There’s a thoughtful article by David Denby about director Victor Fleming (Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, both 1939) in the May 26 issue of The New Yorker. Denby asserts that critics ought to give consideration to Fleming as an auteur, or at least a major director of Hollywood’s Golden Age. It is frustrating that the same half dozen or so directors from that period (Hitchcock, Ford, Welles, Lubitsch, Wilder and Capra all immediately jump to mind, and I’m a fan of each of them) are mentioned as The Greats with little thought to the other workhorses of the day who have equal (or, dare I suggest, even meatier) filmographies. My pet director is Mitchell Liesen, whose films are perhaps not all as well known today, but for sure have style and thematic similarities. Certainly, Fleming having directed two undisputed masterpieces from the studio era deserves serious discussion. For that matter, then, how about Michael Curtiz?
The article appears in conjunction with two recent books, Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master by Michael Sragow and Frankly, My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited by (the great) Molly Haskell, which I am particularly interested in. I’ve always enjoyed Haskell’s commentary and GWTW was one of my first classic film crushes. In eighth grade, everyone had to give a two minute speech on any subject as part of a public speaking exercise. Now understand, my classmates hadn’t heard me speak five words together since nursery, so they were necessarily gobsmacked by my twelve and a half minute oral presentation on a movie well over fifty years old. Such is the effect of GWTW on a certain type of teenage girl. She is also probably the type of girl to read Jane Eyre with a passion then sit in the cafeteria and imagine she is a student at Jane’s miserable Lowood institution. But then I was a weird kid and I went to an even weirder elementary school.
Tags: Film Criticism, Michael Curtiz, Mitchell Leisen, Victor Fleming
