The Real Rhett Butler.(movie director Victor Fleming)(Biography)

Howard Hughes, whose acumen outside certain areas of expertise (aeronautics and the acquisition of beautiful actresses) was rarely sound, once said something intelligent about the relative merits of two movie directors. The remark was delivered in early 1939, when George Cukor had been shooting "Gone with the Wind" for about three weeks. An adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's thousand-page blockbuster novel, from 1936, about the Old South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, the movie was the largest and most expensive production in Hollywood up to that time, with a huge cast, massive sets (the city of Atlanta was burned down and then rebuilt), and hundreds of unshaven and bandaged extras trudging across the landscape. As half of Hollywood maliciously cheered, the production slipped into disaster. The script could be kindly described as a mess, and the star--Clark Gable--was in turmoil. The initial rushes displeased David O. Selznick, the legendary, manic producer who dominated every aspect of the film, and he suddenly fired Cukor, who, he later said, couldn't have handled the more spectacular elements of the movie. In Cukor's place, Selznick hired Victor Fleming, who was then directing the other big picture in town, "The Wizard of Oz." Fleming was a vigorous and resourceful man, but few people considered him an artist. The change pleased Gable but distressed the two female leads--the young stage and film actress Vivien Leigh, just arrived from England and not yet a star, and Olivia de Havilland, who was then Howard Hughes's girlfriend. Both women depended on Cukor, who was known as a "woman's director," and de Havilland brought her troubles to Hughes, who advised: "Don't worry, everything is going to be all right--with George and Victor, it's the same talent, only Victor's is strained through a coarser sieve."

Hughes was almost correct. Fleming's talent was not "the same" as Cukor's, yet he was definitely the right man for "Gone with the Wind," and he did inventive and powerful work on "Oz." But in the seventy years since the release of those films, Fleming, whose talent flowed not smoothly or subtly, but roughly, in surges of energy and feeling, has been largely forgotten. The auteur-theory critics who, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, went wild over Cukor, Hitchcock, Preminger, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Capra, and many other directors of the late silent and early sound periods, ignored Fleming, though he had made a number of entertaining movies in the nineteen-twenties and thirties and his two super-productions of 1939 are very likely the most widely seen movies in American film history--not just good pictures but films that have entered the unconscious of generations of moviegoers. "Gone with the Wind," with its happy plantation slaves--emblems of Noble Toil--posed against reddening skies, has its enraging and embarrassing moments; the racist kitsch is, regrettably, part of the nation's collective past. What remains remarkably modern in the film is the central combat of wills between Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara and Gable's Rhett Butler, each seeking the upper hand in and out of bed. Margaret Mitchell set up the conflict, but it was Fleming who got the two actors to embody it. As for "The Wizard of Oz," the movie's version of the magical land of Oz, in its combined freedom and unease, happiness and fear, has become a universally shared vision of the imagination itself. Since Fleming was the element common to both movies, it's time for his contribution to be lifted out of the shadows.

The seventieth anniversary of these two classics has seen deluxe new (and expensive) versions on DVD, and the appearance of two good books: "Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master" (Pantheon; $40), a full-scale biography that shines up the director's reputation, by Michael Sragow, the film critic of the Baltimore Sun, who has written for this magazine; and "Frankly, My Dear: 'Gone with the Wind' Revisited" (Yale; $24), by Molly Haskell, whose 1973 study "From Reverence to Rape" remains a standard text on women in movies. Haskell has lived in Manhattan for more than forty years, but she grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and as a girl she became obsessed with Margaret Mitchell's rebellious Southern belle, Scarlett, as personified in the movie by Leigh--a selfish, greedy, flirtatious yet sex-hating, intractable green-eyed demon who is every inch and flounce a heroine.

When summoned by Selznick, Fleming hadn't ...