George Cukor: Hollywood Master 9780748693573

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George Cukor

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“No great artist ever sees things as they really are.”                      (Oscar Wilde)

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George Cukor Hollywood Master

Edited by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer

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© editorial matter and organization Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer, 2015 © the chapters their several authors, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun—Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Adobe Chaparral Pro by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9356 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9357 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0362 7 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Contents List of Figures vii List of Contributors ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1    R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance   1  Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage: Dinner at Eight, No More Ladies,    The Women, and The Marrying Kind 11    Maureen Turim   2  George Cukor’s Late Style: Justine, Travels With My Aunt, and    Rich and Famous 28    James Morrison   3  Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names: It Should Happen to You, Les Girls,    Camille, and Romeo and Juliet 43    Dominic Lennard   4  The Cukor “Problem”: David Copperfield, Holiday, and The Philadelphia Story 60     Robert B. Ray   5  Modulations of the Shot: The Quiet Film Style of George Cukor in    What Price Hollywood?, Born Yesterday, Sylvia Scarlett, and    My Fair Lady 77    Lee Carruthers   6  Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor: The Royal Family of Broadway,    A Bill of Divorcement, A Double Life, and Bhowani Junction 92    Michael DeAngelis

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vi  George Cukor   7  George Cukor and the Case of an Actor’s Director: Hepburn and/or    Tracy in Little Women, The Actress, Keeper of the Flame,    Adam’s Rib, and Pat and Mike 107    Charlie Keil  8 Cukor Maudit: Tarnished Lady, Girls About Town, Our Betters,    Susan and God, Desire Me, Edward, My Son,    The Model and the Marriage Broker, Let’s Make Love, and    The Chapman Report 124    Bill Krohn   9  George Cukor’s Theatrical Feminism: Gaslight, Heller in Pink Tights,    A Life of Her Own, and A Star is Born 139    Linda Ruth Williams 10  The Furthest Side of Paradise: Two-Faced Woman, A Woman’s Face,    Hot Spell, Wild is the Wind, and Winged Victory 156    R. Barton Palmer Works Cited and Consulted 173 Index 179

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Figures

Figures  1.1 Dinner at Eight 14  1.2 The Women 17  1.3 No More Ladies 21  1.4 The Marrying Kind 23  2.1 Justine 34  2.2 Travels With My Aunt 39  2.3 Rich and Famous 41  3.1 It Should Happen to You 45  3.2 Les Girls 49  3.3 Camille 56  3.4 Romeo and Juliet 58  4.1 David Copperfield 64  4.2 Holiday 69  4.3 The Philadelphia Story 76  5.1 What Price Hollywood? 84  5.2 Born Yesterday 86  5.3 Sylvia Scarlett 88  5.4 My Fair Lady 90  6.1  The Royal Family of Broadway 93  6.2 A Bill of Divorcement 99  6.3 A Double Life 102  6.4 Bhowani Junction 105  7.1 Little Women 112  7.2 The Actress 115  7.3 Keeper of the Flame 118  7.4 Adam’s Rib 120  7.5 Pat and Mike 122  8.1 Girls About Town 126  8.2 Desire Me 131

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viii  George Cukor  8.3 Let’s Make Love 135  8.4 The Chapman Report 135  9.1 Gaslight 143  9.2 Heller in Pink Tights 147  9.3 A Life of Her Own 149  9.4 A Star is Born 152 10.1  Two-Faced Woman 157 10.2  A Woman’s Face 164 10.3  Hot Spell 166 10.4  Wild is the Wind 168 10.5  Winged Victory 170

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Contributors

Contributors Lee Carruthers is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Doing Time: Timeliness and Contemporary Cinema (forthcoming). Carruthers’s current research focuses on the cinema of Terrence Malick. Michael DeAngelis is an Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies in the College of Communication at De Paul University. He is the author of Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves (2001), along with a number of articles and book chapters on American and international film history, authorship, stardom, melodrama, reception, distribution/exhibition, and sexuality studies; and the editor of Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television (2014). He is currently working on another book about the concept of therapy in cinema during the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Charlie Keil is a Professor in the History Department and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913 (2002) and co-editor, with Daniel Goldmark, of Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood (2011); with Shelley Stamp, of American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (2004); and, with Ben Singer, of American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations (2009). He is currently editing an anthology on D. W. Griffith for Wiley-Blackwell and completing research on a history of the origins of Hollywood. Bill Krohn has been the Los Angeles correspondent of Cahiers du cinéma for thirty-five years. He is also the author of Hitchcock at Work (2003), Luis Buñuel: Chimera (2005), Stanley Kubrick (2010), Alfred Hitchcock (2010) and articles in various publications. He co-wrote, -directed and -produced It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles. Dominic Lennard is an Associate Lecturer in the Centre for University Pathways and Partnerships at the University of Tasmania. He is the author of Bad Seeds

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x  George Cukor and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Film (2014), and has also previously published essays on topics including Tim Burton, Batman on film, film stars, and the “bromance” phenomenon. James Morrison is Professor of Literature and Film at Claremont McKenna College and author or editor of several books, including Roman Polanski (2007) and Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s (2010). R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature and Director of Film Studies at Clemson University. He is the author, editor, or general editor of more than sixty scholarly books. Recent edited collections include: with Homer Pettey, Film Noir and International Noir (both Edinburgh University Press, 2014); with Steven Sanders and Aeon Skoble, The Philosophy of Michael Mann (2014), with William Epstein, Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: Biopics and American National Identity (forthcoming), and, with Murray Pomerance, Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice (forthcoming). He is the author of Joel and Ethan Coen (2004) and Shot on Location: Postwar Hollywood’s Exploration of Real Place (forthcoming). Murray Pomerance is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University. He is the author of Marnie (2014), Alfred Hitchcock’s America (2013), The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect (2013), The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory (2008), Johnny Depp Starts Here (2005), and An Eye for Hitchcock (2004); and, in fiction, of The Economist (2014), Tomorrow (2012), Edith Valmaine (2010), and Savage Time (2005). He edits the “Techniques of the Moving Image” series at Rutgers and the “Horizons of Cinema” series at SUNY Press, and, with Lester D. Friedman and Adrienne L. McLean respectively, the “Screen Decades” and “Star Decades” series at Rutgers. Robert B. Ray is Professor of English at the University of Florida and the author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema (1985), The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (2002), How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (2001), The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (2008), and Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau (2011). He was also a member of the recording musical group The Vulgar Boatmen. Maureen Turim is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at the University of Florida and has published three books, The Films of Oshima Nagisa. Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (1998); Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (1989); and Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films (1985). She is currently finishing Desire and its Renewal in the Cinema. She has published over 100 essays in journals and books on theoretical, historical and aesthetic issues in cinema and video, art, cultural studies, feminist and psychoanalyst theory, and comparative literature.

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Contributors  xi Linda Ruth Williams is Professor of Film in the English Department at Southampton University. She is author of The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject (1995), and editor of other volumes including, with Michael Hammond, Contemporary American Cinema (2006), as well as numerous articles on gender, sexuality, and censorship in U.S. and U.K. cinema. She is now writing a book on childhood and child performers in Spielberg’s films, and is developing a large-scale project on contemporary British women filmmakers.

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Acknowledgments

We are sincerely grateful to our collaborators at Edinburgh University Press, especially Michelle Houston, Gillian Leslie, Rebecca Mackenzie, Jenny Peebles, Eddie Clark, Stuart Dalziel, Kate Robertson, Richard Strachan and copy-editor Suzanne Dalgleish, for the gracious and amicable working relationship they have fostered. And to the staff at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, especially Jenny Romero, our deep and respectful thanks. This book could not have been completed without the express, and very generous, help of Nathaniel Deyo (Gainesville), Kris Erickson (Toronto), Dan Sacco (Toronto), and Zach Snow (Clemson). To our families—Carla and Camden Palmer, Nellie Perret, and Ariel Pomerance— our enduring love and gratitude for support, illumination, and guidance. Murray Pomerance R. Barton Palmer November 2014

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Introduction

Introduction

R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance The Career Hollywood’s conversion to a sound cinema drew many of Broadway’s brighter creative talents to filmmaking as the industry made the radical readjustment to producing a much more complex product. Pictures that talked were inherently more theatrical, requiring the mastery of a different set of skills on the part of performers and directors, who now had to work with something very similar to a play script. Among this distinguished company of New York City émigrés, none enjoyed a more consistently successful career in the new industrial art than George Cukor, who was twenty-nine years old when recruited by Paramount Pictures in 1928. Desperate for experienced help in this time of profound paradigm shift, the studio even sent Cukor a plane ticket to the west coast because they were too impatient to await the young man’s arrival in the more accepted fashion, by train. Paramount was certainly taking a chance on offering a director’s chair to someone barely acquainted with the inner workings of the new medium, no matter how successful he had been in his work for the commercial theater. And he had been successful. Showing business acumen early, as manager of one stock company and later co-founder of another, he was a natural on the stage. After a little acting he moved to the other side of the footlights, directing Melchior Lengyel’s Antonia in 1925 (produced by Charles Frohman, with Georges Renavent), Owen Davis’s The Great Gatsby in 1926 (with Florence Eldridge), Martin Brown’s The Dark in 1927 (with Louis Calhern), Lula Vollmer’s Trigger (with Claiborne Foster), Willard Mack’s A Free Soul (with Melvyn Douglas), and Zoe Akins’s The Furies (with Laurette Taylor) in 1928, and Samson Raphaelson’s Young Love (with Dorothy Gish) and Maxwell Anderson’s Gypsy (with Wallace Ford) in 1929, before departing for Hollywood. But the differences between the stage and film had considerably narrowed. With the confining of most film productions to stage set interiors because of the exigencies of dialogue recording, then accomplished with bulky microphones, action scenes became a rarity in many genres, as filmgoer attention was directed toward the same carefully crafted verbal confrontations that were a Broadway

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2  George Cukor staple. After a brief period of apprenticeship in which he familiarized himself with standard filmmaking practices, Cukor quickly made a place for himself in the industry. Paramount had chosen wisely. From the beginning of his stage career, Cukor showed considerable stylistic flair, managerial competence, and bankability or, perhaps better, a knack for turning a profit from diverse projects. These are qualities neatly and appropriately summed up in the term professionalism; few in Hollywood during the classic studio era could claim to be as professional as Cukor. He had a firm grasp of the essentials of effective acting, and was especially skilled at coaching the delivery of the snappy and self-consciously witty dialogue then much in vogue on Broadway; he never became a visual stylist as such, but his expert blocking made for dramatically effective yet apparently “natural” positioning of human figures that pleased the eye. Like his mentor at Paramount, Ernst Lubitsch, Cukor was a sophisticated cosmopolitan, amused by the license then found at the upper reaches of American culture and unhampered in his portrayal of behavior that only fifteen years earlier would have been considered completely inappropriate for either stage or screen production. Neither man was in any sense a moralist, or perhaps each of them had found a sophisticated and cynical slant on human affairs that allowed him to show up moralists as cheats of the spirit. Frequently, Lubitsch’s technique was humor; frequently, Cukor’s was seeing the world as women did, at a time when this attitude was far from fashionable. The interwar years constituted a theatrical era typified by Noël Coward’s provocative comedies such as Private Lives (1930) and Design for Living (1933). Like Coward, Cukor was a closeted homosexual (both men were more or less “out” to friends in the business), and each observed the discontents of heterosexual coupling with the wry humor of the outsider. Coward and Cukor were also enthusiastic participants in the booze-fueled high life of the period; they were each on the inside of the society they took such delight in depicting. Cukor’s Broadway production of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was a version (later filmed by Herbert Brenon) that emphasized the novel’s focus on the scandalous and self-indulgent antics of New York’s nouveau riche, a crowd he knew like the back of his hand.

Working Methods Once in Los Angeles, Cukor was put immediately to work behind the camera, first as a co-director (working with Lubitsch, among others). Paramount was soon repaid for its investment as he turned out quality productions quickly and efficiently, easily mastering the craft of staging and directing dramatic scenes for the camera. Cukor was well suited by temperament to directing the edgy melodramas (now viewed nostalgically as “pre-Code” productions) at which, in his first several years, he tried his practiced hand, including the scandalously successful Tarnished Lady (1931), which furthered the notorious reputation of its star, Tallulah Bankhead, carefully coached by Cukor to deliver a memorable performance as an unfaithful wife who manages in the last reel to convince

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Introduction  3 her husband to take her back. Cukor effectively wrings every drop of emotion from what is no more than a sub-Madame Bovary property (based on a short story by the sub-Fitzgerald fictionalist Donald Ogden Stewart). Bankhead was at the time the London stage’s favorite American actress, and this was her first film. Broadway met the West End, and the result was a very different kind of cinema, one for which American filmgoers would soon develop a considerable enthusiasm. Cukor’s sources were often recently produced plays, as in A Bill of Divorcement and Animal Kingdom, both 1932, based on theatrical hits written by Clemence Dane and Philip Barry. In working with such materials for the screen, he had an exceptional ability to transcend the confining box setting of theatrical space by bringing characters and confrontational moments close through dynamic staging, the close-up, and the extreme variation in shot length inherent in the camera process. The establishment of the Production Code Administration in 1934 meant a shift away from openly provocative productions. The screen version of Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933), released at the cusp of full Code enforcement, was every bit as shocking in its depiction of an unconventional love triangle as its stage source (produced in New York because Coward feared London censors would prohibit its production). Coming at the end of an era, this production illustrated the profound similarities between Broadway and Hollywood, which certainly favored directors of Cukor’s background and interests. The most notable member of this theatrically trained group was undeniably the celebrated Lubitsch, who exerted a profound influence on his sometime younger colleague at Paramount. If fashions changed, however, Cukor changed with them. During the next fifty years in fact, he directed nearly sixty commercial productions for the big screen, including some of the era’s most profitable and acclaimed releases: Dinner at Eight, Little Women (both 1933), Camille (1936), The Women (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Gaslight (1944), Adam’s Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), A Star is Born (1954), My Fair Lady (1964), and Travels With My Aunt (1972)—every one of which is in some sense a woman’s film; in some sense a broader (and scathing) social commentary; in some sense a revelation of what can be done when working with accomplished performers playing a strong script and viewed by a sensitive visionary. The studio era is simply unimaginable without him; he became the acknowledged master of a variety of genres, from screwball comedies to thrillers, prestige literary adaptations, and musicals. Appropriately, his last project, Rich and Famous (1981), is a remake of a classic Hollywood melodrama, Vincent Sherman’s Old Acquaintance (1943), which had starred Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, a screen adaptation of the hit play of the same name by John Van Druten. (In the mid-1920s, he had had a single working experience with Davis onstage, one of which she later complained about; they did not collaborate in Hollywood.) Yet Cukor, drawing interesting performances from Candice Bergen and Jacqueline Bisset, eliminates any trace of cultural staleness from the property, working sensitively with the script’s updated sexual politics as he carefully delineates the lifestyle conflict between two old college friends, one who has pursued a career as a novelist and

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4  George Cukor the other who has wound up, to her joy and discontent, as a wife and mother. More quality entertainment produced with verve and style than auteurist vision, Rich and Famous can be read, and appreciated, as either an adaptation of an adaptation or as an intelligent recontextualization of someone else’s screen success. In its successful derivativeness, Rich and Famous provides a fitting coda to Cukor’s impressive career as a commercial filmmaker whose artistic forté was the skillful mounting of material written by others, as the various chapters in this volume so usefully identify. Even in the 1970s, an age dominated by the idea of an American auteurist cinema, Cukor remained resolutely more theatrical than cinematic, throughout his Hollywood career respecting the seldom-violated boundary between director and playwright. True to his theatrical roots and proclivities, Cukor was most adept early in his career at mounting the “indoor” cinema that emerged in an era of primitive sound recording. Such films emphasized spoken dialogue, then very much a profitable novelty, and they were relatively stagy, set-bound, but often frenetic (making use of dynamic editing). These essentially theatrical dramas were customarily played at a high pitch of emotion and wit, dominated by the stage professionals who had gone west like Cukor and could declaim dialogue at impressive speed in the transatlantic accent then de rigueur on Broadway and in the West End: John Barrymore, Constance Bennett, Billie Burke, Edna May Oliver, Katharine Hepburn, Wallace Beery, among many others. Settings were glitzy not gritty, and themes were hardly topical in the political sense. Cukor was certainly not the only director capable of achieving success with such personnel and material. Even his action-oriented colleagues contributed importantly to the new production trend. Just to take two obvious examples, both Lewis Milestone (1931) and Howard Hawks (His Girl Friday, 1940) did quite well with their screen versions of the Broadway hit The Front Page (1928), a property overflowing with a wry view of gender relations that Cukor also found so congenial and frequently explored in his films. But Cukor did not just work in this vein of film art. As it emerged to maturity in the late 1940s, especially in Cukor’s several comedies starring either Katharine Hepburn or Judy Holliday, this tradition was profoundly shaped by his contributions. He was always its acknowledged and, for the most part, profitable master, never finding it necessary even to assay the “outdoor” genres in which contemporaries like Milestone and Hawks often devoted their energies and artistry. Thus it is strangely fitting that Cukor, who did most of the pre-production work on the interior scenes of the film, was fired from Gone With the Wind (1939) by producer David O. Selznick, who was not pleased with his slow pace of work. Cukor, in any case, confessed to becoming increasingly unhappy as production proceeded. Significantly, he was replaced by Victor Fleming, who was less talented at coaching nuanced performances from the players but more comfortable with the film’s epic themes and action (he had directed Clark Gable the year before in the spectacular actioner Test Pilot). Gone With the Wind could never have been a Cukor film; its scale was far too immense, its drawing room humor and gender conflicts limited by the flatness of Margaret Mitchell’s socially typical characters, who are seldom imagined

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Introduction  5 delightfully engaged in the witty repartee at whose direction Cukor excelled. The property’s social scene is relentlessly American, lacking the European or at least transatlantic aura that might have better inspired Cukor. Cukor for the most part made melodramas, usually with a comic tone, what contemporary Hollywood calls relationship movies or dramedies, a form for whose enduring appeal and commercial value he is in part responsible. In such films, carefully choreographed exchanges of dialogue trump physical action. The plot derives its forward motion not by a movement through space, but by the rapid revelation and then continual transformation of character. Performances of a subtle and affective kind are key, not eye-catching spectacle. Unlike contemporaries such as Raoul Walsh and Fleming, who were suited by temperament and sensibility to genres, including period pieces, in which male stars were the main focus, Cukor fashioned a career in which his considerable ability to shape the performance of actresses was the focus. By the late 1930s, the Hollywood sound cinema had recruited and nurtured an impressive stable of directors. And yet who, it might be asked, except Cukor could have done such an expert job with the transference to the screen of The Women, Clare Boothe Luce’s famed comedy of acid manners, with its varied roster of predictably conflictual female types inhabiting a thoroughly imagined world from which men have been banished? If the pre-Code era very much suited Cukor, so did the 1950s when, in the wake of Kinsey’s revelations about female sexuality and the unexpected popular success of Elia Kazan’s mounting of Tennessee Williams’s notorious A Streetcar Named Desire, the so-called “adult” melodrama became a profitable cycle. Cukor made several interesting contributions to that later series, including Bhowani Junction (1956), Hot Spell (only some segments, 1957), and Wild is the Wind (1958), in which he helped Ava Gardner, Shirley Booth, and Anna Magnani express the vagaries and discontents of womanly desire in a post-Kinsey era. It was significant, in fact, that Cukor was chosen to direct The Chapman Report (1962), which traces the sexual adventurism and discontent of four suburban women who decide to be interviewed by a thinly-disguised Kinsey and his assistants. As in his 1950s melodramas more generally, The Chapman Report ends with a reassertion of conventional morality. Despite their socially conservative endings, however, in both his pre-Code and 1950s melodramas, Cukor pushed the limits of the dramatization of the personal life. Later in life, Cukor would show some resentment at being constantly stereotyped as a women’s director, asserting that for every “Jill there was a Jack” in the films he made. This useful corrective to received opinion reminds us that a number of Spencer Tracy’s finest films were made under Cukor’s supervision, not just the two celebrated Tracy/Hepburn collaborations, Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike (1952) but also the unjustly neglected Edward, My Son (1949), a theatrical adaptation in which Tracy’s bereaved father is clearly the main character and co-star Deborah Kerr, who plays the mother, is overwhelmed by her husband’s powerful presence. Other Jacks got their due from Cukor: Clark Gable in the unforgettable Manhattan Melodrama (1934), Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story, Anthony Quinn in a trio of films including Hot Spell

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6  George Cukor and Wild is the Wind, and James Mason in a carefully modulated impersonation, arguably one of his career-bests, as an alcoholic has-been in A Star is Born. Cukor can claim a good deal of credit for three Best Actor performances (more such awards than any of his contemporaries): Stewart in Philadelphia, Ronald Colman in A Double Life (1947), and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1964). In his delightfully snooty evaluation of Hollywood directors, critic Andrew Sarris concedes that the non-writer director poses a problem for traditional auteurism. Cukor, and other “literary” directors, are too reliant on their sources— according to André Bazin and the other Cahiers critics whom the American journalist is channeling—to earn a place in the “pantheon” of the industry’s greatest directors (most of whom, incidentally, are émigrés, not native-born). But, with somewhat uncharacteristic generosity Sarris proclaims that there is “an honorable place in the cinema for both adaptations and the non-writer director; and Cukor, like Lubitsch, is one of the best examples of the non-writer auteur, a creature literary film critics seem unable to comprehend” (American Cinema 89). Yet Cukor out-Lubitsches Lubitsch in confining himself to directing in the narrow theatrical sense. Especially early in his German career, Lubitsch did work on the scripts for his films and, most notably, penned the original short story for To Be or Not to Be (1942), which is arguably the triumph of his Hollywood years. Cukor, Sarris avers, demonstrates the consistency of the true auteur, but through “a judicious mixture of selection and emphasis” (89). His theme is “imagination, with the focus on the imaginer rather than on the thing imagined,” but, formulated at an unpersuasive level of generality this plea for some kind of intellectual consistency in Cukor’s oeuvre seems a desperate, irrelevant move to relocate the director’s genius in some way of apprehending the world (the imagination) and then staging its enactment (the imaginer). However, Sarris identifies what the real question ought to be for those interested in assessing his accomplishments. Cukor’s talent cannot be calibrated neoromantically as authorship, that is, as finding its origin in the creative self, but has everything to do with choosing which properties to adapt and then managing the adaptation process with verve and effectiveness. But what makes for a good adapter, for a talented master of ceremonies who knows where to put everything and everybody (including the camera)? Who knows how to make a property his own even while enhancing the value it has as belonging to someone else? The essays in this volume provide a series of complementary answers to those questions. Although many of his films are celebrated as classics, Cukor has yet to receive appropriate attention from academic critics. Cukor’s interest in the various forms of indoor cinema lacked the generic focus of Ford’s westerns and Hitchcock’s thrillers. His style was theatricality writ large, a successful transference to the screen of what he had learned from his stage career, including the outsized, often flamboyant handling of emotionality. His approach to visuals, subordinated to performance except when some special effect was needed, does not easily fit the auteurist paradigm: particularly his penchant for long takes, not deep focus set-ups with multi-leveled action à la Welles or Wyler, but medium two-shots of dialogue exchanges that avoid the formal dynamism of shot/reverse shot

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Introduction  7 sequences. And yet it is clear that Cukor was fascinated by the ever-developing potentials of his adopted medium, including, on such films as A Star is Born and The Chapman Report, the affective possibilities of Technicolor. Cukor was much more than a man of the theater who happened to spend most of his career making films.

Atmospheric Touches When in the fall of 1962 he was setting out to film My Fair Lady, late in a career already chocked full of sensitive and engaging films (and a few considerable flops), George Cukor was the epitome of the cultured traveler and raconteur, the “gentleman’s gentleman” receiving and sending correspondence of the most meticulous and charming kind. If he was adept at working with actors, as almost every scholar, critic, and fan has recognized, he was also a master at learning and shaping the minutest details of a project. The actor’s sensitivities, fears, and concerns were paramount to him, but he paid attention as well to design, light, the shape of his scenes, and the minutiae of production. With a keen eye and an imaginative ear, for example, Cecil Beaton writes him to draw attention to some “atmospheric touches” they should both be keeping in consideration for My Fair Lady: “The well-trained hand wrapping the paper round the bunches of grapes”; “Being offered a cigarette, accepting it, and placing behind ear”; “The sky-larking; mock boxing”; Close-up of fried egg or sausage for six o’clock breakfast”; The hollow noises in the arcades and the whistling in the emptiness”; “The beautiful waving lilacs and other massed flowers on the barrows from which a bunch of violets might drop, to be picked up by Eliza”; “Possible acrobatic dance during ‘Get me to the Church on time’ of people leaping on high mountains of piled boxes” (Beaton to Cukor). Reading comments like these, one must imagine Cukor the aesthete whom Beaton had in mind as his recipient, a man who would adore to think of a “well-trained hand,” of “hollow noises” and “whistling,” of “beautiful waving lilacs,” and of leapers upon “high mountains” of boxes. Beaton, after all, is not writing merely sound off his own inspirations; he’s communicating to a man he esteems a fellow spirit in every way. How fascinating that Cukor might be taken as being obsessed with details like echoes, violets, and fried eggs, when so many who review his film work think of him only as an actor’s director. But, of course, Cukor was a preeminent actor’s director indeed. Audrey Hepburn was so enthused by the project of becoming Eliza Doolittle for him, so eager to be working on the film, that in spring 1963 she raved of being “beyond myself with happiness and excitement! It is all so good and so solid, warm funny and enchanting.” But then she goes on with distinctive attention to one deliciously particular aspect of working life under Cukor’s wand: Do you think Cecil could send me the designs for any shoes I will be wearing in the picture, except of course the clodhoppers I am bound to be wearing in the first part. I tell you why. One is an awful lot on one’s feet when working—and

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8  George Cukor since my days in the ballet I have had “trouble with me feet” unless properly “shoed.” The last few years I have taken to having my shoes for movies made by my own private bootmaker in Paris and have tripped through many a picture without a moment’s bother. It does make all the difference. Perhaps the Wimpole Street, Ball, and Ascot shoes could be made here—he makes them quickly, no fitting as he has my last. If Cecil does not like them when he sees them we will immediately discard them. Cecil might want to enclose a sample of material if the ball slippers have to match the dress—they dye any colour one wants. (Hepburn to Cukor) For his part, Cukor wants the beloved Audrey not to be panicking, especially about the challenge of picking up a Cockney accent (which she will need until Henry Higgins “educates” it out of her). “The change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower-girl is neither impossible nor uncommon,” he writes her back, quoting George Bernard Shaw, no less, “The modern concierge’s daughter who fulfills her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue” (Cukor to Hepburn). He knew where she had been born, what struggles she had had. In the end, he used his personal magnetism, a director’s most invaluable asset, writing a quick note to Stanley Holloway (who would play Hepburn’s father): I spoke to Audrey the other day from Lausanne. She’s been working on the Cockney accent on her own. During the last few months she’s said several times, “I’d like to learn to speak with that lovely Cockney accent of Stanley Holloway’s . . . I do hope he’ll help me.” Don’t worry, we’ll have someone else on hand, but it would be very kind if you could cast a parental eye on your daughter’s accent. (Cukor to Holloway) Even here to Holloway, “don’t worry,” I’m making arrangements, I won’t be putting a weight on you; but on the other hand, you could be paternal in fact. Cukor had a sharp ear for the intonations and modulations of the speaking voice and knew an accent when he heard it. Eight years earlier he had assisted Ava Gardner in “get[ting] rid of as much of her American accent as is practical” for Bhowani Junction. To an assistant at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in Boreham Wood he wrote, “She is anxious to do more about this . . . Could you put her on to a teacher who will not only be efficient and intelligent, but engaging and tactful enough to keep Ava’s interest from flagging” (Cukor to Mills). Hepburn was not wrong in thinking Cukor would care about her shoes. As to clothing, he was picky about and attentive to it. “Please tell me what the big shots you have worked with do in the way of shirts when playing straight parts,” Fredric March asked him, December 6, 1939, preparing to shoot Susan and God. “Must they always be slightly off-white? I usually go through at least a couple a day and, if I do go for having some made up in patterns, it can become rather complicated.” March then ices his cake with a loving slur: “Believe me,

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Introduction  9 when I tell you that I look forward with great anticipation to your charmingly insulting direction” (March to Cukor). At shuttlecocks, too, the director is very accomplished. “Now that we’ve got you in the bag, signed, sealed and almost delivered, I don’t have to be so God-damned polite to you any more,” he writes, completely tongue in cheek. “It is obvious that you have been off the Silver Screen for quite a spell—when you ask about shirts being off-white!! We no longer shoot pictures on out-door stages with ‘Inspiration Music,’ nor do we use off-white shirts. However, on second thought, your white shirts won’t be so damned white anyway” (Cukor to March). Then, immediately, a full costume plot promised, to help March think the part through in advance, and a sign-off indicating how much he looks forward, “Freddie,” to “working with you again.” A p.p.s. shot in like a bullet notes that the camera department has, indeed, asked for off-white shirts! It is not only delicious but also helpful, in many ways, to have a direct taste of Cukor’s sly wit, casual language coupled with great linguistic precision, interpersonal charm, passionate focus on his project at hand, and sincere, almost fraternal concern for the well-being of his actors, not to say the imaginations of his collaborators or even their foxiness. To gain command of Rex Harrison for My Fair Lady, he lets it be known he was giving serious consideration to Peter O’Toole, who really wanted it (Cukor to Lerner). After Bhowani Junction previewed he cables Ava Gardner to be prepared for retakes but makes sure she knows that in his view she “gave full blooded exciting original performance” (Cukor cable to Gardner), and looking back on the film he wrote, “I think of you very often, dearest Ava, and most lovingly. I look back upon our working together as one of the most harmonious, deeply satisfying and exciting experiences I’ve ever had” (Cukor to Gardner). Regarding Bhowani, he writes courteously to MGM production executive J. J. Cohn, advising that he intends to have on set George Hoyningen-Huene, “associated with me as a special colour consultant on A Star is Born,” whose responsibilities will be “to coordinate and influence the colour of the entire production”; his purpose is to make sure assurances are given to Freddie Young, the cinematographer, that Hoyningen-Huene will “not encroach on his domain . . . I’m sure that Freddie would find an association with Hoyningen-Huene stimulating—and beneficial to the picture” (Cukor to Cohn). Cukor was much more than a man of the theater who happened to spend most of his career making films. His accomplishments as a filmmaker deserve more than the only occasional and spotty appreciation they have hitherto received from academic film critics. With ten original essays by leading film scholars that provide a comprehensive analysis of his extensive body of work, this present volume is intended to celebrate Cukor’s filmmaking career and supply a hitherto missing chapter in the history of classic Hollywood.

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Chapter 1 Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage: Dinner at Eight, No More Ladies, The Women, and The Marrying Kind

Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage

Maureen Turim

Comedy of manners, drawing room comedies, tragicomedies: these are all terms we might apply to the Cukor films I will discuss in this chapter, though two, Dinner at Eight, and The Women might also be considered ensemble comedies. They are films largely derived from Broadway successes, rewritten and reimagined for the screen by some of the best writers working in Hollywood alongside a director known not only for his sensitive work with actors but also for infusing drama into all his comedies, to shape both modes with great irony. Dinner at Eight (1933) exemplifies the style Cukor brought to these sorts of films, and one can see a direct line from this film to The Women (1939), as both weave multiple narrative threads towards gatherings of a group, Dinner at Eight’s arduously planned and star-crossed dinner party, and The Women’s climatic confrontation in the women’s lounge at an upscale New York City night club. This structure is shared to some degree by No More Ladies (1935), which Cukor finished after the illness of MGM director Edward H. Griffith, without wishing to assume directorial credit. This film’s focus on marriage difficulties in its upper-class New York City milieu culminates in a party planned as revenge on a cheating husband, in which several of his former conquests and a wronged husband converge on a country house. This chapter will explore this structural dynamic of building narrative threads towards a climactic ensemble scene in these three films. Concluding my discussion will be analysis of another, later Cukor film that has less of the ensemble characteristics: The Marrying Kind (1952). Its focus on working-class marriage sets it apart from the upper-class concerns of the other films, yet it shares their tragicomic mode. All four films feature actors from whom Cukor encouraged fascinating performances, including actresses in supporting roles, especially the “grand dames” Edna May Oliver in No More Ladies, Marie Dressler in Dinner at Eight, and Mary Boland in The Women. While much attention has been paid to Cukor’s work with female stars, for which The Women, with its all female cast is exemplary, these

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12  George Cukor films also have remarkable work by male actors, displaying male vulnerability and loss alongside masculine charms.

Dinner at Eight The final scene of George Simon Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s play Dinner at Eight (1932–3) is noted in the published version to take place at 8:00 in “The Jordan Drawing Room,” marking in this terminology its heritage in the British drawing-room comedies of the late nineteenth century. The play builds up to this finale in three acts for which the settings are accompanied by precise temporal indications in the script; Act One is comprised of four scenes, beginning at 10:00 a.m. in the “Jordan Upstairs Sitting room” and preceding to scenes at 2:30. 4:30, and 6:00 p.m. that day, a delineation of temporality that indicates a focus on time passing that seems arbitrary at first, but builds towards acceleration in the second two acts, both set one week later on the day of the dinner party whose planning by Jordan creates the scaffolding of the narrative. Act Two’s four scenes are at half hour intervals (4:30, 5:00, 5:30, and 6:00), while Act Three’s three scenes come in rapid temporal succession (7:40, 7:45, and 8:00). Reading the play, one is reminded of Agnès Varda’s innovative marking of time in her Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), which compresses her heroine’s drama into a self-consciously marked two-hour frame. Cukor’s film eliminates these temporal demarcations, but signals its awareness of time passing through other means, as we shall see. Cukor’s film, Dinner at Eight, assembled much scriptwriting talent for the adaptation from the play: Frances Marion and Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote the script, with additional dialog by Donald Ogden Stewart. Yet the film script remains remarkably consistent with the play; it never once deviates from the interior sets, such as by adding a street scene. Instead, the writers and director emphasize high theatricality, the wonderful tensions that careful framing can accentuate in dialog exchange. Gesture and movement are highlighted, while dialog and action are streamlined. A drawing of an Art Deco clock under the credits gives way to superimpositions of each actor’s face on the plate set for a dinner party, thus marking from the outset both the concern with temporality and the inscription of the dinner party as event-to-be-anticipated. This emphasis frames the action to follow as preliminary to the anticipated titular party. The opening scene takes up this challenge by introducing Millicent Jordan (Billie Burke) as a socially preoccupied matron, who waltzes into the upstairs sitting room through a double door, announcing with orgasmic glee, “Darling, I’ve got Lord and Lady Ferncliff!” Her ecstasy is met with caustic reminiscences by her husband, Oliver (Lionel Barrymore), of their previous dinner with the Ferncliffs, attended by “a lot of people who had been buried for years and got up just to eat that mutton!” This vividly ghoulish complaint not only provides sarcastic comedy at the expense of the British upper class, it prompts Millicent, who aspires to association with titled wealth to argue for the business purpose to be extracted from the social engagement, since Lord Ferncliff, like Oliver “is in shipping.” With her husband’s wry acceptance of the

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Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage  13 engagement for its instrumental value, Millicent’s happy babbling about her plans for the dinner party moves her from the breakfast table in a diagonal path to her writing desk in the foreground, while a butler appears to help her husband into his coat in the mid-ground of the image; the ulterior purpose of this framing becomes clear when Oliver joins her in a two-shot framing behind the writing desk, so that their dialog may continue, this time presenting the back story of Oliver’s first love, the Broadway actress Carlotta Vance, whom Millicent includes among her invitees to please him. Dinner at Eight repeatedly uses such diagonal character movement accompanied by deep-focus staging to break up the two-shot conversation scenes, adding more dynamism to the exchanges through a creative treatment of space. The beats of a dialog scene are thus punctuated by the activity of daily life. David Bordwell has repeatedly discussed Cukor’s diagonal stagings and lengthy, well-framed two shots, in the context of Hollywood stylistic history, beginning in Cukor’s work from the late thirties, with notable inscriptions in The Marrying Kind; in this essay, I follow his lead in noting the continuity of staging and framing movement from Dinner at Eight through The Marrying Kind, making note that such diagonal staging occurs as early as 1933, as I have just described. Following a cutaway to the daughter’s entrance, Oliver glides into far right of the image framing her, to create another two-shot dialog; Jordan’s gaze at his daughter Paula (Madge Evans) in this framing demonstrates far more attentive sympathy between father and daughter than what appeared between him and his wife in what seems to be their habitually patterned exchange. Daughter and father both confess to have passed sleepless nights, as Oliver asks Paula, “There isn’t anything really wrong, is there?” After her denial earns a loving pat on the cheek, Paula crosses to create a two shot with her mother in the foreground, who announces that she expects Paula and her fiancé Earnest to attend the dinner she is studiously planning, while Paula is non-committal, and equally disinterested in shopping for her wedding trousseau, her mother’s next proposition for that afternoon. Millicent continues to babble, but a new shot of her at her desk reveals Paula crossing at a diagonal behind her and exiting the far door; Millicent only belatedly notices, already engaged in another phone call. Millicent, then, is the comic character in this first scene, satirized in her excessive self-concern that is set critically against the angst introduced in both her daughter and her husband’s demeanor, angst as yet unexplained. Cukor blocks the scene most effectively, ending on Millicent as social performer, happily extending an invitation to her party. The next scene at Oliver’s shipping offices develops to the point of financial crisis the undercurrent of discontent introduced in the first scene, as we learn that not enough cargo has been registered to warrant a scheduled sailing, and that Oliver is worried someone is secretly buying out his shipping firm’s stock in a hostile takeover. Enter the previously discussed Carlotta Vance (Marie Dressler), seeming at first to be making a social call, offering some comic banter on aging that nonetheless allows this dowager to bravely flirt, renewing a persistent mutual attraction with Oliver. However, the joy of their reuniting recedes

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14  George Cukor once they cross the room to be seated in two shot, as Carlotta slowly reveals that she is about to sell her stock to a high bidder. Like Millicent, Carlotta is a continuously comic presence; in Carlotta’s case it is the aging degeneration of her once famous looks, even while she maintains her flirtatious gestures, and pride that makes her the object of laughter. Such ridicule is misogynistic, except here it is always tempered by the appreciation of the virtuoso theatricality that Dressler brings to the part, and the fierce pride with which she imbues Carlotta. There is also topical humor about the Depression: Oliver refers to “the financiers sitting on the benches out there” obviously connecting the Bowery location of the firm to the Bowery as refuge to the homeless. Just as the reality that his friend is about to betray him is soaking in for Oliver, Mr. Packard (Wallace Beery) arrives for an appointment that had been previously announced, indeed, one that Oliver had arranged as he suspects Packard is behind cornering the stock. Packard is portrayed as the epitome of nouveau-riche gaucheness, always cutting angles, and lacking any ethical strictures. If the film satirizes aspects of the ruling class, it portrays the ascendancy of new capitalists as even worse. Much of this same satire is aimed at Packard’s wife, Kitty (Jean Harlow), whom we meet in a subsequent scene in her all-white bedroom. Indolent and narcissistic to the extreme, she alternates between baby-talk flirtation and shrewish retorts. Her constant mistreatment of her maid as a “nitwit” signals

1.1  Kitty (Jean Harlow) abuses her maid (Hilda Vaughn), whose dark hair and costume create visual contrasts with her employer’s all-white environment in Dinner at Eight (MGM, 1933). Digital frame enlargement.

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Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage  15 that she, as a former hatcheck girl, feels compelled to abuse those now beneath her, a characterization that has racial overtones, as her blond whiteness in her feathered negligee contrasts sharply with her dark-haired, black-attired maid. Boxes of candy and her hand mirror mark her self-centered indulgence, but the measure of Harlow’s power is how even in portraying this highly unflattering character, she captivates. Kitty’s redeeming quality is her willingness to blackmail her husband with her knowledge of his crooked deals, and her gutsy hiding of her lover, a high-society doctor, who will reemerge as Oliver’s physician and an invitee to the dinner. The character of Larry Renault (John Barrymore) dominates the middle of the film, in tragicomic scenes of great nuance. The two Barrymore brothers are never onscreen together, yet each of their portrayals works so well in the shadow of the other, especially as each of them has intimate conversations with Paula—Lionel in fatherly affection, John in hesitant yet lustful seduction. John Barrymore is credited by Cukor with active participation in his characterization of the alcoholic has-been who still tries to charm others. Cukor says that even the blocking of his movement onscreen, always brilliant in this film, was derived in collaboration (Long 23–4). Once we return to the mansion, a culminating scene is dominated by Millicent’s hysteric reaction to an aspic disaster, as the bulldog gelatin mold she planned as the dinner’s thematic tour de force has fallen victim to melodramatic conflicts amongst the household staff, a disaster rendered moot when the Ferncliffs cancel in favor of a trip to Florida. All of these calamities, though, are soon overshadowed as the seriousness of Oliver’s illness finally dawns on Millicent. Ailing upstairs, he further reveals the threat of collapse facing his shipping company. Millicent, now faced with real disasters, seems to shed her obsession with the trivial, if not her ironically comic character, by vowing to economize and persevere. In seclusion in the library, Carlotta reveals to Paula that Renault has committed suicide, allowing Paula to save face without ever confessing her affair with the older actor and allowing Carlotta to intervene on Oliver’s behalf, just at the moment that Packard, under Kitty’s influence, desists on his takeover move. Cukor celebrates this all’s-well-that-ends-well comic ending by framing a final exchange between Carlotta and Kitty, in which Kitty tries to impress the older woman with her having read a book about changes in the labor market due to automation, creating the opening for Carlotta’s retort, “That my dear, is something you will never have to worry about!,” implying that she views the parvenu Kitty as a prostitute. The group exits the shot through double doors in depth to the dining room, effectively “closing the curtain,” just as the actual dinner would finally begin. In Dinner at Eight Cukor set the pattern that would be reworked in Holiday (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), and The Women of staging satires of the wealthy as ensemble interactions with multiple focal characters. Each film stages scenes within highly specified rooms inside a mansion, hotel, or large apartment, developing a rhythmic perfection.

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16  George Cukor

The Women The Women’s innovation in this ensemble staging is its all-female cast, who spend much of their time, in various configurations of two, three, or four, breezing with aplomb through bantering conversations or tensely comic confrontations as they discuss men left unseen and unheard, confined to the other end of telephone calls, notes sent, and, in the final reconciliation, just offscreen, as Mary (Norma Shearer) extends her arms in sadder, but wiser forgiveness. Another unusual rendering of offscreen male presence is the way the film recounts the argument between Mary (Mrs. Steven Haines) and her husband as hilariously reenacted by a maid to the female cook, as the cook, in turn, offers a running sarcastic commentary on what she has heard. Two particular articles come to mind when thinking of recent critical responses to The Women: Debra Fried’s feminist perspective in “The Men in The Women,” that emphasizes the hold a patriarchal view has on the staging of the film, despite the absence of males; and Alexander Doty’s exploration of camp and queer readings, “Queerness, Comedy, and The Women” (Flaming Classics) Both are fascinating essays, producing diametrically opposed appropriations of instances in the film. Fried emphasizes how men dominate all the female conversations, decrying the film’s patriarchal depiction of women, for which she holds Cukor responsible, while Doty celebrates the film’s queerness, in adulation of Cukor as a queer director, while sifting judiciously through various possible lesbian and gay male interpretations of scenes. Doty is especially strong on the drag-queen aspects of Sylvia’s (Rosalind Russell) and Crystal’s (Joan Crawford) portrayals, whereas Fried argues that what is most telling about Sylvia’s initial spying on Crystal at the department store perfume counter is how she sizes up potential and actual Crystals from a heterosexual male perspective. Each reading provides different, valuable insights. I am struck by how both angles on the film depart from its historical critical reception, colored as that was by familiarity with Claire Boothe Luce’s Broadway hit that ran from December of 1936 through 1938 and the author’s biography; the play and the subsequent film were seen in the context of Luce’s own life. She was a child actress of a single mother, later parvenu in the top echelons of Manhattan’s upper East Side by virtue of her marriages, first—as Claire Boothe— to millionaire George Tuttle Brokaw, then in 1935, after that union ended in divorce, to Henry Robinson Luce, the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune. Thus, the film was seen as an insider’s exposé of the malicious gossip of very privileged women, who, unlike Luce, did not pursue careers but rather centered their lives entirely on social activities. Luce’s attitude toward these women was seen as acerbic and scathing. The female writer aims her wit at other women, even while giving them lines critiquing men. If she gives the audience a good woman around whom to rally in Mary Haines, her authorial investment seems less in goodness triumphing and more in demonstrating that Mary needs to learn the laws of the gilded asphalt jungle, just as Luce learned to survive this milieu. Add the similar wit of Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, who collaborated on the screenplay, and one

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Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage  17

1.2  Mary (Norma Shearer, c.) goaded by her comically excessive cousin Sylvia (Rosalind Russell) to confront her husband’s paramour in The Women (MGM, 1939). Digital frame enlargement. must account for the play and film as a female critique of feminine roles in high society and marriage, coupled with a desire for change that emerges towards the end. As in Dinner at Eight, the film has a montage opening, in this case foregrounding the jungle motif by associating each character with an animal, an associational montage reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Strike. Here, the images introduce the comedic mode, notably establishing the predator, Crystal, as a leopard; the innocent prey, Mary and her daughter Little Mary (Virginia Weidler), as deer; and the gossip, Sylvia Fowler, as a black cat. Cattiness and gossip are often seen in American literature and film as negative components of women’s social life, be it in the small town, amongst social reformers, or in the urban haunts of privilege. In contrast, drag-queen culture elevates the witty put-down as central to self-expression, so it is no accident that Sylvia will be central to Doty’s queer reading, while Fried decries both the form and the significance of gossip in the film, pointing to “the garrulous soundtrack of The Women” and observing, “Its unrelenting acoustic onslaught of chat, gossip, counsel, complaint, sweettalk, cracks, bicker, and gab make it easy to understand why talkies may contain a moment of nostalgia for the silent era” (64). In taking aim at Cukor’s style to make her feminist argument, Fried misses his expertise at consistently framing dialogue exchanges in fascinating and

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18  George Cukor observant ways, with much clever variation in this film in particular. The Women is fast-paced sound comedy at it best, including the overheard comments as the camera sweeps by in tracking scenes, and much well-paced blocking and camerawork. A splendid opening scene takes place in the Art Deco beauty parlor and health spa, whose dimensions and automation recall the wash and brush-up shop in the Emerald City from 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, and, as Stanley Cavell notes, work to metaphorically display Hollywood’s own shaping of women (Pursuits of Happiness 212). Some of the most comic moments of this scene are incidental bits: an anonymous woman drops off her lap dog to a uniformed attendant in charge of a pack of small dogs; or, the camera floats through the two-storey set to extend its observation through a series of connected rooms in which mud baths, scientific facials, massages, and exercise machines each provide sarcastic looks— visual and verbal—at vanity and the servants that attend it, until we attain the manicure parlor that is the first instance to be central to the narrative. It is here that we first meet Sylvia, as the manicurist spills the gossip, via annotation of the “jungle red” lacquer color, about Stephen Haines’s adulterous affair with Crystal. This venue will later be joined by the ladies’ luncheon, the fashion show, the dress shop, the upper East Side apartment, and the Connecticut country house, sites that the film explores as the boundaries of these women’s lives. Insofar as there is a circle of friends, a group camaraderie amongst women, such alliances often serve as comic fodder, since few loyalties surmount the competitive treachery and backbiting remarks. At the core of this circle of women friends are cousins, Mary and Sylvia, whose family ties demand social courtesy, though Sylvia’s jealousy of Mary, and Mary’s awareness of Sylvia’s untrustworthiness are at issue from the beginning. Many (including, in some interviews, Cukor himself) find fault with the slower-paced, more conventional melodramatic scenes of the film, such as Mary’s discussion with her daughter about the meaning of divorce, which are thought to interfere with the pacing of the comedy (McGilligan 159; Levy 121; Lambert 108). However, such judgments do not take into account the principle of alternating tonalities (comedy juxtaposed to tragic scenes) that structure the film, and that set up the intergenerational conversations and activity of Mary with her mother (Lucille Watson) and daughter. The reflexivity of the home movie made by Mary and her daughter of their horse race to win the approval of the absent husband, and the commented-upon screening of Mary’s Bermuda vacation (actually her effort to give her husband time to repent his affair) set up a complex dynamic of interlacing humor with irony and sorrow. Another way to look at The Women is as an examination of companionate marriage. To her mother, Mary describes her marriage as one of partnership and enduring friendship. In return, her mother’s advice about Stephen’s affair counters Mary’s purportedly somewhat naive faith in fidelity with lessons she learned herself, as the silently suffering, cheated-on wife of an upper-class man of the previous generation, Mary’s father. Mary’s mother represents the strength of self-contained solitude, as she never discussed with her husband her knowledge of his philandering. Yet her strength has cost her. She has no women friends, no

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Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage  19 feminist interaction with women, something, as we shall see in the Reno dude ranch segment, that Mary keeps trying to pursue, despite her mother’s warnings. She warns Mary not to trust any of her women friends, a lesson she also credits to her own experience, voicing directly the misogyny inherent in much of this film: women are catty, never to be trusted. If the mother offers the “sage” face of past experience, it is a perspective superannuated by the honesty to which Mary aspires, and the young daughter, as well as characters later to be introduced, does become her trusted confidant. Little Mary first appears as a naive interlocutor to whom Mary can indirectly express her pain, all the more interestingly conveyed as she is trying to hide it. Little Mary will prove to be a precocious intelligence (a quality Weidler would reprise in The Philadelphia Story), as we see in the movie reenactment of her mother at a horse race made for the intended audience of her father, and in her response to the vacation footage her mother displays for her. Later, Little Mary becomes the primary agent of Crystal’s undoing, once she observes her father’s new wife, as she reports to her mother, “talking lovey-dovey with another man” from her bubble bath. So the melodramatic scenes are made to pay off in Little Mary’s later comedic turns, as in that bathroom scene in which she negotiates Crystal’s antagonism towards her with comically contrasting good manners. Cukor was also critical of Adrian’s flamboyant, avant-garde-inspired costumes and the inclusion in the black-and-white film of a Technicolor fashion show, elements the studio imposed on him in an effort to sell to a female audience (Lambert 109). Rather than see the fashion show as an intrusion, however, one might consider it surreal staging and editing that reiterate the visual humor of Sylvia’s eye-adorned costume early in the film. Especially noteworthy is one bathing suit cover-up that has a manikin’s hand as its large decorative button closure. In both this outfit and Sylvia’s, Adrian was citing Elsa Schiaparelli’s Parisian designs of the thirties for their humorous rethinking of apparel as an expression of artistic wit and intelligence. From the caged monkeys that open the fashion show; to the doubled fashion-show-within-the-fashion-show (via a shot that includes an “audience” that turns out to be more fashion models who turn to exhibit their ensembles to the camera); to the artificial seaside and Little-Bo-Peep sets that recall designs in early cinema, such as those of Georges Méliès; to the gargantuan test tubes and laboratory hosing that provide the background to the show’s most colorful textiles, the fashion show not only has its own brilliance, it underscores the manner in which the film maintains a modernist celebration of transformative change for women, of which fashion may serve as emblem. If, as one of the funniest lines in the film maintains, “A woman is compromised the day she’s born,” there is a celebration of the modern woman’s refashioning of self at work here, though one facilitated by wealth and leisure. The various inscriptions of class antagonism in the film are a counterpoint, and another of the ways the film presages change. In Sylvia’s first meeting with Crystal at the perfume counter, and in Mary’s confrontation with Crystal in a

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20  George Cukor fitting room, Crystal’s perspective as working-class woman fighting to have what the other more wealthy characters take for granted is expressed with verve. Yet, like Kitty in Dinner at Eight, Crystal oppresses her hired help, in this case a black stock clerk (Butterfly McQueen, uncredited), whom she tries to hire on the cheap to cook for her rendezvous that evening (an instance that tellingly speaks to the segregation practiced in New York City department stores in a period in which black women were confined to jobs not publically visible). In other ways, as well, Crystal’s goal of social ascendancy is tarnished by her duplicity and ruthlessness. Her working-class ambitions are doubled later in the film, when Miriam Aarons (Paulette Goddard) is introduced in Reno as a soon-to-be divorcée who has left her husband for a richer one—who just happens to be Sylvia’s. Miriam is as feisty as Crystal, but her practical goals and unconventional morality are tempered by sincere care for Mary, and for Peggy, working to divorce her husband until she finds out she is pregnant and realizes she still loves him. With her audacity, Miriam tempers the return of Mary and Peggy to their husbands, lending them her wisdom, stemming from her class background, as she teaches these more docile friends to recognize and fight for their desires.

