Free Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) by Michael Sragow Page A

the corrupted lord and his corrupting lady, and honed down the verse to compact inter-titles. But Tree insisted on delivering the play complete. So Emerson employed two cameras—a dummy that stayed trained on the star while he orated, and a real one that caught only the action that Loos extracted from the full text. The weightier challenges for the moviemakers included a night victory celebration for Macbeth’s army shot with banks of lights. Tree himself found “this nocturnal scene deeply impressive.” On at least one occasion, though, the “curse of the Scottish tragedy” that has doomed many a theatrical production threatened this screen version, too. Emerson followed Elizabethan tradition to the extent of casting the three witches with padded men; then, in an ambitious stroke of special effects, he had their fingers wired so that when they intoned, “Double, double, toil and trouble,” a lightning bolt would blast from each of their hands. On shooting day, one bolt set a witch aflame. According to Loos’s biographer, Gary Carey, the burning witch howled, “My tits! My tits are on fire!”
    The film did a nosedive at the box office. The very name of Shakespeare, wrote a
New York Times
reporter, “bears the taint of highbrow-ism, and because one has been inveigled into the theater at some time to sit through a badly staged and acted performance of one or more of the cycle of dramas, the mere mention of a movie ‘Macbeth’ conjures up memories of tedious hours.” Whether Fleming shot
Macbeth
(the film and most of the credits are lost), he knew its sorry history, and the lesson he gleaned couldn’t have been clearer: “Motion pictures should meet the requirement of that qualifying adjective”—they should always be
motion
pictures.
    In a trumped-up quotation that is often used and never footnoted, Fairbanks declared, “D.W. didn’t like my athletic tendencies. Or my spontaneous habit of jumping a fence or scaling a church at unexpected moments which were not in the script. Griffith told me to go to Keystone comedies.” The source is an identical third-person passage from a 1929
Photoplay
history of Hollywood: “Griffith was not pleased with the new star’s athletic tendencies. Fairbanks seemed to have a notion that in a motion picture one had to keep eternally in motion and he fre quently jumped the fence or climbed a church at unexpected moments not prescribed in the script. Griffith advised him to go into Keystone comedies.” All of this may derive from Fairbanks’s disastrous attempt to make a Keystone-style farce in 1916’s
Mystery of the Leaping Fish.
In reality, Griffith never tried to fob off Fairbanks on Mack Sennett. A month before the opening of
The Lamb,
Griffith said that his new star “has already proven himself of such great worth in pictures that we have engaged him for an exclusive three years’ contract.”
After
the opening of
The Lamb,
it’s possible—as Allan Dwan thought—that Griffith, a ladies’ man himself, grew to envy Fairbanks’s masculine charisma. That’s why Dwan figured Griffith assigned his great new star to Dwan’s unit. At any rate, that master of Victorian melodrama, Griffith, was not the man to nurture a twentieth-century eternal adolescent like Fairbanks.
    Better suited to harnessing his roiling energy were rugged craftsmen like Dwan and Fleming, who’d joked and improvised their way with eclectic casts through countless unforgiving locations and didn’t let Broadway stardom stymie or intimidate them. Their challenge was formidable: modulating Fairbanks’s constant motion, loosening his emphatic poses, and keeping the expressions he developed for live theater—always smiling, and always with the high beams—from scaring away the up-close movie audience. Fairbanks Jr. somewhat snobbishly noted:
The fact of the matter is that none of my father’s directors had really very much autonomy in any department. They were in effect directors of good but not