Victor Fleming strides through Michael Sragow's eponymous biography with the panache of Rhett Butler—and no wonder, since the director helped forge Clark Gable's onscreen persona with Red Dust and Test Pilot years before they reunited for Gone With the Wind.
~Wendy Smith, Los Angeles Times
Not only persuasive in its argument that Victor Fleming was one of the unsung titans of his era, [this book] also makes for a fascinating case study in how power was acquired, wielded, and lost during the 1930s and '40s.... For readers with a limited knowledge of the movie industry, its transition from silent to talkies, and the rise of the big studio picture, Sragow's thorough scene-setting could double as a cinematic history lesson—illuminating the many famous lives that Fleming touched (and helped to shape) and the ways in which sets, casts, contracts, and careers worked during Hollywood's grand glory days.
~S. James Snyder, Time
Sragow is immensely attentive to Fleming's films, and he traces in detail the fortunes of all the people connected to them, but his book is held together by what can only be called the romance of movie-making in the studio era—the large, free, hard-drinking life that the men (but rarely the women) enjoyed when movies were still made quickly and relatively cheaply, craft was spoken of with respect, and art was barely mentioned.
~David Denby, New Yorker
Michael Sragow's Victor Fleming is certainly among the best film director biographies ever published. Mr. Sragow captures the man, a life and an era that is, as the title of Fleming's most famous film put it, 'gone with the wind.'
~Peter Bogdanovich, Wall Street Journal
Long due for a smart, thorough appreciation, Fleming comes to life in Sragow's generous, incisive narrative.
~Alex Belth, Esquire