No More Ladies A parallel treatment of modern marriage can be found in No More Ladies, a film that begins with a montage of a radium clock and wild revelers. This montage ends on a close-up on the clock surrounded by three Deco glass balls, one of which is subjected to an angry, manicured hand tapping out someone’s impatience. The camera tilts up to reveal the elegantly gowned Marcia (Joan Crawford) in her white Deco bedroom. That she is waiting for a tardy date is revealed by an insert on her pocket agenda; a cut back to the clock affirms that he is two hours late. The stood-up Marcia tears off her evening dress in an angry striptease, kicking her high heels across the room and revealing her legs emerging from lace shorts. The scene recalls Crawford’s earlier flapper roles, such as in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), in which angles on Crawford’s legs were a major element of framing. Yet rather than a free-living flapper, Marcia will be shown to be a young woman bent on a marriage that would reform her wild and inconsiderate beau, the confirmed bachelor Sherry (Robert Montgomery). As we shall see, however, she hopes to do this without his sacrificing the charm that amuses her. All the minor characters actively work to keep this unlikely couple from forming. Grandmother Fanny (Edna May Oliver) is protective of Marcia. Fanny’s gowns recall the Gibson-girl styles of the turn of the century, connoting an oldfashioned character, though her superannuation is only ambiguously evidenced in her dialogue. She is portrayed as a feisty individualist, declaring (in a retort that helped the film evade censorship) that she hasn’t said “darn” in ages, implying her facility with less polite language. Only later does she emerge, incongruously, as a prude. Similarly, Sherry’s cousin Eric Holden (Charlie Ruggles), whom they encounter at a nightclub once Sherry convinces Marcia to forgive him his tardiness, tries to

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Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage  21 preserve Sherry’s bachelorhood, as when he introduces Marcia to a prizefighter (Franchot Tone) to lure her so that Sherry won’t be tempted to succumb to marriage. The joke is on Holden, as Marcia, Sherry, and the fighter demonstrate wittily their long-standing friendship. Yet when Sherry is distracted by an old flame whom he might newly conquer, Marcia makes the bold move of leaving the nightclub with the prizefighter in Sherry’s car, retaliating for his flirtation. When he is later reunited with Marcia in the grandmother’s drawing room, the sparring nature of their relationship plays out, as each alternatively charms, chastises, or punishes the other.

1.3  Comic nonchalance in a marriage proposal in front of an open modern double-door refrigerator in No More Ladies (MGM, 1935). Digital frame enlargement. An adroitly staged proposal scene occurs later that same night in the kitchen, when Sherry convinces Marcia to offer him a snack. The scene showcases a large modern domestic space with a side-by-side refrigerator-freezer epitomizing the height of 1930s modernism. Distracted from their snacking, they leave both the refrigerator and the freezer door open, continuing their arch exchange in front of it, the open doors providing exquisite commentary on their upper-class nonchalance. Sherry’s response to what he interprets as an ultimatum is to offer Marcia a proposal steeped in a suave double negative, a prefiguration of how his philandering pleasure-seeking will continue well into the marriage. The film culminates with a party at Fanny’s summer home, featuring an elaborate modern ballroom with symmetrical curved staircases. One by one, all

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22  George Cukor the characters introduced earlier reappear, including Sherry’s most recent lover, followed by a crowd of anonymous partiers. After comic charades and dancing, Marcia turns the tables on Sherry by again leaving with Jim, the prizefighter. This act of rebellion on her part is calculated, and has the effect of winning Sherry back, now chastened by her exercise of a new single standard. No More Ladies frames Crawford, Montgomery, and Tone in Art Deco settings that lend style to their flirtation with modern alternatives to faithful, yet boring marriages, yet finally tries to demonstrate, rather unconvincingly, that style will not be lost once fidelity wins out. All three films I have looked at so far attempt to revitalize or restore the very upper-class marriages they get their energy from critiquing. Now let’s turn to one that shifts its comedic focus to the working-class marriage.

The Marrying Kind The Marrying Kind uses a device to motivate the about-to-be-divorced couple’s flashback narration of their marital history: the judge volunteers after hours to listen to their story without their lawyers present. This scene prefigures the advent of divorce mediation, in which a neutral third party helps couples resolve their conflict without adversarial dispute; by the end, it also serves as ad hoc marriage counseling. What is important to note is that Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon’s script precedes the institutional practice of divorce mediation in the United States by some twenty years (Kirton). Marriage counseling, on the other hand, has a much longer history, particularly as religious counseling, yet it gained great momentum as a secular therapy practice in the U.S. in the 1950s (Celello), just as this film was written. In other words, the film uses the judge, notably a sympathetic female (Madge Kennedy), to offer a “talking cure” for marital discord. As noted by Sarah Kozloff, the film’s use of discrepancies in the voice-over narration relative to the image is one of the most striking examples of ironic voice-over in film history (Invisible Storytellers 112). The dialog between Chet and Florence Keefer (Aldo Ray, Judy Holliday) extends through a lengthy portion of the flashback, but in each of three flashbacks the voice-over gives way to an equally long non-narrated section. Only in the midst of the third flashback do we briefly return to the judge and the couple in the present, a punctuation that, as we shall see, marks a shift in tone for the film. Chet claims, “It was just a pick-up,” while Florence rejoins, “It was not,” with Chet conceding, “Okay, it was not”; this is the contested introduction to the couples’ meeting in Central Park, narrated in close alteration first by the husband, then by the wife. Chet says that he and his buddy bet that the two women who had walked between them would look back. Just as the women do look back in the image, Florence in voice-over protests that they did not. Chet says that they did, because he can remember paying off the bet to his friend, a transaction shown in the foreground of the image. If momentarily the husband seems the more reliable narrator, his veracity is immediately undercut by his subsequent claim that the ruse of running around to arrange a second meeting was his friend

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Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage  23

1.4  “Sure enough, they look back,” Chet’s voiceover narrates the Central Park meeting of Florence (Judy Holliday, r.) in The Marrying Kind (Columbia, 1952). Digital frame enlargement. George’s insistent idea for which he felt no such enthusiasm, undercut by images of him exuberantly leading the way. Chet claims that in their play of repetition and reversals, he and George did walk between the two women, but never looked back. The image repeats the contradiction, showing the men actively looking at the women as they head into the back of the image. Just as this contradiction is shown, Florence underlines it: “It just so happens, I remember it differently.” It is additionally ironic that one of the first inscriptions of disagreement involves “looking back,” since retrospection marks the structure of this film, as it does all flashback films; in flashback use, the link between subjective memory and actual history develops significantly in American films of the 1940s, as I have explored in my book Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. The Marrying Kind’s knowing wit, such as this lovely play of rhyming reversals, underlines the larger irony of retrospection once subjectivity shows itself to be unreliable in the film. The necessity of the Hollywood film romance to differentiate “meeting cute” from pick-ups underlies a longstanding aim of naturalizing circumstance as it purifies such situations, particularly as far as the women are concerned. Good girls from D. W. Griffith’s protagonists on through Ginger Rogers meet men circumstantially, not because they are willing to be picked up. Stanley Donen’s On the Town (1949) goes to great lengths to distinguish Meeting the Love of One’s Life from the everyday pick-up of sailors on leave, as did the 1944 Broadway play

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24  George Cukor from which the film was adapted, even while using location shooting, as does The Marrying Kind, to ground its narrative encounters in specific New York City street environments. Thus the humor in this Central Park scene in The Marrying Kind also reflexively addresses its predecessors. The film’s narrative similarity to The Crowd was noted by Bosley Crowther in his original New York Times review: The charming and lastingly affecting thing about The Marrying Kind is its bittersweet comprehension of the thorniness of the way that stretches out for two young people after they have taken the marriage vows. This reviewer has fond recollections of King Vidor’s old film, The Crowd [1928], which was also about the frustrations of a young married couple in New York. The Marrying Kind compares to it, and that’s the nicest compliment we can pay. The similarity of the two films’ narratives includes parallel exploration of the circumstances of courtship in the modern city, tied to a Coney Island excursion in The Crowd and a less likely Long Island drive-in excursion in The Marrying Kind. Both films explore how male ambition is thwarted in the tedium of the workplace, making the man unable to function well in the family. A child’s death exacerbates the family crisis just when the couple is attempting to recommit to their marriage by doing something positive for their children (gifts in The Crowd, the picnic in The Marrying Kind). Yet, unlike the The Crowd, which develops from happy romance to tragedy, The Marrying Kind is more directly a comedy, at turns situational, slapstick, and satire, including some quite subtle jokes. One such is the elaborate joke on the Hays Code prohibition of the double bed even for married couples: moving into their first apartment after marriage, Chet and Florence return from their Atlantic City honeymoon to single mattresses on the floor, with an alarm clock between them. Chet suggests, in his bashful manner, that Florence order a double bed from the furniture man, if she is not too embarrassed to do so; in this way we hear not only his boyishness and his awkward attempt to express passion but the scriptwriters and director ribbing censorship. The fact that once the new furniture arrives the couple still have single beds confirms the power of the censor, although some commentators on the film seem to miss this reflexive joke. Later, the camera partakes of a sensuous single-bed gesture of its own: after a reconciliation, there is a shot that cranes into an overhead close-up of Chet and Florence’s embrace, finally framing them with her body encircling his head as she leans to kiss his face while their hands caress each other’s heads, accentuating the pose. Another departure from The Crowd may be remarked in Judy Holliday’s portrayal of the wife with much more gumption, indeed “chutzpah,” than Eleanor Boardman is granted in the silent film. Kanin and Gordon have written her dialogue (as well as some of Chet’s) with noticeable Yiddishisms, therefore a Brooklyn syntax, that Holliday (born Judith Tuvim) delivers with knowing cadence. In her case, this syntax gives her assertions forcefulness, and we

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Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage  25 imagine Florence would have no hesitation asking for the double bed, just as she calls all situations as she sees them. “No one could say there was anything wrong with the way it started out,” Chet summarizes the first flashback, cueing us that subsequent flashbacks will present more problems. Florence prepares us for more discord in the second one, by speaking of Chet’s ambitions, which, given the forces holding him back, lead to tensions. However, the “big blow-up” scene that opens this flashback sequence involves something that at first appears detached from work ambitions, Chet’s reluctance to attend a going-away party for Florence’s sister and her husband, leaving for a month’s trip to Europe. Yet this flashback will eventually extend to the issue of stagnation at work that Florence voiced, because inherent in the conflict is Chet’s discomfort with the relatives’ middle-class ascendancy, as he wishes for an invention that will catapult the family to wealth. Circumstances escalate. Chet stays late at work, due to an equipment breakdown that scatters ball bearings throughout the post office sorting floor. Left standing on a street corner, Florence expresses in voice-over her mounting fury, which escalates with Chet’s drunken behavior at the party and his flirtation with another woman. Florence’s growing anger at her husband culminates in a startling airport scene as they stand by the cyclone fence to send off the relatives. The plane noises interfere with the married couple’s argument, notably downing out a retort of Florence’s, for which we get only Chet’s comic response—another reflexive joke, both on sound mixing and on censorship: “I didn’t even think you knew words like that.” A spectacular dream sequence built from the “day’s residues” reworks earlier moments in the film, as Chet slides out of bed, and moves through a dissolve onto the post office’s conveyor belt. The patriotic fantasy of the President visiting their sorting facility transforms into a nightmare of the President slipping on the ball bearings left from the spill the day before, then metastasizes into Chet’s fullblown persecution fantasy for all his failures. “Shoot him at sunrise,” a phrase lifted from his own retorts to earlier incriminations, becomes literalized in his dream, as his wife is multiplied to form an entire firing squad, aiming rifles at him. Yet once Chet awakes, he is inspired by his nightmare to invent ball-bearing skates, only to have his elaborately diagramed and produced prototypes fail in a demonstration to his brother-in-law, who falls as catastrophically as did the dreamed President. The humor accruing to this dream and the invention it inspires is slapstick, filmed with great precision to the timing of the physical jokes and reactions. Yet satire builds as well, notably topical and observant of everyday life as Florence later discovers the lauding of a similar invention in a Life magazine in the hands of a fellow subway rider. A similar joke on the aspirational, yet finally defeated, circumstances of the working class surrounds a radio quiz show for which Florence guesses the right answer, privately, but Chet overrides with an incorrect answer. The female divorce-court judge responds to the recounted stories by wondering if they think their only marital trouble is “Not getting rich,” which would be an

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26  George Cukor illusion. As she tells them, “You wouldn’t believe how many rich couples I see here,” this serving as allusion to Cukor’s other marriage comedies. Florence’s indication that they are “hard luck for each other,” works as segue to the film’s final flashback sequences, ones that are fully tragic, but not before a detour to some more comic interludes. “The kind of love they have in books and movies that’s not for real people,” Chet offers one of the films famous, reflexive lines, and the judge’s insistent, “Why not?” sets up the ultimate ending on a reconciliation that Cukor, himself, found forced (Lambert 175). If Chet is still comically worried about money—“it seemed like I was working just to pay the obstetrician and pediatrician”—the comical interlude of a vacation each of them sees differently, and the images of joyfulness of the family, undercut each narrator’s subjective focus on both real economic troubles in Chet’s case and Chet’s obsessive worries about spending money in Florence’s. This happy vacation rendered ironically is followed by another outing, in which the drowning of the son is rendered masterfully, with visual understatement that provides its own irony. Cukor speaks of pride of the staging, in which he holds on the couple with their daughter in the foreground as others’ legs are seen rushing behind them in response to the calamity of the drowning, to which they are as yet oblivious. From this death, the flashback turns to death’s aftermath, again reworking elements of The Crowd: Chet purchases a toy for his son in an act of denial, then is hit by a truck as he turns to return it to the street vendor. The scene incorporates psychoanalytical observation as astutely rendered as the dream sequence was, showing the denial and dislocation of unresolved mourning. Losing a child without being able to directly address each partner’s separate grief is implicitly added to the film’s explanation of the marriage failure. Chet’s recovery in an upstate rest home and Florence’s return to work bring the narrative back to the financial and gender-role contestations that the film shows to be the underlying issues troubling working-class marriages in the fifties. The Marrying Kind came out only one year after “I Love Lucy” premiered on television on October 15, 1951, and precedes “The Honeymooners,” which didn’t appear until 1955. Television is ignored in the film in favor of a console hi-fi radio, the gift of which from a former boss is a point of contention in early sequences, and becomes the vehicle for the radio contest debacle. The omission bares a certain historical irony: television was to supplement, if not supplant film’s comic look at marriage, particularly working-class marriage and family. The edge which The Marrying Kind brings to this examination is particularly noteworthy, so sharp, in fact, that it perhaps explains why the film was not very successful upon first release. Yet contemporary analysts such as Judith E. Smith and Pamela Wojcek Robertson establish the importance of the film’s critical look at marriage, especially as it explores domestic space and the limitations on females within American postwar marriage culture. There is certainly a world of contrast between the apartment in which the film is centered, then newly opened, privately funded Peter Cooper Village, moderately priced and aimed at a lower-middle-class market, which the working-class

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Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage  27 characters of The Marrying Kind struggle to afford on only one salary, and the town houses, estates, summer houses, and luxury apartments that the characters in the other three films I have discussed take for granted, at least as long as their husbands’ businesses don’t fail, or their marriages don’t end in divorce. Cukor uses many of the same filmmaking skills to frame the arguments that ensue in either case, bringing to these works a discerning eye for the unfolding of a discussion, the tension of a disagreement, the duplicity of an undisclosed secret, the antagonisms of everyday life, even while he intimates the complexity of the thoughts granted his characters by his skilled collaborators: his writers, his designers, and certainly, his actors.

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Chapter 2 George Cukor’s Late Style: Justine, Travels With My Aunt, and Rich and Famous

Cukor’s Late Style

James Morrison “Late style is in, but oddly apart from the present” (Said 24)—so writes Edward Said in On Late Style. Published in 2006 following Said’s death in 2003, the book is an elegant treatment of the question of “lateness” in art and culture, its posthumous appearance making it a poignant example of its own subject. Although its wide-ranging anatomy of the theme demonstrates the mastery Said attributes to late style, it also remains fittingly incomplete, fittingly because the aspects of late style that Said emphasizes are its unsettled and unresolved qualities. Though Said acknowledges late works that reflect maturity, wisdom, and reconciliation—Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, Shakespeare’s The Tempest or The Winter’s Tale, Verdi’s final operas—he reserves his keenest interest for works in which “consciousness of being at the end” (14) shadows such qualities. He is most engaged with a kind of “mastery” that challenges our usual ideas of that concept, partaking of senescence, resignation, a refusal or harmony of final serenity. In this Said follows Theodor Adorno, whose work on Beethoven in particular influenced most serious discussion of late style in recent decades. For Adorno, as Said notes, lateness is “the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal” (13). Beethoven is the quintessential example because his final compositions turn so decisively away from the organic unity of his early work into something “wayward and eccentric” (10), even irascible and willfully resistant to prevailing tastes. Such resistance is the saving grace of late style, according to Adorno. For all its incongruities or discontinuities—because of them, in fact— late work stands apart from the habitual assumptions of its own time, whether because of a backward-looking commitment to now-outmoded practices or an evolution of techniques that derive from past work but take on altered meaning due to their differences from a new order that has arisen around them. Either way, the late work Adorno extols does not easily fit into reigning paradigms and cannot be readily co-opted by the zeitgeist. The question of late style is especially fraught in art forms like cinema that are industry-based and typically governed by organized institutions that

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Cukor’s Late Style  29 tightly regulate accepted norms, the Hollywood cinema remaining the paragon. Certainly three turning points in Hollywood history, the coming of sound, the collapse of the studio system, and the transition to digital technologies, at a stroke (or strokes of varying duration, the last one still painfully underway) rendered any previous style that managed to survive such shifts “late” in some literal sense. One need only revisit Griffith’s sound films to encounter the fascinating spectacle of a master out of his element, producing work of a stunning discordancy. Whether digital video will ultimately make any film on celluloid seem anachronistic remains to be seen, but hindsight reveals that the rise of the New Hollywood in the late sixties, virtually overnight, cast an enervating dusk on every facet of the industry. A certain belatedness attended the whole project of importing at long last some brand of modernism into Hollywood, modernism itself having run its devious course decades before in every other art (including corners of cinema, of course). This meant that for all the novelty of their approaches, the young Turks, callow mavericks, and film school auteurs who emerged with the New Hollywood were themselves late to the game. But it was the holdovers from the Classical era, especially those studio directors who declined to go gently into that good night, who found themselves by default, consciously or otherwise, exemplars of late style in its most irremediable forms. Among those Classical auteurs who continued to produce work on the cusp or in the flush of the New Hollywood—Robert Aldrich, Charles Chaplin, John Ford, Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway, Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph Mankiewicz, Vincente Minnelli, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, William Wyler— George Cukor was one of the more suggestive cases because from the start of his career in the early thirties his work had been notable for its versatility, his style obstinately malleable. Ranging across genres and cultivating a certain detached impersonality, Cukor has claims to being “the most elusive of major American auteurs” (15), as Christoph Huber remarks in a comprehensive treatment of Cukor’s work on the occasion of a major retrospective at the 2013 Locarno Film Festival. Huber’s subtitle tellingly conveys his verdict on Cukor: “A Master (of the) In-Between.” Huber aptly identifies the “Cukorian schism between public and private” (18) but cautions that “thinking in such binary terms does not get you anywhere with Cukor; it is all about dialectics” (18). In fact, critical accounts tend to emphasize the tensions or contradictions of Cukor’s work even more than is common in auteurist analysis. In one of the liveliest recent overviews, Dan Callahan finds Cukor’s films animated by a conflict between earthiness and elegance, “torn between crafty decorum and the wild nether reaches of excessive emotion.” The clash between possibilities of human freedom and countervailing constraints shapes most Cukor films, often staged as a choice between performance and genuineness, role-playing and authenticity. Yet Cukor’s obvious love of performance always complicates the dichotomy; in Cukor’s world, as Huber notes, “the acting never stops” (18). Moreover, if the defining feature of Cukor’s art is his manner with actors, it is “his refined treatment of performance as something that is both real and artificial” above all, according to Huber, that “marks him as a master of the in-between” (17–18).

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30  George Cukor As early as A Star is Born (1954), and in every film after My Fair Lady (1964), Cukor’s films “fit” less securely into the prevailing categories of the day than those of his career’s earlier decades. Justine (1969) and The Blue Bird (1975) are the most obvious “problem” films, and even the relatively undisputed masterpiece of Cukor’s late phase, Love Among the Ruins (1975), is in a minor key and holds the status of a “TV movie.” Indeed, Cukor’s willingness to work in television, with Love Among the Ruins and The Corn is Green (1979), suggests a quality of mellowness, even resignation, that in the work itself coexists visibly with a certain anxiety about being perceived as old-fashioned. Early in his career Cukor had been branded as being “on the consciously classic side” by critics like Otis Ferguson (170), and Huber’s take is representative of a wider critical consensus: “Cukor’s classicism—he always endorsed ‘invisible’ style—[though] at times barely concealing an astonishing modernism, was clearly out of step with the modes of cinema emerging after the studio era” (16). As his papers show, especially around the time of Justine, Cukor himself was quite concerned with this appearance of being “out of step.” In private correspondence, he noted with wry intonations but palpable pride as Justine was released that “I’m pleased . . . I’m really in” (Letter to Rodney Ford). In casting Justine, he sought actors with “contemporary” looks, and one agent writing on behalf of Dean Stockwell assured Cukor, “This sure as hell is a ‘different’ Dean than perhaps you have considered over the past few years; and about as contemporary as you can get!” (Note from Bill Robinson). Even so, Cukor never embraced an identity as an auteur, rejecting the status he might thereby have claimed. That Classical Hollywood was in its own waning period just as its major directors were receiving international acclaim as auteurs is not just an ironic coincidence. Among other things, auteurism discovered a latent modernism in Hollywood. But, as Huber notes, “Cukor portrayed himself as a man of the studio system, obedient within reason” (14). He spoke slightingly of auteur theory in interviews (see especially Lambert 12–20) and with outright disdain in private: “I wish you’d tell me what auteur means. I know it’s a French word meaning author. Apparently it’s not enough to be a directeur [sic] these days . . . Apart from everything else, it’s so pretentious—auteur indeed!” (Letter to Rodney Ford). Cukor’s late style does not bring to fruition an underlying modernism formerly frustrated by the system, as key late works of Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray, and Orson Welles did. Rather, maintaining the adaptability of Cukor’s studio years (beyond the points at which there was any stable baseline to adapt to), it adds the tension between classicism and modernism to the long-standing schisms of the director’s work that become sharper and stranger in this last phase. Justine is Cukor’s most sustained encounter with modernism and his most vigorous effort to engage with stylistic and narrative “advances” of the New Hollywood. Travels With My Aunt (1972) is something of a retrenchment, unapologetically “old-fashioned” in many ways, yet selectively incorporating new techniques and post-Production Code material in a manner that illustrates Cukor’s attitude toward the new dispensation. Rich and Famous (1981) synthesizes

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Cukor’s Late Style  31 these approaches; as a remake of Old Acquaintance (Vincent Sherman, 1943), it harks back to Classical Hollywood after the New Hollywood itself had waned, yet it evinces a certain surface chic more effortlessly than any of Cukor’s other late films. As comfortably as Rich and Famous sits alongside other “women’s films” of the eighties, from Claudia Weill’s It’s My Turn (1980) to Garry Marshall’s Beaches (1988), it is also the only one of the director’s films to engender explicit discussion of Cukor’s homosexuality. More than Cukor’s other later films, these three describe an arc that defines the trajectory of Cukor’s late style in all its strangeness and, ultimately, its very particular kind of queerness.

Justine and New Hollywood Modernism The New Hollywood introduced a current of modernism into mainstream American movies in its experiments with form and narration, its systematic deconstruction of conventional genres, and its general tendencies toward skepticism and demystification. An important part of this trend drew upon works of modernist or quasi-modernist fiction and drama that had not been adapted previously due to constraints of classical style or restrictions of the Production Code. The American independent filmmaker Joseph Strick made a career of such projects in the 1960s and 1970s, working his way through Jean Genet (The Balcony, 1963), James Joyce (Ulysses, 1967, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1977), and Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer, 1970). Based on material from Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” Justine began as a Strick project. An acclaimed work of late modernism, Durrell’s sequence of novels deals with religious and colonial conflict in the waning days of British rule in Egypt in the late thirties. In fact, the project had originated earlier with Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s ambition to film the quartet around the time he was adapting another tale of international intrigue, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1958). In interviews, Cukor suggests that Strick shot mostly unusable footage on location in Tunisia before he was fired and the production ordered back to Hollywood (Lambert 250–1). The production notes indicate that very little of Strick’s footage was used; even many of the exteriors that appear in the final film were shot in Hollywood (Justine production notes). As realized by Cukor, in any case, the film retains significant features in common not only with the run of Strick’s films but with New Hollywood modernism more generally. As a rule, these films played up modernism’s taboo subject matter and played down its formal experiments and its challenges to traditional realism. The poetic, densely textured narration of Durrell’s Justine aspires to a retrenched stream-of-consciousness, nowhere near the radical experiments of a Joyce or a Woolf but attuned more to the play of memory than to the cause–effect determinants of linear narrative. Strick’s relatively literal-minded renderings of Joyce tend to reduce the books to their stories, and the film version of Justine similarly attempts to extrapolate a more stable through-line from the erratic flux of Durrell’s narrative technique. Given the material, as with Strick’s adaptations, this effort can succeed only marginally, and Cukor’s direction,

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32  George Cukor though surprisingly lithe, also turns on strategies of deferral and delay—most significantly a pattern of prolonged, disjunctive reaction shots, lingering closeups of characters gazing at nothing in particular. After a feverish and over-stuffed opening sequence in which a prostitute (Anna Karina) ingests Spanish Fly, the film settles into a slow, pensive rhythm interrupted periodically and sporadically by quick lurches forward or sideways (in several digressive, strangely emphasized brothel scenes), ending in a final stretch as narratively packed as the opening interlude but curiously impassive in its execution. Unexpressed feeling is one of the film’s chief subjects, and its watchful, torpid atmosphere underlines the theme with a listless melancholy. In a film otherwise dominated by Cukor’s usual detached long shots, the most characteristic images of Justine recur across several of its close-ups, intense shots of faces that seem wholly devoid of emotion, even the eyes vacant, yet brimming with unshed tears. Another key influence on New Hollywood modernism is the international art cinema, and Cukor’s film overtly bids to capture some of its aura in the casting (largely inherited from Strick), that features several refugees from the 1960s art film. The title role is played by Anouk Aimée, whose roles in films by Federico Fellini, Jacques Demy, and Claude Lelouch had positioned her as a successor of sorts to Brigitte Bardot, although her portrayal of Justine exhibits far more world-weary ennui than passionate earthiness. Dirk Bogarde, Anna Karina, and Philippe Noiret bring a range of associations to their roles as a consul, a prostitute, and a bureaucrat, with Bogarde in particular performing a study in tight-lipped repression redolent of his work in Joseph Losey’s 1960s chamber films The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967). As a sort of pastiche of art-film tropes, Justine evokes Losey in its fascination with exotica and turpitude, but Cukor treats the material with a studied equanimity that recalls Antonioni’s anomie more than it does Losey’s hothouse expressionism. Aimée, Bogarde, Karina and John Vernon, as Justine’s powerful but softspoken husband Nessim, all play their roles with an extreme understatement, quite in keeping with Antonioni but essentially unheard of in a Cukor film. Along with its other art-film trimmings, and given Cukor’s long-standing directorial investment in performance above perhaps any other element, Justine is perhaps most interesting as an effort to create a context to accommodate emergent performance styles of European new waves of the time. Among other things, these were variously characterized by a concerted withdrawal of affect (as in Antonioni) or a heightened spontaneity (as in the Czech renaissance) or, in special cases, both, as in Godard (Karina’s performances in his films providing key examples) and much of the French New Wave. As an “actor’s director” across four decades, Cukor had created cinematic spaces previously to showcase a range of performance styles, though these had nearly always maintained a core of Hollywood professionalism in the old style, and they encompassed the decisive shifts that conditioned even the most conventional Hollywood acting in the 1950s and 1960s. One of the defining features of Cukor’s work had been a reliance on counterpointed performances, most obviously in the union of Spencer Tracy’s taciturn stolidity with Katharine Hepburn’s tremulous emotionalism,

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Cukor’s Late Style  33 but also in the willowy stylization of Judy Holliday set against the straight-fromthe-shoulder directness of William Holden or the breathless flutter of Marilyn Monroe set against the silken elegance of Yves Montand, among many other examples. Among the elements that distinguish Justine from Cukor’s early work is the relative consistency of its ensemble. Those performances not defined by extreme understatement produce alienation effects of other kinds, and the performers are, in any case, pointedly segregated from the major players, largely defusing the contrapuntal effects of contrasting performance styles. Recalling his work in Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le métro (1960), Noiret plays a French diplomat given to unpredictable episodes of transvestitism, in a warm and buoyant performance that is, however, relegated to the sidelines. He appears in drag in a string of sequences set in undifferentiated brothels and cabarets that serve to sketch the “dissolute” character of the milieu. Sudden and truncated eruptions in the narrative, these scenes are notable for their lack of integration into the plot, and the relation of Noiret’s character to the main storyline is barely suggested. A gay character played by Cliff Gorman conjures vagrant shades of Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band (not released in William Friedkin’s film version until 1970, but in which Gorman had starred on Broadway in 1968), but he is even more marginal than Noiret, appearing—albeit persistently—mostly peripherally until he aggressively comes on to Justine’s unruly brother-in-law (Robert Forster) at an orgiastic masked ball and is stabbed to death. Other than the episode of poisoning in the opening sequence, this is the only event in the film that is treated on an emotional scale appropriate to the action, if not over-stated, with shrill music cues, dissociative editing, and shock-cuts. Amid the general dispassion, the sequence is shocking indeed, yet the event is barely referred to again. The poisoning and the murder stand out as the most dramatically wrought (or over-wrought) scenes in the film, despite their minimal effect on the plot. Following in quick succession, the series of climaxes greatly consequential to the narrative—revelations of intrigue and incest, further deaths and a suicide—are all the more striking, by contrast, for the cool, sedate treatment they receive. Production notes indicate that Cukor’s “contemporary” touches were an object of some controversy. The producer, Pandro S. Berman—who at the disastrous premiere of Sylvia Scarlett (1935) over thirty years earlier had dramatically told Cukor that he never wanted to see him again—expressed unease with these elements. In his editing notes on the rough cut, Berman singled out as distracting flash-cuts, various cutaways, cut-ins, and other techniques of discontinuity (“First Run with Mr. Berman” n.p.). In notes on a later run, some viewers remark on the unconventional nature of the reaction shots: “Everyone wasn’t in accord on whether [one character] was seeing [another] when he looks up” (Justine Cutting Notes 9). By comparison, Cukor’s own notes in the same folder favor just these aspects and the fact that each of the offending instances appears in the final cut shows that he prevailed. In general, Cukor’s notes confirm his effort to achieve unusual effects of pacing and a generally elliptical texture. Although some of the cutting notes point to a typically Cukorian briskness (“Mr.

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34  George Cukor

2.1  Polymorphously perverse revelries stall the narrative of Justine (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1969). Collection of the author. Cukor wants faster pace. . .” [1]), most emphasize protraction: “Add [shots] to stretch moment” (6); or “Stretch Justine’s entrances” (11). As his notes make clear, Cukor also sought editing effects that would “Somehow point up irony” (1). As further evidence of the director’s intentions, the composer of the film’s score, in his own notes on the production, remarks the difficulty of fitting music cues to the film’s strange rhythms and of achieving compositional effects to match the film’s elliptical qualities (Jerry Goldsmith’s Notes). In a sense, such aspects of the film’s narrative and its patterns of emphasis are only more pronounced variations on significant tendencies of Cukor’s earlier work: the general resistance to conventional development, the inclination to digress and deviate, the interest in ostensibly “marginal” events and characters. But the affective structure of Justine, its desolate, strangely vacant feeling of melancholy, is virtually unprecedented in Cukor’s oeuvre. The director’s characteristic persistence in shots around the long-to-medium scale is tempered here, as noted earlier, by an unusual preponderance of close-ups, specifically—even more unusual for Cukor—reaction shots, framed to stall the narrative yet, due to the blank, impassive facial expressions of the actors, to withhold the emotional shadings or subtexts of conventional reaction shots. These shots strongly suggest the direct influence of Antonioni since, like Antonioni’s reaction shots in his films of the 1960s, they are rarely contextualized in ordinary ways. Rather, they

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Cukor’s Late Style  35 are lingering close-ups of characters gazing into space, and the pattern is general; every major character is shown in such an attitude of sad blankness at some point in the film, often when some more palpable reaction is clearly called for. Cukor’s characteristic avoidance of point-of-view shot structures remains in force in Justine, so the reaction shots take on an abstracted, fractional quality, apart from the already-diffuse narrative flow. Often, as in Antonioni’s shots, they do not connote the act of looking at all, because the shots are so dissociated that it is unclear what the reaction is reacting to, what the subject of the shot is looking at, if anything. In Cukor’s typical frontal compositions in the medium-to-long shot spectrum, the viewer is often encouraged to note how the characters sharing the frame fail to look at one another, and this is certainly the case in Justine, although at least in the interiors the compositions tend to be more compressed and starker, less “sumptuous,” than is common in Cukor. Something of the same effect is amplified in the reaction shots. Often, they are shots of people looking beyond other people, or looking away, or looking at nothing, refusing to respond, even if the tears that well in their eyes belie that failure. Cukor’s sophistication previously lacked the cosmopolitan irony of such auteurs as Fritz Lang or Douglas Sirk. It had instead a casual, pragmatic edge. But Justine brings just such an element to it. As the film’s key motif, the inexpressive close-up is the principal vehicle of this irony. In Lang and Sirk (and later, under their influence, in Fassbinder), the blank reaction shot signifies a certain obliviousness, blindness, a failure to see. A long pivotal scene in Justine has a blind character at its center (played by Elaine Church), but the scene unfolds with no mention of her blindness. It is revealed only much later, along with the disclosure that she is in an incestuous relationship with her brother (the character played by Bogarde), and after these revelations we do not see her again. Like most knowledge in Cukor, this knowledge is strictly qualified; only in retrospect do we understand the character’s withdrawn demeanor, her unfocused gaze, her tendency to look away or beyond others. In part this is because those around her do the same. More to the point, Cukor’s gentleness prevents any criticism of his characters as severe as Lang’s or Sirk’s of theirs. Cukor’s characters may be oblivious, but we are granted no superior knowledge in relation to that trait. Whether literal or figurative, this blindness is a condition shared among the characters (and to some extent with the audience).

Abstraction and Rhythm in Travels With My Aunt Based on one of the lightest of Graham Greene’s “entertainments,” as the writer dubbed his less serious novels, Travels With My Aunt concerns the encounter between Henry, a risk-averse middle-aged banker (Alec McCowen), and his elderly free-spirited Aunt Augusta (Maggie Smith), who draws him into an outrageous and increasingly dangerous series of capers, from smuggling marijuana to fencing a stolen painting to ransom her former lover, a certain “Mr. Visconti,” from violent criminals. Like many of Cukor’s films of the Classical era, the film’s plot turns on a tension between reticence and passion. A similar conflict

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36  George Cukor runs through many of the definitive films of the New Hollywood, from Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968) to Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970), from Skidoo (Otto Preminger, 1968) to Such Good Friends (Preminger, 1972), from Taking Off (Milos Forman, 1972) to Save the Tiger (John G. Avildsen, 1973). Typically, such films ultimately prefer the ardors of the counter-culture over the reserve of the establishment, these being the terms in which the conflict is often framed. Cukor’s film remains poised between the poles in a kind of resolute ambivalence that further expresses the complexity of the director’s position in the New Hollywood. The last shot is virtually the only close-up in the movie, an image of a tossed coin spinning in slow-motion that will decide the characters’ fates, with the outcome coyly withheld when an arch freeze-frame leaves the coin stranded in mid-air and the movie blithely ends. Assiduously episodic in its structure, Greene’s novel consists almost entirely of antic colloquies, and although Cukor’s film prods the plot slightly toward greater action, it retains the halting, tenuous rhythms of the book. While these might have played to some viewers as signs of an atavistic awkwardness rather than instances of quasi-modernism, it was really at the level of technique that Cukor, like other directors of the Classical era attempting to adjust to the New Hollywood, faced the clearest challenges. Even if Cukor’s style is never (pace Otis Ferguson) strictly “classical” in some pejorative sense, it is certainly based on values of refinement, modulation, an unfussy fastidiousness, and indeed, a certain reticence, all qualities increasingly obsolete in the free-wheeling milieu of the New Hollywood, with its smash-zooms, reeling cameras, and accelerated, disjunctive editing patterns. In Travels With My Aunt, less concerned than in Justine with cultivating an updated style, Cukor permits himself exactly three indulgences in such fashionable pyrotechnics (aside from the final freeze-frame), and examining them is instructive for understanding more fully the nature of Cukor’s engagement with emerging cinematic trends. In Travels With My Aunt, as in most of his work, Cukor favors long takes and relatively long shots, cinematic space observed at some distance over some duration. Unlike many masters of the long take who build their shots around successive revelations of mise-en-scène—Murnau, Mizoguchi, Ophuls, Minnelli—Cukor emphasizes effects of precision and simultaneity over those of accumulation and gradual disclosure. Camera movement plays a minor role in the long takes of Travels With My Aunt, and in the sense that they are usually also long shots that show the “whole” space at the start of a sequence, they can seem uninflected. Frequently, a key element of staging reveals in retrospect something surprisingly exacting about the camera’s placement. Cukor’s lone use of a zoom, that most characteristic trope of the day, occurs in one such shot. A wayward high angle slopes down above an ornate staircase, seeming to focus on the milling crowd beyond the balustrades. Henry and one of his aunt’s eccentric cronies straggle into the middle distance, their appearance vaguely forecast by a prior shot, and when they pause to confer whimsically, it seems clear that the sharp cut to this oblong angle has slyly prefigured their movement into the frame. A moment later, however, they saunter off, and with breathtaking precision the camera

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Cukor’s Late Style  37 zooms past them into the crowd below to close in on an eagle-eyed surveillant ominously shadowing them. Synchronized uncannily with the awkward motion of the figures in the middle ground, the movement is undeniably sudden but so graceful that it seems free of flourish, even as its beeline linearity redoubles the sense of exactitude about the camera’s initial placement. In its most familiar uses of the day, the zoom shot enunciates abrupt and unexpected discoveries of elements within cinematic space; it figures suddenness and immediacy, acceleration and impulsivity. The New Hollywood imported it from cinéma vérité and television, in part to capture just these aspects of the purported zeitgeist, as a synecdoche for the spirit of the age in its turmoil and transformation, its agitation and exhilarating change. Cukor’s modified use of the figure—so remote from its quicksilver flare-ups in Petulia or the you-arethere torrents of Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969)—seems predicated on the expected and the already known. The plot-point it serves is pure cliché, however wryly framed, so the elegance of the zoom conveys a sense of imperturbability and of being foreordained, giving it a discreet self-reflexivity that attests eloquently to Cukor’s lateness, the sense of his style being “in but oddly apart from” the New Hollywood. A more sustained example illustrates the intricate dialectic of stylistic consistency and inconsistency, regressiveness and progressiveness that marks Cukor’s late style. With its globe-trotting, time-spanning plot, the film chronicles various styles of mid- to late-twentieth-century pan-European “decadence” in a range of manners vaguely redolent of late Visconti (whose name coincidentally haunts the film in the person of Augusta’s wayward lover) or Bertolucci—a shot of two women dancing appears to allude directly to The Conformist (1970)—with an added layer of insulating whimsy. Like Justine, Travels With My Aunt incorporates many scenes in cabarets and brothels that seem mainly intended to stoke the mood and atmosphere though they advance the plot a bit more in the later film. In one such sequence, Cukor marshals Visconti- and Bertolucci-like uses of hyper-saturated color and colored lights, but lessens the voluptuary overtones by excluding the sinewy camera movement that makes Bertolucci’s first color films seem so avidly responsive to the “decadent” imagery they place on view. Cukor’s treatment of similar material is hardly prissy, but it retains a certain distance by fixing the camera in place, with a somewhat cramped perspective. (In fact, it is closer to Douglas Sirk’s depiction of the club where Sarah Jane performs near the end of Imitation of Life [1959].) A dancer enters from behind the camera in a delirious wash of red light that sets her flaming-red leotard ablaze. Cut off in the shot from the waist up, she gyrates frantically; the fragmentation of the body in the shot connotes a quality of fetishism less than it undercuts the concreteness of the image, by contrast with the vivid and sensual, sensory imagery of The Conformist. Andrew Sarris attributes a quality of abstraction to Cukor’s work as a whole, especially in the “modernist compositions” of his color films (Sarris, “George Cukor”), while Rudolf Arnheim argues that an increasing abstraction is a defining feature of late style in general, as a function of the “changing generation and

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38  George Cukor distribution of energy” in a given artist’s work, with “the subject matter gradually absorbed by an ever more conspicuous texture” (Arnheim 155–6). Certainly a vein of abstraction runs through Cukor’s late films, never threatening to dominate but establishing an undercurrent that shades even the films’ earthiest images. The scene in the cabaret, for example, begins with a sudden cut to a saturated red surface that fills and holds the frame with the ineffable intensity of a Rothko canvas. For several seconds—its strangeness makes it seem longer—this vibrant vacancy puts the already tentative narrative on hold before the camera pans blithely sideward into the scene, little concerned to place the surface in any material context. Similarly, the film begins with the camera roving delicately along the outlines of shapes that only at the end of the opening credits prove to be the curves of the body in a nude painting of the young Augusta that will figure later in the story. A series of flashbacks showing scenes from Augusta’s youth are initiated with images gently stylized to render their objects insubstantial and de-familiarized, most memorably an ethereal twilight image of a gondola that first appears to be a swan, gliding slowly across glimmering water, an image that seems in the process of dissolving into delicate illegibility even as we watch. The final example in the film that incorporates stylistic devices typical of the New Hollywood occurs in another of the cabaret/brothel set pieces, when the scene shifts to Istanbul. The camera whirls in a brief frenzy amid cutaway shots displaying glimpses of exotica in a hectic montage showing glimpses of hanging kilims and Turkish mosaics. Following this burst of activity the film settles again into its more characteristic placidity, but such willed disturbances, contained as they are, contribute significantly to the strange rhythms of the film as a whole. In a sense, these transient excursions heighten the sense of filmic abstraction; so deliberately do they depart from the film’s overall calm, so fleetingly do they arise, that they come to seem largely notional, conceptual explorations rather than realized set pieces. Their effects depend on a certain incompatibility with the predominant tenor of composure. Cukor’s films have always moved with unusual rhythms, mixing briskness with interludes of languor, buoyancy with a strange current of inertia, and his films in the New Hollywood elevate this strangeness to a greater prominence. Travels With My Aunt presents a smooth, mostly unruffled surface, yet within a controlled range its rhythms shift constantly. Often the film portends a release from these bounds, from its own reserve, only to reassert them all the more firmly. A sudden cut to an airplane taking flight as music swells will suggest the possibility of breaking free in an exalted ascent, only to be sharply countered with an equally sudden cut that truncates the aerial effect and cuts off the music’s swirl: a shot of Augusta and Henry strapped in their seats, the bemused banker asking sourly why they have to travel first-class. A play between expansion and compression defines the film’s odd cadences, and underlines its theme of the tension between freedom and repression, liberation and constraint.

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Cukor’s Late Style  39

2.2  “Why must we travel first class?” Liberation vs. constraint in Travels With My Aunt (MGM, 1972). Collection of the author.

Queer Cukor: Rich and Famous Rich and Famous is far from being George Cukor’s coming-out movie—in fact, he never did make that film—although he did come out in an interview with The Advocate just after the film was released (Long 174–84). It isn’t even his queerest film; that honor goes to Sylvia Scarlett, near the start of his career. The story of a friendship between two women across many years, Rich and Famous features no gay or lesbian characters in central roles, and it even lacks the lesbian-coded sidekicks—Eve Arden, Thelma Ritter, and others—who gave a queer spin to the “women’s films” of Classical Hollywood. What it does have are the only explicit sex scenes of any Cukor film, going beyond those of The Chapman Report (1962) and the desultory make-out sessions and nude scenes of Justine. The treatment of these scenes in particular provides an invaluable angle on the gay sensibility of Cukor’s films and the character of his late style. By most reports, Cukor was never closeted in the ordinary sense. Rather, his sexuality was an “open secret,” and his home served as a sort of hub for the rise of gay culture in Los Angeles, as James McCourt and many others attest (McCourt 13). Even if insider knowledge of his sexuality sometimes shaped the production and reception of his films—his being designated a “women’s director,” of course, is rife with coded suppositions—surprisingly little attention has been paid to

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40  George Cukor Cukor as a gay filmmaker. Alexander Doty’s treatment of Cukor in Making Things Perfectly Queer is one significant example, but it is noteworthy that Doty, writing in 1993, considers only Cukor’s work of the Classical era, with no discussion of any of his work after the 1950s. Accordingly, Doty makes much of formal and sub-textual features of the work, highlighting “moments where actors and the construction of the gaze work together to create queer spaces within an apparently straight narrative” (33). In his one public reference to homosexuality prior to the Advocate interview, Cukor straightforwardly notes the constraints of the studio system: “I turned . . . down [Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1958] because at that time it wasn’t possible to deal honestly with the homosexuality” (Lambert 248). By 1969, after a fashion, it would have been possible; Cukor’s longevity meant, pace Said, that he had “survived” to a point where depictions of homosexual characters were no longer prohibited. That he never did make a coming-out film certainly represents an opportunity lost. Cukor’s work is best understood in a tradition that is central to pre-Stonewall gay male sensibility. As David M. Halperin shows, this is an essentially “sexless” tradition, devoted to “breathless absorption in a world of fascinating and precious objects, the maniacal preoccupation with sconces and silver and cut-glass and woodwork and all those aesthetic satisfactions that seem to have nothing to do with sexual pleasure” (329—30). Halperin’s tally is a virtual description of the mise-en-scène of a “typical” Cukor film, from Gaslight (1944) to My Fair Lady, Justine, and Travels With My Aunt. Aside from the preoccupation with aesthetic surface, Rich and Famous extends two other key themes of Cukor’s work that serve to define the particular qualities of his sensibility as gay in a distinctive sense: a concern with friendship as a form of solidarity and an alternative to familial or marital bonds, and an identification with women that turns in particular on the nature of their desires for men. The first of these requires a sharp turn on the original material, since Old Acquaintance derived from an alternative strain of Old Hollywood gay male sensibility (in which Cukor too participated in certain earlier films), a misogynistic one that fetishized hostile relations of rivalry among women as a source of resentful occulted pleasure. With the help of Gerald Ayre’s script, Cukor’s direction of Rich and Famous molds the performances to show how the friendship between Liz (Jacqueline Bisset) and Merry Noel (Candice Bergen) endures for decades in spite of Merry Noel’s many slights and outright betrayals. Cukor’s film is about the women’s loyalty, not their competition. Merry Noel’s obliviousness has its loveable side, tempered by the broad comic strokes of Bergen’s performance, with an attendant warmth, and Liz’s affection for her is understandable, especially since it is chilled with constant exasperation. Their bond resides in shared attitudes that the film itself is dedicated to affirming, a simultaneous susceptibility to romantic idealism and an ironic detachment from it. The same mix defines Cukor’s gay sensibility, but to think of these characters as disguised versions of gay men, as reviewers like Pauline Kael did (247–8), is to collapse a species of gay male identification with women into mere identity, an empathetic mirroring into a narcissistic projection.

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Cukor’s Late Style  41

2.3  Loyalty over rivalry: Liz (Jacqueline Bisset, l.) and Merry Noel (Candice Bergen) in Rich and Famous (United Artists, 1981). Collection of the author. The sex scenes in particular illustrate this distinction. They may be the most homoerotic depictions of heterosexuality in American cinema, yet they highlight the difference between the women’s pleasure in the male body and the camera’s way of looking at the same body. Cukor makes full use of the camera’s position as the excluded third party in a figurative ménage-à-trois. Often he shoots the men from a position behind them, with the women facing both the men and the camera. Framed to emphasize the men’s buttocks, these shots suggest an anal eroticism nowhere registered in the manifest content. In general, Cukor films the male body apart from his female characters’ points of view: however turned on Liz is by the men she has sex with, her pleasure is always self-referential. In a scene where she has sex with a man in an airplane restroom as the plane lands, Cukor cross-cuts between close-ups of Liz’s face and the plane’s landing gear descending, to suggest not that the sex act is mechanical but that its intensity all but absents the man, who is barely shown in the fierce cutting. It’s not inaccurate to say that Liz uses men for sex, but far from demonizing her promiscuity the film celebrates the self-sufficiency of her pleasure and affirms the emotional quality of her “anonymous” encounters as friendly rather than romantic. In this sense Rich and Famous in part fulfills Cukor’s foiled ambition in The Chapman Report to show women’s erotic “problems” as matters of social definition more than of women’s sexuality. As if repurposing Claire Bloom’s “nymphomaniac” from The Chapman Report, Rich and Famous depicts a “promiscuous” woman with almost complete approval.

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42  George Cukor In the scene in which a young man (Matt Latanzi) picks Liz up in the street— Kael contemptuously remarks that it “doesn’t seem like what a women would get into” (248)—Cukor makes especially complex use of the distinction between the camera’s gaze and the character’s point of view. The storyboards point up the construction around sharp cuts, intense close-ups of Liz’s face and longer shots of the man’s body (Rich and Famous Storyboards). In a sense, Kael is not exactly wrong to suggest that the scene plays as “homosexual fantasy”; dressed in tight blue jeans, the man recalls the “clone” look of seventies gay culture and he appears to be stripping for the camera more than for Liz. Indeed, the scene’s homoerotic element is rooted in a teasing visual pleasure, while its heterosexual counterpoint turns less on the dynamics of looking. The scene’s culmination is a shot of the man’s torso filling the left of the frame as Liz slowly presses her lips to his chest, her eyes closed. Fluid and self-sustaining, her sexuality is linked to inwardness, reverie, non-maternal tenderness, tactility. The scene as a whole depends on the coincidence and divergence of gay and heterosexual female desires, exploring their affinities and variations. For all that, Rich and Famous remains more congruent with Classical Hollywood and the Celluloid Closet than with the New Hollywood and its selfdeclared “frankness,” and in fact, Cukor’s movies include fleeting examples of internalized homophobia to the very end. By the time Rich and Famous was released, Hollywood’s vaunted but pallid efforts to “deal with” homosexuality in a “positive” way—in such films as Arthur Hiller’s Making Love (1982)—were barely underway. Later books like McCourt’s Queer Street and Halperin’s How to Be Gay explore how these “advances” successively rendered increasingly obsolete the concept of “gay sensibility” as Cukor exemplified it, and in turn eclipsed an important segment of queer culture while heedlessly effacing main lines of gay history. Perhaps it is most accurate to say that Cukor’s films of Classical Hollywood are queer while his films of the New Hollywood and after are more decisively gay. Such an understanding links this issue suggestively to Cukor’s lateness. In a post-Stonewall context, Cukor’s persistence in a pre-Stonewall sensibility defined by obliquity and camp aestheticism gives his last films an edge of nostalgia, as if mourning the loss of a secret self and of the very sensibility it sought to preserve.

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Chapter 3 Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names: It Should Happen to You, Les Girls, Camille, and Romeo and Juliet

Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names

Dominic Lennard

A number of George Cukor’s films focus on the critique and correction of social personae, featuring protagonists who must fuss over the most “appropriate” or socially desired presentation of self. In It Should Happen to You (1954), the focus on public image assumes fantastic proportions when ditzy nobody Gladys Glover (Judy Holliday) blows her savings on billboard space, brandishing her name in gigantic lettering high over the city for no reason other than to see herself situated this way. Through the miracle of public relations, Gladys is instantaneously celebritized, although no one can quite say why she deserves to be. Yet, she is ridiculed for her grotesque self-presentation by the everyday photographer (Jack Lemmon) who loves her and eventually she renounces her exploded self-image for an identity of normal proportions. In Les Girls (1957), problematic female self-image is again foregrounded through a libel case hinging on a dancer’s sexual propriety. Again, male desire sets the standard for the “proper” female self-image: sitting in the courthouse, the plaintiff’s (Taina Elg) fiancé (Jacques Bergerac) perpetually recalibrates his love for her as he is forced to absorb one after another the purported details of her indecency. In Camille (1936), an ex-courtesan, Marguerite (Greta Garbo), having allowed stigma to reconstitute her self-image, rejects her lover (Robert Taylor) for fear of marking him with the same social taint. Inured to performing her affections for wealthy suitors, Marguerite must tragically perform rejection of the man she does love. Socially forbidden love is similarly centralized in Cukor’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (1936), in which the tides of passion conflict with social taboos and reputations. Here the principal actors’ incongruous ages—Norma Shearer was thirty-four when the film premiered; Leslie Howard was forty-four—mean their performance of this archetypal heterosexual courtship is denaturalized—rendered routine and artificial. This chapter discusses the above films’ focus on socially condoned and legitimated identities, especially on their tendency to articulate a particular performance of self as the truthful and necessary expression of one’s identity while concealing broader social forces that work to disempower the individual.

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44  George Cukor The four films also illustrate selves that transcend societal prescriptions and, consequently, cannot ever find stable realization within the filmic world that contains them.

