was the local gag—everyone knew that I wasn’t going to be able to eat it.”

In
Captains Courageous,
the headmaster imagines that Harvey will be “rusticating” at home with his dad. But Mr. Cheyne, still insensitive to his son’s needs, takes Harvey on a transatlantic crossing, not realizing that the ocean liner merely gives him another grand setting in which to act like a young lord. Betting a couple of boys already sick of him that he can down a counter full of ice-cream sodas, he soon stumbles on deck and falls into the water far below. The overhead shot of Harvey tumbling into the ocean, his head scraping the top of the motion picture frame, and the connecting shot that pans up from Harvey’s bobbing head, across a span of dark and roiling sea to Manuel’s dory, are magnificently eerie. As the fog enshrouds the boy, he crashes out of “our” world—the moviegoer’s world—into an entirely different culture and also into a past decade or century; Fleming’s Kiplingesque fishing fleet is made up completely of tall-masted schooners. There are
no
steam-powered trawlers, or two-way radios, to be seen. Fleming’s creation of a marine world of American fable may be why many lovers of Kipling carry the memory of the film being totally true to the novel. The inventive and supremely accomplished British director Michael Powell applauded how “faithfully” Fleming caught Kipling and wrote, “The film of a book, particularly of a great book, very seldom equals it, but in this case I think it did.” (He even suggested that Canada rename the historic ship known as
Bluenose II
the
Captains Courageous.
)

When Manuel plucks Harvey from the water, then blows his conch-shell horn to signal the
We’re Here,
there’s magic in the dense, moist air. Fleming downplays the otherworldliness of the captain, Disko Troop (Lionel Barrymore), but he doesn’t eliminate it. Disko’s son, Dan (Mickey Rooney), says Troop “thinks like a cod.” Could there be a more pithy statement of the uncanny? Harvey’s shipboard nemesis Long Jack ( John Carradine) soon calls the boy a “Jonah.” And maybe Harvey
is
a maritime jinx. Disko’s reckless race against the rival
Jennie Cushman
to be the first ship back to Gloucester with a full load of cod causes the mainmast to snap, sending Manuel into the drink. Even before that, Harvey persists in upsetting the ship’s chemistry for a good deal of the running time.

Mahin viewed Manuel as “half Portuguese and half black,” and Seelye puts Manuel, with his deep-tan makeup, in an American literary tradition “in which white children are assisted toward wisdom by people of color who then die or are simply removed from the scene.” Hence, he is “a fisher of men” (to Seelye)
and
“the latter-day saintly Uncle Tom,” even, perhaps, a relative of Huckleberry Finn’s friend Jim. (The au courant term is “magic Negro,” with examples such as Will Smith in
The Legend of Bagger Vance
and Don Cheadle in
The Family Man.
) But what Manuel feels for Harvey is paternal fondness, and what Harvey feels for Manuel is filial love mingled with hero worship. When Manuel tells Harvey that he’ll use some of his earnings to buy a purple suit and canvas-topped shoes, and then step out with a series of ladies, he halts his musings on the opposite sex to ease Harvey’s fears of girls intruding on a boy’s world.

If Fleming throws the focus of Harvey’s coming of age on Manuel’s unaffected surrogate fatherhood, he also accents the fisherman’s immediate goal: getting Harvey to mesh with the crew. The vignettes of men competing for the biggest catch give way to images of them forking fish and pitching them into the ship and down the hold, and chopping and
hooking
bait with assembly-line steadiness and momentum. You see and hear how their sea songs keep their spirits up and set a satisfying rhythm when they’re swinging knives. “They had tons of fish packed in ice, and every so often they’d have to throw it away and get a new batch in,” Bartholomew recalled. The frozen codfish came from Boston, and some live halibut were shipped in special tanks from Alaska. (Rooney said he couldn’t resist sneaking a fish or two into Bartholomew’s bunk during location shooting on Catalina Island.)