There have been a number of interesting movie books published this season, and two new volumes, both of them singled out for praise by Michael Fox, flesh out the careers of Hollywood directors who had important careers with major films to their credit but whose names generally don't make it onto the established lists of great filmmakers. Victor Fleming, the subject of Michael Sragow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master, has the distinction of being the credited director what might be seen as the most iconic American movie classics of the early color era, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz--both of which were released in 1939, and both of which were huge productions that Fleming was brought in to complete after other hands had started filming. (Fleming's was still working on Oz when Clark Gable decreed that he would only continue in the role of Rhett Butler if Fleming was brought in to replace George Cukor, who had also done some labors on Oz. King Vidor wrapped up Oz while Fleming made his way to the GWTW set. Sam Wood also worked on GWTW for a few weeks while Fleming was recovering from exhaustion.) Fleming, whose other credits include Red Dust, Bombshell, Treasure Island, and Captains Courageous, broke into movies as a camera assistant, much valued for his mechanical prowess, before moving up to directing silent action films. Fox writes that "Sragow’s great accomplishment... is effortlessly weaving together the various film-book genres. His digressions to illuminate the careers and characters of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy are meaty and delicious, while the making-of chapters...brim with well-chosen behind-the-scenes details that illuminate the bigger picture of Fleming as a fearless pro. Sragow also gives a strong sense of the dynamics of the studio system, while dropping in any number of contemporary references and critical assessments without slowing the narrative a whit." Fleming combined a sensitive side with the man's man aura that made someone like Gable so comfortable about putting his career in his hands. And whatever one thinks of Sragow's efforts to sell him as an artist on the level of, say, Howard Hawks, he certainly got a lot done with the time given to him. He died of a heart attack in 1948, at the age of 59; his last film was Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman, the last of a long string of leading ladies with whom he'd been enjoying an affair during their off-hours.

Glenn Lovell's Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges makes the case for a director of some of the best-loved action epics of the latter half of the twentieth century, especially The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven. Those pictures, and such smaller genre classics as Escape from Fort Bravo, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and Bad Day at Black Rock--probably the most critically respected of Sturges's films, because it doubles as a socially conscious expose about the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II--lack the depth and explosiveness of the work of someone like Sam Peckinpah or the flamboyant showmanship of Hawks, but they stand out among the run of routine action movies for the craftsmanlike precision that Sturges learned during his studio apprenticeship as an editor, and as a director working on training films during the war. Sturges might be better remembered today if he hadn't lasted as long; he ran out of gas after The Great Escape yet continued to plow on, grinding out sadly lifeless shoot-'em-ups such as The Satan Bug, Ice Station Zebra, Marooned, and the dreaded McQ, in which John Wayne, making a mad, eleventh-hour stab at playing his version of Dirty Harry, looked as if he might collapse during the chase scenes and attempt to lasso the villains with his varicose veins. And Sturges, like Fleming, might have done his work for the studios a little too well: Rhett and Scarlet and Dorothy and the Wicked Witch now seem always to have been with us, to such a degree that it seems weird to imagine that somebody directed them. Just as Sturges's two biggest hits helped to create so many action stars--Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, James Garner, just to skim the cream off the top-- that the fellow behind the camera got lost in the crowd.