Bringing her Back to Earth: It Should Happen to You In It Should Happen to You, recently fired and airheaded ingénue Gladys Glover (Holliday) meets documentary filmmaker Pete Shepherd (Lemmon) in Central Park after he films her arguing with a fellow park patron. Of more immediate importance to Gladys, however, is the gigantic and tantalizingly blank billboard above Columbus Circle that she spots on her way home. As she stands beneath it, she mentally conjures G L A D Y S G L O V E R on the blank space in a variety of fonts and configurations, these dazzling variations accompanied by the soundtrack’s trumpet fanfare and the open-mouthed Gladys’s nods of glee. Gripped by these visions, she visits the relevant agency to lease the space at enormous cost to advertise her name, a seemingly warped endeavor that nevertheless precipitates great fame. The tale of a young woman who becomes “famous merely for being famous,” in Daniel Boorstin’s classical iteration, It Should Happen to You achieves new currency and humor in an era of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, whose rampant claims to fame are largely ambiguous or of debated merit. Here, the ditzy yet fame-hungry female embarks on an aspirational journey of mobility, yet is ultimately redirected to the conventional role of homemaker and wife to the admiring filmmaker—for Gladys’s billboard mania is placed in pointed opposition to her availability as an object of heterosexual desire. So transcendently naive is Judy Holliday’s performance that Gladys seems to occupy a pre-lapsarian state of infancy in which adult romance is neglected for infantile self-obsession. After discovering her purchase, Pete expresses embarrassment that he knows a “grown-up” woman who would throw money away in such a fashion. We might say the joyous tableau of self-recognition with which Gladys is obviously enraptured presents an analogue of Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage” of human development. In Lacan’s hypothesis, the infant, who has thus far experienced her body only as an aggregate of disorganized and fragmentary sensations, recognizes herself in the mirror for the first time and appreciates in the reflection a triumphant impression of wholeness and unity (Lacan 1–7). Much like the child described by Lacan, Gladys is thrilled and fascinated by her “reflection”; it is for her an image to be adored and celebrated. However, the socially condoned suitor, Pete, wishes she would direct her infatuation in his direction, and ceaselessly derides her obsession with self-signing, constructing it as an obstacle to their union. Most of the thrill of It Should Happen to You certainly derives from Gladys’s “improper” presentation of self—from the subversively immodest quality of its expression—and the humor to which she is consequently exposed. Unsure of her commercial motives (but assuming she at least has some), an advertising executive jokes, “After all, nobody pays for a sign just to have their name up,” the ensuing laughter inviting viewers to similarly chuckle at this bogglingly silly

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Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names  45

3.1  Gladys Glover (Judy Holliday) grins with glee in It Should Happen to You (Columbia, 1954) upon imagining her name plastered on a billboard overlooking Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. Digital frame enlargement. woman. As soon as her sign is erected, Gladys insists that she and Pete take a trip downtown for a rhapsodic gaze; and when she later dates sleazy but prettified soap-baron Evan Adams III (Peter Lawford) she also subjects him—making him drive his sports car in ceaseless circles below. Gladys’s obsession with billboards as opportunities for self-display is superficially centralized and derided as a wacky quirk, an unsubstantiated and useless narcissism contrary to the more socially desirable, romantically “correct” role. And yet, closer attention suggests a much more understandable origin for Gladys’s self-obsession. In fact, the opening of It Should Happen to You alerts us to Gladys’s need to detach herself from a hegemonic male desire that manifests itself in terms of her continuous victimization. Our first glimpse of the oblivious ingénue, through the eyes of her immediate admirer, is of her stocking-clad yet otherwise unshod feet extending languorously. With his camera trained on the ground, the photographer has been filming the swift and anonymous strides of park patrons for a documentary, and this stationary woman’s seemingly provocative gesture immediately distinguishes her—whoever she will turn out to be—from the passers-by. The quasi-sexual display arrests the photographer’s gaze so completely that he forgets to allow the camera to record it, or perhaps deliberately lowers the device from his face so as to absorb this rare and suggestive sight more directly. His gaze tilts upward to identify the feet as attached to the woman we will come to know as Gladys Glover, who is frowning abstractedly and eating peanuts. Still under Pete’s gaze, Gladys leaves the bench and strolls innocently through the park, scattering her peanuts to the pigeons. She moves dreamily and with a kind of animal inattention to the social specifics of her surroundings consistent with the birds she feeds and attracts. Consequently, she inadvertently seats

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46  George Cukor herself “too close” to a man (Heywood Hale Broun) listening intently to a noisy baseball game on his wireless radio, as if the radio’s buzzing broadcast does not even reach her frequency. Distracted by his unwanted female companion, this fan lambastes Gladys for her intrusion, accusing her (as a woman inattentive to situating herself “too close” to a man while she wanders around barefoot) of an impertinent attempt at courtship: “Listen, girly, I don’t mind a pick-up now and again—only I like to do the pickin’, see?” Not only is her supposed “pick-up” received as intrusive and unwanted, then, but she has also inexcusably positioned herself as active, rather than passive, in such an exchange. Pete arrives to film this everyday argument (albeit without intervening), and later walks off with Gladys, taking the chance to introduce himself as a documentary filmmaker—someone who makes movies “about real things.” “I’m glad you think I’m a real thing,” Gladys responds. The baseball fan’s insults have certainly worked to invalidate this young woman as an entitled social being. In his attack, he brutally invokes a wealth of dominant cultural assumptions surrounding the propriety, safety and—more generally—legitimacy of unchaperoned women in public spaces (see Gardner). Pete naturally offers his name but Gladys, we note, does not, or not until asked. Her slow and reluctant disclosure bespeaks her damaged confidence—the uncertainty she feels in her own identity. And, “It’s a name nobody ever heard of,” she laments, situating her disaffection within a burgeoning American celebrity culture that constructs the importance of having a name others have heard of. She also discloses to Pete that she is an out-of-work model, having been dismissed that morning for being three quarters of an inch too large. We also learn that the removal of her shoes was not—surprise—a coquettish maneuver designed to snag male attention; it was the dull-witted Gladys’s strategy for focusing her thoughts. Yet, in her fiery exchange with the baseball fan, Gladys has been yet again incorporated into a template of male desire and, again, just as brusquely rejected from it as inadequate. In light of this specific and general anonymity and excludedness, Gladys’s superficially frivolous hunger for fame attains a more socially purposeful and perhaps even poignant underpinning. “Who’re you?” the baseball fan questions her after she objects to his curt language. “Nobody, that’s who!” she snaps back. But what if she had had something more to say?—what if she could have had said she was someone? In fact, later in the film, with her mysterious yet massive advertising campaign having taken effect, she innocuously reveals her name while making a routine purchase at a store and is mobbed by adoring fans. Thus, while Gladys’s desire for fame appears initially to be an entirely superficial and amusing quirk, it is in fact qualified by a pattern of male scrutiny and rejection. In her desire for fame seems also to be a desire for insulation from the vagaries, scrutiny, and callousness of male desire. In imagining and eventually projecting herself onto the billboard, Gladys creates an idealized image that is both physically and morally “above” the casual harassment and degradation she encounters every day. And yet, the haranguing that Pete inflicts upon Gladys over her billboard,

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Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names  47 and the obstacle it apparently presents to their relationship, is clearly directed toward slotting her back into a familiar, accessible, patriarchal framework of heterosexual relations. As Pete tries to reason with her to quit all this silliness, she snaps, “Listen to me; I’m over 21!”; “Yeah, from the neck down,” he retorts, asserting his authority as her intellectual and moral superior. On a dinner date at her apartment, he bitterly complains that their romance is stymied because he “can’t seem to get her down to earth.” He also effortfully ignores her billboardfocused blathering and compliments her pointedly on her cooking, thus seeking to affirm for her a role within the home, consistent with postwar celebration of 1950s feminine domesticity that sought to reinforce women’s traditional role. As Pete’s “down to earth” comment insinuates, his attempt to return Gladys to her conventional social role is also wrapped up with reinforcing a socioeconomic status quo—with returning a proletarian nobody to her “proper” or “natural” place. With her billboard enterprise, Gladys clearly becomes a star. Yet while Pete is obviously attracted to her, to him she is no screen idol. For one thing, she’s entirely incompetent at even rudimentary impression-management: during a guest-spot arranged for her on live television, she indecorously announces that she’ll be “making a lot of money” from her appearance. She often slurs her speech too, a far cry from well-groomed Hollywood creations. When Gladys ushers Pete to her apartment window, which offers only the barest glimpse of her billboard, she virtually drawls her disappointment that he cannot see it: “Whass-themadda with your eyesight, anyhow?” The impropriety of her having a man in her room in the first place is also affirmed a moment later when the landlady drops in unexpectedly. Gladys’s social clumsiness delegitimizes her fame, working to ensure that we recognize her “true” social origin—the milieu to which she “properly” belongs. In short, she is always conspicuously a fish out of water. Similarly, her struggling intellect works to take the shine off her star; when another man calls to make a date with her, she waits to say “Bye” until the phone receiver ends up in the cradle; during her live TV appearance she reads with hilarious transparency from cue cards held by the camera operator, even chasing him forward as he attempts to track his equipment backward. Gladys’s unwarranted fame not only elevates her beyond the domestic passivity her suitor requires, it pushes her beyond her “correct” socioeconomic status as well. When Pete derides her frivolous wasting of cash, she retorts that she doesn’t enquire about what he does with his money; he cuts her off with a blunt exclamation that he “[doesn’t] even have any.” Cukor is thus careful to illustrate that Gladys is frustrating her would-be lover not only because of the (to him) frivolous social hoax she has effected, but because she has also “illegitimately” eclipsed him in social standing. Gladys’s ascension to inaccessibility is most pointedly symbolized through her relationship with Adams, who puts her in his sexual sights. Having found his own usual advertising spot rented by this upstart, Adams courts Gladys to work as a model for his products, exploiting her commercially just as he seeks to sexually. Adams is sharply distinguished from the proletarian filmmaker: as he waits for Gladys outside her building, Pete marvels enviously at the richer man’s car,

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48  George Cukor making bitterly self-deprecating jibes about how little he himself earns. The film intends Adams’s soapy wares to belie his moral uncleanliness, and to indicate the necessity that Gladys distance herself from an industry founded on fabricating identities. Eventually, Gladys throws off Adams’s advances and returns to her apartment, where she finds a video message from Pete: a final good-bye message that is again laden with class overtones. He admits that the video is in lieu of his writing a letter, because he cannot write (indeed, he misspells “good-bye” on the opening insert), and he mourns his inability to compete with “a man who drives a foreign car.” (Yet, even in this “romantic” kiss-off, he still forcefully derides her “crackpot” billboard obsession.) Thus, having propelled herself into a celebrity stratosphere to avoid the predation of male desire, Gladys is propelled back down to earth again by the same force. Marketed by Adams’s company as an “average American girl,” Gladys determines that such a character ought never to fall for the slimy and quickfooted charms of a man like Adams. Consequently, she publicly extols the virtues of “proper” working-class values before renouncing the upward mobility that threatens to leave the “average American man” far behind. The superficial narrative of It Should Happen to You would have us believe that Gladys returns to the status of “nobody” because she recognizes the nobility of being an “average American girl”; yet her turnaround ultimately has little to do with her and more to do with the structures of patriarchy in which she is embroiled. While Cukor implies that Gladys elects to return to her most “real” or “organic” identity, his film clearly prescribes this role for her according to a patriarchal ideology. Her cameraman lover is a strictly behind-the-scenes guy, a filmmaker who focuses on the everyday, on a “real life,” unadorned with glitz and affectation. In eventually recognizing and espousing his point of view, Gladys cannot but affirm the “reality” he advocates.

Calling the Tune: Les Girls Cukor’s musical Les Girls also concerns the idea of undesirable fame, and fame specifically in conflict with socially endorsed female roles. The film begins at a libel trial in London, where Sybil (Kay Kendall), a musical comedy dancer, is set to explicate and defend the contents of her tell-all memoir that focuses on her days in a Paris theater company called “Les Girls.” On the way into the courthouse, she and her adversary, Angèle (Taina Elg), spy each other and express a firm intention to avoid even bumping into one another. Sybil’s memoir alleges that Angèle, her fellow dancer and a French sex kitten, attempted suicide over one man while simultaneously engaged to another (the man to whom she is, at the time of the trial, now married and who sits beside her throughout its proceedings). At the center of Sybil’s scandalous narrative, recounted in flashback, is Barry Nichols (Gene Kelly), the perfectionist dance coach with whom Angèle is accused of carrying on her dalliance, and head of the production company. Sybil claims that when Barry rejected Angèle and terminated their affair, the devastated dancer tried to kill herself by filling her apartment with gas. He rescued her. On the

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Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names  49 stand herself, Angèle alleges that it was Sybil who attempted suicide after Barry’s rebuff. Eventually, the suit is dismissed when Barry provides a “definitive” account of events: there was no affair at all and no suicide attempt—an account that leaves everyone’s reputation intact. However, the focus in Les Girls on female presentation and moral cleanliness works to highlight and subtly critique the patriarchal values to which these women are ostensibly held to account by the film’s men.

3.2  The flamboyant Sybil, or “Lady Wren” (Kay Kendall), defends the veracity of her scandalous memoir during her libel trial in Les Girls (Sol C. Siegel/MGM, 1957). Digital frame enlargement. Les Girls’s emphasis on female conformity to roles outlined by men is especially pronounced through the charismatic yet incessantly domineering Barry. As leader of his female troupe, Barry insists on correctly rendered dance routines, yet also on his dancers’ “correct” sexual fidelity and deference to him. At the beginning of Sybil’s narrative, he is seen overseeing the auditions for a new lead girl, having decided to fire his present one, Mimi, after discovering that she is seeing another man: “I don’t like complications,” he grumbles to dancers Sybil and Joy (Mitzi Gaynor), who allude immediately to the late-night “lessons” to which he had been treating the fired girl. Once his eye is caught by the carnal routine of Angèle, he scrutinizes not only her appearance and movements but also her private life: “Are you married? Engaged?” Barry insists that his dancers dedicate themselves totally to their role, forgoing any private life that isn’t under his sexual control. Although he knocks before entering their dressing room, he jokily derides their desire for privacy: “What for?” he smiles, “you got secrets?” He even lives in the same building they do, presumably to keep an eye on them. Lest Barry’s domineering displays seem to viewers too obviously oppressive, he sings a show tune cutely celebrating his appetite for women—about how much he adores “Les Girls” (love and adoration in this context, of course, meaning attraction to the women he finds sexually desirable and available to him). The song represents Barry’s appetite for women as insatiable and endearing. The accompanying dance routine conventionally objectifies its female performers,

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50  George Cukor engaging them in glamorously leggy displays that manage to imply the charm and playfulness of a sexuality that is meticulously structured around impressing a male gaze. Later, a song in which the trio performs as skimpily dressed “ladiesin-waiting” for an unseen “king” again playfully references their subservience to their dance instructor. The women briefly critique Barry’s narcissism once Angèle arrives on the scene, yet it is a routine to which they are accustomed and ultimately must assent. Sybil and Joy conspire to conceal from him their knowledge of Angèle’s French fiancé and hunger for still further male company, thus at least circumventing Barry’s sexism. In accordance with the director’s long-lived affinity with his female characters, the film’s women establish a private domestic culture that regards Barry’s moral authority with skepticism and works to at least regulate his dominance. In Sybil’s version of events, Angèle developed an attraction to her employer and invited his advances, despite her fiancé. The fiancé, Pierre (Jacques Bergerac), thus threatens Angèle’s ability to enact the desirable, wholly devoted feminine persona required by her male employer, since both men require the same devotion. The libel suit brought by Angèle against Sybil threatens to explode the passive image desired by the fiancé—at her side throughout the court case, absorbing every scandalous detail of a story that paints Angèle as a stereotypically hedonistic Française who enjoys male company too much and lives moment-to-moment. The initial scrutiny Angèle receives from her boss (who requires her to fit in with not just his dance company but also his sexual appetites) is replaced by the scrutiny of Pierre, who fears his beloved has been sexually and morally besmirched. In her own testimony, Angèle sets out to paint Sybil as the transgressive one, describing her as an incorrigible drunk in love with Barry—over whom she attempted suicide—thus staining her opponent’s image in the face of her English husband Gerald (Leslie Phillips), who, as Pierre with Angèle, is by her side throughout the proceedings. What Cukor has staged, then, is a courtroom in which women, who in their professional careers play upon a stage in front of a paying audience, are positioned upon “stages” in front of particular powerful men (also paying audiences) whose moral approbation they require and whose surveillance during the case is total. Finally, Barry’s paternalistic intervention sets all of this straight: his testimony, given last of all, denies a relationship with either Sybil or Angèle. As he paints himself, he pines for and pursues only one dancer, Joy (to whom he is now married). Yet the devotion he demonstrates to Joy in his narrative of events is so buffoonishly overdone that it does little to plausibly question the controlling and womanizing persona Angèle and Sybil have already dressed him in. As, according to Barry, there was no suicide attempt by anyone (the gas heater having merely malfunctioned, rendering both women unconscious, so that, awakening to the smell of the gas each jumped to the assumption that the other had attempted suicide after a fight with him), Angèle and Sybil come across as being foolish in refusing to speak to each other after the event. In essence, the entire lawsuit is the result of nothing more than irrational female cattiness. In his courtroom

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Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names  51 retelling, Barry recounts how, after consulting with Sybil’s and Angèle’s lovers, he colluded with fiancés Gerald and Pierre by pretending to be ailing from a heart condition in order to close the dance company, this allowing both women the freedom to be with their sweethearts while he devoted himself finally to Joy. Barry’s manipulating the future and aspirations of the dancers invite us to shift our moral scrutiny away from the women and onto the film’s scheming men. Of course, the libel suit brought by Angèle against her depiction in Sybil’s memoir centers on public defamation, on the slanderous construction of an untrue identity—a characterization that Angèle feels she must vigorously rebut. The contents of Sybil’s memoir (and consequent defense testimony) endanger Angèle’s ability to perform her gender to the specifications of middle-class patriarchy’s recipe; she cannot be a prim and “proper” object for male affection if she is at the same time a sexual predator. Initially, Pierre stands as an “innocent” representative of those patriarchal values, upping the stakes for Angèle of any non-compliance. But Barry’s revelation that Pierre had conspired with him to deprive Angèle of her career moves the fiancé from victim to victimizer. Incensed by his manipulations, Angèle pointedly ignores Pierre as she strides from the courthouse at the end of the film, rushing to reconcile not with her “wronged” lover but with her legal opponent, Sybil—who is now pointedly ignoring Gerald. If Barry’s narrative absolves him of being a womanizer, it thoroughly inculpates him and the other men for their overreaching paternalism.

Swooning Out of Step: Camille and Romeo and Juliet Camille plays out its protagonist’s adherence to a prescribed social role with a more tragic tenor. Yet, rather than constructing love as the rewarding consequence of performing one’s “correct” social role, Camille makes love giddily unassimilable—an ecstatic turbulence that can never be reconciled with the banal and ultra-codified world of its participants. An insert at the beginning of the film describes mid-eighteenth-century Paris as a “gay half-world [where] the gentlemen of the day met the girls of the moment at certain theatres, balls, and gambling clubs, where the code was discretion—but the game was romance.” The heroine, Marguerite Gautier (Garbo), is just such a “girl of the moment.” Expertly trained in the pursuit of social advance, Marguerite will fall deeply for one man but align herself in partnership with another, because the true love of the first can offer her neither the social nor the financial advantage brought by the second. In acting out her “correct” role with an aloof and disaffectionate lover, she gives painful priority to the performance of a socially expected sexual and economic role. Her “true” love lingers (of course), undermining her manipulative performance; yet so sutured is she to role expectations that the eventual embrace of her true desire coincides with her social and physical death. Camille opens with a glimpse of a world constructed for the whims of powerful men, in which women meticulously perform their femininity in such a way as to flatter a male gaze. Our first view of Marguerite has her purchasing a bouquet of camellias, the flower seller thus dubbing her “The Lady of the Camellias” (the

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52  George Cukor title of Alexandre Dumas Fils’ source novel); an older companion, Prudence (Laura Hope Crews), bejeweled and shimmering herself, rebukes Marguerite for her extravagance. The merchant accuses Prudence of hypocrisy, since Marguerite purchases extravagances from her, too, in the form of clothing; yet she staves off the charge by emphasizing that those purchases constitute “an investment.” As Marguerite’s stagecoach draws toward the theater, her property value is further evoked through the threat of its eventual depreciation: “You won’t be young forever,” her companion advises, before recommending that she make her best effort to seduce the Baron de Varville (Henry Daniell), “one of the richest and most elegant gentlemen in Paris.” At the theater, the Parisian courtesans seek to ensure correct placement and presentation of self on the balcony. They are objects for rich males’ attention, their efforts emphasized by their bickering. Also in attendance is Marguerite’s plainer and pushier rival for male attention, Olympe (Lenore Ulric), who knows how to play the “game” of romance, including undercutting rivals by stealing their booths, a move that underscores the stakes involved in striving for the status that comes with linkage to an appropriate male. Marguerite’s older minder has delivered to the Baron a note inviting him to her booth after the intermission. Straightening himself and glancing pompously around, the Baron is arrogant enough to repress any thrill at the invitation. Instead, he requests a seat with a view of the women’s box so he may decide whether he feels the lady who sent the note is deserving of his attention. Olympe, having targeted the Baron for herself through her opera glasses, directs Marguerite’s attention to the object of her own avaricious gaze. Looking through her own glasses, however, Marguerite accidentally spies the financially paltry yet visibly splendid Armand (Taylor), who gazes longingly upward: “I didn’t know that rich men ever looked like that,” Marguerite admiringly opines (Olympe swearing that the Baron is at this same moment treating her to his gaze). When, beckoned by Marguerite’s glances, Armand finds his way to her booth, she naturally assumes he is the Baron and encourages his advances; the confusion is soon discovered but, deeply impressed by the young man, Marguerite asks him to stay. Social obligation gets the better of her eventually, however, and she sends the humble lawyer on a frivolous errand in order to keep an eye on the Baron, whose attentions she feels obligated to pursue and procure. Thus, while the extravagantly frocked dancers of the theater perform with physical vigor, on the balconies these courtesans are performing with equal skill and energy. In this scene, the women cultivate themselves as the objects of male gazes while privately warring behind the scenes to establish whose presentation is more effective and meritorious of male validation. This world of “correct” places and presentations collapses—at least temporarily—as Armand and Marguerite lock eyes. While she is clearly the object of his enraptured male gaze, he is the object of her deep and amorous admiration. In gazing longingly down upon him from her balcony perch, and in openly taking pleasure in his appearance, her otherwise unquestioned passivity is demolished in an ecstatic exchange of adoring and seductive gazes. Armand’s and Marguerite’s romance is thus initially

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Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names  53 kindled through covert and silent, yet deeply intent glances, thrillingly staged by a director who had knowledge of scenarios in which one’s sexual interest must work around stifling social conventions. Marguerite winds up with the uppity Baron, and thus commits herself to repressively structured and affected displays of romance, although Armand seeks her out once again and the two begin a heady affair. Meanwhile, the narcissistic Baron regards his lover’s fidelity with persistent skepticism. He seems incensed at her failure to perform the wifely role that, according to the guidelines of patriarchy, he expects should comprise the whole of her identity. The open secret of their very practical union—its foundation in money and affectation—is most tensely evoked during a scene in which the Baron plays piano as Armand chimes the doorbell for Marguerite. The paramours had arranged a liaison presuming the Baron’s absence but at the last minute the aristocrat had made an unexpected return. The Baron tickles out Weber’s “Aufforderung zum Tanz” (“Invitation to the Dance”), the romantic and civilized strains of which jar discomfortingly with the performance of intimacy and spousal devotion in which Marguerite is presently engaged. As Armand, oblivious to the Baron’s presence, persists in ringing the bell, Marguerite implausibly pretends not to hear it. “Does my music shut out the rest of the world for you?” the Baron smugly retorts, mocking her performance of devotion. She hastily comments that he “plays beautifully” and, while still delicately dancing his hands over the keyboard, he returns the compliment with mock civility: “You lie beautifully.” Canny enough to know that her love is probably a performance, the Baron nevertheless needles and bullies her for failing to seamlessly maintain her front. The couple’s tense role-play here evokes the director’s interest in his characters’ “proper” social and sexual roles and the effort involved in playing those parts. Marguerite and Armand do embrace their love openly (albeit temporarily) and abscond to the country, away from the Baron, who relinquishes his unfaithful companion and frees her of her debts to him. But the pressures of class are ever-present and, at this juncture, irrepressible. Even in the country, the lovers chance to come across a chateau belonging to the aristocrat, and which seems to spy on their transgression, evoking the class and gender hierarchies the two flaunt. Michel Foucault describes Bentham’s panopticon prison complex as “induc[ing] in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (201). While the chateau does not quite perform this function, it nevertheless presents as “a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it” (201). The Baron has of course neither constructed nor employed his chateau as a mechanism of surveillance, yet it is quite clear that Armand perceives it as just such a persecutory force: “I always know he’s there,” the young lover jealously complains. Having captured Marguerite’s interest while being mistaken for a much richer man, Armand remains understandably sensitive to the potential allure of those more financially powerful than himself. In the country, he surely fancies that he is beyond the prescriptions of class structures—but the chateau says otherwise.

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54  George Cukor Consequently, while the two have chosen each other, their love is persistently beleaguered by their inability to reconcile it with the pressures of the patriarchal and rigidly hierarchized world around them. Status and expected social roles also intervene to stymie Marguerite’s and Armand’s romance through the stigma attached to her history as a courtesan. Armand’s family is upwardly mobile, seeking to establish and maintain the correct markers of the bourgeoisie. This is clearly indicated in the formal attire of Armand’s father, who arrives in the country to beseech Marguerite to leave his son. He initially advises that marriage outside patriarchal norms cannot last—that their love is doomed for its nonconformance. Marguerite convinces him of the sincerity of her love, yet he invokes the union as an impediment to Armand’s social mobility and adduces the stigma it would attach to his son. With care for Armand being her highest priority, the already stigmatized Marguerite is hyper-attentive on her lover’s behalf to information that might also stigmatize him. Fabricating a “renewed love” for the Baron, and playing on Armand’s insecurity, she disdainfully drives Armand away out of concern for his “correct” and advantageous social persona, thus again enacting the role prescribed for her by a man (this time, Armand’s father). Marguerite and Armand eventually reunite again at the film’s conclusion. She is by now virtually destitute and selling her possessions to survive, while her health is taxed by an illness that has plagued her entire life, and to which she tragically succumbs after she embraces her true love. Marguerite’s death prevents any working out of how her relationship to Armand might have been sustained socially. Yet we might observe that, really, their love is necessarily asocial—a phenomenon fundamentally “beyond” social identities. Alain Badiou describes love as an experience founded in difference; lovers, he argues, reconstruct an experience of the world that embraces Otherness. He speaks of love as “an existential project: to construct a world from a decentred point of view other than that of [one’s] mere impulse to survive or reaffirm [one’s] own identity” (25). At first love necessitates a disconnection, because it involves two distinct subjectivities: it at first “separates, dislocates, and differentiates” (28). The initial stages of love seek to embrace this disjuncture, constructing a new and necessarily tentative experience of the world, an encounter with “the quasimetaphysical status of an event, namely of something that doesn’t enter into the immediate order of things” (28). The new experience of the world achieved by this “event” means that love always constructs a reality beyond what is understood through reference to social structures. Love seems not to “belong” to any order, is something ineffably “outside”—a simultaneously blissful and perilous demolition of structure. Badiou points out that the symbolization of this “event,” of love as a fundamental embracing of the Other, is familiar from art: “Many stories or novels focus on cases where the Two are marked out, when the two lovers don’t belong to the same class, group, clan or country” (28). The romance between Armand and Marguerite clearly emblematizes this experience of difference; Marguerite is quite aware that Armand is not the prescribed and socially condoned suitor for her.

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Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names  55 E. Ann Kaplan points out that “the mutual love between Marguerite and Armand threatens the patriarchal order, first because Marguerite is not a woman who can be accepted into Armand’s world, and second, because their love is not the kind that is productive to bourgeois capitalism” (46). Consequently, love threatens to rupture and transform the identity of a woman whose identity depends on a complex performance of aspiring and belonging. The love between Armand and Marguerite is not merely in conflict with their prescribed social selves; that conflict propels and constitutes their love, emblematizing the thrills and risks of the attempt to forge a new existential perspective founded on difference. Camille’s depiction of Marguerite’s and Armand’s strained union evokes its homosexual director’s acute understanding of romance’s potential as a socially risky or illegitimate endeavor and the necessity of secrecy and subterfuge. The social disparity between the two lovers is generic enough to metaphorize any number of social impediments to romance; such impediments possibly including a cultural clampdown on homosexuality in the United States after the relatively tolerant 1920s, a clampdown that saw gay life increasingly pushed from acceptable public view. As George Chauncey points out, “a host of new laws and regulations were enacted or newly reinforced in the 1930s that suppressed the largest of the drag balls, censored lesbian and gay images in plays and films, and prohibited restaurants, bars, and clubs from hiring homosexuals or even serving them” (8). However, Marguerite’s economic imperatives also mean that we see a love that offers the promise of abandoning with thrilling irresponsibility the economic circumstances so brutally familiar to viewers in the 1930s. In swooning for Armand, Marguerite also swoons for a life beyond banal striving for material comfort and security. In Marguerite’s death, love’s fundamental Otherness is again underscored, illustrating what Badiou describes as “the meltdown concept of love: the two lovers met and something like a heroic act for One was enacted against the world. In Romantic mythology we can see how this point of fusion very often leads to death” (30). The fundamental exceptionality of their love means that “it is impossible to go back to a world that remains external to the relationship.” Marguerite’s illness allows the romance to be preserved from the dull predictability of functional life, from any practical context or structure. The love of Marguerite and Armand retains the risk-status of Badiou’s event, of a communion—a dizzying encounter, beyond class that can never be maintained. The transgressive nature of the love is suggested in their final encounter. On her deathbed, and aware that Armand has come to see her, Marguerite seeks to make herself up to meet his gaze, not wanting him to see her pallid and disheveled. However, she eventually refuses to delay their union and requests he come in immediately. In this final exchange, she poignantly flouts the conventions around personal appearance and decorum that have previously dictated her existence. They kiss, and kiss feverishly: she throws her kisses around his face. In fact, we might say that this practiced and jaded lover kisses him as if she had never kissed a man before—as if she needs to relearn the act.

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3.3  The meltdown concept of love: Armand (Robert Taylor) embraces the dying Marguerite (Greta Garbo) at the conclusion of Camille (MGM, 1936). Digital frame enlargement. Marguerite dies because she cannot have an identity truly outside the structures to which she is perpetually beholden, either as an adherent or as a transgressor: she is trapped between worlds. As noted, Cukor was certainly familiar with romance as, for some, a concealed and socially marginalized experience, and Marguerite provides an illustration of social death eventually manifesting as physical death. While extolling the film’s pleasure for female viewers in an “equalizing,” “mutual,” and “deeply satisfying” love, Kaplan also argues that the heroine, “internalizing patriarchal norms, is brought to make a supreme sacrifice of the object of her love, and to find martyr-like satisfaction in the deed” (46). Marguerite’s dependence on social structures and hierarchies is so complete that her escape can be translated into only destitution and death. Thus, in one sense, Marguerite’s death provides a tragic impediment to Armand’s and her continuing love. In another sense, however, that death may be read as an expression of the love itself, an amorphous but powerful pressure against her social and physical reality. In discussion of such a love, love that demolishes structure and flows freely regardless of social prescription, and that ends in death, the inevitable reference point is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, of which Cukor helmed a 1936 cinematic adaptation starring Norma Shearer as Juliet and Leslie Howard as Romeo. Indeed, Badiou identifies Shakespeare’s play as “the outstanding allegory for this

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Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names  57 particular disjuncture because the Two belong to enemy camps” (28–9). As in Les Girls, the parties ranged thoroughly in opposition to each other here are in many respects thoroughly similar—indeed, “both alike in dignity.” The lovers’ union is of course famously rendered taboo by long-held paternal grudges, their love thus made incompatible with social structure or strategy. In this way love is symbolized as the risky “event” Badiou describes as beyond “the immediate order of things” (27). Yet Cukor’s adaptation is perhaps more notable to a modern audience for the misalignment between the actor’s ages and the ages of the teenaged characters they play. Leslie Howard played Romeo at forty-four, while Norma Shearer played Juliet at the less dissonant but still clearly incongruous age of thirty-four. For centuries, actors of ages far in excess of his have played Romeo onstage (see Hutchings 467–9), yet both the extent of the mismatch here and the medium’s preservation of these particular performances means that the actors’ ages in Cukor’s adaptation stand out as singularly mismatched—indeed irrepressible. This somewhat dilutes our sense of paternal force preventing the romantic union, since the “children” are themselves already clearly thirty- and fortysomething adults. Similarly, we might say that in their excess their youthful passions seem contrived. This offers intriguing interpretational possibilities that counterpose readings of the play that stress the primacy of love as an organic and uncontainable force. Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet is unavoidably theatrical: the text’s status as a construction, a contrivance, is virtually always apparent. Viewers’ reflection on the play’s principal character roles as constructions leads to reflection on the gender roles they express, depriving them of their seemingly organic or vital quality. In effect, in this “archetypal” enactment of heterosexual courtship, the actors’ too-obvious “performances” threaten to render stilted the apparently “natural” courtship in which they are engaged. We see the “archetype” of young love, but no living example. Just as the actors’ ages make their passions seem conspicuously an act, the heteronormative desire that structures those passions seems prescribed, over-structured and, thus, suddenly unnatural. Under the guiding directorial hand of the gay Cukor, the film evokes a culturally dominant romantic paradigm as routine, and certainly not more “natural” than the queer desires that 1930s American society increasingly sidelined and denigrated. If the film retains dramatic coherence (which it evidently did for contemporary audiences), it may be that audiences are prepared to elect to absorb heterosexual passion in any posture, even one that goes beyond “realism” in the conventional sense. If the performances of the film woo and charm, they might be said to offer the pleasure of performance itself. We may delight in the giving of grand life to familiar roles; in the pleasurable enactment of this familiar script (an iconic rendition of heterosexual desire). Romeo and Juliet is also a reinforcement of a familiar social script: a celebration of romantic “convention.” In this reading, the film depicts not so much a recklessly accelerated love, a love that transgresses boundaries, as a “rendition” pleasurable in its fidelity to expectation and tradition—traditions intimated by the performers’ ages. Alternatively, if we are yet

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3.4  “Let lips do what hands do”: Romeo (Leslie Howard) first kisses Juliet (Norma Shearer) at the Capulet ball in Romeo and Juliet (MGM, 1936). Digital frame enlargement. more deeply thrilled and transfixed by these performances, finding in them a deep “reality” or “truth” that negates as superficial an actor’s implausibly advanced age, our response surely again highlights social constructions, now of age rather than gender (or class, as in Camille). The passion of these lovers, one might argue, is all the more real and urgent for how unlikely it is—seemingly mismatched to the bodies it inhabits, indifferent to ageist conceptions of romance and courtship. The maturity of these two is no obstacle to their falling in love with the blithe rapture of youth since youthful they deeply, always, are. The common feature of these interpretive possibilities is that they draw us into contemplation of constructed social roles, such as may be giddily transcended (as in Camille) or, alternatively, contemplated as knowing “rehearsals” of heterosexuality.

Conclusion As her dreamy park-wandering and pigeon-feeding indicates, Gladys Glover of It Should Happen to You is nothing if not “natural.” Yet, having reached the stratosphere of stardom—and having left her pedestrian lover behind—she must be subject to a patriarchal ideology that impresses upon her the apparent necessity of being her accessible, “true,” lowly, everyday self. This is, of course, an ideology focused on asserting the truth not of Gladys’s particular self but of

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Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names  59 the self prescribed by her male admirer. Through its focus on a libel suit, Les Girls similarly seeks to validate for Angèle her “true” identity, apparently for her own peace of mind and benefit; yet the identity she seeks to confirm is the one most preferred by her male lover, and that which assuages a cuckold’s ego. Moreover, this pursuit of female dignity obscures the oppressive and naturalized control of women asserted by her male dance instructor, as well as by her husband himself. In both films, the obsession with the most appropriate or truthful self urged by men is really a revaluing of the self most beneficial and endearing to a dominant, patriarchal ideology. Camille, in contrast, depicts a romance accelerated well beyond adherence to patriarchal role-play—a romance in fact dependent on reckless difference, realized only with its protagonist’s death. Meanwhile, the incongruities of Cukor’s production of Romeo and Juliet, cast as it is with middle-aged stars, demystify its famously passionate, “natural” courtship, awkwardly over-exposing the architecture of heterosexual structures of desire.

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Chapter 4 The Cukor “Problem”: David Copperfield, Holiday, and The Philadelphia Story

The Cukor “Problem”

Robert B. Ray Here’s the Cukor problem in a nutshell: In 1962, Andrew Sarris asserted that one of the auteur theory’s central premises “is the distinguishable personality of the director . . . Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style which serve as his signature” (Sarris, Primal Screen 50). In a long interview with Peter Bogdanovich, however, Cukor insisted that a director “should remain unostentatious; because if you do a lot of fancy footwork, maybe they notice you as a director, but I think it hurts the story . . . I think one should not be aware of technique of any kind” (Bogdanovich 445, 449). Cukor, in other words, was a good citizen of Hollywood’s invisible-style regime, which assumed the primacy of star and story. And when he worked in comedies, his stylistic “signature” seemed to retreat even further from view. V. F. Perkins has argued that with comedy, the picture exists solely for what it shows and we gain nothing by attempting to interpret its structure. Its qualities as an image are submerged in its function as a document . . . That is why the great comedies, with their insistence on action and their indifference to cinematic elaboration, have proved difficult to assess within the terms proposed by traditional film theory. (Perkins 98) And yet, Cukor made good comedies, and other important directors (George Stevens, for example) did not.1 If Cukor seems to fall into the same category, we might recall that he abandoned the theater for the reason he gave Bogdanovich: “I think the role of a stage director is not terribly interesting, whereas a movie director’s job is much more interesting, much more comprehensive and he affects the work much more” (Bogdanovich 442). Cukor thought he was doing something, and he thought that what he did affected his movies. But detecting that something, which involves recovering the decision-making behind his films’ transparent surface, proves more difficult than with a more “ostentatious” director like John Ford. Adrian Martin has noted that

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The Cukor “Problem”  61 film criticism “favours those genres (film noir, horror, romance, melodrama) . . . that trade in what I would call eyeball subjectivity . . . It is far less interested in film styles marked by a certain everydayness” (Klevan Disclosure 64). Not surprisingly, stylistic discussions of Cukor have tended to gather around Gaslight, a noirish melodrama requiring expressionist lighting and oblique camera angles. The “plainer” comedies, like Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940), seem resistant to formal analysis. The best way to discover Cukor’s style is to compare his movies with other versions of the same source material. David Copperfield, filmed by him in 1935, has been made into seven films (three of them silent, one animated) and six television series. Cukor’s Holiday followed a 1930 version, which had earned Ann Harding a Best Actress Academy Award nomination. And his The Philadelphia Story, like Holiday based on a Philip Barry play, morphed into the 1956 musical High Society. By choosing matching scenes from these other versions, we can begin to see what Cukor did to warrant his status as a great filmmaker.

David Copperfield As a project, David Copperfield emerged from MGM’s new unit-production system, imposed by L. B. Mayer after the studio’s previous all-powerful central producer, Irving Thalberg, had suffered a heart attack at the end of 1932. Having hired his son-in-law David O. Selznick to set up his own team, Mayer encouraged a rivalry with Thalberg, now reduced to supervising only a few of MGM’s pictures. Selznick wanted to make prestige films, and literary adaptations, especially of a writer like Dickens, perfectly suited his ambitions. Ironically, David Copperfield, although nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, would lose to Thalberg’s Mutiny on the Bounty. Even more than most novels, David Copperfield presented obvious problems to Selznick, and to the director he hired, George Cukor: • The book was famous, probably the most well-known of Dickens’s long novels. As a result, audiences had well-developed preconceptions about the story and characters. • The book’s enormous length required any film version to omit characters and incidents, even ones well-known to readers. • The Phiz illustrations had permanently established viewers’ sense of characters’ appearances. • Dickens’s flat, unchanging characters, often identified by a single tagline (“Barkis is willin’,” Micawber’s “Something is bound to turn up”), had an obvious function in novels published in installments: they were immediately recognizable, even if they disappeared for long stretches. In the cinema, on the other hand, their cartoonish qualities could threaten verisimilitude. • The novel conflated realism, fairy-tale magic, gothic horror story, melodrama, and sentimental tales. Historically, movies that mingled genres (like Renoir’s La règle du jeu [1939]) often found hostile receptions.

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62  George Cukor • The novel’s first-person narration (the first time Dickens had used it), written from the perspective of David’s maturity, rendered every incident and character in a double light—their appearance at first and in retrospect, when their ultimate significance, only hinted at initially, became apparent. In the cinema, which has no tenses, this divided consciousness is almost impossible to capture, unless the filmmakers rely on intrusive voice-over narration. • With its motto “More stars than there are in heaven,” MGM could not help noticing that David Copperfield was not a star vehicle. The hero of its first half is a boy and that of its second half a not very interesting young man. Mayer pushed for Jackie Cooper, just three years removed from 1931’s big hit The Champ, but Selznick insisted on an English boy and chose the previously unknown Freddie Bartholomew. We have come to think of Micawber as the starring role, but in fact the character appears in only a few of the novel’s pages. Cukor and Selznick initially cast Charles Laughton, but after only a few days of shooting, he gave way to W. C. Fields. Selznick and Cukor quickly got to work solving these problems. In a January 6, 1937 letter to Sidney Howard, the playwright and Gone With the Wind (1939) scriptwriter, Selznick described the necessary abridgement process “in adapting well-known and well-loved books . . . it is much better to chop out whole sequences than it is to make small deletions in individual scenes or sequences” (Selznick 159). Thus, MGM’s movie does without Mr. Creakle’s school, Mr. Mell (the kindly teacher, betrayed by Steerforth), Dr. Strong, Rosa Dartle (Steerforth’s former nurse, whose face he has scarred), Martha (a fallen woman), Julia Mills (Dora’s friend), and Miss Mowcher (the dwarf hairdresser: “Ain’t I volatile?”). Paulette Bane, an MFA student at the University of Florida, compares the cinematic adaptation of a novel to remodeling a house: “The space of the narrative must be withdrawn. And yet, the house’s structural integrity has to be maintained—certain walls can be knocked out, but not a load bearing one.” Even after Selznick’s cuts, David Copperfield was still standing. In bringing Dickens’s characters to life, Cukor acknowledged that “we were guided by Phiz, who did the original illustrations,” working on “making them slightly grotesque, at times caricature [sic] . . . funny and frightening at the same time. You achieve it partly by the casting, but also by deciding on the style of playing. The outward [re]semblance is important too” (Lambert 64). Cukor was particularly pleased by Roland Young (departing from his usual comic parts to play the villainous Uriah Heap), and by Basil Rathbone and Violet Kemble Cooper (as the Mudstones). Lennox Pawle is miraculous as Mr. Dick, whose befuddled kindliness seems as light and wind-borne as the kites he makes from the pages of his never-to-be-finished memoir. And, of course, W. C. Fields, who, as others have suggested, was less an actor than an act, an old vaudevillian, whose improvisations Cukor encouraged. Fields steals one scene simply by entering a house and, upon observing a plate holding a single pear and three bananas, intones (as if simultaneously surprised, delighted, and somehow saddened), “Ah, fruit.”

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The Cukor “Problem”  63 Did Cukor have a conscious découpage for David Copperfield, a formal design underlying his scene-to-scene decisions? “I wanted everything more stylized,” he told Lambert (70), but did he get his wish? In general, Cukor’s Copperfield depends on the director’s preference for medium two-shots of more-than-normal duration. The film rarely deploys panoramas (except to set scenes, as with Aunt Betsey’s house-by-the-sea and the Pegottys’ ship-turned-cottage) and avoids rapid editing. One important scene, with David and Steerforth in Yarmouth, and using only five shots for its two-minute thirty-three second length, will serve as an example.2 It is an important moment. David (Frank Lawton) has brought his friend Steerforth (Hugh Williams) to Yarmouth to meet the Pegottys. The visit will prove fatal: Steerforth will seduce Emily into abandoning her fiancé, Ham, and running off with him, bringing about her ruin and his own eventual death. But those events lie ahead. Having shown Steerforth serenading the admiring Pegotty family, Cukor cuts to a tableau of a previously unseen house by the water, with a triple-masted sailboat on the right horizon. A jaunty sea-chantey accompanies the image, which dissolves to a sign identifying the building as an inn, “The Yarmouth Skipper.” Another dissolve takes us to Shot 1 (twenty seconds): a modestly composed, but striking, interior medium-long shot of Steerforth reclining on a day-sofa, looking back over his left shoulder at a fireplace which lights his face. The music has ceased. The image’s details economically convey Steerforth’s decadence: his lounging, full-length silk robe; his posture of melancholy lassitude; the wine glass in his left hand and the decanter on the table; the room’s flickering shadows; the model ship behind him (matching the real one shown us two shots earlier); the latticed window, faintly lit by a not-quiteidentifiable time of day (“How I detest this mongrel hour,” Steerforth will say. “Neither day nor night”). In fact, Steerforth resembles something of the 1890s of Wilde and Dowson. Cukor now offers the first of the scene’s surprises. From frame right, a door, previously invisible, opens into the room and David enters. The music resumes but becomes more somber. Seven full seconds pass before Steerforth looks up from the fire to acknowledge David’s presence: “Why, David, you come upon me like a reproachful ghost.” Prompted by David’s movement, Cukor brings the camera closer, cutting to Shot 2 (thirty seconds), a medium two-shot of Steerforth (still on the sofa to the left, the model ship immediately above his head, the fireplace flames reflected in a mirror over his left shoulder) and David (standing to the right with the fire behind him). “Not reproachful,” David says, removing his gloves and his coat. “I’ve been looking at the pictures in the fire,” Steerforth offers, turning his head away in a gesture both listless and despairing. “What have you been doing?” As they begin to talk about Dora, David’s movement towards Steerforth’s side motivates a slight forward dolly into a closer shot of the two men. Cukor avoids any shot change. “I envy you,” Steerforth tells David, as Cukor offers his next surprise: Shot 3 (thirty-eight seconds), a cut to the door that reveals Steerforth’s servant, Littimer (Ivan F. Simpson), whom we had not heard enter. He has

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4.1  Steerforth (Hugh Williams, l.) and David (Frank Lawton) at the Yarmouth Skipper in David Copperfield (MGM, 1935). Digital frame enlargement. materialized like the ghost Steerforth has accused David of being. “What is it, Littimer?” Steerforth asks, and as the servant walks towards them, the camera follows him until he takes up a position behind his master and David, announcing that he “has arranged for the boat for the summer.” Cukor has pulled the camera back from the previous medium close-up of the two friends. With the fireplace flames hellishly accompanying him, Littimer hands Steerforth a yachting cap and then retreats, backing out of the frame unctuously. Steerforth puts on the hat and walks to the left to examine himself in a mirror, motivating the camera to follow and momentarily abandon David. David, however, quickly reenters this new frame, and the two talk briefly before Cukor’s next surprise. “Hang it, Littimer, when’s the boat to be ready?” Steerforth imperiously demands, and Shot 4 (four seconds) reveals Littimer, assumed to have left the room. “It’s being freshly rigged, sir, and re-named,” he replies, innocuously concealing from us the portent of his remark by only slightly emphasizing the last two words. With Shot 5 (sixty-eight seconds), Cukor returns to the window and Steerforth beside David, who asks, “What are you going to call her?” “Little Emily,” Steerforth replies, sitting down. The camera, motivated by David’s sitting, as it had not been by Steerforth’s, lowers slightly to frame the two men, as Cukor dollies in slightly. “David,” Steerforth mysteriously asks, “if anything should separate us, promise me you’ll always think of me at my best.” “You have no best for me, Steerforth, and no worst,” David replies.

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The Cukor “Problem”  65 Cukor manages this scene with only five shots, which average over thirty seconds in length, the final one lasting over a minute. He uses no close-ups, no heavy-handed music or lighting that would give away Steerforth’s designs on Emily. But the scene’s surprises—the opening door, Littimer’s appearance, and Littimer’s remaining presence—work to create a mild unease, an ominous portent of unexpected (and undesirable) things to come. Dickens’s novel turns on the contrast between David’s trusting innocence and the dark events that regularly assail him: his mother’s marriage to Mr. Murdstone, Pegotty’s banishment, Mr. Creakle’s abuse, the counting-house factory job, Micawber’s leaving, Mr. Wickfield’s failures, Aunt Betsey’s bankruptcy, Uriah Heaps’ villainy, Micawber’s apparent betrayal. David anticipates none of these things, and the filmmakers were faced with the task of portraying his naiveté while simultaneously, and subtly, hinting at things to come. In fact, Cukor’s choices align the viewer with David’s perspective, making us share in his eagerness to think only the best of the friend he most admires. In all three cases, the unexpected has resulted from a slight, but significant, deviation from standard Classical Hollywood practices: (1) the door opens into what has seemed a perfectly composed, entirely self-sufficient, painterly shot, as if the frame’s right margin has suddenly swung inwards; (2) Littimer’s two appearances occur without any preceding offscreen sound, Hollywood’s usual means of anticipating a shot change to a new arrival. Cukor, in other words, has demonstrated the possibilities available to someone willing to work imaginatively with conventions. By contrast, the 1999 BBC version, directed by Simon Curtis (with Bob Hoskins as Micawber and Maggie Smith as Aunt Betsey), sets the conversation between Steerforth (Oliver Milburn) and David (Ciarán McMenamin) in a coach returning them to London from Yarmouth, rendering its eighty-one seconds in sixteen shots that average only five seconds in length. The shot/reverse shot pattern, with bust shots of the two young men, carefully lights only half of Steerforth’s face, signaling his divided nature. After Steerforth’s plea that David “think of me at my best,” Curtis uses a voice-over in which David, presumably speaking from hindsight, gives the game away: “Nevermore would I touch his hand in friendship, nevermore hear his laughter or feel the warmth of his companionship. May God forgive you Steerforth; I cannot.” If Cukor has decided on showing us things from David’s initial perspective, the BBC version insists on the primacy of his retroactive knowledge. Cukor’s movie is the more earnest version, truer to the viewpoint of the child, who remains at the center of Dickens’s own favorite book.

Holiday Holiday began as Philip Barry’s Broadway hit, which ran for 229 performances in 1928–9. It was then filmed in 1930 at Pathé, just before that failing enterprise merged with RKO. Cukor made his version at Columbia, a studio with far fewer resources than MGM’s, and despite its setting amidst the spectacularly rich Fifth Avenue Setons, Holiday looks somewhat dull compared to The Philadelphia Story.

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66  George Cukor Indeed, it visually resembles The Awful Truth, which Cary Grant had made the year before at Columbia. Holiday’s origins are important. On Broadway, the play had starred Hope Williams, a debutante-turned-actress, whose tomboyish manner and confidently athletic stride had earned her the nickname “the Park Avenue swagger girl.” She was a sensation at the time, notable for her mysterious ability to captivate an audience by underplaying. Noël Coward, who used her in his 1935 film The Scoundrel, recalled that Williams “had a charming speaking voice with a sort of beguiling tonelessness.” Remarkably, almost all the qualities associated with Williams—the androgynous athleticism, the elusively distinctive voice—also characterized Ann Harding, who assumed the Linda Seton part in the 1930 film. More important, Hope Williams’s stage understudy had been Katharine Hepburn, who had studied Williams carefully and later admitted, “I stole a great deal from Hope” (New York Times [4 May 1990]). Auditioning for Cukor’s A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Hepburn had chosen a scene from Holiday, the play she knew by heart. Cukor’s description of that audition suggests both his own casting instincts and movie stardom’s enigmas: She really wasn’t the current idea of a movie star at all, in her manner or anything. For the test she did a scene and not too well, actually, from . . . Holiday; she played it all right—with a sort of original personality. But at one time she was required to put a glass down; and she put it down on the floor— because there didn’t happen to be a table there—but she did it with her whole body, and the angle of her body, the way she played the particular moment—it occurred to me: “My God, that girl.” It wasn’t just speaking lines—she would suffuse a thing with feeling—and that business with the glass really convinced me she was right. (Bogdanovich 446) Holiday would become Hepburn’s fourth of the ten films she made with Cukor. With Hepburn having just earned the label of “box office poison,” Columbia proposed Irene Dunn, but Cukor and Hepburn wanted to work together, and they got their wish. Another casting decision would prove less successful. For Linda Seton’s sister, Julia, the rival for Johnny Case’s affections, Cukor wanted Carole Lombard, whose appeal would have made Johnny’s eventual choice less predictable. Hepburn said no, and Cukor settled for the undistinguished Doris Nolan, who never poses Hepburn a real threat (Coffin 66). With Cary Grant signed as the leading man, Lew Ayres (who steals every scene he’s in) as Linda and Julia’s brother, and Edward Everett Horton as Johnny’s friend Nick Potter (a role he played in the 1930 film), Cukor began work. Holiday tells the story of Johnny Case, a young man from an impoverished family who has managed to work his way from Harvard to Wall Street. Having amassed enough money to satisfy his immediate needs, he wants “a holiday” from work so that he can “find himself.” On a brief vacation at Lake Placid, he has met and fallen in love with Julia Seton, whose family’s immense wealth he discovers only when they return to New York. At the Seton mansion, he also

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The Cukor “Problem”  67 meets Julia’s older sister, Linda, and her alcoholic brother Ned, forced into the family business by his father. When Johnny eagerly describes his holiday plans to Julia, she tries to persuade him to abandon them and join the Seton bank. In the end, of course, Johnny chooses to leave without Julia, to sail to Europe with his friends the Potters. It is Linda who joins him. As the old adage goes, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” In Holiday’s Broadway run, Hepburn served six frustrating months as Hope Williams’s understudy before finally getting a chance at the role. She promptly bombed, getting none of the laughs that Williams had achieved so effortlessly night after night with the same lines (Leaming 265). When Holiday ended its New York run, the tour began in Boston on the night of the stock market crash. There, Barry’s play, so blithely indifferent to money (all the characters have it) flopped. Donald Ogden Stewart (playing Nick Potter) observed that “Phil’s [Barry’s] message was received by the Boston mourners with an impressive two and a half hours of silence” (Anderson 55). These failures are instructive. Cukor told Gavin Lambert that Holiday, “like all good comedies . . . was something that could have played seriously as well” (Lambert 100). In fact, we might describe Holiday as a play made by transporting the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau into drawing-room comedy. With his rejection of work, his desire to get away, his need to explore himself, Johnny represents a modern version of Thoreau, who insisted that “We are made to exaggerate the importance of what we do” (11), while redefining basic economic terms: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I would call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run” (24). At Walden Pond, Thoreau learned, “I could avoid all trade” (47) and “found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living” (50). “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he wrote, in what could serve as Holiday’s epigraph, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not want to live what was not life, living is so dear” (65). If Johnny has taken up Thoreau’s project, Linda’s brother Ned, a thwarted musician forced into the Seton financial business, represents what Thoreau famously called a life of “quiet desperation” (8). And yet Barry’s version of Thoreau lacks something. Thoreau used his twenty-eight-month stay in the woods to write A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “Civil Disobedience,” and half of Walden. Johnny only talks about “a holiday.” In fact, his behavior seems more derived from Emerson’s lines in “Self-Reliance”: “I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation” (Emerson 165). These uncompromising words continue to pose a challenge, defying our need for reasons. We accept such terms from Emerson and Thoreau because their whims resulted in great literature. By contrast, Johnny can appear merely childish. Running off to Europe with the annoyingly fey Potters hardly seems the recipe for deliberate living. For the movie to work, it has to make us suspend this judgment and like Johnny Case. How does Cukor manage this problem?

