Victor Fleming

 Victor Fleming



Captains Courageous (1937)

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Gone with the Wind (1939)



RANKED:


3. Captains Courageous (1937)


Despite the illustrious films of "Gone with the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz" being front and center of Victor Flemings filmography, he does have a fine resume in the Hollywood studio system. He made a vast array of films for Hollywood from 1916 to his final film in 1946. Beyond the before-mentioned goliaths from 1939, one of his greatest accomplishments was the 1937 adventure flick "Captains Courageous." This coming-of-age tale tells the story of a young spoiled rich boy who must learn the ways of labor and a hard day's work when he becomes stranded on a fishing boat. The film was a great success for Fleming and even won lead actor Spencer Tracy an Academy Award win. The film's success is perhaps what also led Fleming to the technicolor behemoths to come. 






2. Gone with the Wind (1939)


Both lauded for its technical achievement and stooped in innumerable controversy, Victor Fleming's monolithic "Gone with the Wind" is still a hot topic of discussion in the film community 85 years after its release. It is easy to see why there is so much fervor over the film, both for its technical prowess, along with its controversial romanticism of the Old Deep South. The illustrious technology achievement left every movie-goer in complete awe. The performances in the film are now considered iconic, from Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, and Hattie McDaniel's Oscar-winning performance. The themes of the story even fit perfectly into the anxieties many Americans were facing with the oncoming war, as the film substituted it for the terror and fallout of the Civil War in the 1860s. The film was so spectacularly received, it both became the highest grossing film of all time, as well as started a conversation about black Americans and their depictions in American cinema, along with their real-life treatment beyond the film screen.





1. The Wizard of Oz (1939)


There is no film that was as significant, culturally influential, and SEEN as MGM's musical marvel "The Wizard of Oz." It is a film that is still considered a technical marvel, but with this marvel comes cinematic consciousness itself. Despite its adaptive format from a source material, the majority of people in the 20th century have connected to "The Wizard of Oz," either through childhood or even adulthood. It's themes contains ideas that were used time and time again in various works of literary, social, and artistic expression. The film demonstrates the value of its own artificial construct and how that construct can inform reality itself. With these abstractions, like with the very abstraction that is film, we begin to understand the world and its mechanisms in far more engaging and valuable ways. Just as Dorothy reevaluates her own life after viewing it through the lens of the fantastical realm of Oz, our own perceptions of life become reanalyzed and reevaluated through art itself and its own construct. "The Wizard of Oz," along with these powerful themes, shaped the 20th century, and all forms of art that would follow. According to the University of Turn, it is the most influential film ever made and according to the Library of Congress, it is the most seen film in history. It is a monolith that created that original of cinematic consciousness and is one of the greatest film achievements in history. 

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