Victor Fleming | Test Pilot / 1938

some immodest questions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Howard Hawks, Vincent Lawrence, John Lee Mahin, and Waldemar Young (screenplay, based on the book by Frank Wead), Victor Fleming (director) Test Pilot / 1938

 

Just prior to what was perhaps the most fabulous year in film director Victor Fleming’s life, 1939, when he finished The Wizard of Oz and replaced George Cukor in directing Gone with the Wind, the renowned “man’s director” had another hit with his tale about the wildly adventurous test pilot Jim Lane (Clark Gable again), performing with his partner mechanical specialist Gunner Morris (Spencer Tracy) and the film’s love interest whom he quickly turns into his wife, Ann Barton (Myrna Loy).

       Loy, with good reason, since this film represents one of her most witty and enthusiastic acting stints of her long career, described it as her favorite movie, as Tracy similarly spoke of it was one of his most memorable, any qualifications probably having to do with the fact that he evidently had a testy relationship throughout the shooting with his co-star Gable. I’ll come back to that. In short, a good time seemed to be had by all, director, audience, and stars.

      Today, reviewers of the DVD and those simply reassessing older films seem not to have as much enthusiasm for the work. Critic Matt Hinrichs, for example, describes it:

 

“As much as Test Pilot appears to be about derring-do in the air, mostly it stays grounded in a soapy story that focuses purely on the three main characters. Despite being too long and dialogue-heavy, it soars purely on the film's casual vibe and the palpable chemistry of the lead actors (especially Gable and Loy, scintillating in their sixth and final screen teaming). Gable's infectious enthusiasm betrays the fact that he's playing a charming scamp for the umpteenth time, while Tracy does a valiant job of giving his rather flat character real meaning and motivation. Perhaps most surprising is Myrna Loy's radiant, vivacious portrayal—she's never been this loose and uninhibited onscreen, which might explain why the actress chose this over other, better-known projects as her favorite film.”

 

And Dennis Schwartz, writing in Ozus’ World Movie Reviews, has similar reservations, awarding the film only a C+ for good effort:

 

“It’s hard to believe this so-so action pic was nominated for three Oscars, including for Best Picture, original story and editing, and that this was Myrna Loy’s favorite movie role (like what was she smoking!). Victor Fleming (Gone With The Wind / Captain Courageous / Red Dust) directs the great name cast of Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Myrna Loy with noisy ease, but the weak story by former Naval Captain Frank ‘Spig’ Wead that’s written by Vincent Lawrence, Waldemar Young and Howard Hawks never kicks in with interesting dramatic excitement or a romance story that matters. It all feels mechanical like the experimental flying machines. Nevertheless, it was a big commercial success, giving the public the kind of dashing romance, easy-going comedy, first-rate aerial sequences and daredevil heroics it found uplifting. The film tries to make it alone on star power, and almost does.”

 

     Even the more enthusiastic reviews of the day spoke mostly of it as an “romantic thriller” most notable for its adventurous aviation scenes.

     Meanwhile, my first question, surely an odd one given these typical commentaries, was how did this wonderful film squeak by the Hays board? Had Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil (1926) and William A. Wellman’s brilliantly coded “aviation thriller” Wings (1927) so convinced his US audience that the kind of male camaraderie practiced by their central characters was such normal behavior in the military that this post-military buddies’ relationship was nothing out of the ordinary? Or was I reading in, as I sometimes have been accused, in imagining that Gunner Morris kept hanging around his old friend Jim because he truly—not just in the friendly in “pat-on-the-butt” sense—in love with Gable’s character?

      I suppose lots of test pilot mechanics paste their gum to the top of the planes every time their friend sails off to the “woman in the sky” just to protect him, planting his spit from his mouth upon the symbolic “forehead?” Maybe most mechanics live with their pilot friends, hang out with them day and night, wake them carefully to make sure they keep their flying appointments, and make sure night and day that they’re sober enough to take off?

      Doesn’t just any good friend suffer every second that his buddy is challenging the flying machines to do things beyond even their designer’s imagination? When his best chum brings home women, isn’t it fairly normal for the mechanic to get a little testy over the whole issue of “women?”

       And when Lane’s plane nearly crashes into a Kansas wheat field, what else is a friend mechanic to do but pay out-of-pocket expenses to travel there to fix it up? So what if he’s miffed that another woman is mixed up in the whole affair, and he gets particularly irritated when he hears how his pal has taken a shine to her? Surely it’s common sense to try to hurry him off the next morning and get him back to where he can have him all for himself?

     When it’s clear that he’s lost his best friend to marriage, it’s totally appropriate, isn’t it, that a mechanic, in this film Gunner, won’t take up Jim’s invite to live with them in their new little apartment, but still makes close friends with what has become a trio, Gunner, Ann, and Jim, a kind of threesome who now show up everywhere together?

        When it becomes apparent that Jim hasn’t any idea how to treat a lady, let alone his wife, I should imagine itis generally up to his friend to suggest that he might buy her at least a negligee to sleep in, and go shopping with his pal for that item?