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68  George Cukor He was helped, of course, by having Cary Grant. To recognize this casting’s immediate effect, you need only watch a few minutes of the 1930 Holiday, where Robert Ames, an ageing moon-faced juvenile with brilliantined hair, makes you wonder what Linda Seton could possibly see in Johnny Case. Grant was not quite a major star in 1938; in fact, he would not make the Top Ten Box Office list until 1944, put there by uncharacteristic roles in Destination Tokyo and Arsenic and Old Lace. But he had already made Topper (1937), The Awful Truth (1937), and Bringing Up Baby (1938), and he had worked with both Hepburn and Cukor before in Sylvia Scarlett (1935), a commercially unsuccessful curio. Grant’s unidentifiable, but posh-sounding, sing-song perfectly suited Barry’s stylized dialogue, and his acrobatic training enabled the somersaults and flips that convey Johnny’s goofy, exuberant, free spirit. And yet, more was needed. As Barry wrote him, Johnny never quite comes into focus: neither young nor old, neither ambitious nor lazy, he defines himself in terms of a longing for something he cannot articulate. If Julia ultimately fails to understand him, Cukor must have worried that a Depression-era audience wouldn’t either. After all, he had that Boston flop to remind him how precarious comedy can be. In Holiday, Cukor’s principal solution to this problem involves having the viewer see Johnny in the reflection of Linda’s barely concealed love. To achieve that effect, he developed a découpage that consistently makes prominent Linda’s attitude to Johnny. And for that move to work, he had to find a striking way to introduce Hepburn. Katharine Hepburn would never make the Top Ten Box Office list (she was always an acquired taste), but in 1938, despite her Box Office Poison label, she was a Big Deal, a more famous figure than Grant. Her first appearance in Holiday demonstrates Cukor’s gift for staging scenes. Linda’s entrance follows a near-quarrel between Johnny and Julia about whether they should immediately notify her father about their intended marriage. JOHNNY: It’s getting pretty complicated, isn’t it? JULIA: You didn’t think it would be simple, did you? JOHNNY: I suppose I just didn’t think. JULIA: Oh, Johnny, Johnny, what’s the matter with you? JOHNNY: Well, I just hate the thought of sitting down with another man and being practical about you. JULIA (laughing): Oh, angel. JOHNNY: I love you, Julia. JULIA: I love you, Johnny. JOHNNY: That’s the main thing, isn’t it? (They kiss, and as they embrace, the elevator opens to reveal Linda.) Barry’s dialogue here is more functional than sparkling, and when Edward H. Griffith filmed this scene for the 1930 Holiday, he followed the play, setting the conversation in one of the Seton mansion’s formal rooms. Linda’s entrance occurs in the deep-right background, with Johnny and Julia in the left foreground, an

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The Cukor “Problem”  69

4.2  Katharine Hepburn’s striking entrance in Holiday (Columbia, 1938). Digital frame enlargement. establishing shot rendering Ann Harding (as Linda) indistinct. Griffith quickly cuts to a medium shot of Harding as she walks forward to join the couple, but he has missed an opportunity that Cukor seizes. First, he moves the couple’s conversation into the house’s elevator, a luxury representing what will come between them (“I didn’t know I was marrying into a house with an elevator”), and one whose confined space increases the tension between them, as they stand side-by-side, facing outward and looking miserably down at the floor.3 With their reconciling embrace, the forty-second shot ends as an offscreen sound of the elevator’s opening motivates a cut to a new set-up showing the couple, kissing on the left, and Hepburn on the right, leaning against the door. It is an unforgettable shot. It is also one that, unfortunately, makes the movie’s outcome obvious: by 1938, what audiences knew about Cary Grant, especially from his roles as the sophisticated, charmingly ironic husband in both The Awful Truth (1937) and Topper (1937), would already have made Doris Nolan (Julia) an impossible partner. The 1930 version, with Mary Astor as Julia, creates a more unpredictable triangle. Cukor would remember this lesson when he made The Philadelphia Story, where Jimmy Stewart becomes a believable rival to Grant. This sequence confirms Cukor’s proposition that “you can’t photograph it [a play] the way it would be on stage” (Bogdanovich 450). One of the movie’s most important scenes further shows how Cukor works with theatrical sources. At the end of Act II, in the midst of their grandiose New Year’s Eve engagement

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70  George Cukor party, given against Linda’s wish for a small celebration, Julia and Johnny have quarreled bitterly about his reluctance to enter the Seton family business. When she demands that he return to the party downstairs, he refuses, telling her that he wants to “wait a moment with Linda” in the old upstairs playroom. When Julia leaves, Johnny turns back to Linda, who starts the playroom’s music box and invites him “to step into a waltz.” He accepts, and alone in the playroom, they dance and talk: JOHNNY: There’s a conspiracy against you and me, child. LINDA: What’s that? JOHNNY: The Vested Interests. LINDA: I know. JOHNNY: They won’t let you have any fun, and they won’t give me time to think. After another exchange, Johnny stops dancing, while holding Linda: JOHNNY: Of course, they might be right. LINDA: Don’t you believe it. JOHNNY: I don’t know. They seem awfully sure. LINDA: It’s still your ride, isn’t it? You know where you want to go, don’t you? These words evoke the most famous proposition in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. (Emerson 163) As the sounds of New Year’s celebrations reach them from outside, Johnny and Linda walk to the window, and he kisses her on the cheek. She turns towards him, with their faces only inches apart. Without permitting a kiss, she sends him back to the party and Julia, remaining alone in the playroom until Ned enters. In 1930, Griffith filmed this moment straightforwardly, if unimaginatively, using thirteen shots in three minutes fifty-five seconds. Although Cukor uses only one shot fewer for his slightly shorter scene (three minutes twenty-nine seconds), he makes six crucial changes to Griffith’s approach: 1.  After Johnny has sent Julia away, the scene opens on an establishing shot of the playroom, suddenly more softly lit than in the preceding shots. Cukor seems willing here to violate a classical principle: “A character on the screen can turn the lights on and off at will. The director . . . does not have the same freedom unless he is willing to draw attention to himself at the expense of the film’s action” (Perkins 83). The scene will require a mood of tantalizing intimacy, and Cukor will gamble on keeping the audience from objecting. He will make the same move in The Philadelphia Story.

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The Cukor “Problem”  71 2.  At screen left by the music box, Linda stands alone in a black dress. Johnny enters at right rear, hands in his pockets, not looking at her. She turns over her shoulder to look towards him, but he avoids her eyes. In the 1930 version, Griffith had Johnny walk directly, and eagerly, over to Linda. Cukor has made him wander the room, making what could be knights’ moves on the checkerboard floor. As Emily Glosser has pointed out to me, Johnny’s movements already resemble the dance that the couple will soon begin. In Johnny’s circling, Cukor has also found a visual correlative for something hard to convey cinematically—a person thinking. 3.  In 1930, Griffith quickly moved his camera close to Johnny and Linda. Cukor keeps his camera farther back, allowing us to see the playroom’s musical instruments (piano, drum set) and toys (the trapeze that hangs in the background between them). This use of a slightly removed, discreet camera placement that avoids separating characters from their defining setting is a Cukor signature, one equally important to The Philadelphia Story. 4.  Griffith filmed the couple at the window from behind, as they looked out towards the avenue’s New Year’s celebrations. Cukor, however, takes his camera outside the window, producing a striking, back-lit image of Johnny and Linda facing us. When they turn towards each other, they appear in near-silhouette. 5.  In the 1930 Holiday, Johnny kissed Linda passionately on the mouth. Cukor has him kiss her on the cheek. They turn to face each other, their faces nearly touching. But they do not kiss. Cukor has intuited that the audience must feel ambivalent about a woman taking her younger sister’s fiancé and will accept her doing so only after the engaged sister has given him up. 6.  Griffith relied on a shot/reverse shot pattern of Johnny’s exit from the playroom, following him to the hall elevator, from where he exchanged glances with Linda, left standing at the playroom door. She shut the door behind her to return to the playroom and Ned, who had entered five shots earlier while Johnny was still present. Cukor, however, has Linda return to the playroom alone, keeping her back to the camera. “The motion picture camera held on a human figure squarely from behind,” Stanley Cavell observes, “has tended to inflect some significance of privacy and vulnerability, of self-reflection . . . Such a shot naturally constitutes the ending of a film” (Cavell on Film 139). In this case, however, it is not the end of Holiday. Ned enters, and the movie continues, but Cukor has enabled us to see Johnny and Linda nearing an acknowledgment of their love. They will have to acknowledge it to themselves before they can declare it to each other. By the end, the movie will have enacted a situation Kenneth Koch makes lyrical in “One Train May Hide Another”: In a family one sister may conceal another, So, when you are courting, it’s best to have them all in view Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another. (Koch 441)

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72  George Cukor

The Philadelphia Story The Philadelphia Story is Cukor’s best movie and one of Classic Hollywood’s greatest films.4 Its origins are well known. By 1938, Hepburn’s career had reached an impasse. She had not had a hit since Alice Adams (1935), exhibitors had labeled her “Box Office Poison,” and Selznick showed no interest in her as Scarlett O’Hara, offering his reasons in a memo: I think Hepburn has two strikes against her—first, the unquestionable and very widespread public dislike of her at the moment, and second, the fact that she is yet to demonstrate that she possesses the sex qualities which are probably the most important of all the many requisites of Scarlett. (Selznick 188) Philip Barry had his own problems: four stage flops in a row, three of which had closed after fewer than twenty-five performances. Hepburn and Barry got together and began to work on a play specifically designed to revive her career. Doing so would require having her character experience a scolding for qualities associated by the movie-going public with Hepburn herself: arrogant independence, impatient intelligence, aristocratic pride. The plan was simple: Hepburn, as Donald R. Anderson writes, would “be redeemed through a form of public punishment” (116), and Hepburn understood the strategy. “Please don’t give me an entrance,” she told Barry. “Write a nice dull scene for me at the beginning where I can be mean to my mother, so that they can see I’m not trying to cotton up to them, that I’m just as horrible as ever, even though I can’t get a job, which they all know” (Anderson 116). Hepburn visited Barry at his Maine summer house to get things right. As Sheridan Morley observed, “Few actresses in the entire world history of theater can ever have had such close attention from a playwright” (75–6). George Jean Nathan detailed Barry’s method: He spent two long months observing at close quarters, recording carefully every attractive gesture she made, every awkwardly graceful movement of her body, every odd little quirk of her head and every effective dart of her eyes, then to incorporate them all into the play he was writing for her. A line was interpolated to allow her to swing her lithe figure across the stage, another was so contrived that a toss of her lovely brown hair would pictorially embellish it, still another was so framed that is would permit her, while seated relevantly, to cross her knees and display her pretty legs to the critical professors out front. If her voice was found unable to cope properly with a line, it was altered until she could handle it nicely. (Morley 75–6) The Philadelphia Story was a Broadway smash, running for 417 performances in 1939–40 and touring for two years. Helped by her former lover Howard Hughes, Hepburn shrewdly purchased the movie rights, which enabled her to choose Cukor and the surrounding cast. After Gary Cooper turned down the Dexter

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The Cukor “Problem”  73 Haven part, and MGM declared Gable and Tracy unavailable, Hepburn happily settled for Cary Grant (Dexter) and Jimmy Stewart (Macauley Connor). After a brief slapstick prologue of Tracy and Dexter fighting, conducted without words, the movie opens on the eve of Tracy Lord’s second marriage to George Kittredge, an ambitious self-made manager in the Lord coal business. Over the course of the midsummer’s night, she will find herself tempted by journalist Macauley Connor (with whom she shares a drunken nude swim), chastised by both George and her ex-husband Dexter, and suddenly thrown into confusion about everything she had been so sure about. Having learned how to become “a first-rate human being,” she remarries Dexter at the end. The movie has to operate like a magician, keeping you busy so you don’t notice the machinery. Looked at too closely, The Philadelphia Story can raise problems in our more politically sensitive age. For after all, what Tracy has to “overcome” is her intolerance to Dexter’s alcoholism and her father’s philandering. As Molly Haskell observes, “This is the furtive revenge of mediocrity on excellence; she is being convicted merely for being a superior creature” (182). Andrew Sarris’s critique pinpoints the issue: It was not until I actually saw Blythe Danner, almost invariably a luminous stage performer, groping desperately with the part of Tracy Lord that I perceived for the first time the real subject of The Philadelphia Story. The play was not about a spoiled socialite like Katharine Hepburn. The play was about Katharine Hepburn herself, and what the American people thought about Katharine Hepburn in 1939, and what Katharine Hepburn realized she had to do to keep her career going. The Philadelphia Story is quite simply the breaking, reining, and saddling of an unruly thoroughbred for the big races to come on Broadway and in Hollywood. It is Katharine Hepburn getting her comeuppance at long last, and accepting it like the good sport she was. (You Ain’t Heard 451) The movie also pulls its punches about the rich. In fact, The Philadelphia Story amounts to The Great Gatsby told from Tom and Daisy’s perspective, and showing no mercy for its own arriviste Gatsby figure, George Kittredge, whom the movie humiliates at every turn. Like Tom and Daisy, Dexter and Tracy are privileged, reckless, and ultimately cruel. Like Gatsby, Kittredge is humorless, a fatal flaw in screwball comedy, and his money is nouveau. Mike Connor assumes the Nick Carraway part, observing and eventually participating in the events. Cukor had a feel for this material: his first major success as a director had come with a 1926 Broadway version of Fitzgerald’s novel. But Cukor could not simply “film the play.” For one thing, as he told Lambert, “the laughs came quite differently. In the theater all the comedy was in Phil Barry’s verbal wit, but in the movie a lot of it was visual, reactions, pieces of business” (Lambert 101). The first visual element was the choice of players, something Cukor always understood. Jean Renoir repeatedly insisted that in the cinema, the actor is more important than the role. If we imagine The Philadelphia

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74  George Cukor Story with only one major change, John Howard and Cary Grant swapping parts, we can begin to see how our sense of “Kittredge,” for example, depends less on his “flaws” than on casting. In the cinema, physiognomy is destiny. Howard is shorter than both Grant and Stewart, and though the youngest of the three, much the oldest looking. With his neat mustache and formal suits, he seems a figure left over from the 1930s, a poor-man’s John Barrymore or William Powell, precisely a type being left behind by 1940. High Society (1956), the musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, suffers enormously from miscasting. At fiftythree, and twenty-five years older than Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby was too old to play the Dexter Haven part (although he and Kelly reportedly had an offscreen affair), and Frank Sinatra’s tough-guy persona and Hoboken accent misplace the small-town Midwestern sense of Macauley Connor. Even Grace Kelly, who at first seems a proper Tracy Lord (renamed “Samantha” for the remake), lacks Hepburn’s edgy self-awareness, which, like every major star’s defining quality, is sui generis. By comparison, Kelly seems another example of a stock type, the spoiled rich girl, only a less funny version of Newhart’s Stephanie Vanderkellen (Julia Duffy). The second visual challenge facing Cukor involved framing. The story’s primary setting, the Lords’ Main Line house and grounds, if made too large or shot without considering the actors’ appearance, might have unbalanced the film’s effect. Holiday, of course, makes this problem an explicit theme, opposing the downstairs rooms’ chilly formality to the playroom’s intimate warmth (“This,” says Johnny Case, pleasantly surprised on first entering it, “is quite different”). Cukor begins to address this problem in The Philadelphia Story by confining the movie’s action to only five of the Lord estate’s immediate areas: the south parlor, a small living room, an enormous dining room (piled high with wedding presents), a family sitting room, and the back terrace. Clues encourage us to imagine other rooms: the presence of “the south parlor,” for example, implies a north, and possible east and west parlors. And Kittredge’s unanswered phone call locates Tracy’s bedroom offscreen, but within earshot of the terrace. Most of the action takes place in the smallest of these spaces—the family sitting room, the small living room, and the terrace—where we notice that Cukor’s framing is primarily a function of his camera’s distance from the events and people being recorded. Because Cukor preferred filming his actors together in a single shot, rather than isolating them in shot/reverse shot patterns, these more modest spaces work to his advantage. By contrast, High Society consistently resorts to long shots of its characters, who, as a result, often appear isolated from each other, dwarfed by cavernous, high-ceilinged rooms. In The Philadelphia Story, the tighter blocking and closer framing make the Lords’ rooms seem warm and the people sympathetic. Cukor’s intimate framing encourages an interest in his movie’s characters, while High Society transforms them into objects of study, kept at a distance. To get a sense of this difference, compare Cukor’s famous scene (invented for the movie) of Mike’s late-night visit to Dexter’s house, with Grant and Stewart across from each other at a tiny card table (“C. K. Dexter Haven, you have unexpected depth!”), to High Society’s version, which initially keeps Crosby

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The Cukor “Problem”  75 and Sinatra apart, lost in an enormous, overly-furnished library, before they join each other to sing “Well, Did You Evah?”. We have seen that the 1930 Holiday, with its cramped framings, often isolated its characters from the locations that purportedly defined them. High Society makes the opposite mistake, seeming more interested in displaying Newport’s grandeur than in telling a story. Cukor’s framing, without ever calling attention to itself, strikes the perfect balance. A nearly twelve-minute sequence at The Philadelphia Story’s midpoint illustrates Cukor’s decision making. Set at the Lords’ swimming pool, the interlocking scenes show Tracy encountering all three of her suitors, with Mike arriving with her in an establishing long shot—which, for one of the few times in the film, keeps the characters at a considerable distance, separated in the frame by the pool and a large marble statue. Cukor motivates the subsequent breakdown shots, involving a shot/reverse shot pattern, by having Tracy and Mike enter adjacent dressing rooms, from where they carry on a conversation. Once the characters return outside, Cukor uses a thirty-four-second two-shot as Mike refuses Tracy’s patronizing offer of a hunting cabin. Her glance offscreen left motivates a cut to Dexter, who moves into a twenty-nine-second three-shot, with Tracy between the two men. Except for one twenty-eight-second three-shot and three brief reaction shots of Mike’s increasing embarrassment and departure, the next twenty-seven shots, often going back and forth, concentrate on a Dexter-Tracy quarrel. It is the film’s most rapidly edited sequence, but Cukor, always economical, returns repeatedly to particular set-ups. When George arrives, Cukor places Tracy between the two men. As Dexter walks away, she sheds her bathrobe and, dressed only in a striped white bathing suit, walks determinedly to the diving board, glances offscreen left (in the direction of the now-departed Dexter), squares her shoulders, and executes a perfect dive. Tracy’s dive is one of The Philadelphia Story’s most memorable images, unnecessary to the movie’s narrative (the play had obviously managed without it, and so will High Society) but ideally suited to blurring the line between the character and the famously athletic actress playing her. Dexter, of course, has left behind his wedding present, a model of the True Love, the sailboat on which he and Tracy had honeymooned. She walks to the diving board in bright sunlight. Just three minutes, fifteen seconds, and sixteen shots later, without any explicit signs of temporal ellipsis, the sequence ends with Tracy standing alone at the pool’s edge, looking at the model boat floating in total darkness. Cukor, of course, has gradually reduced the light from shot to shot, invisibly achieving the mood he needs (as he had done in Holiday’s waltz scene). The scene’s final image, entirely absent from High Society, represents the best of Cukor. In a fourteen-second long shot, Tracy walks deliberately, distractedly down the steps towards the pool. In her white robe, she matches the pool house’s Doric columns and the marble statues to which she has been unfavorably compared. The tree branches visible in the right foreground make our watching seem like spying.5 It is the only time in the movie that Tracy appears alone. Still in long shot, she stops by the water and looks at the boat. Cukor holds the shot briefly, ending it as Tracy walks off to the left, a dissolve almost hiding her final

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76  George Cukor

4.3  Hepburn alone at the pool in The Philadelphia Story (MGM, 1940). Digital frame enlargement. gesture, a stubborn toss of the head. Cukor has shown us Tracy thinking, but has left it to us to imagine her thoughts, providing no close-up or camera movement or dialogue to lessen the ambiguity. It is the kind of effect that good directors achieve. Cukor did so often—and almost without our notice.

Notes 1. A student of mine once protested a paper assignment on Howard Hawks by saying that “Hawks isn’t doing anything.” 2. Paulette Bane called my attention to this scene and many of its important elements. My comments begin from her observations. 3. Glen Lindquist alerted me to the elevator’s function in this scene. 4. I have written at length about The Philadelphia Story in The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 85–156. Some of my comments here also appear, often in slightly different form, in that book. 5. Spencer Chalifour alerted me to the effect of the tree branches in this shot.

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Chapter 5 Modulations of the Shot: The Quiet Film Style of George Cukor in What Price Hollywood?, Born Yesterday, Sylvia Scarlett, and My Fair Lady The Quiet Film Style of George Cukor

Lee Carruthers

It’s easier to do justice . . . to dialogue and characterization than to the rhythms and felicities of visual style. Carlos Clarens, George Cukor (1975), p. 119 In a brief essay on Cukor, Ed Buscombe identifies what he calls the director’s critical problem, highlighting the extent to which Cukor’s films have eluded rigorous analysis: while there is a clear consensus within the literature about the quality of the films and their enduring appeal as Hollywood texts, critics have been disinclined to scrutinize them at the level of style, so as to specify a distinctive film aesthetic. In other words, we know much about the broad themes, narrative turns, and luminous personalities of Cukor’s cinema, but very little about the patterning of images and sounds that animate his films, lending substance and energy to their premises and preoccupations. Written in 1973, Buscombe’s commentary reflects the concerns of its disciplinary context, pursuing an alignment of critical approaches between auteurism and structuralism. But for contemporary scholarship, the difficulty he mentions is still germane: forty years on, assessments of Cukor remain frustratingly imprecise, sustaining the impression that perhaps there is “nothing to say” about his cinema. In this discussion, I want to offer something more concrete about the cinematographic style of Cukor’s work, so that we might obtain greater scholarly purchase on it. This effort will necessarily entail an acknowledgment of the films’ resistance to such schemes, as well as a sensitivity to their formal restraint. If critics have failed to describe Cukor’s style definitively, this lapse can lead us back productively to the films themselves, reappraising their self-effacement. In what follows, I will outline some of the challenges to analysis that Cukor’s films present, and the limitations of the received criticism, before examining a range of diverse titles to see what can be discovered about their formal character. Specifically, I will point to particular modulations of the shot that prove characteristic for Cukor’s cinema, related to their realistic texture and canny framings. This analysis finds fresh affinities across Cukor’s oeuvre, extending

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78  George Cukor from the early projects What Price Hollywood? (1932) and Sylvia Scarlett (1935) to the commercial successes of Born Yesterday (1950) and My Fair Lady (1964). One way to figure the challenge of Cukor is to say that however we approach his cinema, it appears to radiate outward, throwing off authorial ascriptions rather than consolidating these as a coherent creative signature. Never original works for the cinema, Cukor’s films are appropriations of diverse literary and theatrical materials respectfully reinterpreted for the screen: the adaptations of Alcott (Little Women, 1933), Dickens (David Copperfield, 1935), and Shaw (My Fair Lady) are illustrative cases. Relatedly, Cukor’s alliance with screenwriters Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon extends across the 1940s and 1950s, inflecting his work in significant ways: this fruitful partnership produced six films: A Double Life (1947), Adam’s Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), The Marrying Kind (1952), Pat and Mike (1952), and It Should Happen to You (1954). At their point of origin, Cukor’s films seem always to arise from somewhere else, and out of a collaborative process, complicating any narrow claim for filmic or directorial “purity.” Another relevant issue is Cukor’s reputation as a “woman’s director”—an oftdeployed descriptor within critical writings that once more emphasizes a collaborative practice rather than an autonomous vision. The term comes to designate, somewhat loosely, a range of factors: an unusual concentration of women’s themes in Cukor’s work; his affinity for, and facilitation of, female performance; and, in a way that is potentially pejorative, an alignment with the undervalued category of “women’s pictures.” As is well known, Cukor is credited with eliciting iconic performances from a number of actresses, such as Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, Judy Garland, Judy Holliday, and others. His films consistently describe women’s lives in ways that are acutely observant, poignant, and singularly intense. While these factors offer a valuable way to think about Cukor’s work, they also partially obscure it: the notion of Cukor as “woman’s director” has tended to preclude any sustained consideration of his films as complex cinematographic texts, as though the performances were their sole source of energy. Finally, there is the restrained style of the films themselves, driven neither by aggressive montage nor by the stylized structuring of long takes. While there are notable instances of both in Cukor’s cinema, neither technique is markedly obtrusive. Instead, the form of Cukor’s films cleaves to narrative processes, and especially to the requirements of dialogue, in ways that cherish the rhythms of the source material while also conforming to the efficiencies of studio production. This alignment of style to substance poses a genuine problem for critical assessment: how can we characterize the form of Cukor’s work as something discernible and distinctive if it often yields to, rather than perceptibly deepening, its narrative content? To put the question another way, how should we talk about a film style that is modest rather than conspicuous, without exaggerating its claims to uniqueness or, at the other extreme, failing to observe it? In their efforts to valorize American cinema in writings of the 1950s, the critics at Cahiers du cinéma situated Cukor’s work as an embodiment of Hollywood film practice, informed by an appreciable “efficacy and elegance.” As Éric Rohmer writes,

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The Quiet Film Style of George Cukor  79 Hollywood has its share of the precious, but as a rule it does not smother itself in as many flourishes as our cinema does. Its film-makers have more confidence in the power of what they show us than the angle they choose to show it from. For them ellipses is no more than a narrative process, not, as all too often with us, a convenient way of avoiding any problem of acting or mise-en-scène. (89) While Rohmer’s commentary seeks to describe a broad tendency of American cinema rather than a single director, his remarks are particularly well suited to thinking about Cukor’s work. At issue here is a mode of storytelling that appears unmannered when compared to French cinema of the period. For Rohmer and his colleagues, Hollywood’s privileging of narrative coherence over other considerations is not a constraint upon expression but rather a welcome liberation from digressive or idiosyncratic stylistics. In view of the Hollywood figures that he names beside Cukor—Griffith, Hawks, Hitchcock, Lang, Mankiewicz, and Ray—it’s clear that this idea of Hollywood practice is highly diversified, and is seen to foster individualized forms of expression. It’s worth noting a correspondence between Rohmer’s account and Cukor’s own comments about his work. In interviews, Cukor consistently stresses his facilitative role on set, and his commitment to an unassuming film style, cultivated in deference to the needs of the story and the actor’s performance. In a seminar at the American Film Institute, he described his approach to cinematography as follows: As a rule of thumb—unless you have to move the camera, unless it does something for you—be quiet. The less you fidget with the camera or the cutting, the better. The audience has got to hear the lines, and if you complicate the action or the camera work then the audience will strain to hear every word . . . when I say that the camera should be quiet, I don’t mean that it should be static or that the cutting should be static. I think it should move when necessary—just don’t become infatuated with it. (Stevens 286–7) This reserve has evidently produced a comparable silence on the part of critics: Cukor’s emphasis upon the listening, not the “looking” viewer tends to discourage much probing of the visual aspects of his cinema. While the filmmaking approach that Cukor describes doesn’t rule out an examination of cinematography, it does not enable one either. In light of these challenges, it’s unsurprising that critics have not proposed a definitive “Cukorian” aesthetic. Substantial studies of Cukor, such as those by Lambert, McGilligan, and Levy are biographical accounts whose discussion focuses on plot and production detail and the director’s relationships with Hollywood personnel (see also Domarchi; Carey; and Phillips). While such topics are of interest, it’s remarkable how thoroughly these texts suppress the films’ cinematographic qualities, and thus their medium-specific address to viewers. A revealing case in point is the critical treatment of a project like A Star is Born

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80  George Cukor (1954), arguably Cukor’s most acutely stylized film and an attractive object for analysis. Lambert’s collection of interviews with Cukor, engagingly framed as a long and intimate conversation with the director, discusses the film’s formal choices largely as they inflect actors’ performances. Similarly, McGilligan’s text details the film’s myriad problems of production (and post-production), but never approaches the look or sound of a single shot, except as briefly recalled by others. By contrast, Levy’s account points to the inattentiveness of the literature, and aims to redress it, seeking a “fresher perspective on Cukor’s subtle mise-en-scène and distinctive visual style” (9–10). Yet despite this promise, Levy’s discussion proves indifferent to the film’s intricately layered compositions, and its arresting use of color: these salient effects receive no comment at all. A different version of this problem is encountered with Carlos Clarens’s compelling study of the director, which sees Cukor’s film style as curiously bifurcated, initially reliant upon “star and script guidelines” before undergoing a shift in creative sensibility. He characterizes Cukor’s work before the mid-1950s as follows: Cukor could hardly be called an innovator. He is, rather, a unique refiner who limits himself to a few genres, developing such a subtle rapport between camera and performer that the 7 1/2 minute take in Adam’s Rib, the one-shot sequences in The Actress, or the hand-held camera in A Life of Her Own, pass almost unnoticed . . . But with Cukor, one can always distil a series of correspondences, analogies, and connections, a complex system that cross-references the entire oeuvre and refers one Cukor heroine to another. (Clarens 19) These lines frame an evident contradiction: Cukor’s work is cohesive thematically and with respect to its characters across the corpus, but it cannot be read this way at the level of film style. On this view, the early films are too conventional to merit much attention: their forms do not lead us to an improved understanding of the director, and cannot be parsed as potential sources of meaning. Yet with A Star is Born, Cukor suddenly allows the “mise-en-scène to come to the fore”; by 1969, his work is that of an acknowledged “visual stylist” (119). What’s missing here is a persuasive rationale for this transition, and a specification of its basis: Clarens does not point to any change in the conditions of production, or in Cukor’s relationship to the work. Thus the author’s claims remain underdeveloped and therefore difficult to sustain. And as we have seen, interviews with the director and the content of production histories tend to belie this hypothesis. Finally, James Bernardoni’s critical study and filmography provides a close assessment of Cukor’s style across eight representative films, thus initially appearing as an important exception to the critical problem outlined above. To some degree it is: the author’s examination of camera movement, cutting, and mise-en-scène is skillfully rendered. But ultimately Bernardoni’s book reveals more about his own standards of evaluation that about Cukor’s aesthetic. Privileging values of coherence, economy, and identity of form with content, the author’s conclusions about Cukor focus on the extent to which the films conform

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The Quiet Film Style of George Cukor  81 to such criteria, rather than using the wealth of observed technical detail to elucidate the free-standing features of the director’s cinema. Once again Cukor’s work seems to resist illumination on its own terms, overshadowed this time by a quasi-Aristotelian scheme. One wonders, in particular, whether the instances of expressivity that the author deems “excessive” might actually constitute the peculiar energies of Cukor’s cinema. Clearly Cukor’s cinema places special demands upon critics, despite its unassuming appearance. What is required is a way of relating to the films that is open to their assured and patient spirit, reading their “quiet” forms not as a lack of style but as a mindful modulation of it. Let’s turn now to a consideration of four films to see what they disclose of Cukor’s aesthetic, noticing, in particular, the way the early work opens out to later productions and reveals congruities of style. In the next section, I will examine two films, one early and one mid-career for Cukor, that deploy what we might call a realistic texture, integrating documentary-like details into their narrative workings. These elements are carefully blended with more polished perspectives that are exclusively diegetic: what results is a flow of fiction that actively appropriates real-world detail, in ways that are generative for the films’ systems of meaning. As we shall see, this strategy effects a particular kind of interplay between shots, allowing us to begin to conceptualize the style of Cukor’s cinema.

Reading Realistic Textures: What Price Hollywood? and Born Yesterday Documentary images are a recurrent feature of Cukor’s corpus, but are rarely assessed for their calculated aesthetic effects. They furnish whole sequences in A Double Life, Pat and Mike, The Marrying Kind, The Actress (1953), It Should Happen to You, and in the titles that I will discuss below. One might propose two kinds of justification for their frequent presence. First, pseudo-documentary effects are conventional components of Hollywood practice during the Classical era. One need only think of the gritty, “torn from the headlines” look of the gangster cycle in the 1930s, or the police procedural aesthetic of 1950s film noir to mark this inflection across these and other generic modes through the period. Another rationale lies closer to Cukor’s project: these kinds of images lend a discernibly “filmic” character to the productions that they infuse, dynamically transforming the terrain of literary and theatrical works by their cinematographic viewpoint, and contributing new currents of self-reflexivity. But one shouldn’t overstate the practical purpose of these images, suppressing the effects they potentially create. On close inspection, such realistic details, often distinctively configured in Cukor’s cinema, generate subtle exchanges between shots that institute significant tensions. For What Price Hollywood?, documentary detail serves as an essential rhetorical element, buttressing an “inside” view of Hollywood production. For Born Yesterday, these materials function as something more earnest: the real spaces featured in the narrative open out to the wider world, signaling its ethical possibility.

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82  George Cukor What Price Hollywood? relates the story of Mary Evans (Constance Bennett), an ambitious young waitress who gets a break in the movie business when she meets the notoriously inebriated Hollywood director Max Carey (Lowell Sherman). The film charts her rise to fame, and the director’s sad decline and death; it also describes, if somewhat less credibly, Mary’s love affair with a wealthy polo player and the marital woes that ensue. These narrative premises may sound familiar to many viewers: adapted from an original story by Adela Rogers St. Johns, they are reconfigured as the basis of Cukor’s A Star is Born and its iterations by other directors (William Wellman’s 1937 film and Frank Pierson’s of 1976). What is less well established is the extent to which this early film anticipates Cukor’s later work stylistically. The film’s opening shots provide a dynamic distillation of thematic concerns. The first image presents a woman’s hand, turning the pages of a fan magazine in rapid succession. She pauses to examine an advertisement for silk stockings modeled by the “frolic beauty and screen star, Glinda Golden.” The image at once fades to reveal the magazine’s reader trying on the stockings herself, in a filmic effect of instant gratification. We return once more to the magazine’s pages to admire, and then to acquire, an advertised dress and lipstick (that “Hollywood stars prefer”). With the lipstick, the shot shifts to an extreme close-up of the woman’s mouth as she applies it. The effect here is intense, and somewhat startling, deliberately reproducing the kind of visual proximity associated with a kiss—but here appropriated to the calculated pleasures of consumer culture. The images that follow present the same woman poised between two sources of reflection, the fan magazine clasped in her left hand and a mirror in her right. This doubled perspective then recurs, in variation. She folds the magazine in half and brings it to her cheek, creating an improvised “two-shot” with the cover image of Clark Gable. In the waning moments of this fantasy, Mary assumes the voice of Garbo and makes romantic declarations, imitating the star performance in Susan Lenox (1931). Finally, the scene is curtailed with comic abruptness, as she shifts to the hard-edged vernacular of the period: “It’s getting late, and I must scram.” These early moments are worth examining. We should notice, first, the compact and considered style of the sequence. In scarcely more than ninety seconds of screen time, the film articulates a complex relay of desire and substitution that anticipates the narrative trajectory while acknowledging its intrinsic hollowness. This transaction is developed in ways that are expressly cinematic, fueled by the instantaneous transformations of film editing and the exaggerated perspective of the close-up. Notably, these effects both picture and invite the enthusiasm of the film viewer. The wish to bridge the divide between reality and its idealized Hollywood reflection is the evident subject of the scene: it is what Mary seeks, as actress and film fan, and will energetically pursue. This desire also underlies the flow of images and the pleasure they supply to viewers as they effortlessly formulate Mary’s transformation. More specifically, it’s striking how liberally the film is infused with actualities of the movie industry: here, the references to MGM stars Gable and Garbo,

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The Quiet Film Style of George Cukor  83 and in the next scene to the restaurant where Mary works, the Brown Derby, contribute a thoroughgoing sense of reflexivity that is sustained by the film as a whole. The Brown Derby opened in Hollywood in February 1929, in a building designed for Cecil B. DeMille, and was soon claimed by members of the film industry. Reputedly, stars received fan mail addressed to the establishment, and gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper both made it their headquarters. As featured in What Price Hollywood?, the practice of offering the use of a telephone at table side was pioneered there (see Wanamaker and Nudelman). As a narrative exposé of Hollywood stardom, the inclusion of such detail is unsurprising, but Cukor’s film is an early instance of the form. What I mean to highlight here is not just the foregrounding of such content but the way it serves an encompassing formal system: realistic textures are carefully deployed to heighten the affective force of a scene, creating a bristling interface of objective and subjective elements. This dynamic is clarified when we look closely at another sequence. Having rescued director Carey from an alcohol-fueled incident, Mary visits him at the studio, seeking the break that he promised. Once again, snippets of Hollywood press coverage structure the flow of narrative. Lines from a gossip column appear as an insert, clarifying the plot for viewers while commenting upon it cynically (“Carey In Again: Max Carey stole the Brown Derby’s prettiest waitress. What for? Oh, same old story. Going to put her in pictures”). The insert is replaced by a series of images with an unmistakable documentary texture. These are exterior views of the RKO lot, bustling with activity. Linked by dissolves, the images feature a camera perspective that approaches, and then enters, one of the buildings on the lot (designated as “10”), finally arriving at the sound stage where Mary will attempt her first lines.1 Thus the real activity of the studio, captured in stock footage, is carefully sutured to the film’s narrative framings, producing a blend that appears quite seamless. To appreciate the thoughtful design of these elements, and to situate them as credible components of Cukor’s aesthetic, it’s useful to hold their realistic contours against a shot that soon follows. Having miserably failed her first acting assignment, Mary is dismissed from the studio: it is this image, framing her departure, which invites our attention. Initially, she is pictured in medium-long shot, hovering in the doorway before she leaves the building. Her slender frame is diminished, and half-obscured, by the tall metal turnstile that secures her departure and will prevent her return. Here Cukor’s mise-en-scène grows evocative: pictured prominently, the bars of the turnstile are lined with small metal prongs, evenly spaced and rising like thorns from a branch. The composition is bold, dominated by the hard lines of the metal structure, and nearly Expressionist in inflection. Juxtaposed with the more objective shots that precede it, the force of the image is strangely heightened, emphasizing its cruelty and abstraction. This kind of image doesn’t spring to mind when one thinks of Cukor; indeed, its peculiar features cannot be called representative. But there is something instructive in this composition that shows us the value of the documentary elements Cukor uses, and thus the working out of a robust visual style. The image

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84  George Cukor

5.1  Location shooting turns expressive in What Price Hollywood? (RKO, 1932). Digital frame enlargement. of the turnstile produces an intense description of Mary’s experience, capturing a private, despairing moment in which the elements of the space appear infused with her feeling. It thus creates an affective contrast that is too exact to be merely incidental: it perfectly reverses the objective views of the studio lot in their forward-tracking movement, and in their impersonal presentation of industrious daily activity. The interplay of shots is deftly handled here, and throughout the film’s operations. The key moments of Mary’s personal and professional life are shot through with real-world references, alluding to stars and scandals with recognition value for viewers. At the same time, the film continually generates “authentic” views of internal studio processes, presenting images of private documents, screen tests observed from the projection booth, and on-set views that expose the constructed nature of filmmaking itself, foregrounding the work of camera operators and lighting and sound technicians. The film consistently deploys these elements to intensify its most strongly felt episodes, as though aiming to enhance the emotional authenticity of such moments by a credible texture. Versions of these techniques recur in A Star is Born, worked out more extravagantly in widescreen and Technicolor. These effects are not just the fodder of a “behind the scenes” narrative: they resurface across Cukor’s work to effect poignant contrasts, securing and deepening meaning. Based on Garson Kanin’s Broadway success, Born Yesterday relates the story

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The Quiet Film Style of George Cukor  85 of the boorish junkyard tycoon Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford), who arrives in Washington D.C. with his mistress, the former chorus girl Billie Dawn (Judy Holliday). Harry is intent on buying political influence, and hires newspaperman Paul Verrall (William Holden) to educate Billie, in hopes of making her more acceptable to Capitol society. Billie exceeds all expectations, mastering the lessons in American history, exposing Harry’s corrupt business dealings, and falling for her tutor in the process (see Bordman and Hischak 86). The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, securing one for Judy Holliday’s performance. From the outset, it’s clear that Cukor’s film is at pains to renovate the fixed setting of its source material, transforming the single room of Kanin’s play into a more sprawling enterprise that encompasses the luxurious interiors of Washington’s Statler Hotel as well as a substantial survey of the city’s places of interest. Indeed, these two zones formulate an important opposition for the narrative that ensues, conveying a contrast between conspicuous, private wealth and the values embodied in shared public space. Especially notable is the film’s extensive use of location shooting, depicting Billie and Paul’s tour of Washington attractions: this sixteen-minute episode, set over the course of three days, animates the details of an anecdote in Kanin’s original script, told by Billie retrospectively. The inclusion of real and recognizable spaces contributes a genuine freshness to the film, and lends concreteness to its claims: the world that Billie is exposed to here, as the cornerstone of her education, is made present to viewers as well, substantiating her transformation while extending an edifying discourse to viewers. In these sequences, camera movement is dynamic and quite expressive: drifting through the Capitol Building, for example, nearly grazing the crowds of tourists, the camera palpably conveys the busy, peopled quality of the space, finding a formal articulation for the democratic principles the building celebrates. Aligned with Billie’s awestruck gaze, the camera tilts upward to offer a handsome view of the rotunda’s painted canopy. On other occasions, its emphasis is more objective, locating Billie within a wider context, a diminutive figure set against large-scaled splendor. The sightseeing tour extends to the Library of Congress, the National Gallery, and the Jefferson Memorial: in each location, an edifying explanation is offered, and permits amusing dialogue exchanges. But the images are not merely illustrative, supplying a neutral content. Rather, the beauty of the space in its fluid presentation subtly attunes the film’s ideas, insisting, with every frame, on the privilege and pleasure of citizenship. Consider, for example, a scene less saturated with pedagogical purpose, in which Billie and Paul attend an open-air concert on the Potomac, and then sit on the terraced steps that descend from the Lincoln Memorial. After the performance, Billie mentions that she has received a letter from her father, from whom she is estranged. She and Paul are framed in a loose medium shot. The camera edges forward almost imperceptibly as she speaks, effecting a slight intensification. As the sequence proceeds, it’s clear that its formal arrangement is calculated to particular ends: the waterfront is visible between the pair, lights shimmering on its surface. In the distance, on the ground below, three men in shirtsleeves

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86  George Cukor are visible, crisscrossing the pathway at the water’s edge as they stack chairs from the concert. Their activity is a reminder, though not an intrusive one, of the world that lies beyond Billie’s concerns, and appears indifferent to them. The groundskeepers do not distract from Billie’s anecdote, but tend to deepen it: there is some consonance with her father’s work ethic, which she mentions; but more richly, their presence proposes that other lives might matter to, and make contact with, her own. None of this is expressed directly by the scene’s dialogue, or by the actors’ performances, but instead registers as a seemingly stray detail in the furthest plane of Cukor’s enduring image. These elements are strategic, though easy to miss: etched into the narrative background, their effect is subdued but powerful, and leavens the film’s didactic agenda.

5.2  A conversation between Billie (Judy Holliday) and Paul (William Holden) is deepened by background action in Born Yesterday (Columbia, 1950). Digital frame enlargement.

The Facilitating Frame: Sylvia Scarlett and My Fair Lady I now want to examine a feature of Cukor’s cinema that operates on a smaller scale, and as something more elusive, than deployment of documentary detail. What I have in mind is harder to separate out from narrative processes than the realistically textured images we have assessed already. Instead, it is more a matter of acknowledging a “pause” that is permissive, or a kind of uncluttered presentation that is designed to yield to the internal logics of the scene. Specifically, I want to address what we might call the “facilitating frame” of Cukor’s cinema,

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The Quiet Film Style of George Cukor  87 or the way in which his compositional prerogatives enable narrative processes rather than embellishing them. Sylvia Scarlett is a singular achievement for Cukor in this respect, though not a commercially successful one. Based on Compton MacKenzie’s 1918 novel, and retaining the picaresque structure of its source material, the film blends gender and genre elements as a cross-dressing comedy-romance. Its narrative antics possess an exuberance that strongly recalls Shakespeare’s comedies. At the same time, it features a number of surprisingly downbeat elements. (This tonal mix perhaps contributed to the film’s notoriously cool reception; indeed, Hepburn earned the label of “box office poison” from The Independent Theatre Owners of America.) The story of Sylvia Scarlett concerns the exploits of a father and daughter (Edmund Gwenn; Hepburn) who flee to England to escape embezzlement charges. To avoid detection, the daughter dresses as a boy, transformed from Sylvia to Sylvester. The pair is soon joined by a con artist, Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant) and a Cockney housemaid (the uncredited Bunny Beatty), and become a traveling troupe of entertainers. Sylvia’s deception somewhat improbably goes undetected—a conceit that permits a genuine destabilizing of gender identity on several occasions, played to comic effect. Ambiguities are curtailed when Sylvia’s identity is revealed to a young artist (Brian Aherne) with whom she falls in love. She is paired with him at the film’s conclusion. The film’s structure is episodic, unfolding as a series of playful exchanges, equivocations, and reversals. Camera movement is unobtrusive and fluid; shot transitions are likewise restrained, cutting only to underscore a narrative detail or when the staging requires it. If these procedures are consistent with classical Hollywood practice, we can still detect something distinctive in Cukor’s use of them, especially when we pause to consider his adroit treatment of the shot itself when, in moments of unusual emotional resonance, there occurs a careful modulation of framings. In such instances, the quality of reserve often attributed to Cukor’s film style pays special dividends, experienced from a viewer’s perspective as a kind of patience, a strong sense that the images have found an imperturbable timing that facilitates their meaning. For example, we might focus upon an episode that occurs at the film’s midpoint, where Sylvia bids farewell to the artist, calling at his window. The sequence proceeds as an evenly paced exchange, cutting between the pair. But there is a discerning arrangement in the framings. The first image is a long shot that establishes the space of the exchange: the artist leaning out the window casing, Sylvia standing below, apologetic and filled with inexpressible feeling. In the eight shots that follow, the framings are meticulously rendered, generating the sense of uncertain affection that underlies the exchange without overstating it. The camera distance diminishes here in restrained increments, moving from the initial wide shot to one at mid-range, before finally offering an intimate medium close-up. But these shifts do not occur all at once, nor predictably: rather, they twice return to the more distant framing, and then switch back again, effecting an alternation that is aligned with the ebb and flow of emotional content.

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88  George Cukor

5.3  One of Cukor’s carefully calibrated framings: Katherine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett (Radio Pictures, 1935). Digital frame enlargement. Cukor’s framings thus articulate the elastic play of forthrightness and vulnerability—of masculine and feminine energies—embodied by his protagonist and by the film as a whole. What is characteristic of Cukor’s aesthetic is that these operations do not announce this idea, or simply reflect it, but rather subtly augment its force. Once again, Cukor’s stylistic prerogatives are discerned in muted transitions rather than large-scaled flourishes, and proceed by a delicate emphasis. My Fair Lady is yet another tale of feminine education, here adapted (as it was earlier on Broadway) as a musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. This is also Cukor’s most highly decorated project, receiving eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Director. The narrative concerns a wager between phonetics professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) and his friend Colonel Pickering (Wilfred Hyde-White) that promises to make flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) presentable in high society by improving her elocution. As an exercise in cinematographic style, the film tends to redouble the challenges to analysis encountered with Cukor’s work by its “theatrical” mode of presentation. Put simply, My Fair Lady is a sumptuous treatment of its material, but not an assertively filmic one. In interviews, Cukor has described his approach to adapting the work as essentially conservative, on the one hand limited by the stipulations of Shaw’s estate, which forbade any substantive reworking of the text, and on the other, under considerable pressure to retain the popular appeal of the stage version rather than transforming it (see Lambert 240–5). Although generally giving it praise, critics sometimes ascribed to the work a quality of staginess (see

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The Quiet Film Style of George Cukor  89 Kauffmann) and, somewhat paradoxically, an energy that seems less cinematic than the celebrated Broadway production, which featured effects approximating dissolves and close-ups (see Clarens 115–6). Andrew Sarris’s review speaks to these factors: As a longtime admirer of Cukor’s directorial style, I had expected something more in the way of creative adaptation . . . With so much capital invested, My Fair Lady has been approached so reverently that transference has degenerated into transcription. This property has not been so much adapted as elegantly embalmed, and yet, with few exceptions, the film fails dismally to repeat the click effects of the stage show. (Confessions of a Cultist 175–81) Given the tone of the review, one wonders if My Fair Lady isn’t the primary cause of Cukor’s exclusion from Sarris’s pantheon of directors. While he is described by the critic as “a genuine artist,” Cukor is relegated to the less exalted category of filmmakers whose work reflects a “fragmentation of their personal vision” (see American Cinema 88–90). Whether or not one shares Sarris’s view, it is difficult to assess My Fair Lady without returning to the matter of its theatrical origins, particularly as these potentially influence its presentation on screen. But does the film’s indebtedness to the stage version, and thus to other authors and contributors, mean that it does not evidence a distinctive directorial style? An earlier filmic adaptation of the Shaw play, Anthony Asquith’s Pygmalion (1938), which featured the same cinematographer as Cukor’s production, Harry Stradling Sr., did not invite the same line of critique, perhaps because its production values were manifestly more modest. In certain respects, this question is a sharpened version of the one that framed this discussion at the outset, related to creative collaboration. With Cukor’s cinema, we have to work a little harder to discern his signature at the level of the image, which sometimes concerns the way a film pulls back from an effect, rather than declaring it. With this in mind, let’s turn to some of the formal qualities of the film itself. Critics have noted that the film’s widescreen framings seem designed to preserve an integrity of space: they favor perspectives on the action that remain at some distance from it, producing closer views only infrequently. This approach permits a straightforward presentation of actors within the frame that highlights Cecil Beaton’s elaborate costuming and production design. But it differs in obvious ways from Cukor’s use of widescreen in his previous musical, A Star is Born, which displayed a real self-consciousness about the resources of the frame, often endeavoring to skew or complicate it visually. With My Fair Lady, the diegetic space is comparatively legible, and overflows with attractive period detail. It does not aim to impart a recognizable realism, as we’ve seen in Cukor’s earlier work, but rather to deliver a certain kind of viewing pleasure. An early plan for the film included location shooting in England, but was scrapped due to financial constraints. This kind of realistic detail might have brought the film into line with Cukor’s other work more readily (for more on these production details, see Lambert 244–5; McGilligan 283).

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90  George Cukor The film’s mise-en-scène is appealing and also exacting in its specifications, as though the dimensions of the frame had been extended to accommodate its visual interest. Long-shot views of interior spaces foreground their meticulous arrangement: for instance, each room in Professor Higgins’s home is ornately furnished, lined with books, pictures, and oversized curiosities related to his research. Likewise, the film’s celebrated depiction of Ascot is rendered in eighteen static images, producing a play of distances, none closer than medium long shot, in cued alternation. The motionless quality of each shot and its perfectly subdued color palette induce a kind of comic artificiality, emphasizing the onlookers’ formality and inhibition. One may be tempted to read these elements more or less as Andrew Sarris does, as inert transcriptions of a theatrical staging recast for the screen. This, I think, is an aspect of their aesthetic logic, which seeks to amplify rather than alienate the theatergoer’s experience of the material. But a sympathetic glance at these details suggests that their patterning may be more deliberate, and turns on the issue of shot scale. The film’s preference for stately compositions within a wide frame is too persistent a choice to be a mere default option, that is, to be fully justified as a holdover from the theater or a requirement of the film’s art direction. Rather, we might think of the compositions as constituting a stylistic scheme that advances a core theme: the wide-scaled framings unfailingly emphasize the rigidly “picturable” quality of the film’s world and the characters within it, both emulating and exposing the artifice at the heart of the text and the abstraction of female identity that it describes. Regarded this way, an image of Eliza that appears late in the film stands as a considered point of contrast, and as a recognizably Cukorian contribution. Framed in a moment of triumph, and at closer range, she finally pulls away from the compositional background, as the sole focus of the image. Though brief, the shot keenly registers a subtle affective shift, showing her relief as the camera tilts upward in an exhalation of breath, toward expectation.

5.4  A rare close shot of Eliza (Audrey Hepburn) in My Fair Lady (Warner Bros., 1964). Digital frame enlargement.

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The Quiet Film Style of George Cukor  91

Conclusion I have sought to locate and analyze certain formal correspondences across Cukor’s work, examining a diverse range of films that have typically received thematic, rather than stylistic, scrutiny. These trends assume what can be termed a “quiet” operation, springing from tensions that are generated in small visual contrasts, punctuating details, and persistent framings. We might say that Cukor has a light hand, and a great deal of patience. What occurs from shot to shot is a delicate modulation, or a reluctance to overstate, by the camera’s placement and focus, what might arise from the image unassisted. My sense is that these stylistic habits can be traced across the wider spectrum of Cukor’s work, arriving at a more precise understanding of his film aesthetic. If Cukor’s style is more challenging to detect and describe than that of other filmmakers, it is because its fundamental character is facilitating. His close collaboration with actors and other creative personnel is not coincidental to this aesthetic but instead nourishes it, and may be extrapolated as a formal method that is observable in the films when we are attentive to them. The techniques that I have identified are subtle qualities, but not indistinct ones. I find that they animate the palpable intensities of the work, illuminating the deep concern with women’s lives that extends across the films and, in Cukor’s telling, the ceaseless proximity of hope and despair.

Note 1. RKO’s Stage 10 is perhaps best known as one of the shooting sites for Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941).

