Victor Fleming
An American Movie Master
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This definitive biography chronicles the life and work of the legendary director of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.
Victor Fleming was the most sought-after director in Hollywood’s golden age, renowned for his work across an astounding range of genres—from gritty westerns to screwball comedies, romances, boddy pictures, and family entertainment. Yet this chameleon-like versatility has resulted in his relative obscurity today—despite his having directed two of the most iconic movies of all time.
Fleming is best remembered for Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, but he directed more than forty films, including classics like Red Dust, Test Pilot, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Captains Courageous. Fleming created enduring screen personas for Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Gary Cooper, as well as for Ingrid Bergman, Clara Bow, and Norma Shearer—who were among his many lovers.
In this definitive biography, Michael Sragow restores the director to the pantheon of great American filmmakers, correcting a major oversight in Hollywood history. It is the dramatic story of a man at the center of the most exciting period in American filmmaking.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fleming, who directed most of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, and all of The Virginian and Bombshell, was not just a consummate studio craftsman but a distinctive artist, contends this rapt biography. Film critic Sragow has a tough case to make. Fleming's varied oeuvre suggests no signature onscreen style; instead, Sragow celebrates his feel for action and fantasy, and his intuitive way of directing actors. He also credits Fleming with inventing the Hollywood masculinity embodied by screen idols like Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. Fleming, a big-game hunter and a polished bon vivant known for bedding his female stars, was both "a man's man and a ladies' man," Sragow writes, who made male characters correspondingly tough but chivalrous (though offscreen Fleming wasn't above twisting Lana Turner's arm or slapping Ingrid Bergman to draw on-camera tears). Sragow's intricate, engrossing accounts of the making of Fleming's films convey his on-set charisma (and form a fine montage of Hollywood's evolution), but the real auteur is the studio system itself and its well-honed myth-making machinery (Fleming's last movie, Joan of Arc, an independent production, was a fiasco). Sragow's Fleming is a man who personified Old Hollywood, but didn't transcend it. Photos.
