A Film Career Pulled Into Focus

Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master
By Michael Sragow - Pantheon, 645 pages, $40)

I am fortunate to have known a few people who were significant in Fleming's life, including pioneer picturemaker Allan Dwan, who essentially discovered Fleming and brought him into the movie business around 1915. A perfect example of the devil-may-care, anything-goes, haphazard quality of the early movie business is Dwan's description of meeting Fleming, quoted in the book from my 1960s interviews with Dwan.

Dwan explained that one day, while he was shooting in Santa Barbara, his car developed engine trouble. No one on the crew could fix it, but one of the actors told him that he had met a chauffeur in Montecito who knew more about cars than anyone. "So we drove around looking for this fellow," Dwan said, "and at one of these estates there was a tall young boy shooting a .22 -- with a Maxim silencer -- at a target in the garage." That was the guy, the actor said. They pulled the ailing car up behind the man with the rifle. It was Victor Fleming. Without even looking at them, he said: "One of your tappet valves is stuck."

In 1941, Fleming directed his version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," one of five movies he made with Spencer Tracy, who delivered a tour-de-force performance, but it was a fateful project because Fleming worked for the first time with Ingrid Bergman and fell hopelessly in love with her. Both were married when they became lovers, a romantic saga that is especially affecting and beautifully rendered in Mr. Sragow's account, aided by quotations from Fleming's heartbreaking letters. In one note to Bergman, Fleming said he wanted "to tell you boldly like a lover that I love you -- cry across the miles and hours of darkness that I love you -- that you flood across my mind like waves across the sand."

Wow.

The portrait of Fleming in Mr. Sragow's telling is that of an engaging, complex and endearing person. Whatever one may think of his uneven record as a director, the human being behind the films emerges as someone you would like to have known and clearly would have liked a lot, as Mr. Sragow obviously does. What more could you want from a biography than for it to make the dead come alive again?