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Chapter 6 Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor: The Royal Family of Broadway, A Bill of Divorcement, A Double Life, and Bhowani Junction

Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor

Michael DeAngelis

Critical responses to the films of George Cukor have often focused upon polarities and dichotomies held in mutual tension. In a recent article for Cineaste, for example, Christoph Huber suggests that “the genius of Cukor’s way with actors, his refined treatment of performance as something that is always both real and artificial (the key treatment of his overall aesthetic) marks him as a master of the in-between” (17–18). The interplay of cinema and theater logically frames many such discussions, and indeed the historical/critical responses to the director’s work reference Cukor’s introduction to the medium of cinema as a dialogue coach in the late 1920s and his previous artistic training as a noted Broadway director. The fact that some of his first directorial efforts were adapted theatrical works secures even further his association with the stage, and reviewers of Cukor’s earliest films often note the integrity that his theatrical background brings to his cinematic compositions (Hall, “True to the Stage”; Hall, “Clemence Dane Play”). Another set of polarities arises in the arena of sexuality. The notion that the gay/straight dichotomy compelled Cukor to maintain discrete public and private identities also becomes the basis for queer readings that critics such as Alexander Doty analyze (Flaming Classics; “A Queer Feeling”). It is from this same polarity that the “doubling” of identity arises, becoming so pronounced that one of the major biographies of the director takes its title from the phenomenon—Patrick McGilligan’s A Double Life, referencing both Cukor’s sexuality and his 1947 film of the same title. Another dynamic that informs much of the director’s work, but that has received less extensive treatment in the critical literature, similarly involves this notion of a “double life,” while exploring the “otherness” associated with such a duality in relation not to the director’s sexuality but in connection with the specific constructions of space, time, and perspective that occur in the individual film narratives. The critical investigation of this dynamic promises to illuminate an aspect of doubling that is no less fundamental to the director’s concerns, and this chapter provides such a study through an examination of doubling in the

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Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor  93 spatial, temporal, and perspectival attributes of four Cukor films that at first glance might seem to have little in common—The Royal Family of Broadway (1930), A Bill of Divorcement (1932), A Double Life, and Bhowani Junction (1956). As I will show, the doubling that occurs in these films evidences a concern with the implications of relationships between here and there, then and now, and seeing and being seen. A double life? Yes—or more accurately, two lives that play out as impossibly simultaneous and adjacent to one another.

The Royal Family of Broadway Produced by Paramount Pictures not long after the start of the sound era, The Royal Family of Broadway begins as celebrated theater veteran Fanny Cavendish (Henrietta Crosman) rides home in a limousine with Julie, her daughter and stage star (Ina Claire), following her evening’s performance. Watching the series of brightly lit Broadway theater marquees from the back of their limousine, Fanny grumbles when she notices her son Tony’s (Fredric March) name on one of them in conjunction with a starring film role. Tony’s venture into the medium of film has violated her sense of pride in the family’s long tradition of theatrical heritage, and from Fanny’s perspective, the arrival of this popular new medium is a most unwelcome one. Tracing a series of missed opportunities, present choices, and future prospects involving the central character of Julie Cavendish, however, The Royal Family of Broadway strives to immerse its heroine in the immediacy of the present moment, even as the film appears to disguise itself as a celebration of past traditions.

6.1  Three generations of Cavendish family stage performers: Julie (Ina Claire, l.), with daughter Gwen (Mary Brian, c.) and mother Fanny (Henrietta Crosman, r.) in The Royal Family of Broadway (Paramount, 1930). Digital frame enlargment.

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94  George Cukor Exploring the struggle to maintain one’s personal identity in the face of overwhelmingly powerful forces of heritage and generation, the film derives much of its impact from its emphasis upon doubling. For what does it actually mean to be a “Cavendish”? It means being an actor, a performer, and never being “oneself” in the way that Julie feels she has every right to be, or at least to experience momentarily. Virtually all of the Cavendishes in the film, including Julie’s daughter Gwen (Mary Brian)—who is about to make her own entry onto the Broadway stage—struggle with the condition of having to maintain two selves at once. The situation plays out most comically with Tony, who arrives home midway through the film on the run from an irate Hollywood film producer against whom he has just contractually defaulted. For him, daily existence itself has been transformed into a performance on overdrive, as he breathlessly darts and bounces from room to room, stripping to his underwear for a bath, refining his fencing skills in impromptu duels with the servants, and trying out a number of disguises that will permit him to flee from the family estate unnoticed. Fanny’s situation is more complex and ultimately more debilitating. From beginning to end, her mode and style of conversation, casual or otherwise, comprises an accentuated form of theatrical vocal projection. She looks and sounds as if she were always on the stage, and her consistent lapsing into the identity of performer betrays a curious temporal collapse of “then” and “now,” in which any sense of the present slides away into either special moments of the past or anticipated visions of the future. She habitually loses herself in reveries of past glories and performances with her now deceased husband, and her determination to resume work and to accumulate more “splendid memories” becomes the only force that sustains her when others advise her to slow down her pace. “Every night when I sit here alone, I’m really down there, at the theatre,” Fanny admits to Julie, this deliberate substitution of “there” for “here,” this compulsion to perform on the stage, leading her to recount (and thereby, to actively relive) in detail the routine that she endures each night in preparation for the next stage performance. The present-tense narration reveals her immersion in an imaginary activity that absorbs the realities of present moment into the routine that she has learned and hopes soon to repeat. Ultimately, however, this dissolution of present identity into a vortex of experienced and anticipated performances brings Fanny to exhaustion, and she becomes overwhelmed and obsessed by her visions to the point of passing out in the family parlor. Fanny is, of course, largely unaware of this temporal slide, and in fact no one in the film seems so self-consciously reflective about the implications of the split between onstage and offstage versions of the self as Julie. As if it were not enough that she must contend with the demands of her hectic working life in the theater, her position as a figure who always derives her identity in relation to others—both next to them and between them—marks even more emphatically the problematic situation that the narrative imposes upon her. As much as she wills herself to embrace the present moment on her own terms, her position(s) within the family consistently require that she merge with either her mother or her daughter. Confessing to Fanny that she has become tired of acting, she lapses into the role

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Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor  95 of her daughter Gwen who, in the course of the film, protests, yet ultimately yields to, the professional priorities that compromise her plans to devote herself to her fiancé Perry (Charles Starrett). When Gwen resists her grandmother’s directive that she cancel her personal plans to attend an important meeting arranged by the family’s agent Oscar Wolfe (Arnold Korff), however, Julie suddenly adopts the role of matriarch and insists that Gwen comply with Oscar’s wishes. Occupying a central and centered position in a narrative of performers across generations of a long family tradition, Julie’s identity “plays off” of the demands of the representative of the generation adjacent, in effect simultaneously forfeiting the notion of the present to its neighbors in lineage, past and future. “I’m just in between now—between my mother and my daughter,” Julie admits at the start of the film, and indeed the narrative gets its momentum from the oscillations between these positions and identities that it requires of her. A mid-narrative one-year ellipsis finds Julie to be in a state of limbo, having decided to accept the proposal of marriage offered by millionaire Gilmore Marshall (Frank Conroy), a fling from the distant past who seems to her a conveyor of respite from the in-between life with which she appears to have been saddled; indeed, Gilmore’s proposal is contingent on Julie agreeing to leave her life in the theater behind and move with him to a remote area of South America. That the decision to marry Gilmore was an impulsive one is suggested by matters of individual perspective that the film articulates not through point-of-view shots or psychological reveries that later cinematic technologies would make available, but mainly through registers of facial expression as Gilmore describes what seems to him as their ideal life together. Solitude, their closest neighbor thirty miles away, and “sixty miles from the nearest town,” Gilmore paints an appealing picture of their future. What clearly emerges from Julie’s puzzled, forced grimace, however, is neither acceptance of nor resignation to such a “fate,” but rather, and quite problematically, the confrontation of two versions of herself: the first who sees freedom as an escape from the restraints of tradition that her theater family heritage has imposed upon her, no matter what the cost; the second who has somehow become able to perceive this first version as an “other,” a stranger. Something similar happens after Julie observes her personal assistant (who has no more schedules to arrange for her now unemployed employer) looping strands of yarn with a hook. Julie plays at emulating the activity until the assistant identifies it as crocheting. “Am I crocheting?” Julie responds in repulsion, abruptly dropping her tools, suddenly perceiving this domesticated “self” as some imposing and totally unwelcome other. In both cases, the promise of situating oneself in a vast, open space with no one adjacent (besides, of course, her husband) resonates with Julie as nothing less than a nightmare. And in both cases, the double vision—the “seeing herself see herself”—that she is offered by the dreams of a “country villa with a garden and trees” becomes a most unappealing alternative to that other manifestation of doubling that she herself enables each night through theatrical performance. That these revelations come to her through a process of imagining scenes and arranging perspectives side by side is consistent with the tenor of the narrative,

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96  George Cukor which ultimately argues that, though they may be anchored in tradition, both contiguities in space and continuities in time figure as requisites to life lived according to one’s own terms—at least in the case of this life. “I can walk out now, and nobody can stop me,” Julie may have protested moments earlier, but at the end of the film, and without a moment’s hesitation, her mother having just died backstage in the middle of her final performance, Julie agrees to step in and finish the show.

A Bill of Divorcement The second cinematic adaptation of Clemence Dane’s eponymous 1921 British stage play, Cukor’s A Bill of Divorcement extends The Royal Family of Broadway’s focus upon the problematics of doubling through an exploration of generational adjacency in time, space, and perspective, even though its take on this issue ultimately seems darker and gloomier. The plot involves the impossible position in which the middle-aged Meg Fairfield (Billie Burke) finds herself when her husband Hilary (John Barrymore), who had been confined to a mental hospital for twenty years and now believes that he has suddenly been “cured,” escapes and returns to a home environment whose changes he did not anticipate: having just recently procured a legal divorce from him, Meg has become engaged to Gray Meredith (Paul Cavanagh), against the wishes of Hilary’s devoted sister Hester (Elizabeth Patterson) and daughter Sydney (Katharine Hepburn). Sydney, whom Hilary knew only as an infant before being institutionalized, closely resembles Meg twenty years earlier. While The Royal Family of Broadway ultimately associates lineage and generational destiny with pride and comfort in the predictability with which each family generation shares its predecessor generation’s remarkable attributes, A Bill of Divorcement focuses more intently upon a set of less favorable or predictable generational inheritances. If the matter of being a Cavendish is closely tied to opportunity and the cultivation of talent, the matter of being a Fairfield is a much less predictable endeavor, since, as Sydney discovers early on, her father’s condition stems from a hereditary predisposition to insanity rather than being, as she has always been told, a result of shell shock. Doubling is central to the family drama at every turn and the film includes some familiar figurations of the phenomenon. The narrative associates doubling with duplicity and deception when, for example, just after Meg reveals to Hilary that she has undergone divorce proceedings, Hilary lashes out at her as if he were relating a cruel joke. “When’s a wife not a wife?” he asks Sydney, and follows up immediately with his own caustic punchline: “When she’s this—this!” And referencing his past erratic behavior, Hilary protests that “I wasn’t myself then,” emphasizing the sharp contrast between these two “selves” and what he perceives as the completeness of his cure. Duplicity and deception are also at the heart of what becomes Hilary’s final act of compassion and acceptance in the film, as he feigns a relapse into madness in the performance of a jealous rage over his wife’s relationship with Gray, orchestrated to induce his daughter to convince her mother and fiancé to leave the estate together at once.

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Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor  97 More often, the film draws upon the trope of doubling to accentuate problems and paradoxes in the configuration of familial and romantic relations in the narrative—paradoxes of time, space, and perspective. The most noteworthy temporal imbalance involves sequencing and generation, as A Bill of Divorcement structures absences that disrupt continuity. For example, when Hilary arrives home from the mental institution and first encounters Sydney, he mistakes her for Meg, and she proceeds to correct him: SYDNEY: I think I’m your daughter. HILARY: Daughter? Daughter! That’s good. My wife’s not my wife—she’s my daughter. SYDNEY: You’re forgetting it’s been years and years. HILARY: Of course, it is years. It’s a lifetime. My daughter’s lifetime. The configuration of this lifetime away is such that Sydney herself comes to represent a gap—here, not only in the form of an entire family generation upon which Hilary has missed out, but also as an ellipsis, an absence whose disavowal would actually restore continuity to her father’s experience. Indeed, as soon as Hilary returns home it becomes clear that he expects such continuity, as he remarks with dismay at pieces of living room furniture that appear to have been moved or rearranged for no apparent reason. Later, Dr. Alliot (Henry Stephenson) inadvertently substantiates Sydney’s association with absence when, trying desperately to explain to Hilary that his expectations of a return to normal family relations might not be realistic, he exclaims that no child of such a parent should ever have been born. Although he later disavows the implications of this bold statement when Sydney addresses the matter with him, the paradox remains that if Sydney had never (or, at least, not yet) been born, this would mean that Hilary and Meg would still be together—that there would have been no time away, and no illness (or daughter) to mark the passage of time. Sydney is, however, quite present, and accentuating the paradox is the fact that what is continuous—though not in any way that is predictable or even logical—is the illness itself and the act of its having been passed on or handed down to Hilary, and possibly to Sydney as well. Doubling marks these temporal paradoxes as very real ones, connecting the Meg who married Hilary to the Meg who now wants to move on, the daughter to the mother whom she so closely resembles, and ultimately, the father to the daughter who shares his “temperament” and his predisposition to madness— joined ultimately in an impossible configuration, the daughter being actually more her father’s than her mother’s double, and the husband closer to her than he is to his own (ex-)wife, who does not share his or their daughter’s mental instability. A Bill of Divorcement reinforces these paradoxes of time through other devices of doubling that juxtapose healthy and diseased versions of the self. The first of these involves Sydney’s perception of her present and future, according to a narrative that initially defines health in terms of marriage, procreation, and

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98  George Cukor generational adjacency. At the start of the film, before the hereditary nature of Hilary’s illness is revealed, Kit (David Manners) proposes marriage to Sydney by offering her the ring that his mother wore, and they speculate gleefully upon their abundant and accomplished progeny. These rituals and scenes of joy and levity later become too painful reminders of what Sydney can no longer have. Despite Kit’s explanation that his love for her remains unaffected by the news of the illness that might claim her at some imminent point, and despite his protesting that they need never have children at all, the contrast between their exuberance and the “health” of their relationship (revealed now to have been illusory) and its presently tainted nature becomes too much for her to bear. The former apparent proximity of the forthcoming generation of Kits and Sydneys has now yielded to a pronounced fear and dread of what their arrival might bring. “Just go,” she directs him, “as if you were going into the next room.” Here and elsewhere, the narrative isolates the “diseased” version of Sydney, marking her as not only temporally elided but also spatially removed. Early in the film, in the only scene that provides her with any sustained time alone, Sydney is shown relaxing in the hearth and immersed in the glow of her family’s vast, fireplace-lit living room, as if she were luxuriating in a bliss that prefigured her forthcoming identity as happy wife and mother. After the subsequent intrusion of Aunt Hester (whom Sydney compels to reveal the truth about her father’s illness) and the arrival of the disease-carrying father himself, Sydney hides herself behind the stairway rails, appearing caged and trapped. Similarly, the doctor’s later comment about “the child who should never have been born” draws her away from the living room and toward her bedroom door, as if she had already relinquished the right to linger in familiar and welcome surroundings. Though the illness that her father has harbored, and that may be lingering within Sydney, is an invisible one (“It’s in our blood, isn’t it?” she remarks to Dr. Alliot), the film’s final scenes find those marked by the certainty or expectation of illness sequestering themselves so that the healthy can move on with their lives. The final configurations of the sick and the healthy are marked out by a series of simple and delicate character movements that accentuate the already marked distance between here and there: a match-on-action of Hilary quietly closing the door and exiting his house after he overhears Meg explaining her resigned obligation to remain with her now-recovered ex-husband; a subsequent movement from outside to inside as Sydney joins her father in a separate wing of the house; and finally, no movement from inside to outside in response to Kit’s final whistling plea for Sydney to reconsider joining him—no movement except for the drawing of the drapes to mark an ultimate separation of interior and exterior spaces. Like the closing moments of The Royal Family of Broadway, this film ends by resolving dualities of then and now, there and here, and seeing and being seen, through a reconfiguration of family loyalties and alliances. Sydney had tried unsuccessfully to complete a piano sonata that her father left unfinished decades earlier. In the film’s closing moments Hilary reveals the last movement

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Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor  99 of the piece with his daughter as they share places at the piano keyboard. The act restores order by eliminating doubleness and bringing about a new form of adjacency—no-longer-mad father and potentially mad daughter together, side by side, while the lives that they might have lived play out elsewhere and offscreen and the lives that they are living play out through their collaborating fingertips.

6.2  Isolating the mentally unstable: Sydney (Katharine Hepburn) together with her father Hilary (John Barrymore) at the end of A Bill of Divorcement (RKO, 1932). Digital frame enlargement.

A Double Life Both Royal Family and Bill of Divorcement focus upon the problem and necessity of “resolving” doubleness and duality, and A Double Life extends the exploration of this thematic issue of the process of transforming two into one. Like Royal Family, A Double Life addresses this issue in a narrative involving stage performance; and like Bill of Divorcement it also addresses matters of pathology, although here the disease is one whose origins are neither genetically inherited nor capable of being transmitted across generations. Disease begins and ends with celebrated stage actor Anthony “Tony” John (Ronald Colman), who in the opening section of the film is reticent to accept an offer to play Othello because, as his agents put it, of “the way he has of becoming someone else”—a tendency that ultimately claims more victims than just the actor himself.

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100  George Cukor Unlike either of the two earlier films, the explication of matters of doubling and duality in A Double Life is executed both expressively and expressionistically, strategically and to the point of excess. At the start, the narrative becomes saturated with signs and symbols of a duality which, in this case, arises from the process of representation itself. Before the audience is ever offered a clear view of Tony’s face, we are confronted with marks of duplication and commemoration, with workmen carrying a seven-foot poster picturing the actor in his current play (A Gentleman’s Gentleman) into the theater lobby, his celebrated name also appearing boldly on the theater marquee. His back to the camera, Tony is revealed within a gallery of performers next to the theater lobby, his shadow cast on the wall behind him. Confronted by a larger-than-life portrait of himself and recognized by fans shortly afterwards, Tony escapes into the theater hall where he stops to gaze at a sculpted bust of his head before exiting into the adjacent alley via the stage door. The composite of images and icons stand in for the actual performer and thereby offer evidence of his appreciable talent and profound influence. (Later in the film, he and his ex-wife and theatrical partner Brita [Signe Hasso] are presented with the gift of an elaborately decorated cake topped by figurines of Othello and Desdemona.) Yet even after Tony has turned his head to reveal the “original” face that has been overshadowed by this series of representations, the narrative continues its exploration of ambiguities and dualities surrounding his identity. As he walks down a central Manhattan street, his back to the camera, two well-dressed women (who turn out to be stage performers) approaching from the opposite direction recognize and call out to him—Tony remembers one of their names but hesitates uncomfortably with the other woman, with whom, as the interaction makes apparent, he has been briefly romantically involved. “What a darling,” the first woman comments after Tony walks away; the other, slighted woman responds, “Stinker.” The expressionistic strategy later extends the emphasis upon duality through the pervasive use of mirrors in the film, a device that separates the subject from his own self-representation while offering him a glimpse of how others perceive him, and that also becomes a shorthand to encapsulate the dynamic of seeing/being seen explored in the two previous films through remarkably different means. The split between the subject and his own representation is intensified by the mirror image shots, the first of which occurs in his dressing room at the theater, shortly after Tony has decided to seriously consider accepting the Othello role. Rather than provide distance or perspective regarding his self-perception, however, the reflection curiously intensifies his conviction to become this “other,” this character that progressively consumes him. In effect, then, the mirror images fuel rather than distance him from his obsession with the role. They also demonstrate the primary problem of “merging” with the represented image, a process enacted nowhere more notably than in a sequence shortly after the dressing room scene, after which, his mind already primed for the new dramatic venture, he takes a late-night stroll and happens upon a poster of Venice in the display window of a travel agency. The shot of this encounter is framed strategically with Tony occupying screen left, the poster screen right, and the reflection of Tony absorbed in

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Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor  101 this process of looking sufficiently visible in the center of the frame to prompt him to turn his head towards it. This look directed at his reflected image initiates a cut to a close-up of the reflection itself, which subsequently dissolves into an image of Tony dressed in the costume of the Moor of Venice before dissolving back to his originally reflected image. The shot series ends in a return to the first framing of Tony, reflection, and travel poster, the actor suddenly released from the illusion that momentarily consumed him, and even smiling in recognition of the flight of fancy to which he has just surrendered himself. Yet from this moment onward, the narrative renders ambiguous the distinction between Tony’s realized and hypothetically imagined states of being. Indeed, just after he has moved away from the travel agency’s window display, the camera tracks in on the Venice poster and proceeds to dissolve to another street scene, the sound of voices speaking in Italian clearly audible, and the illuminated sign of a restaurant called “Venezia Café” visible as Tony emerges into the frame towards it. Given the “hallucination” of Othello that he has just encountered, the effect of this transition in setting is such that it becomes difficult to determine whether the current scene constitutes a return to the subjective, imagined vision of this “other” Tony. Although it does not (the restaurant turns out to be in Little Italy, where he appears to have walked), Tony’s “happening upon” the restaurant turns out to be fortuitous, since it is there that he meets the waitress Pat Kroll (Shelley Winters) whom, out of his jealousy over Breta’s imagined love affair with his publicist Bill Friend (Edmond O’Brien), his diseased imagination will transform into a duplicitous version of Desdemona. If these distortions and ambiguities associate doubling in the film with the collapse of spatial distinctions between “here” and “there,” the film also features an equally curious and startling means of disorienting the cinematic viewing experience of story time. In one scene, after Tony appears to have verified his intention to accept the Othello role, he and Breta become engaged in a discussion of her own reservations and feelings on the prospect of playing Desdemona. When Tony appears momentarily distracted, Breta asks what he is thinking. “It’s nothing,” he responds. “The tricks your mind can play. Somewhere in the future, I can see it all finished. I can see the whole magical production, opened, praised. It feels fine to have done something worthy. And then I think of all the things that have to be done between now and then . . .” Tony’s ruminations on this process initiate an elaborate fourteen-minute sequence that visually samples each stage of the production of Othello, from first rehearsals to opening night. While the sound in the depicted diegetic “realities” of the sequence is distorted and muffled, the sound of Tony’s second-person voice-over narration is crystal clear. The effect is such that he appears to be producing the realities that we are seeing, even though it is impossible to verify, as we are exposed to them, whether they are actually transpiring within the story or, instead, he is imagining them, especially since the scene does not subsequently return to the time and place of his conversation with Breta. It is as though his spoken words were transforming his ruminations into reality through the act of speaking them—very much like what ends up happening to Tony himself. Indeed, in subsequent scenes, the

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102  George Cukor sonic intrusions of his obsessed and jealousy-saturated imagination play out as subjective, internal voices that dictate to him the seeming veracity of what is illogical and unreal. The obsessive refrain in his head of Breta . . . Bill . . . Breta . . . Bill . . . superimposes Desdemona’s perceived infidelity onto the scenario of an affair between his ex-wife and Bill Friend, which is itself then superimposed onto his relationship with the innocent victim Pat.

6.3  Waitress Pat Kroll (Shelley Winters), moments before being murdered by Othello-obsessed Anthony John (Ronald Colman) in A Double Life (Universal, 1947). Digital frame enlargement. To these ambiguities of here and there, and of then and now, the film also plays with the blurry distinctions between seeing and being seen, not only in terms of self-reflections in mirrors but also in relation to matters of performance and theatricality, in order to demonstrate how Tony progressively loses track of the distinction between what is happening in the world of a staged narrative and what is transpiring within his offstage life. If in the final stages of his selfinitiated flash-forward Tony exclaims that “you remember that you’re on the stage, in the theater, an audience in front of you, and suddenly, you are startled by the sound of your own voice,” such demonstrations that he is aware of the difference between being onstage and offstage have already begun dissipating as the product of (a-)synchronous narration. Tony/Othello is not aware, and he transforms the shared public space of the theater—where people are actually watching, and where the performer is aware of their presence—into a much more intimate, psychological space, a private realm that no one else sees or could

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Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor  103 possibly see. Intensity of performance (and performer) result in the elimination of distance and perspective, such that Tony never attains the requisite perspective that ultimately permits Hilary in A Bill of Divorcement to see from a position “outside” of himself. Psychologically, Tony cannot handle dualities at all, to the point where even the mental image of Breta and Bill together in her house, where Tony is or has been, drives him to distraction. By the time that he murders Pat (without actually realizing that “he” has committed the crime), Tony has effectively induced in himself the sense of being one with Othello; ironically, he must follow to completion the tragic consequences of having merged his own identity with that of the Shakespearean character before he might ever remove himself from the clutches of this “other.” Logically, as it turns out, such a release can occur only through a confluence of the character’s onstage death with Tony’s “real” onstage suicide, by eliminating the self that initiated the merger in the first place. Only just before dying can he both recall the crime that he has committed and express remorse for his actions.

Bhowani Junction The matter of differentiation that forms the central problem of A Double Life is extended in scope (and by means of CinemaScope) in Bhowani Junction. The film shares with A Double Life a central concern with the integrity of individual identity. However, the transformation of two into one in Bhowani Junction is rendered not only as an internal and psychological problem but also externally, as a social, political, and ultimately a national phenomenon. And while it is seemingly not a film about issues of performance and performativity, Bhowani Junction reveals itself to be no less concerned with the dualities and duplications that comprise the core of the other three films of this study. As the central character of this story set during the time of India’s establishment of independence from British rule, Anglo-Indian Victoria Jones (Ava Gardner) must constantly confront the problem of what it means to “be oneself” in a social environment replete with “us/them” distinctions: caste versus caste, radical Communist Indians versus Congress Party Indians, Indians versus Brits, and men versus women. As Bosley Crowther notes in his New York Times review of the film, Victoria “is not just a standard prototype of the socially inferior native in a land over which the white man rules. She is, by her racial commixture, a symbol of divided loyalties, a single instance of the political ambivalence that now affects many Asiatic states” (“Vivid Experiences” 123). Victoria is positioned in the middle of all of these conflicts, in a plot that conflates the negotiation of political unrest with the management of interpersonal relationships. As a halfcaste, Victoria is always “in-between” in relation to the needs and demands of others, and also with respect to her own identity. “I’ve discovered it’s a wonderful thing to know who you are, and we don’t know,” she says of herself and fellow Anglo-Indians early in the film. One of her primary goals is to attain such selfknowledge despite the odds against her. The dualities and ambivalences with which she contends are partially related

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104  George Cukor to her relationships with men who, at various times that sometimes overlap, express a romantic interest in her. Yet rather than helping her to find any form of security in her identity, these relationships end up becoming instruments of alienation, reminders of what she neither wants nor intends to become. Throughout the first half of the film, at least, her commanding office Colonel Rodney Savage (Stuart Grainger) exhibits an arrogance and sense of self-importance that she finds intolerable. Her disgust over his actions peaks in a sequence where the Congress Indian rabble-rouser Surabai (Abraham Sofaer) instigates a protest against the British in which he and several others block the access of a British train by lying on the tracks, vowing to risk their lives for their political cause. Lacking sufficient negotiation skills to prompt them to disperse, Savage “resolves” the situation through tactics of humiliation and force by threatening to pour buckets of Untouchable human filth over the protesters. He ends up carrying out this ultimately successful plan as Victoria looks on in disgust at his actions. Moments later, when she relates these events to fellow railway station manager and hotheaded fellow Anglo-Indian Patrick Taylor (Bill Travers), who has proposed marriage to her and who, up to this point, has exhibited as much scorn toward Savage as has Victoria, Patrick bursts into laughter, applauding the audacity of Savage’s actions. She then becomes equally disgusted with Patrick over his insensitivity. By the time that she confides in Ranjit (Francis Matthews), an Indian colleague who works in the rail station office, that “I feel as if I’ve come to the point where I don’t belong anywhere,” it has become clear that Rodney Savage and Patrick Taylor, as representatives of their respective races and ethnicities, are as much the cause of her alienation as is the uncertain volatile and political state of the country that she has always known as her home. Wherever her place might be, it is clearly not with either of them. Her disappointment with Savage and Taylor stems from their seeming inability to remove themselves from what Victoria considers to be quite narrow and limited perceptions, both personal and political. As the railway strike scene emphasizes, both men lack the empathy that comprises such a distinctive aspect of Victoria’s way of being in the world. Indeed, Ranjit sees this in her, explaining that he was even more upset for how deeply Savage’s act of humiliation affected her than he was by the act itself. And this gift of empathy provides a means of coping with India’s increasingly volatile political situation—a way of seeing from the eyes of others as well as one’s own. Once she is forced to kill Lt. Graham McDaniel (Lionel Jeffries) in self-defense after his attempt to rape her, however, Victoria ultimately pays a price for her seemingly effective management of this dynamic of seeing and being seen. Her uncanny ability to adopt the perspectives of others is suddenly transformed into a compulsion to be everyone (and everywhere) at once, and much of the second half of the film finds her rushing around between spaces, always in a hurry, looking forward, looking back, as though the process of such constant, frenetic movement might ultimately lead her to a place of safety. And it is in this second half of the film that diversity of perspective leads her to a form of “blendingin” that is more conspicuous than she imagines it to be. Victoria takes her lead

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Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor  105 from Ranjit’s mother, Sandani (Freda Jackson), who applauds the Anglo-Indian’s murderous act, arranges for the disposal of McDaniel’s body and helps Victoria to cope with her post-traumatic stress. Victoria is identified by Sandani as “the heroine of the new India,” her transformation initiated by a shot of the two women facing a mirror, Victoria now clad in the sari that marks her association with this new identity. “India is your home now, my child,” Sandani proclaims. “The dawn is breaking now.” Victoria’s subsequent agreement to become Ranjit’s wife and join his Sikh religion intensifies this sense of her desire to belong by “losing” herself in an act of blending in, and it also provides her with a means of disavowing the implications and consequences of her murderous act.

6.4  “India is your home now, my child.” Anglo-Indian Victoria Jones (Ava Gardner, l.) merges into the identity of national heroine with the assistance of Sandani (Freda Jackson) in Bhowani Junction (MGM, 1956). Digital frame enlargement. The situation is brought to its crisis, however, with a disastrous ceremony with her fiancé in the Sikh temple, as Taylor, Savage, Ranjit, and Sandani, all join with the officials investigating McDaniel’s murder as a set of overlapping, conflicting, and disorienting voices in her head—an accumulation of disparate forces growing so loud and unbearable that she flees alone in despair from the temple. From this point onward, Victoria vows to stop running away. “I belong to India as myself,” she proclaims after she has been acquitted of all crimes by the end of the film. She thus anchors herself to the land that she has always known, without any possible insight into what this land might now become, and refuses Savage’s offer to return to England as his wife. What is most remarkable about this decision is how definitively it restores Victoria’s allegiance to stability and place, simultaneously leading her back to the state of “oneness” that has eluded her throughout the film—to a place whither Savage himself must later elect to return if he is ever to have a life with her. Victoria’s final state offers an ideal combination of the empathy that has guided her and the confidence that can now ground her. Although these four films are thematically disparate, their analysis ultimately reveals connections that are central to Cukor’s method. The focus on doubling in

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106  George Cukor time, space, and perspective helps to illuminate a complex relationship between individual and social identity over a wide range of cinematic narratives—from the generational issues that pervade The Royal Family of Broadway, to the delicate problems of heredity and family addressed by A Bill of Divorcement, to the pathological confrontations of self and other in A Double Life, to the interface between the individual and her soon-to-be-liberated country in Bhowani Junction. And the configurations of these relationships ultimately lead to a fuller appreciation of the ways in which Cukor himself, as a theater director who subsequently redirected his efforts to a new medium, becomes doubled— through strategic manifestations of form, style, and theme across a wide range of cinematic endeavors.

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Chapter 7 George Cukor and the Case of an Actor’s Director: Hepburn and/or Tracy in Little Women, The Actress, Keeper of the Flame, Adam’s Rib, and Pat and Mike Cukor and the Case of an Actor’s Director

Charlie Keil

The more successfully you work through the actors, the more your own work disappears. George Cukor, quoted in Gavin Lambert, On Cukor (1972), p. 188 By his own statements, George Cukor resists the kind of analysis that traditional authorship study has fostered. Rather than devising a distinct style or pursuing a consistent set of thematically rich motifs, Cukor claims to serve the actor, his presence as an auteur dissolving in the process. And yet, considered in the context of recent scholarly discussion of film authorship, studio-era craft contributions, and screen performance, George Cukor’s reputation as an “actor’s director” commends him as an ideal case study. Never one of the auteur theory’s “pantheon” directors, Cukor remained on Andrew Sarris’s “far side of paradise” precisely because his talent seemed aimed at serving the material more than shaping it to his own purposes. And, as many Cukor scholars have pointed out, the material Cukor has served often existed on page or stage prior to its cinematic presentation. In 1971, Gary Carey calculated that of the forty-eight films Cukor had directed up to that point, thirty-four were adaptations. Equally revealing: over a quarter of Cukor’s films feature actors as leading characters (9). Cukor’s own theater training, established prior to his arrival in Hollywood during the first years of sound filmmaking, buttresses the tendency to see his work as invested inordinately in the appeal of acting; as Sarris notes, “even when Cukor’s characters do not appear formally behind the footlights, they project an imaginative existence” (The American Cinema 90). In interviews, Cukor would repeatedly affirm that he was not interested in asserting himself stylistically (through bravura camera movements or selfconscious editing [in Long 116; in Stevens Jr. 286]). And he differentiated himself from those directors thought to engage in extensive preplanning (such as Hitchcock) at the same time that he foreswore indulging improvisation by his actors. Instead, he asserted fidelity to the script as the logical starting point: “I start from the text, and, of course, I have a general idea about how the film

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108  George Cukor should go. The things that happen on the set enrich it or change it or surprise me a little. I might perhaps plan a sequence in detail, but I always watch the actors and discover things; I don’t plan every tiny movement” (Cukor quoted in Higham and Greenberg 62). Both in his deference to the producer’s authority and his openness to the ideas of his co-workers, Cukor is often held up as an example of the consummate studio director. Chief among those co-workers, of course, were the actors. Cukor elaborated on his technique for inviting performer input while still remaining in control: The director has to know how much to say and when to shut up and what influence he has. [The actors] have to respect you, and they have to believe what you say. Then, too, you have to have a grip on the whole film, and you have to deliver the goods. There should be no bullying on either side. And I think they should trust you, so when you say something they don’t question it. They should know that you’re a very sympathetic and intelligent audience . . . I do think directors can influence performances. The director should be interested in acting, in actors, and not in himself. I don’t mean to be noble, but you’ve got to think of what the other person is doing and how you can achieve it together. It’s all a collaboration. I think you’ve got to anticipate What can they do, what can I give them, what can they get out of me? (Cukor quoted in Long 104) This study of five films that Cukor made with either or both of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy as stars aims to give more precise form to his suggestion that a director’s role entails understanding what actors can do and facilitating their performances. This examination of the studio director-as-collaborator engages with recent scholarship that has reopened the question of film authorship, moving beyond approaches indebted to either a reconstructed Romanticism or poststructuralism, and tackling directly the thorny issues of intentionality and multiple authorial contributions. At the same time, in its close study of performance it contributes to the growing body of work that explores the manner in which screen acting functions and intersects with those facets of film style that facilitate its operations. While we often think of studio-era directors as being contract employees, assigned to projects with little recognition of their particular skills or interests, at its most effective the system worked to build on established strengths. For that reason, Cukor often found himself directing adaptations, and, particularly in the postwar years, returning to a team of collaborators, be it the Ruth Gordon-Garson Kanin writing duo (for a concerted period in the late 1940s and the early 1950s), or the color consultant George Hoyningen-Huene and set designer Gene Allen (for a decade starting in the mid-1950s). When asked about who was responsible for inventive bits of business in the Gordon-Kanin films, Cukor would typically say that explicit details were already provided in the scripts; similarly, he attributed the color schemes and effects of films such as Bhowani Junction and Les Girls to Hoyningen-Huene and Allen. Repeatedly in interviews, he would assert his prerogative to maintain control over the filming

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Cukor and the Case of an Actor’s Director  109 situation while readily ceding authority on particular elements to knowledgeable craftspeople. Ultimately, the keynote is consultation: The décor, the way it’s designed, the way it’s dressed, the way it works. The director has something to do with that. We do it together . . . [The cameraman and the director] talk. And we talk to see how it will work. I have something to do with [camera placement]. You have to know what you’re doing. But I’m not that involved in the technical things . . . [I will use long takes], but it depends on if the actor has the capability of doing it. And also on the style of the thing. If the actor can do it and if it suits the piece, then it’s good. (Cukor quoted in Long 157–8) The notion of a singular authorial figure responsible for a film’s meanings and effects has traditionally found its most convincing candidate in the director, but numerous scholars have challenged this view by forwarding a principle of multiple authorship, premised precisely on the logic of commercial film production, which depends upon the input of multiple agents, all of whom have developed and defined roles and talents. Tellingly, Berys Gaut enlists the contribution of the actor to challenge the legitimacy of seeing films as the product of a single author: It is when we apply the constructed [single] author to acting performances that it yields a true efflorescence of glittering improbabilities. For we have to think of these performances as if they were products of a single artist: strictly construed, the performers’ actions would be the artist’s, he would move them the same way I move my arm. To think of the actors in this way is to forfeit our sense of them as agents, and so radically to distort our experience of mainstream cinema, an experience of seeing representations of agents performing actions. (Gaut 160) Gaut’s advocacy derives from his conviction that a multiple-authorship model best reflects how “causal agents [bring a] film into existence,” but he also believes that “given the existence of multiple authors, the spell of intentionalism is weakened for we have considered cases where conflicts between collaborators lead to features of the film unintended by any of them” (168). C. Paul Sellors sees no reason why multiple authorship should eliminate the possibility of collective intention, and uses an example of an actor’s input to demonstrate how collective intention can manifest itself even in the face of dissension. For Sellors the very act of discussing how a character should be portrayed indicates both collective authorship in action and participation in the spirit of collective intention: “Collective intention does not require the collective agreement of all the members of the collective, for the reason that these are individual ideas. One of the core principles of collective intentional action is collaborative agreement takes priority over individual preferences” (125). Ironically, embracing a collective authorship approach to the study of film as a produced and performed text brings film analytical methodology closer to that

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110  George Cukor employed for theatrical performances, which tends to decenter the director and give more weight to the actor. This need not deny the medium-specific differences that define screen acting, even as it suggests that certain commonalities bind acting across diverse performance traditions. Authorship as collaboration, screen acting as a variant of stage performance: both insights lead us back to the example of George Cukor, trained as a theater director and heralded for his ability to solicit outstanding performances from the actors in his films. When Andrew Klevan initiates his discussion of film performance as “the achievement of fluency . . . as each action flows fluidly into the next or as one move integrates with another,” his aim is to indicate how such indeterminacy stymies the analyst’s attempts at precise description while also indicating how that indeterminacy feeds into our own sense of interpretive instability (“Living Meaning” 35). It should come as no surprise that Klevan’s first two examples derive from scenes from Cukor films, Camille (1936) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). Accordingly, this study will proceed by examining in detail key scenes of performance featuring two of Cukor’s favored actors, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, in films spanning three decades and two studios. In the process, I mean to demonstrate how Cukor’s active participation in a collaborative approach to filmmaking leads to a particularly generous attitude toward the actor, producing multiple moments where performance becomes the stylistic dominant within his work. To prove the centrality of performance to Cukor’s achievement as a collaborative director will necessarily mean studying the craft of the actor in considerable detail. If such an approach does not succeed in causing Cukor’s efforts to “reappear,” at least it might indicate how his contributions fuse with those of the actors to produce an approach to performance typical of a Cukor film. In particular, I will focus my attention on Cukor’s reliance on the long take, because it is with this technique that the director’s role seems to fuse with the actor’s most consistently. In each instance, we will see how a facet of performance is highlighted or shaped, or works to bring some other aspect of the filmic text as a whole into relief. If Cukor is, indeed, an actor’s director, it is through examination of actors’ performances within the context of the long take that we can best see his collaborative approach in action.

Solo Turns: Little Women and The Actress Little Women (1933) marked the second time that Cukor directed Katharine Hepburn, who would become one of his closest friends and a recurring artistic collaborator for four decades; conversely, The Actress (1953) was the last of four times that he would work with Spencer Tracy, whose professional affiliation with Cukor was restricted to a short period extending from 1949 to 1953. Yet both films reveal Cukor’s confidence in his lead performers, his sense that each could imbue a central role with a distinctive flavor that would elevate the text. Little Women is often identified as Cukor’s own favorite film, though in some interviews he shies away from such an assessment. Certainly it marked a

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Cukor and the Case of an Actor’s Director  111 turning point in Cukor’s career, following closely on the heels of Dinner at Eight (1933) and garnering an Academy Award for its script and Oscar nominations for the film and Cukor’s direction. Its commercial success helped to solidify Katharine Hepburn’s reputation as fledgling studio RKO’s most important star. Cukor had already directed Hepburn in her screen debut, A Bill of Divorcement, and her performance in Little Women confirmed that she and Cukor were an estimable team. Cukor has said that the film’s success derived from the fact that nearly everyone involved respected the spirit of Louisa May Alcott’s novel and refused to succumb to a sentimental approach that would have done a disservice to that admirable New England sternness, about sacrifice and austerity. And then Kate Hepburn cast something over it. Like Garbo in Camille, she was born to play the part. She’s tender and funny, fiercely loyal, and plays the fool when she feels like it. There’s a purity about her. (Cukor quoted in Lambert 75) Clearly, Cukor understood Hepburn as possessing a connection to the part of Jo March, and more generally, to the New England sensibility that informs the story. As this was only Hepburn’s fourth film, one can say that Little Women helps to solidify her star persona, particularly her intelligence, independence, and forthrightness. One sees all of these qualities conveyed in her initial scene, performed with Edna May Oliver (playing Aunt March), particularly its latter portion, which takes place at the bottom of a staircase, filmed in one take lasting just over one minute. This scene functions not only as our introduction to the character of Jo March but establishes Hepburn’s purchase on the part. Though seemingly simple—there is only one distinct camera movement and the actions of the characters stay confined to a fairly circumscribed area—the scene gives Hepburn ample opportunity to display a range of emotions while also demonstrating her ability to act through reaction. Beginning with Jo on screen left, above her aunt, the girl is initially solicitous, asking forgiveness for wanting to leave early. Hands clasping her bonnet at waist level, Hepburn stares intently at the angry Oliver; after initially raising her eyebrows several times while explaining her reasons for leaving, Jo keeps her brow lowered when she listens to Aunt March’s reaction. When Oliver exclaims self-pityingly that no one cares about her being left alone on Christmas, Hepburn responds by turning her head to allow a three-quarters view, and softens her expression, attempting a half-smile while apologetically wishing the other a Merry Christmas. As Oliver casts her head down, Hepburn passes behind her on the older woman’s right, effectively switching positions with her while Aunt March bends down to secure what turn out to be four envelopes from the front pocket of her dress. (A slight tilt downward of the camera isolates the action.) While Oliver is focusing her attention on retrieving the envelopes, Jo/ Hepburn adjusts her demeanor, adopting an attitude that is more indeterminate, an admixture of ambivalence toward the old woman and fretful attentiveness toward the doorway, indicating her anxiousness to leave.

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112  George Cukor

7.1  Two stages of Jo’s interaction with Aunt March: supplication and defiance; Jo models exaggerated versions of male aggression and female submission for Amy in Little Women (RKO, 1933) Digital frame enlargements. When Oliver presents her with the envelopes, Hepburn professes gratitude, but her somewhat forced smile and hunched shoulders indicate that she is adopting a response she believes the older woman will appreciate rather than expressing genuine thankfulness. Hepburn maintains a posture of passive acceptance, her upturned gaze again fixed on the face of the other woman, even accepting with a slight grimace her aunt’s characterization of her as “just like your father.” But when Aunt March continues by dismissively referring to Mr. March “waltzing off to war and leaving other folks to look after his family,” Jo’s face immediately transforms, becoming highly animated as her voice rises. Her mouth extends itself more pronouncedly as she speaks, and her jaw juts out several times, with her head bobbing up and down, indicating the strength of her convictions when defending her family against her aunt’s charges. When Aunt March condemns her as “impertinent,” Jo relents, casting her eyes downward and then assuming a conciliatory posture more in keeping with her initial attitude toward her aunt when their positions were reversed. As the shot ends, the mirror-image symmetry places Hepburn in the same posture of servitude as we saw at the outset of the shot, but now she is closer to her point of exit. This scene crystallizes many facets of Jo March’s character: her tendency to react with emotional intensity, especially if her family is disparaged; her uneasy relationship with domineering authority figures; and her recognition that she

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Cukor and the Case of an Actor’s Director  113 must occasionally adopt attitudes foreign to her own disposition, even as she resists the strictures that impose those attitudes upon her. Hepburn the actress personifies these traits and embodies them with a forcefulness that is registered by Cukor’s adoption of a stable and largely static camera position for the duration of this take, an approach that emphasizes the interaction between Jo and her aunt. The shot’s framing and relative stillness also serve as a counterpoint to the eruptions of action that bookend it. Just prior to this moment, Jo had charged up the staircase to grab her outerwear in preparation for a hasty and surreptitious exit; and once her aunt has finished chastising her for leaving a chore incomplete, she polishes the banister by sliding down its entirety, using her coat and skirt to do the job. Jo’s unconventional approach to the constraints of conventional femininity manifest themselves throughout the film in acts of physical abandon fitting for a self-professed “tomboy”: she vaults over fences, hurls snowballs great distances, runs through forests and glades, and uses a poker to engage in a mock fencing duel. Hepburn performs all of these actions in unbroken long shots that confirm that she herself is executing them, literally embodying the physical dimension of Jo’s unorthodox behavior. Befitting the developing Hepburn persona, Jo March possesses a combination of feminine and masculine traits. (The ideologically transgressive potential of this persona would reach its zenith in the next Cukor/Hepburn collaboration, Sylvia Scarlett, the disastrous reception of which ensured that Hepburn would temper those masculine attributes in subsequent characterizations.) Jo’s ease at adopting a masculine persona is apparent when she casts herself in the two male roles in her own “Melodious Operatic Tragedy,” The Witch’s Curse, but the fusion of masculine and feminine personae emerges most clearly when Jo rehearses both the parts of Black Hugo and Princess Zara to demonstrate to Amy (who will perform Zara’s role in the production) how her sister’s character is meant to collapse in fear. Initially framed in long shot within the curtains separating dining room from parlor, the setting casually underscoring the ersatz theatricality of the moment, Hepburn coaches Joan Bennett on the proper way to enact a fainting scene. Cukor cuts to a medium long shot once the actors’ positions have been established and Hepburn begins her instructions in earnest. She immediately adopts the persona of Black Hugo, scrunching up her features in mock menace, her eyes narrowed, her lower lip curling downward in a snarl, her jaw clenched and her fingers claw-like. Bennett’s muted response prompts Hepburn to take on the role of Zara herself, literally placing herself where Bennett had once stood and making an immediate transition from the hunched threat of Hugo to the passive posture typical in melodrama of a damsel in distress. Gone are the gnashed teeth and distorted mouth that signified the peril posed by Hugo; Hepburn replaces the performance of masculine intimidation with an equally outsized mimicry of female powerlessness. Her Zara reacts to Hugo with eyes widened by fear, her arms outstretched and her hands fluttering, while her face remains almost masklike in its beseeching quality as she calls out the name of her erstwhile rescuer, Rodrigo. Cukor underlines the ease of Hepburn’s transformation by capturing it

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114  George Cukor all in one sustained forty-five-second long take, with Bennett often positioned back-to-camera so that the focus remains on Hepburn. As much as the scene demonstrates Jo’s immersion in her own dramatic creations, equally at home parodying masculine and feminine stereotypes, it also showcases Hepburn’s dexterity as an actress, as she effortlessly enacts Jo’s overstated tutelage in the thespian arts. Fusing performative self-consciousness and narrative necessity will become a hallmark of many such bravura moments in Cukor films, providing us ample evidence of why Cukor would find his gifts as an actor’s director singled out beyond all others. Although Cukor did not see the similarities himself, The Actress and Little Women possess numerous commonalities: both are set in the New England of the past; both feature a female protagonist who wishes to pursue a career in the arts; and both focus on a tight-knit family that struggles financially. While Little Women is an adaptation of a well-known literary classic, The Actress is based on scriptwriter Ruth Gordon’s stage memoir, Years Ago. At select moments, The Actress becomes a showcase for Spencer Tracy, playing Gordon’s father, Clinton Jones, as he is given the film’s most notable monologues, set off in typically Cukorian fashion by long takes that privilege the performer. Now, however, Cukor has altered his approach to staging and depth, particularly the placement of actors in the foreground. This shifts the perspective on the featured actor’s performance, though it doesn’t change the centrality of acting to the formal operations of the film, nor the sense that these extended shots are structured according to the dramatic dynamics of the scene. In one scene, set in the Jones kitchen, Clinton is taking in the grocery list that his wife Annie (Teresa Wright) has prepared for him, a task that propels him to rant about the family’s spending habits and ensuing poverty. The composition places Clinton in the center with Annie moving about on his right while daughter Ruth (Jean Simmons) remains stationary at his left, reading a magazine, apparently oblivious to her father’s tirade. The shot runs close to three minutes, and is initially structured according to the objections Clinton voices to the shopping list, with approximately half of the take devoted to butter, cat food, and tangerines, each drawing his ire for roughly thirty seconds. The discussion of the list, dominated by Clinton, entails regular responses from Annie, who is mixing batter while Clinton interrogates the items. After one minute and forty-two seconds, he signals his indignation by plunking the list down on the kitchen table. The shot then moves into its second phase, as he discusses an insurance policy he must maintain and the annual bonus he is due to be paid. When the insurance policy is mentioned, Annie switches to washing up, turning her back to Clinton. (Ruth remains engrossed in her magazine and never looks over.) Tracy’s Clinton occupies himself by putting away his pen and shuffling the pieces of paper before him. He gets up to put the paper away, moving to frame right and into the recesses of the shot, as the women retain their positions. When he returns to the table and mentions the word “poverty,” Annie turns to him, the first time that the two have faced each other standing. At this point Tracy becomes more animated, interrupting his lines on several occasions and signaling his agitation

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Cukor and the Case of an Actor’s Director  115

7.2  Clinton Jones expresses indignation at his financial circumstances before lapsing into reverie in The Actress (MGM, 1953). Digital frame enlargements. as his mind seems to be running ahead of the words he utters. At close to the three-minute mark, Tracy moves away from the table again, this time to a room to the right and behind the kitchen, with the camera panning slightly to keep him in frame as he moves away even though it fails to follow him when he disappears into the adjoining room. (Only the offscreen sound of him yelling and noisily moving items signals his presence.) When he returns, the camera stays static for the most part, retaining Tracy at the center of the composition, with neither woman moving. When he next starts moving again, the camera follows, tracking him down a short hallway, this movement initiated only fifteen seconds before the cut and preparing for a closer shot that isolates his face for the final few seconds of his speech, where he wistfully details the kinds of food he ate when he was a sailor and was not so constrained by the poverty he now experiences as a family man. As much as Clinton dominates this scene, using the ritual of the examination of the shopping list to critique his family members (including the cat) before lamenting their impoverished state, so too does Tracy as actor command our attention. Placed closest to the camera, Simmons is also tucked in the right foreground, studying her magazine for nearly the entirety of the take, more as a visual anchor than as a point of dramatic interest. Tracy is at the center of the composition for virtually the duration of the scene, and his bits of business punctuate the dialogue, unlike Wright’s—breaking eggs, stirring batter, wiping

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116  George Cukor surfaces—which provide background noise without distracting from the chief matter at hand. Tracy’s actions, meanwhile, work in concert with his increasing agitation. Reviewing the list, he moves only his head and hands, swiveling his head back and forth between Wright and Simmons. He makes extensive use of props: his pipe, held in his left hand, the pen he has been holding in his right, and the papers on the table. After rising two minutes and twenty seconds into the take, Tracy employs the entirety of his body for the remainder of the shot, and three new props become crucial to the scene: the chair that he formerly sat in and two magazines, one lying on the kitchen table and the other the one in Ruth’s hands. His somewhat clumsy movements with the chair are orchestrated to bookend the manipulations of the magazines: he moves the chair once, holds and then thrusts down the first magazine, then moves (or knocks) the chair three more times before grabbing Ruth’s magazine and adjusting the chair a final time before departing the space. The chair and the magazines function differently as reminders of the poverty Clinton is experiencing: he makes explicit reference to both of the magazines (one borrowed, the other a cheaper alternative to a title the family can’t afford), while the chair operates as a substitute for the parlor furniture that he can’t even sit on for fear that he “might spoil it.” As Clinton describes his frustration with being poor, “everything” about his current situation reminds him of his limited means, so of course his domestic surroundings become exemplary of his impoverished state. Finally, as he enjoys the brief moment of reverie, recalling when he was a sailor who could eat “oysters and curry, the way they used to fix ’em in Bombay . . . [and] bird’s-nest soup . . .” and the camera follows him, the vestiges of his family life are also left behind, as the framing excludes Ruth and leaves Annie, now out of focus in the door leading out of the kitchen. Tracy puts on his cap, creating a visual link to his days as a sailor, even as the close-up leaves him alone with his recollections of an earlier, carefree time. This scene demonstrates how Cukor’s combination of long take, blocking, prop use, and the actor’s toolkit collectively create a scene that functions as both showcase and commentary on a character’s state of mind. The scene unfolds fluidly, carried by the force of Tracy’s delivery, and it is likely that few viewers would notice the scene’s precise division into distinct movements or the manner in which the nature of the props shifts from those associated with the list to those symptomatic of Clinton’s perceived impoverishment. What viewers would undoubtedly notice is the intensity and commitment of Tracy’s performance, the halting cadences of his speech and the tight containment of the composition, the most clear-cut marks of the collaboration between director and actor.

