George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director (Film and Culture Series)
George Cukor began directing at the beginning of the sound era and continued until he was 81 years old, when he directed his 55th production, Rich and Famous. He wasn’t as versatile as Howard Hawks, who excelled in every genre from westerns, war films and mysteries to screwball comedies and musicals. Cukor was known for elegant literary adaptations. Perhaps because of his homosexuality, he was considered to be a “woman’s director.”
In George Cukor’s People, Joseph McBride presents Cukor as a consummate director of actors, or should we say actresses. Seven of the book’s 28 chapters are devoted to Cukor’s work with Katherine Hepburn, from A Bill of Divorcement in 1932 to Love Among the Ruins in 1975. McBride also discusses Cukor’s work with Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe, among others.
In his introduction McBride quotes Cukor as saying, “My work begins and ends through the actors. And it seems to me, the more successfully you work through the actors, the more your work disappears.” For this reason, McBride describes his book as, “an experiment in how to study a director primarily though his work with actors.” McBride speaks of Cukor’s “audacious, virtuosic use of long takes,” but that was typical of many directors in the 1930s and 1940s. Directors like Hawks, Capra, and Ford were also willing to linger on a scene to allow their actors to convey emotions visually. Still, Cukor was famous for bringing the best out of the actors he worked with.
Since Cukor often worked with adaptations of literary and dramatic work, McBride also sees the importance of discussing the source material with which Cukor and his writers begin. Cukor is drawn to stories and situations that display a sense of characters’ theatricality. According to McBride, Cukor was attracted to characters who defied social conventions. Of Cukor’s early work, McBride has high praise for to Sylvia Scarlett (1935), in which Katherine Hepburn’s character spends most of the film dressed as a man, a film McBride sees as challenging “every aspect of the audience’s preconceptions about gender.” One can see Sylvia Scarlett as a modern take on Shakespeare’s great comedies in which a girl is forced to disguise herself as a boy. Cukor’s film played on Katherine Hepburn’s androgyny. In the course of the film, she is adored by men and women. Audiences weren’t ready for this kind of play with gender; Sylvia Scarlett was a flop at the box office.
After playing a series of unconventional women in the 1930s and being labeled as “box office poison,” Katherine Hepburn successfully remade her image with The Philadelphia Story. Her character, socialite Tracy Lord, is loved by three men, but has to be humbled and fully feminized before she can have a successful second marriage. The play and film were created for Hepburn and Cukor sees to it that she looks radiant from beginning to end. Yet one of the best scenes in the film is between James Stewart and Cary Grant as rivals for Tracy’s affection. Feminists have attacked The Philadelphia Story as a film about the humiliation of a woman, but Cukor’s brilliant direction of his stellar cast have made the film a classic.
Perhaps the most controversial claim of McBride’s is that Cukor’s later films are his most interesting. Cukor did not have the same quality of source material and scripts as he had had in the 1930s and early 1940s and the studios, panicked by competition with television, botched films with disastrous edits.
A prime example is the 1954 film, A Star Is Born, which McBride considers Cukor’s greatest achievement despite the damage done to it by Warner Brothers. Shortly after the film’s opening, the studio chopped 27 minutes out of the film because its length limited the number of screenings the film could have in a day. Typically, the studio did not keep all the material it cut. This was after the studio added a 15-minute musical number not directed by Cukor, that stops the film in its tracks. The number, “Born in a Trunk,” is an echo of the “Broadway Rhythm” number Gene Kelly devised for himself in Singing in the Rain two years before. McBride praises A Star Is Born for Cukor’s brilliant use of the new wide screen process and for his direction of Judy Garland and James Mason. He analyzes the brilliant filming of Garland’s first number, “The Man That Got Away,” which was filmed in one take.
McBride also has high praise for Cukor’s version of My Fair Lady. He goes into detail on Cukor’s work with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison, who played Henry Higgins on stage in New York and London for two-and-a-half years. While critics found Cukor’s work on the film to be professional and somewhat impersonal, McBride sees Cukor’s work on My Fair Lady to by “a good example of how his unobtrusive style functions so well for the material that his finesse escapes notice.”
If Cukor had great success working with the problematic Judy Garland on A Star Is Born, he ran aground with Marilyn Monroe. By the time he worked with the 1950s sex symbol, she would show up late, if at all, and couldn’t remember her lines. Let’s Make Love (1960) had a poor script and a French leading man who had to learn his lines phonetically—a disaster for comedy. Cukor’s challenge was to make Marilyn Monroe look like a star under almost impossible circumstances. Two years later, Cukor would have to fire Monroe from the ill-fated Something’s Gotta Give (later turned into a vehicle for Doris Day). By that time, as the director put it, “She had no control over herself.” She died shortly after.
George Cukor’s People contains a detailed filmography and notes on the source material for each chapter. The book is lavishly illustrated.
One can argue about the choices of films for inclusion and exclusion or about McBride’s choice of which film is Cukor’s “masterpiece” (A Star Is Born). Nonetheless, George Cukor’s People is a fascinating examination of Cukor’s work and an important contribution to the study of the golden age of American film.