         And when the dense-headed boyfriend doesn’t have a clue of what his new wife is feeling about his dangerous flights, it’s inevitable, I should imagine, that he become her sounding board, someone to whom she can share all of her worries, recognizing that living with a fool like Jim, there are only three roads to take: leave him immediately; insist that he quit his profession to take on a safer job which he would hate and hate her for demanding he do it; or live everyday knowing that it might probably be her/his last with the man she/he loves? And naturally, when Jim takes up the plane high into the sky again, cracking it into pieces, it’s standard that a friend like Gunner should intensely scold her for her behavior with tears pouring down from his eyes that reveal his own feelings of fear for losing the man he also loves? I have a picture in case you missed that, American viewers.

       The following conversation must be a typical one between test pilot “bros”:

 

Jim Lane: (asking Gunner) “Who do you love sweetheart?”

Gunner Morris: (spoken in a straightforward manner) I love you.

        When your buddy finally breaks the records and goes on a bender, what comrade wouldn’t fly all over the country to find him in a flophouse in Chicago, having just spent—to his knowledge—all of the $10,000 he’s just be awarded, including the $5,000 he was to have paid to you, and take him quietly home to his desperate wife?

        If your comrade continues his daredevil flying, wouldn’t you start swigging down whisky direct from the flask, get drunk, and mutter endlessly on about the “three roads” that Ann described were the only choices someone who loves Jim Lane can take? Wouldn’t you shout out that all three of you are doomed?

         And feeling that way doesn’t every friend join his risk-taking buddy on a test ride in a new Boeing bomber knowing that it’s finally his time to die, throwing the gum to the ground instead of planting on the airplane roof to protect the man who will never be able to respond in kind?  Just as such a pal might have suspected, the beloved can’t be bothered to even grant him a kiss as he dies.

    If such a character—in one of the best and most understated performances of Spencer Tracy that I have ever seen—represents a “flat character without real meaning and motivation,” then I better give up writing about film after all these years.

      I have a theory that while making this movie, just as William Wyler did with Stephen Boyd before the major early scene in Ben Hur, the manly-man’s director Victor Fleming took Spencer aside and told him that the whole movie was one big love scene between him and Gable, but warned him, as Wyler had Boyd concerning Charlton Heston, not to let Gable know. As if Gable was ever a smart enough actor to realize how to play anything but a dumb heterosexual womanizer, despite the rumors that early on in his career he worked both street and casting couch to work his way up. Nonetheless, as Rick Burin, writing on this film for Letterboxd observes, Test Pilot represents, “the last movie in which...Gable dared to emote, before the need to protect his macho image rendered him dramatically immobile.”

       More likely, the script writers, the brilliant Howard Hawks (who certainly knew how to write and direct movies about queer camaraderie; see my comments on his Red River), Waldemar Young (who, incidentally, was Brigham Young’s grandson), Vincent Lawrence, and John Lee Mahin didn’t bother to tell Fleming, and Tracy, rumored to be bisexual off the screen, didn’t have to be told anything.

      Unfortunately, they also forgot to tell Ann Barton, Jim’s wife in the movie, who despite her remarkable perceptions about the man she has wed, doesn’t seem to truly comprehend just how much Gunner loves the same man. At one point, despairing of her situation with the man who constantly is taking chances with his life, she cries on Gunner’s shoulder, pleading “Gunner, don’t ever fall love, don’t ever.” Too late, I’m afraid. Even Jim, tired of Gunner’s pained looks of suffering suggests: “Why don’t you be gay for once and give yourself a shot.”

      We all know that being “gay” here was meant to suggest its old meaning, “happy, bright, carefree.” But given the situation he might as well have been saying, “isn’t it time that you come out?” and leave me out of your sexual imagination, please.

      As I previously mentioned Hollywood lore is that Tracy and Gable had an increasingly uneasy relationship throughout filming, and when it came for Tracy to die after their plane had crashed, Gable reportedly shouted out: "Die, goddamn it, Spence! I wish to Christ you would!" dropping Tracy's head with a thud. Perhaps Gable finally began to sense his co-star’s situation in this work, and being homophobic—it was he, so it has been rumored, who demanded that the queer Cukor be relieved of his Gone with the Wind directorial responsibilities—could no longer restrain himself.

      Nonetheless, to me and several of my gay friends, there is no question but that Test Pilot is hardly a work that “never kicks in with interesting dramatic excitement or a romance story that matters.” For the LGBTQ community, Gunner Morris’s unrequited love for Jim Lane very much matters, and takes this film to a different level from which, apparently, most of the audience past and present are perceiving it. Like Wings before it, Test Pilot is one of several Hollywood films that truly reveal love between “masculine” males that stands fully apart from the dozens of films portraying homosexuality as an effeminate farce.

 

Los Angeles, February 20, 2022

(Reprinted from World Cinema Review, February 2022).