Performing as a Couple: Keeper of the Flame, Adam’s Rib, and Pat and Mike Little commends a comparison of Keeper of the Flame (1942), on the one hand, and Adam’s Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952) on the other. The former is a serious-minded drama forged by wartime opposition to fascism while the latter

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Cukor and the Case of an Actor’s Director  117 two are battle-of-the-sexes comedies predicated on the timeworn truism that opposites attract. The common feature binding these disparate works is the Cukor-Hepburn-Tracy triangle. These three films are the only Cukor-directed works featuring the two actors, and in each instance Cukor was also working with scriptwriters with whom he already had an established relationship: for Flame, Donald Ogden Stewart, who had previously teamed with Cukor and Hepburn on Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940), both adaptations of Philip Barry plays; for Rib and Pat/Mike, the writing team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, who had penned A Double Life (1947) for him. Cukor would go on to work with Gordon and Kanin again on The Marrying Kind (1952) and also direct Kanin’s scripts for Born Yesterday (1950 and It Should Happen to You (1952); and Gordon’s for The Actress. What unites the three films is their collective contribution to the notion of Hepburn and Tracy as a team, or, as Andrew Britton has characterized them, a “‘democratic’ couple . . . conceived of as isolated and embattled amidst implacably hostile social forces, the only protection against which is the unshakeable devotion and mutual commitment of the partners” (173). Keeper of the Flame is more incidental to Hepburn and Tracy’s reputations as an onscreen couple than the other two works, in part because the prospect of romantic engagement is kept at bay for virtually the entirety of the narrative. The incessant questioning of widow Christine Forrest (Hepburn) by journalist Stephen O’Malley (Tracy) results not in an amorous clinch but the exposure of the truth about her recently deceased husband, Robert. Although Christine and Stephen express a muted longing for each other, any prospect of its consummation is thwarted because of Christine’s status as a widow and her enigmatic behavior. So the narrative’s energies are redirected to create mounting suspicion about her culpability in her husband’s death. Along with the viewer, Stephen begins to collect evidence pointing to Christine playing a role in the accident that claimed Robert Forrest’s life, in the mistaken belief that she has been involved in a clandestine affair with her cousin. The story’s denouement provides redemption for Christine, as it reveals Stephen’s jealousy to be unfounded at the same time that it sacrifices her to the brutality of fascist forces she tried to thwart. Effectively, Christine and Stephen become a couple only after her death: the film’s final montage links their names through his written accounts of her heroic sacrifice, creating a new (democratic) myth to supplant that which had grown up around her husband. If the narrative creates persistent obstacles to the coupling of Christine and Stephen, Cukor’s method works against this tendency insofar as his handling of Hepburn and Tracy’s scenes together helps establish an intimacy in their interplay. Most obviously, Cukor’s reliance on the long take helps to keep the actors spatially connected: in virtually every scene that features them, there is at least one shot lasting longer than thirty seconds where they share the frame, and their first two encounters incorporate long takes of more than two minutes in duration. The couple has no sustained physical contact until their final scene together; it begins with a forty-two-second shot where they clutch each other’s wrists for its entirety. Before that point, intimacy had been conveyed primarily

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118  George Cukor by glances and vocal tone. But the positioning of the actors and the use of key props in these earlier scenes help establish that the removal of Robert Forrest is essential for them to come together. In the first encounter, Hepburn is positioned screen left and Tracy screen right, with a large portrait of Forrest in the middle; eventually, the actors move leftward in the frame, so that the portrait becomes positioned to the far right, but it is excluded from view only in the final minute of the shot. Hepburn and Tracy’s relative positions in the frame don’t change until near the end of the shot. As Christine says she thinks Stephen should leave, she moves right, facing away from him. But as he rejoins, “Funny, I’ve seen you for five minutes and I feel I know you very well,” she pivots. They now face each other on the opposite sides of the frame from what the initial composition provided. This set-up, with Tracy on the left and Hepburn on the right, will be replicated in virtually every scene featuring the two of them together from this point onward. In their next scene together, Stephen pointedly removes the props representing Forrest (such as the papers and photographs Christine has brought to Stephen’s hotel for him to see). By the time of their third encounter, the two are sitting together on a sofa, staring intently into each other’s eyes. When one speaks, the other never breaks visual contact, except for the occasional demure glance downward. Cukor’s long take approach allows for the cultivation of a sense of intimacy, expressed as much by body language and the actors’ response to each other as by dialogue or non-diegetic music.

7.3  The portrait of the deceased political figure Robert Forrest makes its presence felt in encounters between his widow Christine and journalist Steven O’Malley, in Keeper of the Flame (MGM, 1942). Digital frame enlargements.

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Cukor and the Case of an Actor’s Director  119 The sense of physical intimacy is far more pronounced in Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike: Cukor builds the relationship between the two actors primarily through interplay conducted in unbroken shots. But narratively, the Gordon/ Kanin films trade on the notion of rapport between the protagonists predicated on the inherent appeal that the Hepburn/Tracy relationship possesses. As of 1949 they had made four films together, and their status as a team, buttressed by Gordon and Kanin’s witty banter, is cemented by Adam’s Rib and its successor. Rare among the Hepburn/Tracy films, Adam’s Rib presents the stars as a preconstituted couple, attorneys Adam and Amanda Bonner, thereby dispensing with any of the complications of courtship. As James Bernardoni has rightfully indicated in his analysis of the film, most of Cukor’s long takes devoted to scenes with his stars offer a “meditation on marriage” (49). The Bonners are on opposite sides of a court case where a wronged wife (Judy Holliday) has been charged with assault for shooting her husband when she caught him in the arms of another woman. Scenes in the courtroom alternate with those of the Bonners at home (the latter typically preceded by a title card that reads “That evening”; each of these cards is framed by a set of stage curtains, indicating perhaps that the story has been broken down into acts and/or that the interactions between the Bonners possess the quality of ritualized performance). Cukor’s vaunted long takes certainly produce the spatio-temporal continuity of theatrical presentation, yet the intimacy of the camera scale and the angles adopted often suggest a candid perspective at odds with staged drama, and the easy familiarity of Hepburn and Tracy’s verbal byplay suggests a long-standing relationship. One could choose virtually any of their scenes together to prove this point, but I will concentrate on one that takes place on the evening following their first day in court, treating three long takes that are central to the scene in question. Each shot occurs in a different room of the Bonner apartment.In the first (1:11), Amanda waits for Adam to get home from work and greets him at the door upon his arrival. At this point, we have already seen strain in the Bonner relationship and understand that the trial has the potential to drive a wedge between the two. For that reason, their hug in the entranceway takes on added significance, registered by a slight track-in. Even once they pull their bodies slightly apart, they remain physically connected, touching each other’s arms, and the camera captures their lockstep movement as they head toward the doorway to the living room, still facing each other. When they finally break contact as Tracy sets down his coat, briefcase, and newspaper, Hepburn touches his face, asking if he is alright by pulling his chin toward her and then punching it tenderly as if to suggest that he has taken a few knocks. She offers him her drink and almost as an afterthought grabs the discarded newspaper; as they move into the recesses of the living room, the camera pivoting to frame their movement through the doorway, the paper is barely noticeable in her hands. A new shot (1:42) begins as they sit on the couch, its scale reduced by a slow track-in until the couple’s heads and torsos fill the frame; this framing will be retained until the shot’s end. At the thirty-second mark, Hepburn becomes distracted by what she sees in the paper (coverage of the trial) and momentarily

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7.4  The play of physical intimacy between married lawyers Adam and Amanda Bonner gives way to synchronized domestic cooperation in Adam’s Rib (MGM, 1949). Digital frame enlargements. loses track of what Tracy is saying. But to reestablish their connection, he gently grabs her face and turns her toward him. She soon sets the paper down and begins patting him on the shoulder as she addresses him by their shared pet nickname (“Pinky”), brushes the side of his face lightly, and then replicates her earlier gesture of punching his chin. This time, though, she does it a couple of times, and references herself directly as the possible source of his woes. But when Tracy responds that battling his adversary has been a “cinch,” Hepburn begins to toy with the paper again, and doesn’t fully release it until Tracy calls her “Dear” and says that he couldn’t stand the idea of her not “being alright, that’s all.” From that point onward, her hand moves decisively back to Tracy, fingering his jacket, stretching her fingers out toward his face, and finally slapping her hand down on his chest. Throughout their conversation, Tracy has held (and twice drunk from) the daiquiri she offered, that we know she had originally made for herself. As much as Adam’s newspaper serves as a reminder of the tension produced by the trial, Amanda’s proffered drink suggests her desire to keep the peace. The subtle use of these props, each defined as initially belonging to one spouse but now handled by the other, renders the scene more than a tender portrait of a couple unwinding; it also hints at the ongoing pressure that the trial is exerting on their relationship and each spouse’s recognition of the need to offset that pressure by conciliatory gestures. The handling of the props works in concert with

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Cukor and the Case of an Actor’s Director  121 the manner in which the actors deliver their lines. Tracy modulates his volume so that the word “Dear”—soliciting the question from Hepburn of “You mean me?”—emerges as far less loud than his response of “I sure do,” and then utters his follow-up query, “Are you alright?” in scarcely more than a whisper. Hepburn for her part, runs together her multipart answer—“Me? Sure. Of course. Why?” in such a way that the words are barely distinguishable one from the other. After Hepburn pronounces Tracy “loveable,” several brief shots hint at the physical side of their relationship, as he vigorously massages her neck and then pulls her out of frame on their way to the kitchen, eliciting offscreen squeals of delight. The final shot under consideration is an extended take (2:48) where the two initially prepare dinner in a highly choreographed but understated set of actions at the stove, fridge, and kitchen table before the discussion turns again to the trial. While the meal preparation entails successful negotiation and compromise (agreement on lamb curry as the main; rejection of green peppers in the salad), the discussion of the trial produces only an impasse. The script and the direction operate in productive tension. We can see how well Amanda and Adam function as a team at the same time we recognize how their differences make them ideal opponents. A similar physical manifestation of opposing qualities permeates Pat and Mike, where Hepburn as sports phenomenon Pat Pemberton is paired with Tracy as her trainer/promoter Mike Conovan. Perhaps because of the emphasis on sports, the physical quality of the Hepburn/Tracy relationship gains even more prominence here, and is served on several occasions by a moving camera that tracks the couple as they chat in unbroken shots lasting anywhere from twenty seconds to over a minute. In one scene, where Pat is jogging in a park while Mike rides a bicycle beside her, Cukor captures their dialogue in a series of moving camera shots, the last of which is the longest at fifty-seven seconds. Another scene begins with Mike putting Pat through her training paces (he requires her to hop on one foot fifty times—which Hepburn executes in a long take) and ends with a shot of Tracy strengthening Hepburn’s left arm through a resistance exercise that involves him pushing up against her torso repeatedly as she lies on her back. No other sequence save the massage scene in Adam’s Rib (where the Bonners’ act of giving each other a rubdown devolves into Adam slapping Amanda’s rear in retribution) put Cukor’s stars in such a sexually suggestive physical situation. Hepburn adopts a position of acquiescence by necessity, but the exercise requires that she resist with a counter push every downward thrust of her arm that Tracy initiates. Only at the end of this fifty-one-second shot, when Mike suggests that Pat’s fiancé will never entertain a fully equitable relationship, does she allow her arm to go slack and the mutuality of the movements cease. The film’s penultimate scene, set in Pat’s hotel room, ends with a relatively simple long take (1:30), where once again Hepburn and Tracy are in close physical contact, eventually both sitting on Pat’s hotel bed. As the shot progresses, Tracy stops redirecting his attention to the doorway through which Pat’s disenchanted fiancé just exited, and the intensity of the two actors’ gazes increases. When Pat proposes a romantic partnership, Mike elects to sit beside her, and the camera

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7.5  The professional and the personal merge during physical therapy, as administered by trainer Mike Conovan to athlete Pat Pemberton in Pat and Mike (MGM, 1952). Digital frame enlargements. renders the shot scale more intimate through a slight track-in and tilt down. The yearning posture and slight movement of Hepburn’s head toward Tracy’s suggests a kiss will occur, but he eliminates the possibility by rising up just before it can happen. Fittingly, the final scene of the film cements their partnership in terms that recall the physical movement of earlier moments between the couple, while ringing a variation on the inspirational questions that Mike has used to motivate his other protégé, boxer Davie Hucko (Aldo Ray). After each successful swing or putt, Pat joins forces with Mike on the green; at these points, she asks Mike one of his own questions, as the camera tracks in front of them, capturing their triumphal strides forward, with Mike/Tracy squeezing Pat/Hepburn’s arm in the third of such shots, her putter still held at chest level by her other arm. Pat and Mike ends with a celebration of the couple as a fluid entity, one only fully realized (and recognizable) in the interaction and movement of the actors who inhabit the roles. In his dedication to the moments that actors create with their craft, George Cukor employs the long take so that viewers can remain alive to what Andrew Klevan has labeled the “affective complexity” (“Living Meaning” 45) of screen performance. In Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy he found two of his most able communicators and collaborators. That he entrusted so many long takes to their performances earned him the label “actor’s director,” but more significantly

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Cukor and the Case of an Actor’s Director  123 it demonstrates that Cukor understood that the role of the camera was to reveal screen acting’s myriad functions: establishing character, commenting on the narrative, and embodying emotional states. Walter Murch suggests that a talented director “lays out opportunities that can be seized by other people” and “[protects the] communal vision by accepting or rejecting certain contributions” (quoted in Kozloff, The Life of the Author 44). If Cukor serves as what Murch calls the “immune system” of his films, his talent is to preserve the filmic text as a vibrant organism.

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Chapter 8 Cukor Maudit: Tarnished Lady, Girls About Town, Our Betters, Susan and God, Desire Me, Edward, My Son, The Model and the Marriage Broker, Let’s Make Love, and The Chapman Report Cukor Maudit

Bill Krohn In memory of Lee Sanders “There are no artistes maudit in Hollywood,” Jean Domarchi says in the first book written about George Cukor, after demonstrating that Hollywood cinema is of necessity capitalist in its form and content (14). But even a director with Cukor’s amazing track record has films maudit, and like the films Jean Cocteau first baptized with that untranslatable name, most of them are masterpieces. Two themes interweave in the following notes: that Cukor’s strategy vis-à-vis the Code—vis-à-vis any Code with a capital C—was already in place in Tarnished Lady (1931), and that the economic laws implicit in the Code, the laws of Class, had already been put in their place as cinematic simulacra invented for the occasion. (We’ll call these simulacra nonce classes.) It’s a given that all this is always happening inside a film because of Cukor’s inscription, in his first features, of a form of filmed theater that stages these codes and their subversion just as it does in the films of Jean Renoir and Orson Welles. Cukor’s modernism1 flourished in the 1960s and 1970s (he loved Warhol) (Lambert 152–5) even as his productivity declined, but some of its greatest successes were underground and occurred in offbeat films like the ones I will discuss here, where the Code, aflame, burned most brightly. Cukor also directed scenes in other people’s films, so his fragments, unlike those of Welles, are unsigned. The oeuvre even includes an unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give, a comic remake of the film maudit par excellence, Desire Me (1947), one of the few films in Hollywood history without a directing credit or so much as a mention in the AFI Catalogue of Feature Films—a fact that has no discernable impact on its dark splendor, while capping the malediction that, at one time or another, has touched all my examples. Hence their curious luminosity.

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The Dangerous Thirties Filmed on location in New York and the Paramount Studios in Astoria, Tarnished Lady extends the little theater of the films made on Paramount’s Hollywood soundstages to the world, as Welles would do in Othello (1952). Society playgirl Nancy Courtney (Tallulah Bankhead), whose family has lost its money, makes a marriage of convenience with stuffy stockbroker Norman Cravath (Clive Brook) so that her befuddled mother (Elizabeth Patterson) won’t be harassed by bill collectors. Unable to stand it for more than a few months, she flees her marriage to go back to her boyfriend DeWitt Taylor (Alexander Kirkland), a free spirit like her. Punished at every turn, and pregnant to boot, Nancy realizes belatedly that she loves her husband, but instead of telling him, she goes to work in a department store to prove that she can make it on her own—the very store where we first saw her buying an expensive pair of gloves and having her credit refused. She is one of a long line of Cukor heroines who continue to resist their happy ending long after it’s a done deal, suggesting that marriage isn’t a very happy ending after all. Cukor dramatizes Nancy’s ambiguous relation to the class structure of Depression America by showing her smoking a cigarette in a classy setting, then pulling back to reveal that she’s posing for a cigarette ad and needs the money. Nancy enters the film as a commodified image with no illusions left but love. And when she enters the marriage chamber, stark lighting dramatizes the sacrifice she’s making. Donald Ogden Stewart’s script skates on the newly published Hays Code by justifying the divorcée’s child as having been conceived in wedlock—the haven from the Code where all Cukor’s comedies of remarriage abide. But the wedding night image is so stark that we wonder if this isn’t Nancy’s first time with a man. The fact that, on the eve of her wedding, she and her boyfriend DeWitt went “somewhere” they’d “never been and will never go again” is for naughty minds to construe as referring not to a restaurant but to a friendly depucelation, and when her fellow free spirit turns up after her marriage with a rich girlfriend, we are left to wonder if Nancy unintentionally initiated him into more than love of money. Bankhead was bisexual and hardly shy (Israel 44–6). Without that information we (the naughty few) are left to wonder if her character is straight, gay, or bisexual. Her only true friend is Ben (Osgood Perkins), the first in a long line of Cukor “fixers” who manipulate the other characters to bring about one of those happy endings. The fact that Cukor changed Stewart’s script so that Nancy and Norman’s reunion occurs in the department store makes its own comment on this one. Girls About Town (1931) is not really pre-Code Cukor, but its racy ambiance makes it seem that way. Cukor and the Code came to Hollywood at the same time, and it supplied him with a lifelong dancing partner. “On the screen because of censorship, there was a kind of innocence about the tarts,” he tells Lambert (40–1). “They had lovely clothes and lots of money and a succession of rich men

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126  George Cukor who were mad about them, but they always said ‘Good night’ at the door. Of course the audience smelled something . . .” For example, we can’t be sure that we’ve seen party girl Wanda Howard (Kay Francis) and Jim Baker, the out-of-towner (Joel McCrea), in bed together (Code Provision 19 requiring “the exercise of taste”: Cukor’s specialty). They seem to have spent the night on a big stationary hammock full of pillows on the deck of a yacht, where the trick could certainly have been managed. But chastity is a professional obligation that dark-haired Wanda shares with blonde Marie Bailey (Lilyan Tashman) in the huge Art Deco apartment on top of a skyscraper where Hattie the maid (Louise Beavers) sits in the upper window wearing a shawl like Mrs. Bates to discourage “dates” from coming up.

8.1  Do they or don’t they? Even the maid doesn’t know for sure. Louise Beavers (l.), Lilyan Tashman (c.), and Kay Francis in Girls About Town (Paramount, 1931). Digital frame enlargement. Neither girl seems to have a boyfriend. Their “pimp” Jerry Chase (Alan Dinehart) is a businessman who uses them to warm up other businessmen from out of town so they’ll sign deals after a night of antiseptic revelry. There are no photos on Jerry’s desk, and he has no ties to Jerry’s Angels except the telephone and the $500 check he gives them for their services. After a hard night of evading passes and pinches, Marie goes to sleep with hers on the pillow beside her like a lover. We’re two bank crashes into the Great Depression, and everyone in the film is a businessman, including the gold diggers. Despite the bawdy atmosphere, no one

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Cukor Maudit  127 appears to be having sex, only appearing to have it. Prohibition briefly rears its head when stolid Jim’s obnoxious friend Benjie (Eugene Pallette) shows up at his own birthday party blowing a police whistle at the front door. The guests quickly dispose of their drinks, and built-in hideaway liquor cabinets stash the bottled evidence out of sight in the walls of Marie and Wanda’s wondrous apartment. It’s one of Benjie’s stupid practical jokes (“Anybody have a guilty conscience?” he crows when he sees that it worked) and a source of pleasure for the guests, who don’t even appear to be getting drunk. Everything about the party is a simulacrum of vice designed to pick the pocket of birthday boy Benjie, a rube from Lancaster, Michigan, who gets pleasure from simulated code violations—that is, from the Code itself. Like the audience. At the end of the film, Wanda and Jim’s marriage is sanctified, as is practical joker Benjie’s marriage to Edna (Lucille Brown), a plain talker from the country, who shows up and negotiates their remarriage with Wanda’s blessing. This nonjudicial sanctification is possible because the Law of the Father has been replaced by a new Law, a playful Law that shapes every element of the narrative to pull the rug out from under any suppositions we make about these characters: the heavily coded presuppositions about both gold diggers’ sexual orientation that the film calls up and overturns in every scene, and at every change of scene. The story credit on Girls goes to a very successful Broadway playwright, Zoe Akins, who had been Garbo’s lover in her youth and was still an unabashed lesbian (Lambert 73–4). Kay Francis was a lusty bisexual with a preference for gay affairs, and the pixyish vaudeville-to-Broadway shooting star Lilyan Tashman who plays her roommate Marie was a lesbian. (According to Diana McLellan’s The Girls, Akins modeled Marie and Wanda on Tashman and Tallulah Bankhead [68–9].) The only gay actor, Anderson Lawler, who was one of Cukor’s “cronies” from New York (McGilligan 40), makes Wanda’s ex-husband the most intriguing male character in the film. Apart from Jerry, whose libido is a total mystery, the film’s “straight men,” Benjie and Jim, are the classic clown duo, Auguste and Pierrot, performing two male types, the boor and the nice guy. Are Marie and Wanda simply gay? No more “simply” than the actresses playing them, who are given their own sexual personae to play. When Wanda tells Marie that she’s in love with Jim, Marie replies: “Are you going straight on me?” Wanda (sheepishly): “Yes.” Marie is all for it, but asks, before we fade out on their continuing banter, “Did I ever tell you about my operation?” The phrase is usually applied to minor surgeries, but a Danish artist had been making history, and international headlines, by undertaking sex reassignment surgery in 1930, and it seems that Marie’s quip was in the air in gay circles. The “operation” line is used here to tip the audience the wink that Marie is a lesbian and Wanda bisexual, like Tashman and Bankhead, their models. Marie approves her roommate’s wise choice to quit the rat race and become a loving trophy wife for a man who is flawed but can learn. Provision 19 (“the sale of women”) is canceled by Provision 16 (“the sanctity of marriage”), so that the Code gets a thorough workout, but tastefully, as the Code advises. Paradoxes are among the more refined pleasures of playing with the Code. So are inversions:

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128  George Cukor “Girls about town,” women having breakfast in bed together, women sacrificing themselves for each other. Marie sells everything in a gold-diggers’ auction to put Wanda right with Jim. (As they leave, she tells Hattie to “give the ladies their sticks and hats.”) When her sacrifice has worked, she calls Jerry and announces exuberantly, “From now on, I’m working alone!” Marie becomes the director’s onscreen avatar (the “fixer”), sending her intended cash-bullfrog husband back to his wife, then sending her lover Wanda (Mr. Hays take note: separate bedrooms) off to Lansing with Jim to form the ideal heterosexual marriage that convention—a more powerful code than the Code—demands at the end of a film. In Girls About Town men are sexual predators fated to be taken to the cleaners by their prey. Since everyone but Marie and Wanda’s poor relations is living the high life on banked or borrowed funds, the forgotten men and women of the Depression are kept offscreen, permitting Akins and Cukor to dream a new version of class warfare where the classes are replaced by the sexes, with two women coded as gay and played by gay actresses leading the women into battle and the men—the ones played by straight actors, at any rate—being treated by the film as interchangeable cannon fodder from an Old Regime (capitalism, sexism) that has recently displayed deep cracks in its foundations. Like Marx’s apparently unshakable classes, Cukor’s nonce classes have classes, and gays are an important class in themselves: a form of realism that trumps Brecht while adapting some of his methods. Cukor follows the script of Our Betters, a play by his friend Somerset Maugham, very closely in the 1933 adaptation he filmed for David Selznick. Constance Bennett stars as Lady Pearl Grayston, a wealthy American arriviste with a purchased title living it up in high-society London. To keep Pearl from being unsympathetic (a Code as important on Broadway as it was in Hollywood), Maugham explains that she became a playgirl only when she discovered that her husband, penniless aristocrat Lord George (Alan Mowbray), married her for her money. But the author of a book on gay characters in Hollywood argues persuasively that Maugham in Our Betters portrayed his bed-skipping characters, who could easily be gay, as straight (Barrios 501). Cukor tips the film’s mitt by making Ernest (Tyrell Davis), the dance instructor adored by Pearl’s friends, the most outrageous pansy in the history of pre-PC Hollywood—“PC” for Political Correctness, the Code that has replaced the Production Code. While everyone in the cast is devoid of gay mannerisms, Ernest’s eleventh-hour appearance is a caricature of homosexuality: huge bee-stung lips, eyeshade, painted eyebrows, exaggerated gestures (slicking the hair, fluttering the hands), and a rough way with the ladies: “If you put your foot there,” he says as he teaches Pearl’s arch-rival the Duchesse (Violette Kimble-Cooper) to do the tango, “I shall kick it.” This cartoon, which Cukor fought with Selznick to preserve unsmudged, is the return of everything the film and the play have repressed, no doubt to the delight of Maugham and the sophisticates in the audience, Cukor’s eternal groundlings. Ernest and the utterly ordinary-looking Thornton Clay (Grant Mitchell), who accompanies the

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Cukor Maudit  129 Duchesse wherever she goes, are the only officially gay characters in the film, and both are played by gay actors. The eruption of Ernest, who’s from a different kind of film, is a daring early example of how Cukor’s films flirt with heterogeneity, the centrifugal counterforce to the unity of all the elements in a film, which was always his foremost concern. The nonce classes here—the idea, not the term, comes from Pascal Kanè (85)—are Americans (Pearl and her sister Bessie [Anita Louise]) and the decadent British. Pearl momentarily abandons her militant shamelessness by sending Bessie and Bessie’s nice American boyfriend back where they came from, but the ultimate matchmaker is tango king Ernest, who persuades Pearl and the Duchesse to kiss and make up. “What an exquisite spectacle,” crows he, “two ladies of title kissing one another!” They do in the last shot, with Ernest presiding, but only on the cheek.

The Darkling Forties Made while Europe was already at war, Susan and God (1940) indirectly reflects America’s looming military involvement by satirizing Moral Rearmament, the saccharine 1940s equivalent of all the movements preaching peace and love that have come along since. When Gavin Lambert was interviewing Cukor, it was the hippies (152), but the “born-agains” were waiting in the wings to pick up the baton. The deliciously vapid song performed by the smiling, uniformed members of Susan’s movement anticipates the guitar-strumming ditties that subsequently replaced traditional hymns in churches. Susan (Joan Crawford) is a screwball comedy character gone bad. Extravagantly garbed and manic, she has driven her estranged husband, Barrie (Fredric March), to drink and now wants to divorce him. It was Manny Farber who first compared Cukor’s “quick and animating caricature” in the 1930s to Disney’s “mice and pigs” (542–3), but Susan is straight out of Looney Tunes, then in ascendance. She is the Tasmanian Devil in drag. “I simply couldn’t understand how a woman could give up her husband and her total lifestyle and everything she’d lived for to become a religious nut,” Crawford said. “I went to George Cukor a little hysterical, did I understand who the hell I was playing and why. In 15 minutes George straightened me out, and from that time on I was Susan straight through to the last day of shooting” (Newquist 87–8). Returning from Europe with her guru, Lady Millicent Wigstaff (Constance Collier), Susan tries to “fix” her friends by forcing them to publicly confess the truth about their relationships and wrecks their lives in the process. She turns out to have broken up couples that needed breaking up (two friends who were never going to get married, an aspiring actress harnessed to a wealthy boob), but first she is forced to spend the summer with Barrie and their wallflower daughter, Blossom (Rita Quigley), in the home she abandoned, with the promise that if Barry takes a single drink, she can have the divorce he’s been stubbornly refusing to give her because he still loves her. The film propounds two riddles: Why is Barrie in love with this monster, and

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130  George Cukor is Susan still in love with him? The first mystery is cleared up late in the film when Barrie tells Susan he’s waiting for her to go back to being the wonderful “screwball” he fell in love with in the first place. Pierre Léon argues that the ambiguity—did Susan “convert” to drive Barrie away?—is systematically maintained, to be broken only once when she is afraid for him, and at the end when she becomes jealous (120–5). This strange comedy of remarriage pits Susan, a whirling dervish of cubist design(s), against the normal characters while using her daughter to bring her back into the fold. (By now the Code was taking divorce very seriously.) Cukor encourages his actress to camp it up, and her remarkable performance is the first, but not the last, in a Cukor film by an actress who appears to be a female impersonator, or a clockwork marionette. The famous backstory of Crawford’s origins as Lucille Fay LeSueur from Lawton, Oklahoma, known to every member of the public in 1940, adds its own textures by suggesting that born-wealthy Barrie found this brilliant nut-case on the wrong side of the tracks. Rough tactics like those Barrie uses at one point with Susan have been called misogynistic, but Cukor biographer Emanuel Levy describes how the director put Shirley Temple through the wringer to crack her Apollonian cool and get a hysterical reaction while reshooting a scene for William Dieterle’s wartime melodrama I’ll Be Seeing You, four years after Susan. The aim of Bressonian modernism—Cukor loved Robert Bresson (Lambert 254)—is to capture symptoms of sexual trouble in non-professional actresses; Cukor did it with pros, of which Temple was a consummate example, as well as a paragon of false “innocence” (Levy 156–7). Cukor told Lambert that Desire Me (1947) was recut and reshot by a small horde of directors (Lambert 254), but this bold experiment is marred by just two tiny additions: a prologue with Greer Garson’s character in a doctor’s office, launching a flashback that is the whole film, and a shot of her coming out of the office with another unnecessary Garson voice-over that delays the ending by a minute. Nothing is said in either scene that isn’t abundantly clear from the film, so the silly bookends (and the ballooning cost overruns) were reason enough for Cukor to take his name off it. If it had been a success he could always have claimed it later. Instead it lost two million dollars. Cukor told Lambert that he took a story that “didn’t make any sense,” and commentators have failed to grasp that he meant that as a positive description. Cukor asked for director’s rewrites and had a tough shoot, so Desire Me is automatically described as “a troubled production,” and actors’ memoirs reliably beef up the run-for-cover strategy of all involved, but if one simply trims out the bookends, Cukor’s film is still there, and it’s one of his best. Director’s obsessions are often handed them on a platter. There was nothing in Cukor’s history that imprinted the story of Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden” in his DNA, but after David Selznick gave him an “Enoch Arden”-themed play to film (a man returns as if from the dead and learns that his wife is about to remarry), he reworked the story in Desire Me and again in the unfinished Marilyn Monroe film Something’s Got to Give, which harks back to Garson Kanin’s comic treatment

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Cukor Maudit  131 of the tale in My Favorite Wife (1940). That’s the reference Cukor gives Lambert (269), but in the film Monroe’s character is named Arden. The film starts “not making sense” immediately, when we see two men escaping from a concentration camp at the end of World War I but only see a bit of one man’s face. This is Jean (Richard Hart), who we then see returning to “his” French village while Robert Mitchum’s voice-over (he turns out to be the other escapee) recounts Jean’s thoughts and feelings. Mitchum’s voice tells us that Jean has so thoroughly absorbed what his comrade told him about his wife, Maryse (Garson), that he has fallen in love with her. Giving Jean’s thoughts the voice of the real husband, Paul (Mitchum), signifies that Jean has absorbed Paul’s mind into his own. Fritz Lang wanted to have a different actress do Joan Bennett’s voice-over in Secret Beyond the Door, made the same year, to represent the unconscious, but it was Cukor who got away with it in Desire Me. Jean immediately tells Maryse all of this (!) when she comes home to find a stranger caressing Paul’s pipes, after first confirming false reports that Paul is dead, and while she’s crying her heart out upstairs he lights one up. We immediately get an unvoiced flashback showing that he left Paul to die during the escape. Jean is a rotter, and mad to boot. Allowed to stay on in the house because he was Paul’s friend, Jean seduces Maryse (rumpled bedsheets are the only sign of this the Code would permit), and they begin a liaison that scandalizes the village, although Cukor gives us only that quick shot of rumpled sheets to tell us why. Then Paul (who gets his own flashback before he appears!) returns home.

8.2  “A very strange love story”: Richard Hart and Greer Garson in Desire Me (MGM, 1947). Digital frame enlargement.

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132  George Cukor Cedric Gibbons designed a wonderful French village that Cukor had built near Carmel, and cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg (who had shot Lang’s Fury [1936]) alternates velvety darkness and real sunlight, ending with a climactic pursuit over the rocks that overlook the sea where Paul and Jean are only intermittently visible through a curtain of white fog. If the film hadn’t run into “production problems” (i.e., a terrified producer), Jean would have earned his place in the distinguished gallery of murderers Cukor filmed during and after the war (Krohn 78–97). The protagonists of this strange love story are played by an actor and actress who came from the stage; Mitchum, who started in Hopalong Cassidy westerns, is the odd man out whose role, which he resented, is to bring them together with his memories. The gay subtext is what queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a homosocial bond mediated by the woman both men have sex with—a phenomenon that exists outside the pages of Victorian literature, where she first studied it, and was probably not unheard of in Hollywood. Desire Me, with its super-straight cast, portrays that situation as a dark dream teetering on the edge of a watery abyss. In Edward, My Son (1949) Spencer Tracy, who was gay (Bowers 151–7), plays a man whose only interest in his wife is the son she gave him, the never-seen “Edward”—another situation not all that uncommon in reality. Arnold Boult (Tracy) first walks through a brightly lit door onto a darkened soundstage, where he tells his story directly to the audience, seeking absolution for his sins. His face is creased with concern, but we are reminded as we see more of him that this astonishing actor was also the scariest Mr. Hyde ever put onscreen. We first see Arnold in 1919, excitedly pushing a baby carriage that is a present for Edward’s first birthday. (Like the play it comes from, the film is structured by Edward’s birthdays.) Arnold kisses his wife, Evelyn (Deborah Kerr), on the cheek, and after another peck on the cheek at the end of Act One we never see them kiss again. As he goes from swindling to arson to virtual murder of his partner to give Edward the best of everything, we realize we’re watching a remake of Citizen Kane (1941) where the “Rosebud” isn’t the hero’s childhood, but his child. Tracy’s longtime acting partner Katharine Hepburn, who was also gay, in the last film she did for Cukor, The Corn Is Green (1979), plays a spinster schoolteacher whose star pupil from the coal mine will grow up to be Emlyn Williams, the openly bisexual author of the original play. In fact, Arnold is another one of Cukor’s serial killers. He starts an affair with his secretary, Eileen (Leueen MacGrath), after she helps him cover up the fact that his ruined partner jumped out the window of Arnold’s office; and breaks it off when he fears the scandal will hurt Edward. When Evelyn says she wants a divorce, he forces her to stay married because he won’t let her take his son with her. (This is the grimmest variant on comedies of remarriage ever filmed.) World War II eliminates Edward, who crashes his plane while showing off and kills the whole crew. Evelyn has already turned to drink, aging horribly. After we learn that Arnold’s former mistress has committed suicide, Evelyn’s tombstone joins the parade.

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Cukor Maudit  133 Edward, of course, has turned into a monster, although we only hear about his misdeeds from the other characters, who are all from the U.K. Arnold was a Brit onstage, but the film, made in MGM’s U.K. studios, is about a Canadian businessman because Tracy didn’t want to learn an accent. As a result we have a cast that pits the hapless English against a sonofabitch from the New World, who brings New World ideas like buying on installment plan with him. Having failed to get the unwed mother of Edward’s child to abort it, he announces at the end that he is prepared to start hunting for Edward’s son, who should be ten years old. It never even occurs to him that Edward may have fathered a girl.

From the Fifties to the Sixties The 1950s were good to Cukor, who kept his nose to the heteronormative grindstone once the McCarthy era began. It was not a time for films maudits. The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951) was one of the year’s top-grossing pictures, despite a cast headed by a character actress, Thelma Ritter, playing professional matchmaker Mae Swasey. Ritter’s subsequent starring roles would be on television, as would the careers of virtually the entire cast, including Ritter’s titular co-stars Scott Brady and Jeanne Crain. This shows Cukor’s eye for talent, but it comes down to the fact that the most of the cast were character actors whose natural home, as film production shrank, was on the boob tube. The only dissenter in the press was the infamous New York Times critic Bosley Crowther (12 January 1952), lamenting the cruelty of casting grotesques to play Mae’s clients, like Frank Fontaine (Hjalmar Johannson), who achieved instant TV stardom playing the beloved “Crazy Guggenheim” on “The Jack Benny Show” and later “The Jackie Gleason Show.” The point, inevitably missed by Crowther, is that Ritter’s clients need her help exactly because they’re grotesque or shy. Nancy Kulp, who plays the hyponasal stringbean Hazel Gingras, is both, but she ends up marrying George Wixted (Zero Mostel). Kulp would become famous playing a similarly challenged birdwatcher on “The Bob Cummings Show”; Mostel was blacklisted and came back into the limelight on Broadway as Tevye, but that’s another story. In this respect Mae’s apologia for her matchmaking business is Cukor’s own. A New York-born Jew like Ritter, he identifies with all his characters who play matchmaker, while distinguishing the good ones from the bad. Because she takes money for her services, Mae horrifies the model, Kitty Bennett (Crain), but eventually persuades her to marry Matt Hornbeck, a handsome X-ray technician (Brady), instead of the married man who has been stringing her along with lying promises. (What the adulterous couple were doing all this time is something the Code can ignore if the film doesn’t flaunt it.) Like all Cukor’s “fixers,” Mae can be devious and tricky, but she has a good (albeit broken) heart: even though the bill collectors are after her, she pairs up Crain and Brady for bupkis. When she loses her business because some bluenoses have complained about her ad, thinking she’s running an “escort service,” she retreats to the country, where Kitty has arranged for her to meet a fishing fleet owner played by Jay C. Flippen. Mae accepts his marriage proposal but is relieved when she finds out

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134  George Cukor that it was only a set-up: the guy was boring. Instead, she marries her eternal gin rummy partner Doberman, played by Michael O’Shea, a solid character man bound for TV stardom on “It’s a Great Life,” which ran for seventy-nine episodes. Made on location and on sets that could be used for a TV show (hope springs eternal that the film will become a pilot), The Model and the Marriage Broker pits character actors against stars, with the occasional gay actor like Nancy Kulp unnoticed among the grotesques (http://www.buzzfeed.com/skarlan/in-1989actress-nancy-kulp-came-out-of-the-closest-in-the-be#u3vpm3), and since the presiding spirit is Mae, the character actors win. The Code is mollified for the same reason the bluenoses who close Mae down end up with egg on their faces: because the name of the endgame is marriage. In Let’s Make Love (1960), because a downtown theater in the round is satirizing skirt-chasing billionaire Jean-Marie Clément (Yves Montand), he is prompted to drop in for a look, dressed in his magnificent everyday clothes. Mistaken for an out-of-work actor auditioning for the role of Clément, he plays along and joins the show—under the hastily improvised nom de plume of Alexandre Dumas—in order to get close to Amanda Dell (Marilyn Monroe), the star. “The spirit of Theater is about to invade the soul of Jean-Marie Clément,” says James Bernardoni in his critical study of Cukor, which offers an excellent account of Cukor’s use of theater in film (102–3). The layers of illusion and reality that the theater metaphor enables are dizzying: Clément playing “Dumas” and “Dumas” playing Clément (and doing Emil Jannings’s rooster act from The Blue Angel [1930] when he assumes the role!); consummate showman Montand playing a man with no performing skills, then displaying them when Clément, in fantasy, projects himself into the role of Amanda’s co-star; Amanda’s skirt billowing around her just like Monroe’s in The Seven Year Itch (1955), and so on. Convinced that “Dumas” has gone mad when he tells her the truth, Amanda flees. When Clément shuts down the show in a rage, she goes to his office to demand a reprieve and finds out that her suitor really is a billionaire. Outraged, she flees her happy ending using Clément’s private elevator, and Clément tells her his feelings over the intercom while forcing the elevator to return, so that the final clinch happens in an elevator—one of many cramped spaces like the generically named Theater in the Round (where the stage manager is named Miller, after Monroe’s current husband)—a fair approximation of Cukor’s sentiments about marriage, Stanley Cavell’s thoughts to the contrary notwithstanding. Let’s Make Love was a success thanks to Monroe, but she often takes a backseat to her French co-star, and both are pitted against a cast that seems to be mostly composed of Elvis imitators, Maria Callas imitators, and Yves Montand imitators, while TV’s Milton Berle steals the show. Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly also do cameos, but Uncle Miltie supplies the film’s gay subtext by doing a version of his “swish” act that is not for prime time. Clément is instructed to set up the gag by pretending he’s waiting for a girl who’s always late. Berle swishes in, presumably as Amanda (but it’s Monroe, not Amanda, who was always late in real life) and does a stunning imitation of Amanda (or Monroe) wordlessly “coming on”

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Cukor Maudit  135 to Clément, to Clément’s horror. The pretext for all this is Clément’s doubleentendre request that Berle show him “what to do with a woman”—i.e., how to tell that joke. First understanding this to mean that the notorious playboy has been flying under false colors, Berle proceeds to teach him a lesson about Amanda. “You’re the girl . . . No, I’m the girl . . .” The Code is still in place, but

8.3  “You’re the girl … No, I’m the girl …”: Yves Montand (l.) and Milton Berle in Let’s Make Love (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1960). Digital frame enlargement. the threat of television has the studios fighting back by showing anything they can get away with (Monroe’s body, Uncle Miltie’s swish offensive) that can’t be seen on television. The Chapman Report (1962) is now considered a classic, but it had gotten a bad rap for a while because of something Shelley Winters told

8.4  The female gaze: Ty Hardin and Glynis Johns in The Chapman Report (Darryl F. Zanuck Productions, 1962). Digital frame enlargement.

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136  George Cukor Cukor’s biographer Patrick McGilligan: “He [Cukor] gave me the book to read and later he gave me a huge script, maybe four hundred pages . . . Every time I got a new script, the good stuff was taken out of it” (McGilligan 268). Even allowing for hyperbole, none of this appears to be true, but it colors the way McGilligan interprets the memos flying around during preproduction. Actually, things went smoothly, with one hitch. The treatment was done by Arthur Sheekman, Groucho Marx’s favorite gag-writer, who had more recently written a plush adaptation, at MGM, of James Jones’s Some Came Running. Writer No. 2 was Don Mankiewicz, whose snobbery about the film’s “pornography” is hardly justified by his writing credit on Robert Wise’s lurid I Want to Live! (1958) that got him the job. “Pornography”: that’s the voice of the Code—the studios’ code, not that of their external self-imposed censors—and it tells us why Cukor wanted badly to do this screen version of Irving Wallace’s best-seller inspired by the Kinsey Reports, which had been changing hearts and minds (and helping homosexuals emerge from the shadows) since 1948. Cukor and Darryl Zanuck weren’t reformers arriving a decade late for the rally. (Sexual Behavior in the Female had been published in 1953.) They were showmen doing what Hitchcock, the Leader of the Pack, had done so successfully two years earlier with Psycho: playing pizzicatos on the Code (and the studios’ unwritten code) to give pleasure to a larger audience than the art-house few who were being titillated by the New Frankness in films from abroad. All this was happening in the shadow of Zanuck’s Folly, Cleopatra (1963), which was geysering red ink in Rome. That prompted Zanuck to move The Chapman Report to Warner Bros., which he had overseen before taking over Fox, bringing another mogul, his former boss Jack Warner, into the mix. Zanuck was determined to get a film out that would fill the coffers by going in a new direction: slick exploitation films like Psycho and I Want to Live! that substituted sex for spectacle. Naturally the censors took an interest. Dissatisfied with what Writers Nos. 2 and 3 (Wyatt Cooper) had done, Cukor asked his cop-turned-Oscar-winning production designer Gene Allen, who wanted to start a third career, to do a final rewrite. This gave Cukor’s most gifted collaborator a last-pass opportunity to shape a film where the production design would tell more of the story than the words. When Cooper counted lines to keep his writing credit from being further diluted by Allen’s (a particularly worthless test in this case), Allen and Sheekman ended up with story credits, which Allen accepted (any screen credit is good when you’re starting up the ladder all over again as a writer at forty-four) while Sheekman hid behind the alias “Stuart Grant” (preferable when you already have a powerful list of “Screenplay by” credits, although The Chapman Report would be Sheekman’s last film). All this sounds violent and chaotic, but from Cukor’s position it was simply business as usual for a director with a penchant for risk-taking studio projects. Besides giving Cukor two seasoned cigar-chomping drama queens, Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck, to rage and howl at in those teletypes and memoranda, the switch to Warners had a crucial effect on casting. According to McGilligan, who doesn’t care for the film: “Mandated as part of the Warners tie-in were some relatively deadweight actors with television credentials” (268). As a result, the

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Cukor Maudit  137 four leads in The Chapman Report, Shelley Winters, Claire Bloom, Jane Fonda, and Glynis Johns, are movie stars but the men they marry, cuckold, and couple with are all “stars” from Warner Television’s expanding universe of cop shows and westerns, headed by the collegially wooden “Stu Bailey” of “77 Sunset Strip,” Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Paul Radford, assistant to Dr. George Chapman (Andrew Duggan from “Bourbon Street Beat”), who has come to an upscale Los Angeles suburb to study female sexual response. Add to the mix Ray Danton (“The Alaskans”), Ty Hardin (rising star of “Bronco”), TV western villain John Dehner, professional guest stars Harold J. Stone and Roy Roberts, Corey Allen (relegated to TV baddy roles until his early retirement), Bob Baer playing the seething test-pilot “Boy” in between guest shots on “Bronco” and “Leave It to Beaver,” and newcomer Chad Everett as the water delivery boy with whom nympho divorcée Claire Bloom almost scores a “daybreaker” twenty minutes into the film, and you have a General Theory of Maleness that is purely a function of casting, that is to say of caste: movie stars and TV stars generally don’t go to the same parties. An in-depth production history would try to determine how Oscar-winner Winters felt about playing love scenes with the star of The George Raft Story (1961). Or how Henry Fonda’s daughter felt about having her character’s first orgasm in the arms of “Dandy Jim Buckley” from “Maverick”—but Zanuck spared her that by cutting the scene entirely. Those reflexes, in any event, are part of the film, as are the reflexes of the audience, who don’t exactly consider “Cal Calhoun” from “Bourbon Street Beat” an expert on sex. In fact most of the male actors are virgins, in a manner of speaking, since the characters they’ve played have never had sex, or even thought about it in many cases, because of the Code-within-the-Code governing TV shows in the days before “Masters of Sex” (2013). By 1962, the pill had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and The Feminine Mystique was rattling around in Betty Friedan’s head along with the ideas in Simone de Beauvoir’s Golden Bough of gender, The Second Sex, which had proposed an existential analysis of women’s situation. Friedan’s early chapter on “The Happy Housewife Heroine” begins by quoting letters from housewives who are experiencing an inner turmoil they can’t explain: “Why have so many American wives suffered this nameless aching dissatisfaction for so many years, each one thinking she was alone?” (79). Cukor and Company 1962 were trying to do on film what Friedan would do with her best-seller by making existential heroines out of their desperate housewives. Are the filmmakers barking up the wrong tree with all the sex, then, or is sex a red herring, as it is in Girls About Town? All the heroines of The Chapman Report get laid without paying the price, except the Nympho of course. The Justified Unfaithful Wife’s husband realizes his part in her infidelity, the Intellectual’s husband never notices the difference, and the Frigid Girl finds understanding, orgasm, and a distinguished beau all in one hunky sexologist. The action plan for the next generation of women’s magazines is right where one would expect to find it, in a glossy studio soap opera, and so is the next decade of films about women. In his milestone essay “The Decline of the Actor,” Manny Farber contrasts the way a filmed play like Dinner at Eight (1933) “could once be made to produce

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138  George Cukor that endless unreeling of divergence, asides, visual lilts which produce a vitality unique to the movies” with the new prestige cinema where “the actor has to be fitted into a production whose elements have all been assembled, controlled, related, like so many notes in a symphony,” citing The Chapman Report as his first example (542–6). Of course there is good acting in the film, but it is being done in a visual straitjacket. Moralizing a visual plan that constrains the actresses as a prison for the characters is high modernism. Everything in the image conspires to send Shelley Winters back to a sexless marriage: the flimsy theatricality of the flashback to sex with Ray Danton, the subdued pastoral décor of her home. Glynis Johns’s character, Teresa, is a drag queen, and her getaway is a gay man’s paradise (Warner objected to all the beach footage Cukor shot), but there is literally no place in the film where these women can be anything but clown versions of heteronormative marriage partners. Décor, not biology, is destiny, and the remarriage genre is now part of the décor, like the fake windows on the set of the little play Danton’s character is directing: a world of false appearances created to imprison heroines intermittently impinged on by the men in their lives, who feel like part of the illusion. Paul (Zimbalist), a moderately bright Boy Scout, thinks his hole-punched computer cards will blow away ignorance and repression like cobwebs, when all they are doing is imposing new norms on behavior, as Dr. Jonas, the devil’s advocate played by Henry Daniell, convincingly argues. During the first encounter between Danielle and Zimbalist, a great film actor pitted against a recessive log goes from playing the effete smartass to leaning in and selling himself as an avatar of the director figure, whose authority overmatches Paul’s but can’t do for Fonda’s Kathleen what Paul will do by virtue of having the right equipment to—as Jonas delicately puts it—“follow up.” Perhaps if Dr. Chapman had cashed the check Claire Bloom’s Naomi wrote when she came around the desk because she liked to see who she was talking to, she wouldn’t have been gang-raped in the back room at a jazz joint. As a sexologist, at any rate, all he could offer were fill-in-the-blank questions. The set-up Naomi violates is for interrogating women’s sexuality the way witches were interrogated during the Inquisition. As a woman artist (Cukor regretted that we don’t see more of that), and a British actress to boot, she is dark sister to Glynis Johns’s Teresa, consigned to the gender junk pile while their American sisters can at least look forward to the dubious pleasure of being housewives. That “pleasure” is what Serge Daney, speaking of The Chapman Report, means by “utter despair” (Daney and Rollet 109; translation mine). *** With thanks to Andy Rector and David Ehrenstein.

Note 1. My definition of modernism comes from the theoretical writings of Jean-

Pierre Oudart, which neatly incorporate André Bazin’s theories about filmed theater. See “Suture 1 and 2”; “Un discours”; “Quatre nuits”; “Travail” (Daney and Oudart); and, for Bazin, What Is Cinema?

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Chapter 9 George Cukor’s Theatrical Feminism: Gaslight, Heller in Pink Tights, A Life of Her Own, and A Star is Born

Cukor’s Theatrical Feminism

Linda Ruth Williams George Cukor was a perceptive architect of scenarios which dramatize the commodification of women, in stories of trading and ownership through employment as well as through the prison-house of marriage. A range of his films feature women as working spectacles, literal ‘show girls’ who trade their bodies or talents as entertainment or who perform in the private arena of home-as-theater. The films under scrutiny here reflect the generic diversity of Cukor’s work (a musical, a western, a gothic-thriller, a modern melodrama), but with the common concern of women on show, women in the spectacle marketplace: movie star Esther Blodgett/ Vicki Lester in A Star is Born (1954), traveling theater stalwart Angela Rossini in Heller in Pink Tights (1960), and model Lily James in A Life of Her Own (1950) trade their performance skills. Even the archetypical paranoid woman, Paula Alquist in Gaslight (1944) is an opera singer, if also more of an unwitting player in a highly theatrical drama stage-managed by her husband. Cukor ‘pantomimed’ the actor’s lines in rehearsal, playing them first for imitation, then mouthing them as the actor worked and the cameras rolled (which some found hard to get used to). Cukor’s early career as an actor himself is reflected as he mimics the position of the women from whom he garnered such brilliant performances. I term Cukor an ‘architect’ of scenarios because of the skill with which he organizes the spaces of performance as well as the style and content of what is performed. His stars’ physical occupation of space is important to his sense of effective drama. Like the repertory director he was before Broadway, he found and made theatrical spaces everywhere. Here I risk identifying Cukor as a theatrical director who lacked cinematographic sensibility: Gene Kelly told critic Kenneth Tynan “basically Cukor is a theatre man who neither cares about nor understands the camera” (McGilligan 250). Gary Carey begins his early overview of Cukor’s career, “The theatre is the keynote of Cukor’s films” (9), not just because he has adapted so many theater plays for the screen or because his directing virtues (staging, working with actors, adherence to a great script) are theatrical as well as cinematic, but because he has a “predilection for back stage stories” which suggests that “he, like most theatre people, relishes shoptalk” (Carey 9). Yet Cukor’s biographical relationship to the

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140  George Cukor theater is uneasy. He adapted a number of plays for the screen, but it seems that once he had made the transition to the screen he could not go back. His return to Broadway in the 1950s was unsuccessful: according to Louis B. Mayer’s youngest daughter, by 1955 he was “no longer stage-wise” (quoted in McGilligan 247). Not cinematic enough for Kelly, insufficiently theatrical for Broadway, yet Cukor it seems is most confidently successful when he blithely refuses to demarcate the ‘purely’ cinematic from theatricality, performance, and the written word. Through four discrete readings, this chapter sets out some ways of understanding staged and screened women which might also be extended to Cukor’s other dramas of performance. This is not a reading of Cukor through the lens of psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship, even though psychoanalytic theory has found his lauded women’s films to be marvelously resistant to Laura Mulvey’s famous model of active male gazes and objectified female spectacles. I read Cukor’s women as spectacle/ spectator in a contractual form, with female bodies and talents as self-traded commercial tools. Esther/Vicki, Angela, and Lily are economic participants in the spectacle industries within which their narratives are set, as well as reflections of Cukor’s own preoccupation with the revealing processes of theatrical cinema. Not least, these films also reflect his sustained and touching sympathy for working women and women caught in transformation narratives (he returned repeatedly to the Pygmalion scenario). Although Paula abandons her performance career almost before it has begun, her dramatic insertion into her husband’s script, overshadowed by the dominant presence of her (dead) diva aunt, makes Gaslight a useful theatrical overture to this discussion.

Gaslight: Home/Theater Gaslight was adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s hugely successful Gas Light: A Victorian Thriller, which played in London first then on Broadway under the title Angel Street. It had already been filmed in Britain in 1940 (by Thorold Dickinson, with Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook). It has been claimed by feminist critics, although as a story of a woman driven to the point of madness by a fraudster, the film’s feminism is ambivalent. Male-induced female insanity facilitates an Oscar-winning performance by Ingrid Bergman as Paula, who is ultimately only partially the agent of her own salvation. Still, her story illuminates the loss women might experience giving themselves in the marriage contract, and does not primarily reflect the Victorian values suggested by its mise-en-scène but women’s very 1940s-focused “fears about losing their unprecedented freedoms and being forced back into their homes after the men returned from fighting to take over their jobs and assume control over their families” (Modleski 21). Gaslight’s uneasy feminism is complicated by Cukor’s theatrical framings and his reflexive eye for performance. It is saturated with an acutely cinematic theatricality, from its opulently gothic Victorian London interiors (built on MGM’s backlot) to its hysterical close-ups and meticulously framed performances, utilizing a sophisticated cinematic toolkit to stage its set-piece scenes of seer and

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Cukor’s Theatrical Feminism  141 seen. Gaslight is theatrical not because it was a stage play but because it finds theater in its drama of interiors/exteriors. “Performance” occurs even early in the film, before the hasty marriage which cements the main story. An astonishing self-reflexive opening sequence shows Young Paula as shocked victim, on show to the street-as-auditorium. There has been a murder in a middle-class house in a London square; a silent row of spectators line the pavement looking on (as though “scene of the crime”’ is a theatrical direction). For Cukor theater (theatron) is “seeing place.” Never simply confined to the stage and its actors, Cukor involves views of those watching as much as those being watched. The house door grandly opens and a stunned-looking young Paula is ushered out. First her image is held in the proscenium arch of the door frame, then she is led as if towards her audience, down the steps and into the carriage which will whisk her away from London. Her starkly illuminated white face pops out of the gloom as if limelit;1 its frozen shock, fixed by what she has seen (her aunt’s murder), becomes the spectacle. Her face is so white she might be a ghost, or an angel (her flossy hair is haloed in the studio-streetlights). This masque-like opening recasts both the street and the house’s doorway as theatrical space, and turns the muttering bystanders into an audience. We next see Paula ten years later in Italy, training as an opera singer in the footsteps of the dead aunt, who was a world-renowned diva with a passionate fan following. In rehearsal her tutor pushes her to throw herself into character, but she cannot: love has interfered with her ability to fabricate. Swapping work for marriage, Paula quits her singing career, eloping with Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer). Now her role is that of private victimized woman whose face will be constantly pored over by Gregory. The couple set up home in the aunt’s London house, where Paula will be systematically driven to near-madness by the performance of her husband—which she does not recognize as such. Through a protracted campaign of hidden objects and lingering doubt, Paula endures marriage to a fabricated man (Anton is actually already married, under a different name). At first, it is the man who performs and the woman who reacts: he tells her she is imagining things, that there is no one in the attic (while continuing to make those “noises off”); he tells her the gaslight is not dimming although he controls it like a stage manager; he masquerades as being free to marry when in fact he has a wife. The woman watches the man act, and everyone—as blind as she is to his performance—watches her response. Paula is also scrutinized by others in ways which range from prurient to hostile. Elizabeth the housekeeper (Barbara Everest) and Nancy the housemaid (Angela Lansbury) pass judgment on their mistress’s appearance and diagnose the nature of her relationship with the master. When Paula offers “the way she looks at me” as evidence that insolent Nancy despises her, Anton accuses her of “seeing things.” Nosey neighbor Bessie Thwaites (Dame May Whitty) seems constantly to be looking towards the house from the square, conjecturing about the occupants and their lives behind closed doors whilst hoping for a glimpse through the windows. Scotland Yard Inspector Brian Cameron (Joseph Cotten) watches Paula from a distance having recognized her as the image of her aunt (of whom he was a fan). Yet the more secretive Paula is the more visually enticing

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142  George Cukor she becomes, aided by Cukor’s repeated motif of positioning her in architectural structures (primarily window and door frames) that trap and aestheticize her. Doane places emphasis on the locked door and the secrets behind it in her reading of the paranoid woman’s film, but whilst the locked treasures (and potential monsters) in the closed attic of Thornton Square are crucial to the plot, open doorways and windows are more spectacularly resonant. In one particularly acute moment we share Bessie’s perspective (from the open garden of the square) as she witnesses Paula hovering once again in the proscenium frame of the front door. Dressed to escape, she soon loses confidence and retreats back into the shadows, rather resembling a hesitant turn in the limelight before stage fright sends her panicking into the wings. The door frame and window frame constitute a stage, an orifice of revelation. Another hasty entry and exit comes when Paula galvanizes herself into attending a high-society musical soirée: the rarity of a public appearance renders her almost as visually interesting to fellow audience members as the performing pianist. Here, Anton once again deploys his maddening strategy of making her think she has lost or stolen something without knowing it. His watch has gone from his wrist, and when he finds it in her bag he sadistically observes her agonized reaction. This is theater within theater: in the grand context of a conservatory setting, with diegetic audience arrayed around the maestro pianist, is staged a humiliating scene in the couple’s intimate drama. Paula “makes a spectacle of herself” with an inappropriate hysterical outburst, and has to flee. The closed doors of domestic privacy pressurize this repressed public expulsion. Cameron’s sleuthing will reveal Anton as Alice Alquist’s murderer, who sought out Paula in order to gain access to the Thornton Square house where he believes the diva’s priceless jewels are hidden. What makes the film so resonant for readings of performing women and spectacle is that the jewels have been sewn into the fabric of the theatrical costume Alice is depicted wearing in the huge portrait dominating the living room2—an image which has filled Anton’s field of vision all the while he has been here. As Cameron says, rumbling him, “And this is where Alice Alquist hid them, where all the world could see them.” The woman places the object of desire in plain sight, expecting the man to be blind to it (see Hanson). Paula’s triumph—and the scene Cukor most prized—sees her turning the tables on her tormentor through a Grand Guignol display. She asks for time alone with her husband who has been tied up by Cameron, and forces him to be the literal captive audience of a spectacular one-woman show. He asks her conspiratorially for a knife, which she obediently fetches (to cut his bonds, or perhaps to kill him). Then she towers over him, waving the knife threateningly whilst delivering, as her reason for not helping him now, an exaggerated stylization of the madness he has been working to produce: “Because I am mad, I hate you. Because I am mad, I have betrayed you . . .” As Helen Hanson argues, “Paula’s speech and voice styles become increasingly confident, and harden into anger as she performs and parodies her former role as persecuted wife, giving a performance of ‘the madwoman in the attic’” (127). It is hard not to see this as Paula’s “Diva” moment, with Gregory compelled to watch as her most obsessive fan.

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9.1  Paula Alquist’s “Diva” moment, performing madness for a captive audience (Ingrid Bergman as Paula; Charles Boyer as Gregory in Gaslight; MGM, 1944). Digital frame enlargement.

All the World’s a Stage: Heller in Pink Tights It is a professional performer who is the central sexually confident spectacle in Heller in Pink Tights. Angela Rossini (Sophia Loren) is always on show, even when alone with men. Heller is a departure for Cukor: the only western he directed, it hasn’t aged as well as many of his titles. Striving to attend to contemporary modes of the early 1960s (and suggesting a sexual liberation which had not quite come of age), it is hampered by studio-era genre clichés. Indeed, where post-New Wave westerns more successfully destabilized genre, Heller’s relationship to the genre is misjudged (or before its time). Pressed, Cukor called it a “romantic comedy” (Lambert 180) but the male lead, Anthony Quinn, thought he had mishandled the genre (cited in Zec 140). Sumptuously visual in its enjoyment of costume, design, and color but still paying lip-service to genre staples such as hostile Indians, saloons, and posses, the film has an unsettling plot, both over-complex and too thin, and is almost certainly thwarted by Paramount’s reediting in defiance of Cukor’s cut. Fleeing creditors chasing debts run up by the excessive Angela, Tom Healy’s (Quinn) traveling theatrical troupe takes up a residency at “the best theatre in Cheyenne.” Healy is in love with Angela, his star turn, but— as with all the men she encounters—she flirts, manipulates, refuses to commit, attracted to local gunslinger Clint Mabry (Steve Forrest). The troupe skips town,

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144  George Cukor is set upon by Indians, and finds a way back to civilization—and solvency—when Angela wheels and deals her way to securing a theater under Healy’s name. She finally commits to him. The troupe helps Clint escape his pursuers through a highly theatrical sleight of hand. Heller is an odd Cukor confection, an unsettled work that failed with critics and audiences ironically just when his critical importance was being shored up, and his authorial image lionized, by film historians. Since Cukor was such a strong storyteller, and valued tight scripts, the narrative weaknesses of Heller show despite its visual luster, which Cukor invariably credits to art director Gene Allen and color coordinator George Hoyningen-Huene (“We worked together as a team; where one stops and the other starts, I don’t know” [Long 62]). For such a sartorially spectacular story, it is interesting that costume designer Edith Head is left out of this credit. Unfamiliar views of historical roadshow theatrical life are delivered through a collection of stunning visual moments which are never allowed to grow flesh. That femininity, costume, and color will be central is signaled from the title onwards: the “heller” Angela (from hellion, meaning a rowdy or mischievous person) is the wearer of the customary theatrical staple of tights (a significant shift from Louis L’Amour’s 1954 Heller with a Gun, upon which it is based). In keeping with the film’s reflexive look at theatrical life, there are frock coats, bustles, and marabou-feathered hats bursting from the dark miseen-scène; when theater people arrive they bring vibrancy with them. But there is also the oddly mismatched bric-a-brac of the diegetic performance costumes. The troupe’s two set-piece extravaganzas, La Belle Hélène and Mazeppa, have an authentic look because they were costumed courtesy of an authentic studio dressing-up box; Hoyningen-Huene assembled the diegetic wardrobe from the extensive historical collection he found in the Paramount vaults: “George went down . . . to the wardrobe storage place where nobody ever goes,” Cukor said in 1964, “and he came back with old costumes of the crusades, the Revolution . . . all sorts of incorrect things falling apart and he put them all together. It was so real on the screen, all the actors in the far west with this incredible mélange” (Long 36). The confection of artifice can be read also as a curious, accidental documentation of Paramount’s history. Nevertheless Cukor believed that it had its basis in reality, researching its look and story through archive photographs: Truth to tell, there was never a story, but the subject attracted me. I’d always wanted to do a picture about a troupe of traveling actors and their adventures in the pioneer days. It always struck me as romantic and authentically real. These actors, without in a sense being aware of it, were traveling in culture— they even brought it to California. (Lambert 180) Nor are the film’s theatrical spectacles confined to actual theaters. There is a backstage quality to Heller; watching crowds watch the actors is one element of the fun, but perhaps one of the most remarkable, and original, sequences shows the troupe abandoning their possessions in order to escape Indians. They have evaded their creditors by escaping into the desert, mother-and-daughter act Lorna (Eileen Heckart) and Della (Margaret O’Brien) skipping town wearing all

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Cukor’s Theatrical Feminism  145 of their costumes at once (since suitcases would draw attention to their default). Set upon in their camp, the actors flee, and the Indians raid the wagons. In one of the most original cultural collisions of the genre, they frolic around with the costumes, parading the Paramount regalia in an iconic western landscape as if to draw attention to the hackneyed historical/racial masquerade which brought them into the movie in the first place. It is a carnivalesque moment, as fighting braves don skirts and dance around in a blizzard of feathers and silk. This bold hesitation in the action vividly reinforces the film’s commitment to serious play through dressing up (and Cukor’s sartorial enjoyment: “I think clothes are the greatest invention in the world” he told Peter Bogdanovich, “and one should be awfully careful who one undresses” [465]). Earlier in the story the troupe tries to befriend two strange wandering Indians, dazed semi-vagrant figures uncannily garbed in discarded Civil War uniforms. Lambert calls them “astonished and dowdy and alien”; Cukor, having copied historical photographs, insists on their authenticity (Lambert 181). If narratively Heller’s Indians are as clichéd as any in the genre, visually Cukor is doing something quite different with this odd collision of Native American, white, and European theatrical cultures, as if costume itself led him to inject a new politics through spectacle. The focus on a traveling theatrical troupe is of course prime Cukor material, reminiscent of his early times as a summer-stock showman. Certainly the protagonists here are “traveling in culture,” through cultures, and as cultural pioneers (or perhaps imperialists). Indeed, Cukor suggests that they may be the basis of cinema’s Californian foundation. Of course he himself has brought Eastern notions of theatrical excellence to the new West as a stage director enlisted to work in talkies. For someone reading Heller in the twenty-first century, its primary interest might come from an almost postmodern reflexivity about the framings and artifice of theatricality (characters being constantly caught in proscenium-like frames [Bernardoni 113]). Men are players here, too: when Angela boasts that Healy, playing Paris in the Belle Hélène pageant, is “the handsomest man in the world,” he ruefully adds, “Of course, I wear a lot of make-up.” But it is Heller’s proto-feminist views of women, often role-playing as women for (usually financial) gain, which interests me most. Of course there have been many noted exceptions to the generic typecasting of women as prostitutes, homemakers, or school “marms,” most strikingly where they have owned (and policed their) property as saloon proprietors and cattle queens (Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns [1957] or Cattle Queen of Montana [1954]; Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar [1954]). But the western landscape was predominantly masculine. Heller’s focus on theater facilitates a different view of working women, foregrounding economic function and paving the way for more diverse representations over the following decade, from Jane Fonda in Cat Ballou (1965) to Julie Christie in McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971). Yet at the same time, the film is not bereft of the pretty-girl-for-sale theme. A secondary character, Lorna (Eileen Heckart) is seen at one moment descending from the upstairs booths where the prostitutes ply their trade into the saloon’s male crowd with her twenty-year-old, but continually infantilized daughter Della

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146  George Cukor (Margaret O’Brien, of child-star fame). They want to sell picture-cards of the child-woman: “For only 50 cents, for one half of one dollar, you can visit,” as if the purchase of a photograph can buy the girl’s virginity. Cukor affords us a close-up of the arrayed cards in Della’s hand: coy portraits in stock poses stamped with the photographer’s brand (accurate for the nineteenth century), except that here, in an inside joke, the photographer’s name is “Hoyningen-Huene,” Heller’s color coordinator and formerly a famous fashion photographer. The image is reinforced as merchandise, its bounded space a complementary arena for selling women. Sophia Loren’s Angela is always on the stage, and views her visual image as always promoting her waged work. Although we first encounter her going through her lines with Tom, when she is presented to the crowds in the Cheyenne street she may as well be in a play. The moment is revelatory and costume-focused, attributed by Emanuel Levy to Cukor’s talent for “orchestrating great entrances for his female stars” (251): we see her shoe, her (striped) tights, her pinched waist, and finally, almost, her face—but it is tilted down, enshrouded by a veil, the famous Loren eyes becoming visible only after a moment of holding back. It is almost reverse strip-tease, with more and more (of less and less) revealed as the coquettish sequence proceeds, and Healy orchestrating her entrance as Cukor does Loren’s. In this more commercial teaser-campaign than sexual display, what is being withheld and revealed is what diegetic audiences in Cheyenne could wish to see more of, and what cinema audiences have already invested in. Angela/ Loren is top of Healy’s/Cukor’s bill, and must be carefully marketed and parceled out for maximum return. Her predominantly black costume enables the splashes of purple (hat, gloves) to “pop” from the frame, especially as she walks through the intensely red-painted interior of the Cheyenne theater. When Angela breaks free from the guided tour of the theater and wanders from room to room by herself, the camera overtly frames ways of looking at the star, the troupe, and the film itself. Read as part of Loren’s bid to break into Hollywood, this is also a key sequence in the actress (and her lover, Heller’s co-producer Carlo Ponti’s) campaign to establish her as an international star. Cukor’s camera follows Angela as she snoops around backstage, watched by Clint (as if anticipating that Mulvey-esque male gaze). As we watch her from Mabry’s point of view we see only her fetishized, opulently-bustled rear, framed halfway up some stairs. The moment she realizes she is being spied, she hurries into a room and shuts the door, blocking his view. We remain inside with her, as she ponders her next maneuver. She now uses one of the sliding-doored peepholes in the walls of the manager’s office which enable him to spy on the activities of his entertainment hub as in a panopticon: one hole looks over the theater towards the stage, the second oversees his gambling saloon. As she looks into the latter—a less familiar arena for a female performer—Cukor offers us a reverse shot which reveals that painted onto the peep-hole doors are a naked woman in repose. The nude is spliced in half—opened up, roughly at pubic level—when Angela slides the two halves of the painting apart and inserts her face into the gap. The result is an extraordinary image, all at once profoundly fetishistic whilst using a woman’s face to interrupt any pleasure a spectator may have had in the

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Cukor’s Theatrical Feminism  147 painted pornographic view. Angela’s costume reveals a heart-shaped patch of skin at collar-level, the same color as the painted woman’s nudity, a palimpsest of Loren’s concealed body, and her lips are parted with curiosity. But on a very straightforward level the tactic replaces the looked-at still image of a woman with the moving image of a woman wanting to get the best view.

9.2  Angela (Sophia Loren) surveys the saloon through a panopticon peep-hole, and becomes part of the picture herself, in Heller in Pink Tights (Paramount, 1960). Digital frame enlargement. To win enough money to pay off the company’s debt Angela sidles into an allmale poker game, wearing her finest knock-’em-dead, dazzling white dress (which positions her as the jewel in a rather dull setting). She plays the flirty novice (“I’ve just learned it and it’s so amusing!”), so they agree to let her in (assuming she will be easy prey). Her poker face is girlish incompetence. Yet if she talks dumb she plays clever, nearly winning the whole table. When Clint eventually raises the stakes higher than she can match, she offers herself, the logical conclusion of the gestures towards prostitution which all the film’s women indulge (“We’re all actresses, ain’t we,” a Madam says to her later). Angela loses, but is temporarily excused from honoring her debt when the man Clint has been paid to kill bursts in, and the gunslinger honors his own contract with a bullet: men are paid for violence, women for sex, all except the men of the theatrical troupe, who are in a sexually more ambivalent position (macho Quinn was convinced he had been miscast: “I was basically playing a homosexual” [Levy 251]). Instead of exchanging a vision of her body for money Angela uses it in lieu of money, a strategy she is not adept at controlling. It’s finally not just a vision of herself she must give (like a risqué picture-card) but her body itself. Angela can fabricate as long as there is a distance between performance and spectator, audience, camera. Clint’s claim on her threatens to cross the line.

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148  George Cukor

“I don’t wanna see”: A Life of Her Own In Gaslight Paula gives up a performing career and then finds herself embroiled in high domestic drama, whilst in Heller Angela is already a seasoned stage ham. But I want to turn to A Life of Her Own, the first of two ambivalent stories about women in the contemporary visual industries. Cukor’s least favorite film (on which he was a hired hand), it has attracted little critical attention and less love (McGilligan calls it “the director’s studio rock bottom” [204]; Cukor said, “All I can remember about that one is that I hated it . . . It should be locked up in the archives. None of us are proud of it” [Long 46, 82]). But this derogation seems to make key scenes all the more interesting as portraits of spectacular women. Lana Turner plays Lily James, who moves from small-town Kansas to New York City and pushes herself into a top modeling career. A model she befriends kills herself, whereupon Lily gets involved with a married man, ultimately leaving him and barely avoiding following the same suicidal path. Cukor wanted this desperate story to be even darker, but MGM prevented him from allowing Lily to die. The image of the modeling industry the film presents is biting; if the final vision of a single woman’s bleak horizons is depressing it is because of, rather than despite, this darkness that Life suggests a kind of empathic feminism worlds away from the positive gender politics of Adam’s Rib, just one year earlier. Two threads, career and love, develop Lily’s story, both articulated through the woman as exchanged, traded, or contracted. Professionally she is rewarded for doing little more than physically “being.” An early montage establishing her career combines moving images of her walking to photo-shoots and the scrolling paper of her busy appointment calendar, with still images (magazine covers, billboards) which are the result of her labor. Her (surprisingly benign) boss (Tom Ewell) gives her a raise not because she is the most beautiful model in his agency full of desperate, glamorous women but because she is “hard working, intelligent, and charming.” But this is not enough. She articulates her personal impasse with soonto-be lover Steve Harleigh (Ray Milland) as they sit opposite each other eating a humble meal. Cukor keeps the pair in a two-shot, separated by the table, until he closes in on Turner’s face whilst she picks open the idea that “being somebody” is about “doing.” Her desires are diffuse. She wants “To be a success—to be somebody . . . You don’t really do anything in modeling. People use you, it’s hard work and you get tired. But part of you doesn’t get tired enough.” This articulation of a desire for work is a critical stage on the path to the pair falling in love. By the end of Lily’s dismal story she is overwhelmed by such ennui that she has even lost this desire: “I can work whenever I want to,” she says, to which cynical advertising executive Lee (Barry Sullivan) replies, “The trick is to want to, isn’t it?” Ever the admirer of classy glamour, Cukor enjoys the spectacle of top modeling as much as the film more widely reviles Madison Avenue. One short sequence near the end does both: mink-clad Lily holds a frozen pose, standing in profile on a ridiculously opulent theatrical set, with curtains framing her. Dressers and stylists buzz around; someone declares, “It has to be stark, dramatic,” and wafts “a touch of chiffon” onto her arm, saying, “It’s as if she were Ondine rising up

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9.3  “It has to be stark, dramatic”: Lily (Lana Turner) poses in the theatrical setting of a modeling shoot in A Life of Her Own (MGM, 1950). Digital frame enlargement. out of the sea.” This gesture towards the grandiose story of the mermaid who gains land legs and survives is bathetic, however; Lily is merely advertising cigarettes. By now disenchanted with everything, she walks off set, quitting her job and dropping the mink to the floor, revealing ordinary working-girl clothes underneath. At one point, when he is considering the future of their romance,

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150  George Cukor Steve pauses by a newspaper stand next to a line of identical Life magazines, each featuring cover-girl Lily festooned with playing cards. The magazine buys her image, the public buys the magazine, and Steve must buy her, too: this is the moment when he decides to consummate their relationship and set her up in an apartment like a kept woman. Although she adamantly stresses to the landlord that she will be paying her own rent, the marriage-like security is revealed as one more exchange relationship in which Lily finds herself caught, but which gives her agency. Steve provides a sense of self which her work does not; when he is gone, she is gone. This idea of the spectacular woman as nobody, given value by her beauty and relationship to men, is strangely at the heart of Life’s feminism. Cukor places his protagonist in male architectural space. Her home is set up with Steve’s input, and the key scene there is a birthday party for him, full of strangers, which he does not even (at first) attend. Lily performs the too-gay party-girl, clearly marked as a flamboyantly desperate “act,” but when Steve arrives the party-girl cannot be reconciled with the would-be wife. Projected into everyone else’s vision, she cannot look herself in the eye. The pair struggle in front of a mirror, and, framed by it, Lily can only look away, asking Steve to turn the lights down because “I don’t wanna see.” As a model she is constantly masquerading, but there is no real sense of a substantial self beneath the parade of images. The film is a bleak view of a single working woman’s life, offering her no expectation of finding meaning in the image industry or casual sexual liaisons. Without a real sense that marriage is possible or that a family might be rewarding, Lily might as well be waiting for the woman’s liberation movement to make sense of her nebulous desires, but Betty Friedan wouldn’t publish The Feminine Mystique for thirteen more years. When Lee predicts that her future will comprise a string of men before she disappears “down the chute—you have no other place to go,” Lily smartly retorts, “Well, at the moment I can go home”—a home she is paying for herself. This might be the most hopeful line in the film, smartly delivered by Turner. But in fact she doesn’t go home. She wanders the “noirish” city like a streetwalker, revisiting the suicide site. The final shot sees her walking briskly away from suicide with a determined expression, remembering (in voice-over) her own declaration, “I don’t think I can [live without Steve]—but I’m going to.”

Onstage and Backstage in A Star is Born If Life is one of Cukor’s most neglected titles, A Star is Born is one of his most studied, for its dramatization of Hollywood, its remarkable performances (particularly Judy Garland’s), and for its afterlife. It is another—perhaps the commensurate—story of a show-biz working woman, which also savagely critiques that industry for its amoral generation of human collateral even as it enjoys the backstage home-stage spectacle. Band singer Esther Blodgett (Garland) is discovered by movie star Norman Maine (James Mason). As an A-lister he assumes that the only path to greatness is through the studios, so he persuades her to junk her tour-bus career for a screen test. The studio employs

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Cukor’s Theatrical Feminism  151 her, attempts to make her over, and changes her name to Vicki Lester. Vicki and Norman marry, but their happiness is short-lived: whilst her career ascends he is fired by the very studio which is turning his wife into a star, succumbing to drink, self-pity, and self-destruction. When he realizes that he has become a liability to her career and happiness, Norman drowns himself in front of their glamorous Malibu beach house. After a long period of grief Esther/Vicki tentatively reenters the spotlight. Cukor had been asked by David O. Selznick to direct the first version of A Star is Born in 1937, a romantic melodrama starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, but he declined because the story was so close to his own RKO film What Price Hollywood? (1932) that RKO considered suing Selznick International Pictures for plagiarism. When Sidney Luft approached him to remake it as a musical he immediately agreed because of the opportunity to work with Luft’s wife, Garland, whom he had known since a brief directorial stint on The Wizard of Oz (1939). As with the other films under discussion here (and probably many films discussed in this book), the reason Star is great and the reason it remains so sparklingly fresh, is the interaction—predicated on a fine script by Moss Hart—between its director and female star. This may also underpin the reason it fails. The reshoots and extensive cuts done once Cukor lost control of the film were partly to more centrally showcase Garland (inserted was the “Born in a Trunk” sequence, not directed by Cukor). The central gender twist of the story—a powerful man becomes impotent; an overlooked woman becomes powerful—is key to the ways this film has been addressed (Molly Haskell noted, “The actress who clung to her career, as in A Star is Born and What Price Hollywood? could be expected to ruin her husband’s” [149]). Yet this theme also resounds in the Garland/Cukor dynamic: the popular image is that this is more Garland’s film than Cukor’s. Because he worked with such highly rated women throughout his career, this curious dynamic (the invisible man behind the visible woman) is at the heart of so much of Cukor’s work, but perhaps nowhere more manifest than in Star. So generous was he in coaching superb female performances from his stars that they have served in part to obliterate him from popular public memory, whilst his central women have become ever more celebrated. Cukor as “women’s director” is a film history truism; Cukor as someone who has perhaps disappeared behind the major profiles of women is a surprising reversal for this most sexist of industries. It is Garland’s character from A Star is Born which appeared on a U.S. postage stamp in 2006, not Cukor its auteur. A Star is Born represents the dream factory as a factory, the film industry shown as a primarily profit-driven system in which human labor is bought and sold. As a capitalist venture like any other this has a human cost. All of Cukor’s women discussed in this paper know that nothing comes for free. It’s no accident that the opening sequence of Star takes place at a charity benefit for the Motion Picture Relief Fund, which raises money for those who once worked in cinema but ultimately did not profit from it. Richer than those who need the Fund’s charity, unemployed Norman seems as much a victim of the system as of his own demons. When he hijacks Esther/Vicki’s Oscar acceptance speech and begs

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152  George Cukor the assembled cream of Hollywood for a job, he points to (otherwise improbably benign) studio head Oliver Niles (Charles Bickford) and says, “You! I’ve made a lot of money for you over the years!” Unemployment brings a crisis of masculinity for Norman (nothing specifically starry about that), but what really drives him over the edge is being called “Mr. Lester.” Though this makes him feel an appendage of her (and forgotten in his own name), the irony is that there is no Mr. Lester, nor is there a Mrs. Lester, since Lester is a performance name. Whilst Norman struggles to cope with being unemployed in Hollywood, Esther/Vicki is over-employed. Indeed, having bought her, the studio rebuilds her. Once she is under contract the first thing we see of her is a face obliterated by a mirror as she undergoes the make-up department’s critical scrutiny (“The nose is the problem”), the scene mimicking the torment Garland herself went through

9.4  Goodbye Esther Blodgett, hello Vicki Lester: the studio make-over obliterates Judy Garland’s face in A Star is Born (Warner Bros., 1954). Digital frame enlargement. at MGM. The identity-ownership goes deeper. When Norman first hears that her name is Esther Blodgett he declares, “That’s a name you were born with!”, to which she proudly/candidly replies, “Well, yes I was.” In one of the film’s most famous scenes her pride is stripped back as she discovers when receiving her first pay check that without consultation her name has been changed to Vicki Lester (she is queuing by mistake under “B” for Blodgett when she should be under “L” for Lester). The casual callousness of exchanging identity for money and in the process producing a commercial image could not be clearer, and the parallels with Frances Gumm becoming Judy Garland are manifest. So this dark satire on Hollywood is focused through Esther/Vicki as working woman in the spectacle industry. We never are allowed to lose sight of Garland— both inside the film and out—as female performer in an economic exchange, an artist-for-sale. Of course Norman Maine is this, too, and he is arguably freer when he is owned by the studio, lost when it lets him go (perhaps this was also true of Cukor, who did not make any of the projects he initiated, and struggled somewhat, once his contract with MGM ended). McGilligan calls both director

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Cukor’s Theatrical Feminism  153 and star “creature[s] of the system” (218), who understood each other on those terms. Star sets up Esther’s need to earn effectively. Having been saved by her from public humiliation at the charity do, Norman grabs Esther’s lipstick and uses it for the effusively romantic gesture of drawing a heart containing both of their initials on a backstage wall. Esther’s response is panic: it is “a new lipstick” and she can’t afford to waste them. When later she quits the band, her pianist friend Danny McGuire (Tom Noonan) challenges her that she can’t last long in Hollywood without money. As restored to the cut we have now (a 1981 version, with footage unearthed by Ronald Haver), what follows are extended sequences of Esther making ends meet after Norman lets her down regarding the screen test. She works as a car hop at a drive-in diner, and sings jingles on the radio. It is through work that they meet, assiduous Esther and the feckless roué Norman, and work is the pervasive environment of their relationship. Norman pursues Esther to the after-hours Downbeat Club, and what unfolds is one of the film’s most celebrated scenes. Norman really “sees” her for the first time here, rehearsing a new song with Danny and the band for free. Unpaid, she’s working harder than ever. The “Man That Got Away” sequence is the spine-tingling heart of A Star is Born—the powerful torch song to top them all, underpinned by all the pain of Judy’s troubled persona at the time. As the eleventh greatest song in movie history according to one AFI poll (with Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” at number one), it is hardly a neglected gem. What interests me here is its place in the story of spectacle that A Star is Born is telling. Esther sings for her band; the CinemaScope widescreen is eloquently used to show her flanked—framed—by brass instruments. The star-performance here is pure Judy; though sold as Garland’s come-back film following the termination of her MGM contract in 1950, she had been away only from movies, not live performance, and spent 1951–2 on a hugely successful concert tour of the U.K. and New York. So the showcasing of Esther’s vocal prowess here is thrilling because it is the moment when her working-girl character dramatically blossoms, and also perhaps when Esther hands over proceedings to Judy. When Danny leads in and tells her to “Take it from the top” the hesitant reply is Esther’s. However, once she catches her stride, Esther’s performance is physically Judy: the fine-line mastery of transitions from tremulous to potent, the arm-gestures with which Garland redefined the performance style of the singing diva for the second half of the twentieth century. So where is Cukor here? Despite winning an Oscar for My Fair Lady (1964), he resisted the musical, claiming that he didn’t understand how to stage music. He didn’t even direct the longest musical sequence in Star. But “The Man That Got Away” is interesting because it was shot many times in various set-ups and costumes, and is the sequence which convinced Warners to shift to CinemaScope. So, despite Cukor’s avowed resistance to the format he was clearly working very effectively with the visual potential of the new system. Early, abandoned takes of the sequence demonstrate variations on Cukor’s insistence on one take, allowing his actress to carry the drama (as he had done many times over, but not through a narratively crucial musical sequence). However, in the early versions of this

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154  George Cukor sequence, which are now collected as DVD extras, we first see Esther bringing cups of coffee to her limbering-up band-mates, as if she were a waitress. Cukor fixes the musicians in one spot, and has Esther sing as she moves amongst them, leading the camera whilst the men remain fixed. It was a highly complicated sequence to light and shoot, but the dramatic focus is maintained. Esther is kept as the visual center, and the work this sequence does is to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt star quality as manifest in her vocal prowess. Having eyed up the starlets at the Cocoanut Grove, Norman—sitting unnoticed in an adjacent alcove where he cannot directly see her, nor we him—now responds to Esther because he hears her. She may perform within a generously sketched proscenium, but Norman does not share the camera-view, spatially he is somewhere in the wings, upstage right. Esther is aurally spectacular; Hollywood’s system will make her visually so. Norman tries to reflect this back to her, directing her career away from small-group jazz singing and towards Hollywood. The talk is of careers but the implication is that they are falling in love; work, then, is ever the context for feeling. The studio will come to feel that it owns their marriage; and love will not save them from its poison. But I also think that part of the magic of the “Man” sequence is that for its duration it sustains the fiction that it is possible to escape the impetus of money (Richard Dyer’s 1991 analysis of the coded authenticity of the sequence may also support this). The fiction here is of a casual after-hours jam session. As the Grove’s maitre d’ explains, they work all night here and then they “blow their heads off there again for nothing”: in Star’s utopian artistic moment the most authentic creation happens in an art-for-art’s-sake context. Never again in this film (or indeed in any film) does Garland sing with such an unalloyed ideal of the song for itself. All other musical sequences in Star are staged performances shown, backstage musical-fashion, onscreen and on the studio floor, except one. “Someone at Last” is very different from “The Man That Got Away,” but it also functions in a similar way. Having been fired, Norman spends his time kicking around the couple’s magnificent modernist villa in Malibu. He is undone by his lack of work; Hart’s script suggests that resorting to cooking for his employed wife is the prime symptom of emasculization. Esther returns home from a hard day on set to entertain him, performing across the chic surfaces of their cool living room the very routine she has been paid to rehearse all day at work. The funny sequence is brilliantly rendered, at times seemingly improvised (but Cukor insists he never improvised, just rehearsed and rehearsed his actors to a point at which the lines seemed utterly fresh). Vicki energetically renders one of those ballet-production-number-cum-dream-sequences which were then the centerpoint of prestige MGM musicals: the “Broadway Rhythm” turn in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) or the “American in Paris” ballet in the 1951 film of that name (or, indeed, Star’s own “Born in a Trunk” sequence), and Norman joins in with the joke. Vicki sings and dances her way around “New York,” “Paris,” “China,” and “the African savannah,” masquerading as multiple female archetypes using just the props she finds in the room. She is only performing a performance, but there is something “real” about this sequence which pairs it more with “The Man That

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Cukor’s Theatrical Feminism  155 Got Away” than with the “Born in a Trunk” scene or the later sequence when she films “Lose that Long Face” on set. This is partly because it is a singular moment of delight between the couple (just before things begin to go wrong), and also because she is singing for fun not money. “Forget the camera,” he says. “It’s the Downbeat Club at 3 o’clock in the morning and you’re singing for yourself and the boys in the band. Mainly for yourself, the way I heard you.” Marriage gives Norman a particular private ownership of Esther’s voice to the very end. He turns her voice off from the radio in their wedding-night motel room, asking her to perform a private rendition instead. Once he has resolved to commit suicide he performs a masquerade of cheerfulness for her and jovially complains that she hasn’t been singing around the house enough, so she sings (oblivious) through the kitchen window as he makes his way down the beach to the sea. It seems that Esther is never off duty, even when her husband is killing himself. Gaslight, Heller in Pink Tights, A Life of Her Own, and A Star is Born all show women struggling with their relationship to spectacle even as they flesh out some of classical Hollywood’s most gorgeous entertainments. Personal-political morality tales such as these would become fodder for the feminist movement, burgeoning through the last decades of Cukor’s life. Yet this cluster of movies, marked by intoxicatingly good looks, makes heightened visual spectacle an essential vehicle for women’s stories. That Cukor is excited by the sumptuous settings of über-theatricality is no secret. These films find no contradiction in placing dazzling spectacle (of women and location) hand in hand with strong views of female agency and independence and the consequences that ensue when independence is compromised. In this way Cukor powerfully de-couples female image from female victimage.

Notes 1. Limelight was Victorian theater’s precursor to electrical spotlighting, involving in part oxyhydrogen (the gas then used in gaslight in theaters and affluent homes from the 1830s onwards which has such a leading role in Cukor’s film) (see Booth 88 and McCormick 198). Of course the film’s title itself foregrounds the focus on ways of seeing as well as what is seen. House lights in one room dim when the light in another room is turned up, as the flow of gas is divided. When the light dims, Paula imagines a spooky presence elsewhere, where no one should be. In his attempt to take ownership of her mind, Anton is using the gaslight, its illumination and diminution, as a psychological tool, and it becomes the element of the spectacle of Paula’s paranoia. Her illuminative fears are, however, not illusory—there was a madman in the attic, dimming the lights: Anton himself. 2. Cukor’s living room in Beverly Hills also contained its own permanent tribute to an imposing performer, the life-sized John Singer Sargent drawing of Ethel Barrymore which the actress bequeathed to him in her will.

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Chapter 10 The Furthest Side of Paradise: Two-Faced Woman, A Woman’s Face, Hot Spell, Wild is the Wind, and Winged Victory

The Furthest Side of Paradise

R. Barton Palmer “Usually, when you make a picture that doesn’t turn out well, it’s happily buried,” reminisced George Cukor to Gavin Lambert, undoubtedly expressing a view shared by many of his classic studio era colleagues (122). The unpleasantness of last season’s critical disaster could be, and often was, effaced by this month’s box-office success. An industry devoted to the never ending, sometimes frantic turning out of a product that came and went quickly offered many opportunities for self-reclamation, even as, of course, the volume of production and the complex forms of collaboration on which it depended insured that there would be missteps as well. Television changed that, Cukor sadly observed, because what you did years ago keeps “popping up and you may be confronted with your past failures” (122). An oeuvre (if one thinks about one’s career in this expressively collective fashion) becomes available for evaluation through various forms of re-screening, and this, so Cukor suggests, might not always be a cause for celebration.

An Unexpected Failure: Two-Faced Woman Cukor’s meditations on projects that don’t “turn out well” were prompted by Lambert’s mention of Two-Faced Woman (1941), a film that upon initial release earned a “C” from the Legion of Decency reviewers, thereby prompting a boycott from observant Catholics. Despite this notoriety, often box-office enhancing (see Howard Hughes and The Outlaw [1943]) never connected with audiences when Two-Faced Woman was reissued in a slightly less suggestive, but still rather naughty, form. Two-Faced Woman, as it turns out, was Greta Garbo’s last film, and that meant Cukor had to suffer the further indignity (if that is what it was) of his work being exhibited at festivals in the actress’s honor. Was he to blame in some way for Garbo’s decision to retire? The film did, in effect, end her career, and so the question was perhaps inevitable. Metro terminated Garbo’s contract in the wake of the film’s dismal reviews and pitiful box-office earnings. Had Cukor somehow managed to drain from her image what appeal she still had,

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The Furthest Side of Paradise  157 through his ineffective coaching of her limited gifts for comedy? No wonder that Cukor, who had such success directing her in Camille (1936), inevitably inviting comparisons, would have liked the film to be forgotten. Agreeing with studio officials that, with the closing of the European markets where she enjoyed a longestablished popularity, some revision of the famed star’s persona was required, he had collaborated in the studio decision to turn her into a light comedienne á l’Américaine. As talented as he was in his work with actresses, however, Cukor could not turn Garbo into Carole Lombard. The plot of Two-Faced Woman is easily summarized. An attractive, if dour, European ski-instructor, Karin (Garbo), working at a New England resort, is pursued by one of the guests, a wealthy and handsome New York City fashion magazine editor, Larry (Melvyn Douglas). Their romance blossoms, but a crisis erupts when Karin refuses to give up her job and return with Larry to the city for a life to which she seems to feel more than a little unsuited. Larry returns alone, but then Karin decides to rescue their relationship. Once in the city, she goes on a shopping spree to transform her plain appearance, hoping to impress Larry with her newly acquired urbanity, but she finds him embroiled with an old flame, Griselda (Constance Bennett). Running into Larry’s business partner, O. O. Miller (Roland Young), Karin finds herself forced to adopt a false identity, and she introduces herself as Karin’s twin sister Katherine. A comedy of occulted and half-hidden identities then ensues. In the revised release version, Larry

10.1  In the white telephone drama Two-Faced Woman (MGM, 1941), dealing with the marital hijinks of the filthy rich, the two leads (Melvyn Douglas and Greta Garbo) encounter each other for the first time at the top of an Alpine ski lift. Digital frame enlargement.

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158  George Cukor quickly suspects the truth when “Katherine” meets up with him, but he plays along as the glamorous, witty, and fun-loving “twin” succeeds in taking him away from her serious-minded sibling and the more provocative bad girl Griselda. Karin has demonstrated that she can embody both kinds of femininity that Larry finds appealing, including the more business-like, athletic, and masculine persona he had first found so attractive on the ski slopes. Such cunning submission to the vagaries of male desire seems to be the story’s cultural point, as it demonstrates the lengths to which women presumably will go in their attempts to remain attractive (and coupled). To be sure, despite her energetic efforts at self-transformation, Karin most definitely does not fit Garbo’s carefully nuanced screen persona as an independent-minded female (think of Camille rejecting her erstwhile lover Armand but then dying in his arms). This is perhaps another reason why the material just did not work for her or her fans. Legion reviewers, it seems, were put off not only by Karin’s masquerade but also by, in the first release version (reflecting German playwright Ludwig Fulda’s original conception), a carefully calculated ambiguity about Larry’s commitment to monogamy, since events suggest the possibility that he does not recognize Katherine is Karin until rather late in the day and thus enjoys serial carryings-on with the two twins as well as with his long-time inamorata. An urbane man of the world much like Cukor, Fulda wrote for the German and Broadway stages, specializing in light sex comedies in the manner of Richard Sheridan and Ernst Lubitsch. Cukor, Gene D. Phillips reports, was taken aback by the Legion’s condemnation, and this development was somewhat surprising, of course, because the project sailed through the various steps of Production Code Administration (PCA) approval with only a few quibbles and duly received its certificate (Phillips 100). Often, if not usually, informal contacts between the Legion and PCA officials headed off embarrassing conflicts like this one, but Two-Faced Woman made its way through the system while a somewhat befuddled Geoffrey Shurlock and not founding director Joseph Breen, who had resigned, was temporarily in charge (Breen would soon return, of course). Like the studio heads, Cukor never thought that this fluffy comedy would be taken seriously, but that he was taken aback by the controversy it aroused is also surprising. He had been in Hollywood during 1933–4 when renewed agitation from the Legion about the industry’s promotion of this kind of smart, cosmopolitan material had resulted in the establishment of the PCA as the watchdog of the Code. Because it resulted not only in the expected boycotts but also with the film’s being denied a license in both Providence and Boston, the flap over Two-Faced Woman worried those in the business. It might be that yet another concerted effort was being launched by the Legion to insure that Hollywood fare remained decent and wholesome. For a while, it did in fact seem that Two-Faced Woman might have earned a place in Hollywood history as a camel-back-breaking straw. Speaking for the Legion after developments in Providence made frontpage news in New York, Mrs. James F. Looram said that during the last year Hollywood had, as the Times reported, “made increasing use of marriage to permit the portrayal of suggestive situations on the screen,” which was very

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The Furthest Side of Paradise  159 much a case of the industry going back to the future for appealing material. In this case, Looram said, Metro had “obeyed the letter but not the spirit of the code,” which seems true enough; in the film, adultery and divorce are ruled out in the end though the plot features a series of compromising situations suitably winked at by the sophisticated and suggestive banter of the script (Anon., “Bans Garbo Film at Providence, R.I.,” 29). But the Legion, as it turns out, was not provoked thereby to renew their campaign against Hollywood malfeasance. The film’s failure with audiences meant that it did not inaugurate a trend across the industry for the adaptation of this kind of now somewhat antiquated stage material. To be sure, Cukor’s next project for the studio was also very much in the vein of the light sex comedy so popular on Broadway in the 1920s. It was another signal failure. Her Cardboard Lover (1942) was the fourth screen version of the play by Jacques Deval whose first stage production was in the 1920s (the other Hollywood versions were released in 1928 and 1932, with a French version appearing that latter year as well). Like most filmgoers, Bosley Crowther was unimpressed. Deval’s play—adapted for Cukor by John Collier, Anthony Veiller, William H. Wright, and Deval—had been a “charming bit of nonsense fifteen years ago,” but “the screenplay by four weary writers is just a lot of witless talk,” a judgment that could readily be passed on Two-Faced Woman as well (“Her Cardboard Lover”). Neither Cukor nor stars Robert Taylor and Norma Shearer were able to do much with this dated material. Her Cardboard Lover was Shearer’s last film, but with this release Cukor’s involvement in a growing trend of career-finishing productions came to an end. The director set out on more profitable and more artistically successful directions, as earlier chapters in this volume outline. Her Cardboard Lover bucked a previously demonstrated trend of audience indifference, but matters at first seemed quite different for Two-Faced Woman. After a stunning success with the same principal stars in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), studio executives were convinced that Woman was going to be a can’t miss follow-up project, which accounts perhaps for the somewhat unusual recourse to a Fulda property, the 1925 film directed by Sidney Franklin for Joseph Schenck Productions, Her Sister from Paris (the writer’s other screen credits, the last in 1934, were all for German language productions of naughty comedies very much in the vein of Two-Faced Woman). Remaking the Fulda play must have seemed a good bet because the studio was looking for a European-flavored property like the Melchior Lengyel story that Weimar émigré Billy Wilder and others had so expertly turned into the script for Lubitsch’s film. Fulda’s work for the German stage in the 1920s was undoubtedly known to Lubitsch and Wilder, and probably to other Weimar exiles associated with MGM, such as producer Gottfried Reinhardt. In any case, the plan was to recycle the main elements that had made Ninotchka a huge hit two years before; working with both Cukor and Reinhardt, Garbo would only slightly reconfigure her earlier performance. In Ninotchka, her character begins as a deadly serious government envoy, sent from Moscow to bring back three male colleagues who have been seduced by western decadence, but then she finds herself falling victim to the same materialist and ideological

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160  George Cukor temptations under the repression-releasing influence of a fellow Russian, an émigré nobleman delightfully incarnated by Douglas. Metro’s plan was that the two stars would be reunited in a project once again hinging on Garbo’s liberation from a too-serious version of herself, and, so all concerned expected, the couple would strike sparks on the screen as they had done before. After all, audiences charmed by the somewhat silly fabulations of Ninotchka had demonstrated that they were still eager to visit Lubitschland, a European-flavored realm of the Hollywood pseudo-real that in his early career Cukor had also demonstrated a talented capacity to evoke (especially in Our Betters and Dinner at Eight [both 1933]). Here was a cinematic zone that, in Scott Eyman’s artful formulation, “fuses reality and imagination in such a captivating manner that interpretation is irrelevant. Whether you analyze things from the inside out or the outside in or from the top down or the bottom up, you are always enchanted by the shiny surfaces and suffused with the undiscriminating irreverence, snicker inducing cynicism and yet sweetly despairing hopefulness” (6). Cukor, his designer Cedric Gibbons, and the cast (including the delightful Ruth Gordon and Robert Sterling in minor roles) certainly confected something very much like the imaginary Paris of Ninotchka that had so recently entertained filmgoers. No one would dispute that Two-Faced Woman is all “shiny surfaces” and “undiscriminating irreverence.” So what went wrong? For the reasons mentioned above, Cukor had many opportunities to answer this question, and he refused to explain the problems with Two-Faced Woman as connected to its unfortunate double release due to the Legion’s initial “C” rating. This financially harmful judgment might have been nipped in the bud had Geoffrey Shurlock been in better touch with the organization’s officials. Mrs. Looram calls attention to the fact that in other cases (she mentions Strange Cargo [Frank Borzage, 1940], where the objections were more theological than moral) negotiations between the Legion and the filmmakers had resulted in limited cuts and a revised rating. This was the eventual fate suffered by Cukor’s film, but such changes could have been made before the initial release. The fact is, as the director well knew, uncomplimentary reviews had poisoned the exhibition even before the less-objectionable version was released to the public. Cukor made no Wellesian charge that these more or less minor changes had spoiled “his” film, though Reinhardt complained somewhat unfairly that the required re-shoots and cuts resulted in a version that was “completely butchered,” this in the face of the fact that he admitted to having little confidence in the project as it developed (quoted in McGilligan 166). Cukor was certain that the fault lay elsewhere. But he took no ownership for it and was not reluctant to say so. Only many years later would he be willing to entertain the possibility that some failure of his own was at the root of its disastrous failure: “I’m still not sure, whether or not I was responsible for the complete lack of success of this film” (quoted in Levy 146). Others were to blame, he mostly thought. “It was a novel idea to have Garbo play a woman who pretends to be twins,” he observed on one occasion, “but we started shooting before the screenplay was really ready” (Phillips 99). To Gavin Lambert, he declared that “people at film festivals tell me ‘it’s very interesting,’

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The Furthest Side of Paradise  161 well, I think it’s lousy. The script was bad—not funny. That’s the whole story” (122). So, Lambert asked, did those involved know that the script was a problem before production began? Cukor only sighed and ducked the question, “Let’s call it one of those things,” but everyone involved felt a “portent of failure” (122). In such circumstances, Cukor felt helpless as a director: “you have to use every possible artifice and subterfuge to bolster a weak script, and in the end, the strain always shows in the finished film, as it did in this one” (Phillips 99). Everything possible, of course, did not include Cukor helping out with the script doctoring, as, for example, Lubitsch did (uncredited) with his To Be or Not to Be (1942). Andrew Sarris showed himself famously misinformed when he numbered both Lubitsch and Cukor among that group of “non-writer auteurs” whose evaluation so troubles “literary film critics” (The American Cinema 89). Lubitsch was a writer (the Internet Movie Database—IMDb—lists twenty-nine screen credits), but Cukor most definitely was not, and thus in some instances he found himself at the mercy of mediocre scripts, whose flaws, as his interview with Lambert demonstrates, he was reluctant even to analyze in retrospect. A man of the theater, Cukor seems to have remained throughout his career an adherent of the view that the film director’s job was to mount a production, not conceive it. His role was to emphasize the virtues of the projects to which he was assigned, not make them vehicles for his own ideas. A commitment to personalization was never a part of his professional DNA. According to Reinhardt, Cukor refused to get more than superficially involved in the story conferences as the script for Two-Faced Woman was being written and rewritten prior to the beginning of shooting (McGilligan 165). He was more concerned, it seemed, with Garbo’s costumes. Once a metteur, always a metteur. For him, theatricality and opsis were all; worrying about the film’s look and choreographing its action constituted his job, not doctoring a seriously ill script. Consider the following remark, a kind of non-apology for the mess that Two-Faced Woman became: “I have often said that, if I am given a good script, I will be a hundred times better as a director.” This is as clear a statement as one might expect from him about how he saw his role, as well as what, in this post-Cahiers age, we might be disposed to identify as his self-imposed limitations as a director. In the terms proposed by the first generation of French auteurists, Cukor seems clearly not to have seen himself as “making cinema,” as Alfred Hitchcock once famously proclaimed was his artistic modus operandi after a quick read of whatever texts (original plays or novels, screen treatments, or scripts) he was assigned (or selected) for new productions. In the theater, of course, directors are only occasionally auteurs in the cinematic sense, and even in these unusual circumstances are never fully acknowledged as the dramatist’s equal or stand-in. One thinks of, among a limited set of examples, Elia Kazan convincing Tennessee Williams that the third act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof should be significantly expanded and provided with a more ambiguously positive conclusion. Yet Kazan’s joint authorship of the so-called “Broadway version” of the play was some years later famously rejected and undone by the playwright when it came time to craft the official version for

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162  George Cukor publication. This writing was a form of production, it bears remembering, over which Williams, and not Kazan, had complete control; the playwright required neither a collaborator nor a helpful metteur. The relationship between authors and directors is quite different in the cinema, of course. For obvious reasons, a film is seen as the thing itself and not simply as one versioning of an act of writing that might endure (even through changes) for other purposes, even while prompting further performative realizations. And yet, despite the somewhat uncertain scorn of the “Hitchcocko-Hawksiens” at Cahiers, the act of “putting into” is arguably more cinematic because more collaborative and materially complex, more connected to the physicality of staging and its recording than whatever acts of authorship (and the thematic expressiveness they may be reduced to) precede it. Arguably, such writerly inventiveness is a form of pre-production, not “making cinema” tout court. This problem is not unacknowledged in auteurist theorizing and connects to the importance given in the criticism of Truffaut, Bazin, and others to an expansive view of mise-en-scène. But, as the career and self-conception of Cukor suggests, an important distinction remains between confecting a narrative or writing dialogue, and then staging its dramatic/photographic realization. These acts of putting into cannot legitimately be reduced to an author-like metonymy involving cinematography alone, to the so-called “camera-stylo” proposed by Alexandre Astruc. The staging at which some directors such as George Cukor excel involves so much more than pointing the camera, or even designing what the camera is to capture. The metteur works bit by bit to craft each scene, and occasionally, as Cukor points out, it is the scene that counts as a triumph rather than the work as a whole, which depends on an often-distanced author at the outset and an editor, feeling his own particular pressures, at the very end (see the interview in Long 16–17). Yet the fact remains that, unless he writes his own script, the nonwriter director must work with what others furnish him. He is always already an adaptor of texts. It is distorting, and perhaps patronizing, to suggest, as does Sarris, that Cukor’s authorship expresses itself through “a judicious mixture of selection and emphasis,” with his overarching theme being “the imagination”; these are meaningless generalizations meant to cover a productive heterogeneity that, in my view, stands on its own considerable, but naturally uneven, merits; Cukor’s excellence needs no such weak apologia (The American Cinema 89). Though prepared by experienced professionals (S. N. Behrman, Salka Viertel, and George Oppenheimer), the script for Two-Faced Woman was simply not funny, and Cukor could not make it so. He could not re-author it in some way to provide humor where there was none. There were other limits to what he could control. Garbo was no longer a young and radiant beauty. She had difficulty doing the kind of comedy that the script demanded (the humor in Ninotchka is more of an ensemble affair, playing off stereotypes), and the demand that she do something different in this production (“Garbo dances” proclaimed the film’s advertising) sadly proved to be too much for her, though the sequence in which she does the rumba is charming in its own amateurish way. Karin, after all, is pretending to be the more with-it Katherine, and so the sense of strained performance is

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The Furthest Side of Paradise  163 appropriate for the narrative. As in every melancholy tale of receding popularity, many were the reasons, almost all beyond Garbo’s control, why her screen persona was no longer as appealing as it once had been. Her long-established star quality, aided by Douglas’s not inconsiderable wittiness and urbanity, was meant to carry the picture, but simply proved inadequate to the task. The failure of this project truly had a thousand fathers, not the least significant of which was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. December 7th fell in the middle of the film’s second release. In the aftermath of war’s sudden onset, filmgoers were hardly in the mood for the sophisticated frivolity, the supremely pointless badinage, the casual but seemingly harmless immorality in which Two-Faced Woman trades. Met with rejection, the true artist shrugs his shoulders and, as did Cukor, simply moves on. “Let’s call it one of those things” is a useful exit line on several levels. As he made clear to Lambert, it wasn’t only his picture after all, and the future might, and in fact did, hold out better prospects for success.

More Script Trouble: A Woman’s Face Though based on a French play, Il était une fois (Once Upon a Time) by Francis de Croisset, A Woman’s Face is actually more a remake than an adaptation. The film’s production was inspired by the success that Ingrid Bergman had had in the title role a few years earlier; Gustaf Molander’s Swedish language recontextualization of the story (released in 1938) had been somewhat successful at the box office, but it was not released in the U.S. Cukor, it seems, was familiar with the property and convinced Metro to purchase the rights. He argued that it would make an ideal vehicle for studio star Joan Crawford, who was then interested in reigniting her career with character parts, but the role of Anna Holm required her to spend half the picture with a hideous facial disfigurement (a tour de force of make-up designed by Jack Dawn), and Mayer thought that such radical deglamorization might harm her career. But Crawford was convinced that doing the project with Cukor would help her retain her status as a headliner; the director was already noted for his work with actresses, especially in morally ambiguous roles (e.g., Camille). All concerned concurred that Crawford’s performance, upon which the director spent most of his energies, was one of her best, perhaps a study for her Academy Award-winning role as the title character in Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1946). Cukor maintained that this win constituted compensation for Crawford’s being refused the same well-deserved recognition for A Woman’s Face. But filmgoers flocked to Mildred Pierce, while they did not care much care for A Woman’s Face, and a large part of the problem was with the character of Anna Holm. Yet again, however, the fault was hardly Cukor’s. Here was another project that lacked for adequate pre-production work, including a number of surprising blunders, most notably the inexplicable decision to keep the original film’s Swedish setting rather than to follow Molander’s example in recontextualizing the material. A contemporary American setting would have helped immensely, giving resonance to Anna’s blackmailing operation, which could have been more plausibly and photogenically based in some glitzy night club rather than

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10.2  For A Woman’s Face (MGM, 1941) Joan Crawford was eager to play the part of an extortionist whose face has been horribly scarred, though this meant surrendering (at least until the plot allows her some re-glamorizing plastic surgery) her star image. Cukor’s careful coaching, she later wrote, was crucial to her nuanced and affecting performance in a role that seems a rehearsal for her similar, if more famous and acknowledged performance as the title character in Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945). Digital frame enlargement. a Scandinavian country inn. See, among several examples, John Cromwell’s Dead Reckoning (1947), which similarly features a morally ambiguous heroine (Lizabeth Scott) and a suspenseful conclusion that hinges on the revelation of her true character. But script construction for A Woman’s Face was the main problem, surprising, perhaps, because a reported thirteen individuals worked on the screenplay at one time or another (McGilligan 164), with Donald Ogden Stewart doing the final polishing—surely not one of this talented writer’s better efforts. As every reviewer noted at the time, and every critic has remarked since, the film divides into two unequal and somewhat disconnected parts. Emanuel Levy observes, “The first part of the film is interesting,” but the second “embarrassed Cukor” because it was little more than “conventional melodrama” (143). Gavin Lambert agrees. The first part of this Joan Crawford vehicle is “quite fascinating . . . a character study of a woman whose face has been scarred since childhood” and who has established herself as a criminal mastermind, directing a group of blackmailers who operate out of an inn in contemporary Scandinavia; in so doing, she becomes connected to someone who is truly wicked, Torren Barring (Conrad

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The Furthest Side of Paradise  165 Veidt) (Lambert 126). But then the second part of the film takes off in a quite different direction; it is “just conventional suspense,” and that plotting is poorly managed, in part because it lacks an energizing reversal, even though it features (à la D. W. Griffith) a last minute chase sequence deploying parallel editing. The turning point in the film comes early as Anna, touched by the benevolence of Dr. Segert (the inevitable Melvyn Douglas), allows him to perform complex, and risky, plastic surgery. Paired with a man who obviously loves her and for whom she is feeling increasing attraction, Anna becomes a beautiful woman whose inner moral nature no longer reflects an outer ugliness. The rest of the film, then, is little more than anticlimax. No longer bitter and misanthropic, no longer filled with existential anger, Anna seems to have little reason to continue her love affair with the reptilian sociopath Barring or to act as his accomplice in murdering an inconvenient child standing in the way of his receiving a substantial inheritance. That, delivered from the suffering caused by her disfigurement, she rejects Barring in the end, bringing about his death and thus insuring the safety of the young boy, is thoroughly predictable and not suspenseful in the least, as Lambert goes on to point out. Cukor can do little but agree: “It’s true that the second part of the film has nothing to do with the first” (quoted in Lambert 126). The director’s summary of the film’s plot, in fact, underlines its fatal banality: “You see her as a monster, then plastic surgery makes her beautiful, and she just wants to live down the past and become an awfully nice governess” (126). At first given an interesting character to play, so Lambert suggests, Joan Crawford, under Cukor’s careful direction, is “quite impressive”; but then, Cukor rejoins, “all the interesting character disappears” (126). But, so he asks Lambert, is it not the case that there is some doubt about whether she will reject Barring and his machinations in the end? Lambert will have none of it: “Everything is really blamed on the demonic influence of Conrad Veidt” (126). Cukor then suggests that “if I’d been making this picture now, knowing what I know, having heard your criticism, I could have managed to do it,” meaning that he somehow could have transformed Anna Holm into a character who both fascinates and makes complete sense (126). Would this have made A Woman’s Face more appealing to audiences? It seems doubtful in the light of the story’s structural problems. In evaluating the deep flaws of both Two-Faced Woman and A Woman’s Face, it is useful to remember that, at the time, Cukor was working, as McGilligan suggests, “faster than he preferred, directing scripts that could have used revision” (164). Especially when he was being hurried along by an over-demanding production schedule, Cukor simply could not fashion cinematic silk purses from sow’s ears scripts.

Rescuing Hal Wallis Two Times: Wild is the Wind and Hot Spell Wild is the Wind (1957) and Hot Spell (1958) both belong to a series of adult, sensational melodramas that producer Hal Wallis committed to making during the middle 1950s. All of them featured, in Wallis’s own words, “beaten, unkempt, and depressing people” caught up in events that revealed not the glamorous,

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166  George Cukor but the “seamy side of life” (Wallis 134). Paramount executives were “appalled” at the fact that “even the young people in the stories were unattractive, morally if not physically” (134). Star power, particularly in the form of charismatic and energetic leading men (Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn, Robert Ryan, and Anthony Franciosa), was meant to carry the day, even as actresses of undoubted ability who were not glamorous in the traditional sense (Shirley Booth and Anna Magnani) would supply the love interest. Broadway director Daniel Mann would bring his experience coaching “Method” performances to some of these projects, which Wallis believed would cater to a profitable trend. (Mann’s The Rose Tattoo, with its hot-house Tennessee Williams play as source, with Wallis producing, and Burt Lancaster and Magnani lighting up the screen, was one of 1955’s most profitable and acclaimed releases, with eight Academy Award nominations and three wins). Hot Spell, based on Lonnie Coleman’s popular novel, promised more of the same, with Anthony Quinn as Magnani’s leading man. As it turned out, the production led to a split between director and producer, but only, it seems, near the end of principal photography. Wallis offers an implausible account: “Suddenly he became temperamental, ordering people off the set, and becoming generally abusive” (135). Wallis fired Mann, and they never worked together again. Cukor

10.3  Cukor did some uncredited rescue work for Daniel Mann’s Hot Spell (Paramount, 1958), one of the least successful of the Hal Wallis-produced adult melodramas of the period. Cukor was not suited by temperament to the kind of kitchen-sink realism required by the script, but he found congenial working with the excellent cast, including Shirley Booth (l.) and Shirley MacLaine. Digital frame enlargement.

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The Furthest Side of Paradise  167 was brought in to finish up the picture, but exactly what he found himself responsible for is lost to history. McGilligan, Cukor’s most informative biographer, does not mention Hot Spell. Reviews were generally favorable (Bosley Crowther calls attention to its “brilliant vignettes of character” in “Hot Spell,”). Cukor’s role in the film’s success, so dependent on effective performance, is impossible to assess since only Wallis, and no one else involved in the production, mentions his involvement. Wild is the Wind was designed as an Anna Magnani vehicle, as Wallis hoped to capitalize on his earlier success working with the actress in The Rose Tattoo. The producer allowed his star to choose her property, and she opted for remaking Furia, a 1947 Italian production directed by Goffredo Alessandrini that, in its U.S. release, was advertised by the slug line, “the frankest story ever told!” Isa Pola and Rossano Brazzi did steam up the screen; Bosley Crowther opined that the film offered an “amazingly candid demonstration of the corrupting influence of human lust . . . [and] of the eroticism of the human beast” (“Furia,”). Wallis let his temperamental star have her way; the property seemed to promise a portrayal of female desire as appealing as Magnani was able to offer in Tattoo. As adapted by Arnold Schulman Furia became, as Wallis described it, a “western with a sheepherding background” that, like many entrants in this genre during the era, would be shot on location (rural Nevada). It made sense for Wallis to engage John Sturges, who had substantial experience with westerns, to direct; he had also worked successfully with Schulman, but soon became disenchanted with the project as it became clear that Wallis was interested less in a traditional horse opera and more in a romance along the lines of what Italian Neorealism had been offering American filmgoers. He quit the project, and Cukor was hired as a replacement. But the film’s troubles were just beginning as Magnani, so Wallis reports, was in “a perpetual state of fury” and spent most of her time “sulking like a spoiled child” (145). She was convinced that the script would not work (a pretty fair judgment as it turned out), and that her character’s affair with the son of the forlorn widower she had just married (after an arrangement that brought her from Italy to the U.S. expressly for this purpose) would not seem well motivated. With the script a mess, Cukor could do little to make sense of the characters, and the performances he coached did not play well for either filmgoers or critics. Pronouncing a harsh judgment on his efforts, Crowther opined that there was little “sympathy or consistency” in Quinn’s blustery sheepherder, even as Magnani’s lustful wife found herself at the incongruous center of “a cyclone of hot-breath drama and animal husbandry” (“Furia Remade,”). It may well have been that the offscreen romance that developed between Magnani and the young actor who played her “son,” Tony Franciosa, was more intriguing than any of the fictional material that made its way on the screen, especially when his erstwhile fiancée, Shelley Winters, made her way up dirt roads to where filming was taking place, only to catch Tony in a hot embrace with the irrepressible Magnani.

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10.4  Although he was not Paramount’s first choice to direct (John Sturges left the project), Cukor did an excellent job with Wild is the Wind (Paramount, 1957), a steamy remake of a 1946 Italian original, with the tale of remarriage and cultural misunderstanding moved to California. As a bride imported from the old country for a lusty widower (Anthony Quinn, r.), Anna Magnani delivers an excellent performance, every bit as nuanced and effective as her Academy Award-winning role in The Rose Tattoo, and much of the credit should go to Cukor. Digital frame enlargement.

A Worthy Contribution to the War Effort: Winged Victory Attempting to come to grips with Cukor’s accomplishments, Andrew Sarris somewhat airily proclaims that there is “an honorable place in the history of the cinema for adaptations,” ignoring a central fact of which he was surely well aware: that almost all commercial films are, in fact, adaptations of one kind or another (American Cinema). Hollywood productions are only rarely works of the imagination that can be considered original in the neoromantic sense of finding their origin in the creative gestures of a single individual. The classic Hollywood cinema worked mostly with what was in some sense already there, culturally speaking, finding ways to adapt for the screen all the popular material that could be readily screened. In part, the point of adaptation was to permit (with substantial profit in mind, of course) the wider circulation and consumption of cultural objects whose pre-soldness was well established. Adaptation can, of course, also be as much a form of expanded distribution as of intermedial re-creation. More than the profit motive might be involved as a valued cultural object, transferred to the screen, is made available to hitherto unanticipated audiences, with the

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The Furthest Side of Paradise  169 production perhaps asking to be appreciated as more a social rather than an artistic gesture. A case in point is Cukor’s film version of the Broadway success Winged Victory (1944), a contribution to morale-building on the home front for whose considerable box-office and critical success Cukor deserves more credit than he showed himself willing to assume. To be sure, the director’s critics have not thought much of the film. For McGilligan, it must be counted among the “least of his efforts”; most Hollywood directors, he goes on to say, “were able to avoid this kind of artistic embarrassment during World War II” (178–9). In a similar vein, Emanuel Levy suggests that Winged Victory “was just a chore that became one of his least distinguished endeavors” (155). Gene D. Phillips is willing to grant that although the production was a “fairly routine war film, Cukor brought to it all of his cinematic creativity in order to enliven the material in whatever way he could,” but this is once again to denigrate the conventions and purpose of this kind of filmmaking, which audiences at the time (to judge from the film’s considerable profits) found engaging (52). With their disdain for the felt need to produce heart-stirring propaganda at a time of national trial, these comments seem particularly unfair and, more to the point, off the mark. Cukor was not the only famed director who eagerly turned his hand to this kind of filmmaking as the industry recruited itself and was pressed into service for the war effort. Consider, for example, the implausibly gung-ho heroics of Howard Hawks’s Air Force (1943), a film that lacks the thematic complexities of the director’s peacetime meditations on masculinity under pressure. Like Winged Victory, Air Force was the brainchild of General “Hap” Arnold. Even Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942), which is acknowledged as one of the greatest of wartime productions, offers up uniformly cheery stereotypes in order to produce a deep sense of collective patriotic uplift. Pace McGilligan, Winged Victory was hardly an “artistic embarrassment.” Consider the judgment of a sophisticated and urbane critic, Bosley Crowther: It gives every promise of being one of the most successful films about the war . . . a stunning production, with real planes and training fields and men. Furthermore, George Cukor, the director, has kept all the poignancy and zeal of Moss Hart’s original play. Only now the continuity flows easily and fast in a natural scenic pattern that carries great conviction on the screen. (“Winged Victory” 23) Winged Victory, to be sure, is a stage production more or less transferred intact to the screen, but, as Crowther suggests, Cukor added considerable artistic value to what was intended to raise morale and help finance a global war that was putting a huge strain on the nation’s resources. A play about the recruitment and training of crew for the Army Air Force was the idea of talent agent Irving Lazar, a major Hollywood figure with many important clients, including playwright Moss Hart (most famous for his several collaborations with George S. Kaufman). In early 1943, Lazar persuaded USAAF General “Hap” Arnold that a successful

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170  George Cukor play could raise significant funds for the Army Emergency Relief Fund. Arnold agreed and commissioned Hart, who donated his salary to the fund, to write a lightly fictionalized version of the rigorous testing and training regimen to which aspiring pilots were subjected. Hart then set out on an extensive tour of USAAF training facilities to learn what went on there. Writing the play, including its several musical numbers, was easy enough for the experienced dramatist since the story involved a cross-section of “typical” recruits from different parts of the country. This intimate drama (as Arnold had ordered) included brief scenes devoted to romance and family life. Production, however, posed significant challenges as the cast was to include some three hundred roles, many of them speaking and almost all of them singing, in order to suggest something of the scale involved in the building of a modern army. Army units throughout the country were scoured for personnel who had show-business experience or acting talent. Many who would become leading players in the postwar industry landed roles in Winged Victory, including Lee J. Cobb, John Forsythe, Kevin McCarthy, Barry Nelson, George Reeves, and Martin Ritt. As stipulated by the army contract, all the performers would be current members of the armed forces. Lazar served as stage manager for the play, and would work as a dialogue director for the film version, collaborating successfully with Cukor on staging (now often in exteriors) the film’s several production numbers.

10.5  Winged Victory (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1944) lacks the high seriousness of In Which We Serve (1942), the contribution of his good friend Noël Coward to the war effort, but Cukor does a commendable job with this service comedy/drama, effectively staging the large-scale group set-ups that Moss Hart’s stage version was forced to forego. Digital frame enlargement.

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The Furthest Side of Paradise  171 The play opened in Boston in early fall 1943, just a few months after Lazar had hit on the idea. It was an immediate smash, playing to packed houses, and after a quick transfer to Broadway, did outstanding business, with more than 350,000 tickets sold for its 226 New York performances. As a gesture of support for the war effort (and for its own business reasons), Twentieth Century–Fox purchased the film rights that December, and William Wyler was announced as the director. But Wyler, then a serving officer in the USAAF, had to return to his other military duties, including shooting a series of morale-boosting documentaries. Cukor, having joined the Army Signal Corps as a private soldier, was selected as his replacement. The USAAF underwrote the film production, as they had done in the case of the stage version, agreeing that the entire cast would be signed for the film, with some additions of professional players (including Lon McCallister and a very young Judy Holliday). Managed expertly by Cukor, location shooting at several USAAF bases in California gave the film a truthfulness that the stage version could not provide. By no contemporary measure was the film a failure. If, as Crowther suggested, Cukor (following Hart) relied a bit too heavily on the story’s “sentimental props,” there is no question that he also “sensed clearly the irony of young folks on the threshold of life having to live with the peril of death and killing” (“Winged Victory” 23). Winged Victory is an important document of Hollywood’s extensive contribution to the war effort, but it is also a Cukor film that deserves better than it has hitherto received from the director’s critics.

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Works Cited and Consulted

Works Cited GC = George Cukor Collection, Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills Anderson, Donald R. Shadowed Cocktails: The Plays of Philip Barry from Paris Bound to The Philadelphia Story. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. Anon. “Bans Garbo Film at Providence, R.I.,” New York Times (26 November 1941), 29. Arnheim, Rudolf. “On the Late Style of Life and Art,” Michigan Quarterly Review XVII: 2 (Spring 1978), 149–56. Badiou, Alain. In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012). Barrios, Richard. Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (New York: Routledge, 2003). Bazin, André. What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Beaton, Cecil. Letter to George Cukor, September 14, 1962, regarding My Fair Lady, File 197, GC. Berman, Pandro S. “First Run with Mr. Berman,” February 28, 1969, Folder 136, GC. Bernardoni, James. George Cukor (Jefferson: McFarland, 1985). Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It (New York: Knopf, 1997). Booth, Michael J. Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Bordman, Gerald, and Thomas S. Hischak (eds). The Oxford Companion to the American Theater, 3rd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Bowers, Scotty (with Lionel Friedberg). Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (New York: Grove Press, 2012). Britton, Andrew. Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Buscombe, Edward. “On Cukor,” Screen XIV: 3 (Autumn 1973), 101–6. Callahan, Dan. “George Cukor,” Senses of Cinema 33 (October 2004). Available online at: www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/great-directors/cukor (accessed 2 June 2014).

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174  George Cukor Carey, Gary. Cukor & Co.: The Films of George Cukor and His Collaborators (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971). Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). —. Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005). Celello, Kristin. Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). Clarens, Carlos. George Cukor (London: Secker and Warburg, in association with the British Film Institute, 1976). Coffin, Lesley L. Lew Ayres: Hollywood’s Conscientious Objector (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012). Crowther, Bosley. “Her Cardboard Lover,” New York Times (17 July 1942). Available online at: www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A0CE6D8103CE3 3BBC4F52DFB1668389659EDE (accessed October 2014). —. “Winged Victory,” New York Times (21 December 1944), 23. —. “Furia,” New York Times (21 January 1948). Available online at: www.nytimes. com/movie/review?res=9402E5D9163BE33BBC4951DFB7668383659EDE (accessed 1 February 2014). —. “The Model and the Marriage Broker,” New York Times (12 January 1952). —. “Review of The Marrying Kind,” New York Times (14 March 1952), 27. —. “Vivid Experiences: ‘Bhowani Junction’ and ‘The Proud and the Beautiful’ are Absorbing Films,” New York Times (3 June 1956), 123. —. “Furia Remade,” New York Times (12 December 1957). Available online at: www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9900EFD81730E23BBC4A52DFB4678 38C649EDE (accessed 11 February 2014). —. “Hot Spell,” New York Times (18 September 1958). Available online at: nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9402E3D61F3FEF34BC4052DFBF6683836 49EDE (accessed 11 February 2014). Cukor, George. Letter to Fredric March, December 12, 1939, File 239, GC. —. Letter to Ava Gardner, August 20, 1955, regarding Bhowani Junction, File 25, GC. —. Letter to Paul Mills, MGM British Studios, December 8, 1954, regarding Ava Gardner’s accent, File 25, GC. —. Letter to J. J. Cohn, December 10, 1954, regarding George Hoyningen-Huene, File 25, GC. —. Nightletter cable to Ava Gardner, November 14, 1955, regarding Bhowani Junction preview, File 25, GC. —. Note to Alan Jay Lerner, August 16, 1962, regarding Peter O’Toole, File 197, GC. —. Letter to Audrey Hepburn, April 30, 1963, regarding My Fair Lady, File 1979, GC. —. Note to Stanley Holloway, May 3, 1963, File 197, GC. —. Letter to Rodney Ford, December 4, 1969, Folder 133, GC.

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Works Cited  175 Daney, Serge, and Jean-Pierre Oudart. “Travail, lecture, jouissance,” Cahiers du cinéma 222 (July 1970), 38–51. Daney, Serge, and Patrice Rollet. La maison cinéma et le monde, vol. 1: Le temps des “Cahiers” (1962–1981) (Paris: P.O.L., 2001). Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987). Domarchi, Jean. George Cukor (Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1965). Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). —. Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (New York: Routledge, 2000). —. “‘A Queer Feeling When I Look at You’: Gender and Sexuality in Three Films by George Cukor,” Journal of Bisexuality 7: 1–2 (2007), 89–112. Dyer, Richard. “A Star Is Born and the Construction of Authenticity,” in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: Industry of Desire (London: Routledge, 1991), 132–40. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Annotated Emerson, eds David Mikics and Philip Lopate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Estrin, Allen. The Hollywood Professional Vol. 6: Capra, Cukor, Brown (London: Tantivy Press, 1980). Eyman, Scott. Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Farber, Manny. Farber on Film: The Complete Writings of Manny Farber (New York: Library of America, 2009). Ferguson, Otis. The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1971). Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Fried, Debra, “The Men in The Women,” in Janet Todd (ed.), Women and Film (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 43–68. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). Gardner, Carol Brooks. “Analyzing Gender in Public Places: Rethinking Goffman’s Vision of Everyday Life,” The American Sociologist 20: 1 (1989), 42–56. Gaut, Berys. “Film Authorship and Collaboration,” in Richard Allen and Murray Smith (eds), Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 149–72. Goldsmith, Jerry. Notes on Justine, Folder 137, GC. Hall, Mordaunt. “The Screen: True to the Stage,” New York Times (23 December 1930), 25. —. “The Screen: John Barrymore, Billie Burke and Katharine Hepburn in a film of a Clemence Dane Play,” New York Times (3 October 1932), 15. Halperin, David M. How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Hanson, Helen. Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974).

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176  George Cukor Hepburn, Audrey. Letter (handwritten) to George Cukor, April 6, 1963, regarding excitement about My Fair Lady, File 197, GC. Higham, Charles, and Joel Greenberg (eds). The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak (New York: Signet Books, 1969). Huber, Christoph. “George Cukor: A Master (of the) In-Between,” Cineaste (Spring 2014), 14–20. Hutchings, William. “‘Oh, die Angst! Die Angst!’: Romeo and Juliet as Rock Opera,” in Kimball King (ed.), Western Drama Through the Ages: A Student Reference Guide (Westport: Greenwood, 2007), 462–73. Israel, Lee. Miss Tallulah Bankhead (New York: Putnam, 1972). Justine Cutting Notes, February 19, 20, 21, and 24–5, 1969, Folder 136, GC. Justine Production Notes, Folder 138, GC. Kael, Pauline. Taking it All In (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984). Kané, Pascal. “Sylvia Scarlett: Rélecture du cinéma hollywoodien,” Cahiers du cinéma 238/9 (May–June 1972), 84–90. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Theories of Melodrama: A Feminist Perspective,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 1: 1 (1983), 40–8. Kauffmann, Stanley. “Rex Imperator,” The New Republic (14 November 1964), 32–3. Kirton, John W. Happy Homes, and How to Make Them; Or, Counsels on Love, Courtship and Marriage (London: F. Warne & Co, 1870). Klevan, Andrew. Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000). —. “Living Meaning: The Fluency of Film Performance,” in Aaron Taylor (ed.), Theorizing Film Acting (New York: Routledge, 2012), 33–46. Koch, Kenneth. The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (New York: Knopf, 2005). Kozloff, Sarah. Invisible Storytellers: Voice-over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). —. The Life of the Author (Montreal: Caboose, 2014). Krohn, Bill. “Cukor’s Serial Killers,” in Fernando Ganzo and Collectif (eds), George Cukor: On/Off Hollywood (Paris: Capricci, 2013), 78–97. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977). Lambert, Gavin. On Cukor (New York: Putnam, 1972). Leaming, Barbara. Katharine Hepburn (New York: Crown, 1995). Léon, Pierre. “L’ordre du jour,” Trafic 60 (Winter 2006), 120–5. Levy, Emanuel. George Cukor: Master of Elegance (New York: Morrow, 1994). Long, Robert Emmet (ed.). George Cukor Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001). Lury, Karen. The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). March, Fredric. Letter to George Cukor, December 6, 1939, File 239, GC. McCormick, John. The Victorian Marionette Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004). McCourt, James. Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture: 1947–1985 (New York: Norton, 2005).

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Works Cited  177 McGilligan, Patrick. George Cukor: A Double Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). McLellan, Diana. The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Methuen, 1984). Morley, Sheridan. Katharine Hepburn: A Celebration (New York: Applause Books, 1984). Newquist, Roy. Conversations with Joan Crawford (New York: Citadel Press, 1980). Nugent, Frank S. “Review of The Women,” New York Times (22 September 1939), 32. Oudart, Jean-Pierre. “La suture 1 and 2,” Cahiers du cinéma 211 (April 1969), 36–9; and 212 (May 1969), 50–5. —. “Un discours en défaut,” Cahiers du cinéma 232 (October 1971), 4–12. —. “Quatre nuits d’un reveur: Le hors-champ de l’Auteur,” Cahiers du cinéma 236/237 (March–April 1972), 86–9. Perkins, V. F. Film as Film (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993). Phillips, Gene D. George Cukor (New York: Twayne, 1982). Ray, Robert B. The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Rich and Famous Storyboards, 5f11, William Allyn Papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills. Robertson, Pamela Wojcik. The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Robinson, Bill. Note to George Cukor, January 10, 1969, Folder 132, GC. Rohmer, Eric. “Rediscovering America,” in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma: the 1950s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 88–93. Said, Edward. On Late Style (New York: Pantheon, 2006). Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968). —. Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955–1969 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). —. The Primal Screen: Essays on Film and Related Subjects (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). —. “George Cukor,” Film Comment (March/April 1978). Available online at: http://www.filmcomment.com/article/george-cukor-andrew-sarris (accessed 2 June 2014). —. You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: The American Talking Film, History and Memory, 1927–1949 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Sellors, C. Paul. Film Authorship: Auteurs and Other Myths (London: Wallflower Press, 2010). Selznick, David O. Memo from David O. Selznick, ed. Rudy Belmer (New York: The Modern Library, 2000).

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178  George Cukor Smith, Judith E. Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Smith, Susan. The Musical: Race, Gender and Performance (London: Wallflower, 2005). Stevens Jr., George (ed.). Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings, ed. William Rossi (New York: Norton, 2008). Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge, 1989). Wallis, Hal. Hal Wallis: Starmaker (New York: Macmillan, 1980). Wanamaker, Marc, and Robert W. Nudelman. Early Hollywood (Charleston: Arcadia, 2007). Zec, Donald. Sophia: An Intimate Biography (London: W. H. Allen, 1975).

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Index

Index Accident (1967, Joseph Losey), 32 Adam’s Rib (1949, George Cukor), 3, 5, 78, 80, 107, 116, 119–21, 148 Adorno, Theodor, 28 Advocate, 39–40 Aherne, Brian, 87 Aimee, Anouk, 32 Air Force (1943, Howard Hawks), 169 Akins, Zoe, 1, 127–8 Alcott, Louisa Mae, 78, 111 Aldrich, Robert, 29 “Alexandria Quartet,” 31 Allen, Corey, 137 Allen, Gene, 108, 136, 144 Anderson, Maxwell, 1 Angel Street (play), 140 Animal Kingdom, The (1932, Edward H. Griffith), 3 Antonia (play), 1 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 32, 34–5 Arden, Eve, 39 Army Emergency Relief Fund, 170 Arnheim, Rudolf, 37–8, 173 Arnold, General “Hap,” 169–70 Asquith, Anthony, 89 Astruc, Alexandre, 162 “Aufforderung zum Tanz,” 53 Avildsen, John G., 36 Ayre, Gerald, 40 Ayres, Lew, 66, 174 Badiou, Alain, 54–7, 173 Baer, Bob, 137 Balcony, The (1963, Joseph Strick), 31 Bane, Paulette, 62, 76

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Bankhead, Tallulah, 2–3, 125, 127, 175 Bardot, Brigitte, 32 Barry, Philip, 3, 61, 65, 67–8, 72–4, 117, 173 Barrymore, John, 4, 15, 74, 96, 99, 175 Barrymore, Lionel, 12, 15 Bartholomew, Freddie, 62 Bazin, André, 6, 138, 162, 173 Beaches (1988, Garry Marshall), 31 Beaton, Cecil, 7, 89, 173 Beatty, Bunny, 87 Beavers, Louise, 126 Beery, Wallace, 4, 14 Behrman, S. N., 162 Bennett, Constance, 4, 82, 128, 157 Bentham, Jeremy, 53 Bergen, Candice, 3, 40–1 Bergerac, Jacques, 43, 50 Berle, Milton, 134–5 Berman, Pandro S., 33, 173 Bernardoni, James, 80, 119, 134, 145, 173 Bhowani Junction (1956, George Cukor), 5, 8–9, 92–3, 103, 105–6, 108, 174 Bickford, Charles, 152 Bill of Divorcement, A (1932, George Cukor), 3, 66, 92–3, 96–7, 99, 103, 106, 111 Bisset, Jacqueline, 3, 40–1 Bloom, Claire, 41, 137–8 Blue Angel, The (1930, Josef von Sternberg), 134 Blue Bird, The (1975, George Cukor), 30 “Bob Cummings Show, The” (TV), 133 Bogarde, Dirk, 32, 35

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180  George Cukor Bogdanovich, Peter, 60, 66, 69, 145, 173 Booth, Shirley, 5, 166 Bordwell, David, 13 Born Yesterday (1950, George Cukor), 3, 77–8, 81, 84, 86, 117 “Bourbon Street Beat” (TV), 137 Boyer, Charles, 141, 143 Boys in the Band, The (play), 33 Breen, Joseph, 158 Brenon, Herbert, 2 Brian, Mary, 93–4 Broadway, 1–4, 11, 13, 16, 23, 33, 65–7, 72–3, 84, 88–9, 92–4, 96, 98, 106, 127–8, 133, 139–40, 154, 158–9, 161, 166, 169, 171 Brokaw, George Tuttle, 16 “Bronco” (TV), 137 Broun, Heywood Hale, 46 Brown, Martin, 1 Brown Derby, The, 83 Burke, Billie, 4, 12, 96, 175 Buscombe, Ed, 77, 173 Cahiers du cinéma, 6, 78, 161–2, 174–6 Calhern, Louis, 1 Callas, Maria, 134 Camille (1936, George Cukor), 3, 43, 51, 55–6, 58–9, 110–11, 157–8, 163 Capitol Building, The, 85 Carey, Gary, 79, 107, 139, 173 Cassidy, Hopalong, 132 Cat Ballou (1965, Elliot Silverstein), 145 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958, Richard Brooks), 40, 161 Cattle Queen of Montana (1954, Allan Dwan), 145 Cavanagh, Paul, 96 Cavell, Stanley, 18, 71, 134, 173 Central Park, 22–4, 44 Chalifour, Spencer, 76 Champ, The (1931, King Vidor), 62 Chaplin, Charles, 29 Chapman Report, The (1962, George Cukor), 5, 7, 39, 41, 124, 135–8 Chauncey, George, 55, 173 Church, Elaine, 35 Cineaste, 92, 175 CinemaScope, 103, 153 cinéma vérité, 37

George Cukor.indd 180

“Civil Disobedience” (essay), 67, 177 Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962, Agnès Varda), 12 Cleopatra (1963, Joseph L. Mankiewicz), 136 Cobb, Lee J., 170 Cohn, J. J., 9, 174 Collier, Constance, 129 Collier, John, 159 Colman, Ronald, 6, 99, 102 Columbia Pictures, 23, 45, 65–6, 69, 86 Conformist, The (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci), 37 Conroy, Frank, 95 Cooper, Jackie, 62 Cooper, Wyatt, 136 Corn is Green, The (1979, George Cukor), 30, 132 Cotten, Joseph, 141 Coward, Noël, 2–3, 66, 169–70 Crawford, Broderick, 85 Crawford, Joan, 16, 20, 22, 129–30, 145, 163–5, 176 Cromwell, John, 164 Crosby, Bing, 74, 134 Crosman, Henrietta, 93 Crowd, The (1928, King Vidor), 24, 26 Crowley, Mart, 33 Crowther, Bosley, 24, 103, 133, 159, 167, 169, 171, 174 Curtis, Simon, 65 Curtiz, Michael, 163–4 Dane, Clemence, 3, 92, 96, 175 Daney, Serge, 138, 174 Daniell, Henry, 52, 138 Danton, Ray, 137 Dark, The (play), 1 David Copperfield (1935, George Cukor), 60–4, 78 Davis, Bette, 3 Davis, Owen, 1 Dawn, Jack, 163 Dead Reckoning (1947, John Cromwell), 164 de Beauvoir, Simone, 137 “Decline of the Actor, The,” 137 DeMille, Cecil B., 83 Demy, Jacques, 32 Design for Living (play), 2–3

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Index  181 Desire Me (1947, Jack Conway, George Cukor, Mervyn LeRoy, Victor Saville), 124, 130–2 Destination Tokyo (1943, Delmer Daves), 68 Deval, Jacques, 159 Dickens, Charles, 61–2, 65, 78 Dinehart, Alan, 126 Dinner at Eight (1933, George Cukor), 3, 11–15, 17, 20, 111, 137, 160 Doty, Alexander, 16–17, 40, 92, 174 Double Life, A (1947, George Cukor), 6, 78, 81, 92–3, 99–100, 102–3, 106, 117, 176 Douglas, Melvyn, 1, 157, 160, 163, 165 Dressler, Marie, 11, 13–14 Duffy, Julia, 74 Dumas, Alexandre, 52, 134 Durrell, Lawrence, 31 Ehrenstein, David, 138 Eisenstein, Sergei, 17 Eldridge, Florence, 1 Elg, Taina, 43, 48 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 67, 70, 174 England, 87, 89, 105 “Enoch Arden,” 130 Everest, Barbara, 141 Everett, Chad, 137 Ewell, Tom, 148 Farber, Manny, 135, 137, 175 Fellini, Federico, 32 Feminine Mystique, The, 137, 150, 175 Ferber, Edna, 12 Ferguson, Otis, 30, 36, 175 Fields, W. C., 62 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 2–3, 73 Five Easy Pieces (1970, Bob Rafelson), 36 Fleming, Victor, 4–5 Flippen, Jay C., 133 Ford, John, 6, 29, 60 Ford, Rodney, 30, 174 Ford, Wallace, 1 Forman, Milos, 36 Forrest, Steve, 143 Forster, Robert, 33 Forsythe, John, 170 Fortune (magazine), 16 Forty Guns (1957, Samuel Fuller), 145 Foster, Claiborne, 1

George Cukor.indd 181

Foucault, Michel, 53, 175 Franciosa, Tony, 166–7 Francis, Kay, 126–7 Franklin, Sidney, 159 Free Soul, A (play), 1 French New Wave, 32, 143 Fried, Debra, 16–17, 175 Friedkin, William, 33 Frohman, Charles, 1 Front Page, The (play), 4 Fuller, Samuel, 29 Furia (1947, Goffredo Alessandrini), 167, 174 Furies, The (play), 1 Fury (1936, Fritz Lang), 132 Garbo, Greta, 43, 51, 56, 78, 82, 111, 127, 156–63, 173 Gardner, Ava, 5, 8–9, 46, 102, 105, 174–5 Gaslight (1944, George Cukor), 3, 40, 61, 139–41, 143, 148, 155 Gas Light: A Victorian Thriller (play), 140 Genet, Jean, 31 George Raft Story, The (1961, Joseph M. Newman), 137 Gibbons, Cedric, 132, 160 Girls, The (Book), 127, 176 Girls About Town (1931, George Cukor), 125–6, 128, 137 Gish, Dorothy, 1 Godard, Jean-Luc, 32 Gone With the Wind (1939, Victor Fleming), 4, 62 Gordon, Ruth, 22, 24, 78, 108, 114, 117, 119, 160 Gorman, Cliff, 33 Granger, Stewart, 104 Grant, Cary, 5, 66, 68–9, 73–4, 87 Great Gatsby, The (novel), 2, 73 Great Gatsby, The (play), 1 Greene, Graham, 31, 35–6 Griffith, Edward H., 11, 68–71 Gypsy (play), 1 Halperin, David M., 40, 42, 175 Hamilton, Patrick, 140 Hanson, Helen, 142, 175 Hardin, Ty, 135, 137 Harlow, Jean, 14–15

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182  George Cukor Harrison, Rex, 6, 9, 88 Hart, Moss, 151, 154, 169–71 Hart, Richard, 131 Hasso, Signe, 100 Hathaway, Henry, 29 Hawks, Howard, 4, 29, 76, 79, 162, 169 Head, Edith, 144 Heckart, Eileen, 144–5 Heller in Pink Tights (1960, George Cukor), 139, 143, 147, 155 Heller with a Gun, 140 Hepburn, Katherine, 4–5, 32, 66–9, 72–4, 76, 78, 87–8, 96, 99, 107–8, 110–14, 117–22, 132, 173, 175, 176 Hiller, Arthur, 42 Hilton, Paris, 44 His Girl Friday (1940, Howard Hawks), 4 Hitchcock, Alfred, 6, 29–30, 79, 107, 136, 161–2 Hitchcocko-Hawksians, 162 Holden, William, 33, 85–86 Holliday, Judy, 4, 22–4, 33, 43–5, 78, 85–6, 119, 171 Hollywood, 1–6, 9, 11, 13, 18, 23, 29–32, 36–40, 42, 47, 60, 65, 72–3, 76–9, 81–4, 87, 94, 107, 124–5, 128, 132, 146, 150–5, 158–60, 168–9, 171, 173–7 “Honeymooners, The” (TV), 26 Hopkins, Miriam, 3 Hopper, Hedda, 83 Horton, Edward Everett, 66 Hoskins, Bob, 65 Hot Spell (1957, Daniel Mann), 5, 156, 165–7, 174 Howard, Leslie, 43, 56–8 Howard, Sidney, 62 Huber, Christoph, 29–30, 92, 175 Hughes, Howard, 72, 156 Hyde-White, Wilfred, 88 I’ll Be Seeing You (1944, William Dieterle & George Cukor), 130 “I Love Lucy” (TV), 26 Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk), 37 Independent Theatre Owners of America, The, 87 In Which We Serve (1942, David Lean & Noel Coward), 169–70

George Cukor.indd 182

“It’s a Great Life” (TV), 134 It Should Happen to You (1954, George Cukor), 43–5, 48, 58, 78, 81, 117 It’s My Turn (1980, Claudia Weill), 31 I Want to Live (1958, Robert Wise), 136 “Jack Benny Show, The” (TV), 133 “Jackie Gleason Show, The” (TV), 133 Jackson, Freda, 105 Jannings, Emil, 134 Jefferson Memorial, 85 Jeffries, Lionel, 104 Johannson, Hjalmar, 133 Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray), 145 Johns, Glynis, 135, 137–8 Jones, James, 136 Joyce, James, 31 Justine (1969, George Cukor), 30–7, 39–40, 175 Kael, Pauline, 40, 42, 175 Kanin, Garson, 22, 24, 78, 84–5, 108, 117, 119, 130 Kaplan, E. Ann, 55–6, 175 Kardashian, Kim, 44 Karina, Anna, 32 Kaufman, George Simon, 12, 169 Kazan, Elia, 5, 161–2 Keeper of the Flame (1942, George Cukor), 107, 116–18 Kelly, Gene, 48, 134, 139–40 Kendall, Kay, 48–9 Kerr, Deborah, 5, 132 Kinsey Reports, The, 5, 136 Klevan, Andrew, 61, 110, 122, 175 Korff, Arnold, 95 Kozloff, Sarah, 22, 123, 175 Kulp, Nancy, 133–4 Lacan, Jacques, 44, 175 L’Amour, Louis, 144 Lancaster, Burt, 127, 166 Lang, Fritz, 30, 35, 79, 131–2 Lansbury, Angela, 141 Laughton, Charles, 62 Lawford, Peter, 45 Lawton, Frank, 63–4 Lazar, Irving, 169–71 “Leave It to Beaver” (TV), 137

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Index  183 Legion of Decency, 156 Lelouch, Claude, 32 Lemmon, Jack, 43–4 Lengyel, Melchior, 1, 159 Léon, Pierre, 130, 176 Lerner, Alan Jay, 9, 88, 174 Lester, Richard, 36 Let’s Make Love (1960, George Cukor), 124, 134–5 Levy, Emanuel, 18, 79–80, 130, 146–7, 160, 164, 169, 176 Library of Congress, 85 Life, 16, 25, 150 Life of Her Own, A (1950, George Cukor), 80, 139, 148–9, 155 Lincoln Memorial, The, 85 Lindquist, Glen, 76 Little Women (1933, George Cukor), 3, 78, 107, 110–12, 114 Loewe, Frederick, 88 Looram, James F., 158–60 Loren, Sophia, 143, 146–7 Los Angeles, 2, 39, 137 Losey, Joseph, 32 Love Among the Ruins (1975, George Cukor), 30 Lubitsch, Ernst, 2–3, 6, 158–61, 174 Luce, Clare Boothe, 5, 16 Luce, Henry Robinson, 16 Luft, Sidney, 151 MacGrath, Leueen, 132 Mack, Willard, 1 MacKenzie, Compton, 87 Magnani, Anna, 5, 166–8 Making Love (1982, Arthur Hiller), 42 Malle, Louis, 33 Manhattan Melodrama (1934, W. S. Van Dyke), 5 Mankiewicz, Herman J., 12 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 29, 31, 79 Mann, Daniel, 166 Manners, David, 98 Marion, Frances, 12 Marrying Kind, The (1952, George Cukor), 11, 13, 22–4, 26–7, 78, 81, 117, 174 Marshall, Garry, 31 Martin, Adrian, 60 Mason, James, 6, 150

George Cukor.indd 183

Maugham, W. Somerset, 128 Mayer, Louis B., 61–2, 140, 163 McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971, Robert Altman), 145 McCarthy, Kevin, 170 McCourt, James, 39, 42, 176 McCowen, Alec, 35 McCrea, Joel, 126 McLellan, Diana, 127, 176 McMenamin, Ciarán, 65 McQueen, Butterfly, 20 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 8–9, 11, 14, 17, 21, 39, 49, 56, 58, 61–2, 64–5, 73, 76, 82, 105, 115, 118, 120, 122, 131, 133, 136, 140, 143, 148–9, 152–4, 157, 159, 164, 174 Medium Cool (1969, Haskell Wexler), 37 Milburn, Oliver, 65 Mildred Pierce (1946, Michael Curtiz), 163–4 Milestone, Lewis, 4 Milland, Ray, 148 Miller, Henry, 31 Minnelli, Vincente, 29, 36 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 36 Model and the Marriage Broker, The (1951, George Cukor), 124, 133–4, 174 Molander, Gustaf, 163 Monroe, Marilyn, 33, 130–1, 134–5 Montand, Yves, 33, 134–5 Montgomery, Robert, 20, 22 Mulvey, Laura, 140, 146 Murch, Walter, 123 Murnau, F. W., 36 Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, Frank Lloyd), 61 My Fair Lady (1964, George Cukor), 3, 6–7, 9, 30, 40, 77–8, 86, 88–90, 153, 173–5 My Favorite Wife (1940, Garson Kanin), 131 Nathan, George Jean, 72 National Gallery, 85 Nelson, Barry, 170 New Hollywood, 29–32, 36–8, 42 Ninotchka (1939, Ernst Lubitsch), 159–60, 162 Noiret, Philippe, 32–3 Nolan, Doris, 66, 69

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184  George Cukor No More Ladies (1935, Edward H. Griffith & George Cukor), 11, 20–2 Noonan, Tom, 153 O’Brien, Edmond, 101 O’Brien, Margaret, 144, 146 Oedipus at Colonus (play), 28 Old Acquaintance (1943, Vincent Sherman), 3, 31, 40 Oliver, Edna Mae, 4, 11, 20, 111–12 Once Upon a Time (Il était une fois, play), 163 Ophuls, Max, 36 Oppenheimer, George, 162 O’Shea, Michael, 134 Othello (1952, Orson Welles), 125 O’Toole, Peter, 9, 174 Our Betters (play), 124, 128, 160 Outlaw, The (1943, Howard Hughes), 156 Paramount Pictures, 1–3, 93, 125–6, 143–5, 147, 166, 168 Parsons, Louella, 83 Pat and Mike (1952, George Cukor), 5, 78, 81, 107, 116, 119, 121–2 Pathé, 65 Patterson, Elizabeth, 96, 125 Perkins, V. F., 60, 70, 176 Peter Cooper Village, 26 Petulia (1968, Richard Lester), 36–7 Philadelphia Story, The (1940, George Cukor), 3, 5, 15, 19, 60–1, 65, 69–76, 110, 117, 173 Phiz (Hablot Knight Brown), 61–2 Pierson, Frank, 82 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (1977, Joseph Strick), 31 Potomac, The, 85 Preminger, Otto, 29, 36 Private Lives (play), 2 Production Code Administration, 3, 30–1, 128, 158 Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock), 136 Pygmalion (1938, Anthony Asquith & Leslie Howard), 89 Quiet American, The (1958, Joseph L. Mankiewicz), 31 Quinn, Anthony, 5, 143, 147, 166–8

George Cukor.indd 184

Rafelson, Bob, 36 Raphaelson, Samson, 1 Ray, Aldo, 22, 122 Ray, Nicholas, 30, 79 Rector, Andy, 138 Reeves, George, 170 Règle du jeu, La (1939, Jean Renoir), 61 Reinhardt, Gottfried, 159–61 Renavent, Georges, 1 Renoir, Jean, 61, 73, 124 Rich and Famous (1981, George Cukor), 3–4, 28, 30–1, 39–42, 176 Ritt, Martin, 170 Ritter, Thelma, 39, 133 RKO (Radio–Keith–Orpheum), 65, 83–4, 91, 99, 111–12, 151 Roberts, Roy, 137 Rogers, Ginger, 23 Rose Tattoo, The (1955, Daniel Mann), 166–168 Royal Family of Broadway, The (1930, George Cukor), 92–3, 96, 98, 106 Ruggles, Charlie, 20 Russell, Rosalind, 16–17 Ruttenberg, Joseph, 132 Ryan, Robert, 166 Said, Edward, 28, 40, 176 St. Johns, Adela Rogers, 82 Sarris, Andrew, 6, 37, 60, 73, 89–90, 107, 161–2, 168, 176 Save the Tiger (1973, John G. Avildsen), 36 Schenck, Joseph, 159 Scott, Lizabeth, 164 Second Sex, The, 137 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 132, 176 “Self-Reliance,” 67, 70 Selznick, David O., 4, 61–2, 72, 128, 130, 151, 176 Servant, The (1963, Joseph Losey), 32 “77 Sunset Strip” (TV), 137 Seven Year Itch, The (1955, Billy Wilder), 134 Sexual Behavior in the Female, 136 Shakespeare, William, 28, 56, 87, 103 Shearer, Norma, 16–17, 43, 56–8, 159 Sheekman, Arthur, 136 Sheridan, Richard, 158 Sherman, Lowell, 82

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Index  185 Sherman, Vincent, 3, 31 Shurlock, Geoffrey, 158, 160 Simpson, Ivan F., 63 Singin’ in the Rain (1951, Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen), 154 Sirk, Douglas, 35, 37 Skidoo (1968, Otto Preminger), 36 Smith, Maggie, 35, 65 Sofaer, Abraham, 104 Some Came Running (1958, Vincente Minnelli), 136 Something’s Got to Give (1962, George Cukor), 124, 130 Sophocles, 28 Stanwyck, Barbara, 145 Star is Born, A (1954, George Cukor), 3, 6–7, 9, 30, 79–80, 82, 84, 89, 139, 150–3, 155, 174 Starrett, Charles, 95 Stephenson, Henry, 97 Sterling, Robert, 160 Stewart, David Ogden, 3, 12, 67, 117, 125, 164 Stewart, James, 5–6, 69, 73–4 Stone, Harold J., 137 Stradling Sr., Harry, 89 Streetcar Named Desire, A (1951, Elia Kazan), 5 Strick, Joseph, 31–2 Strike (1925, Sergei Eisenstein), 17 Such Good Friends (1972, Otto Preminger), 36 Sullivan, Barry, 148 Susan and God (1940, George Cukor), 8, 124, 129 Sylvia Scarlet (1935, George Cukor), 33, 39, 68, 77–8, 86–8, 113, 175 Taking Off (1972, Milos Forman), 36 Tarnished Lady (1931, George Cukor), 2, 124–5 Tashman, Lilyan, 126–7 Taylor, Laurette, 1 Taylor, Robert, 43, 52, 56, 159 Technicolor, 7, 19, 84 Tempest, The (play), 28 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 130 Test Pilot (1938, Victor Fleming), 4 Thalberg, Irving, 61

George Cukor.indd 185

Thoreau, Henry David, 67, 177 Time, 16 To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch), 6, 161 Tone, Franchot, 21–2 Travels With My Aunt (1972, George Cukor), 3, 28, 30, 35–40 Travers, Bill, 104 Trigger (play), 1 Tropic of Cancer (1970, Joseph Strick), 31 Truffaut, François, 162 Turner, Lana, 148–50 Tynan, Kenneth, 139 Ulysses (1967, Joseph Strick), 31 Van Druten, John, 3 Varda, Agnès, 12 Veidt, Conrad, 165 Veiller, Anthony, 159 Verdi, Giuseppe, 28 Vidor, King, 24 Viertel, Salka, 162 Visconti, Luchino, 37 Vollmer, Lula, 1 von Weber, Carl Maria, 53 Walbrook, Anton, 140 Walden, or Life in the Woods, 67, 177 Wallace, Irving, 136 Walsh, Raoul, 4 Warner, Jack, 136, 138 Warner Brothers, 90, 136–8, 152–3 Watson, Lucille, 18 Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, A, 67 Weidler, Virginia, 17, 19 Weill, Claudia, 31 Welles, Orson, 6, 30, 91, 124–5, 160 Wellman, William, 82 Wexler, Haskell, 37 Whitty, Dame Mae, 141 Wilder, Billy, 29, 159 Wild is the Wind (1958, George Cukor), 5–6, 156, 165, 167–8 Williams, Emlyn, 132 Williams, Hope, 66–7 Williams, Hugh, 63–4 Williams, Tennessee, 5, 161–2, 166

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186  George Cukor Wise, Robert, 136 Winters, Shelley, 101–2, 135, 137–8, 167 Winter’s Tale, The (play), 28 Wizard of Oz, The (1939, Victor Fleming), 18, 151 Women, The (1939, George Cukor), 3, 5, 11, 15–18, 175–6 Wright, Teresa, 114–16

George Cukor.indd 186

Wright, William H., 159 Wyler, William, 6, 29, 171 Wynyard, Diana, 140 Young Love (play), 1 Young, Roland, 62, 157 Zazie dans le Métro (1960, Louis Malle), 33

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