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| George Cukor (1946) |
George Cukor was
brought to Hollywood with others from the New York stage in 1929 to help
facilitate the transition to sound, in his case as “a dialogue director.” His stage career, as Carlos Clarens notes,
helped shape his film style: “his command of actors, his sense of dramatic
nuance, his intimate approach, the inventiveness of his stage 'business', (and)
the ensemble quality of the acting.” These coalesced in a crucial phase of his
development as a film director from Little Women (1933) through David
Copperfield (1935), Holiday (1938), and The Women (1939), to
The Philadelphia Story (1940), successfully marking him as an
emerging, distinctive stylist.
He learned his
craft in a system based on division of labour, the merging of Fordism and the
creative processes in the pursuit of profitable entertainment. Even scope for
directors to set up their own projects, which had more currency in later
decades, hadn't begun in the thirties. Directors, like actors, were type cast
to assignments. Given Cukor's 'typecasting' based on perceived skills and
experience in the theatre, his statistics below show how soon Hollywood
asserted its reduced dependence on screenplays adapted directly from stage
plays[i]. Not that a
sophisticated theatricality is necessarily 'uncinematic' as Lubitsch and Cukor
were amongst the first to show.
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| Early Cukor, WC Fields, Freddie Bartholomew David Copperfield |
In adapting a stage play to the screen it is
necessary to “find a new movement,” said Cukor, ”and that starts with the
writing.” Clarens comments on
Cukor's overlaying of the recurring thematic concerns in his work – “the
outsider breaking into an alien closed circle and the heroine stirring into
awareness” - without once upsetting playwright Philip Barry's dialogue in Holiday
and The Philadelphia Story so attuned were they to each other. “They are
also,” Clarens points out, “the basis of the postwar comedies written by the
Kanins.”
Cukor avoided the
big statement. In this he was seemingly comfortably attuned to a dictum then
current in Hollywood circles that “messages are for Western Union.” Perhaps his
awareness of the extent to which any open display or admission of his
homosexuality at this time placed him on or outside the fringes of society and
the law even in the relatively tolerant
Hollywood community[ii]. This may
have made him wary of any active social or political engagement which would
leave him vulnerable. He was always impatient with the suggestion that he was
something more than an engaged and gifted craftsman, adroit in his direction of
actors. By implication, progress for Cukor was not to be pursued through the
canvassing of big issues but in the grace that can be reflected by the meeting
of the demands of an emotional life, tragedy in the refusal or inability to
meet those demands. This was given fullest expression in his productively
overlapping collaborations with Katharine Hepburn and with the gifted husband
and wife partnership of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin.
Cukor and actors
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| James Mason, Judy Garland, A Star is Born |
Cukor said that he
didn't like “to talk the part too much with actors.” He still talked but tried
to do so “in an immediate way” creating
his “own language and... own image” avoiding anything that could be seen as
“theoretical.” Others have complained of Cukor's excessive talk (often laced
with expletives) on the set. James Mason found it difficult to adjust on A
Star is Born to “his non-stop flow of talk … a funny way of translating the
lines into modern terms - 'this shit',
'what the fuck'.” Despite the frustrations
of her often impossibly erratic behaviour, Cukor coaxed the performance of a
lifetime from Judy Garland in A Star is Born. He described how he tried
to create an image on the set for a character by employing a phrase or a story
aimed to keep up the actor's intensity between scenes. He said that he never
rehearsed the emotions of a scene, only the mechanics, allowing the emotions to
happen when the camera's running, if necessary for a long time, while the actor
is finding things out for his/herself. Garbo liked to work this way. Judy Garland
did, in several highly charged emotional scenes in A Star is Born as
James Mason also did in the suicide scene. This seems a variation on the
Method's “digging into one's own life.”
Cukor talked about
acting at close range, silent cinema's breaking away from stage acting where
there were no spoken words only faces up close. Some of this he saw as having
been lost with fashionable editing and effects, pretentious suffering rather
than “sincere acting with very few tricks, someone like Gary Cooper,” often
dismissed as non-acting, in other words the tenor of Nick Ray's 'naturals'.
Cukor spoke of the freshness of comedy performance which can only be achieved
by rehearsal not improvisation except occasionally in moments within a scene,
something Spencer Tracy had a gift for doing. He criticised the over emphasis
on psychoanalysis in playwriting from the Group Theatre to Arthur Miller and
acting schools like the Actors Studio. Many of the qualities Cukor looked for
in an actor he summed up as “professional.”
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| Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Sylvia Scarlett |
With Sylvia
Scarlett Patrick McGilligan detects the clear emergence of a pattern in
Cukor's work: his deep identification with the actress. “Through her he saw
himself (functioning) for him on the screen as an idealized alter ego.” Katharine Hepburn made ten films with Cukor,
1932-79, co-starring with Spencer Tracy in three. At the time she made her
first film appearance in A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Cukor admitted
that he immediately took her to task. “She
was opinionated...I told her then that I couldn't take her seriously. But from
the moment she played her first scene she was at home, so striking and
original, she was completely there already.” Hepburn was called “a
natural rebel” with an impatience and directness or what Cukor described as
“cutting through correctness.” She was
without self-consciousness, “born for the movies although she didn't (then)
know it, coming as she did from the stage. She was an immediate success.”
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| Katharine Hepburn, Little Women |
Cukor's second film
with Hepburn was Little Women (1933), his first major success, in which
she plays the non-conforming Jo. Their third film Sylvia Scarlett (1936)
was the director's acknowledged favourite picture, perhaps partly as a
consequence of the rejection of the risk-taking involved, taking on what has
been well described as “a humorous as well as serious personal allegory about
sexual awakening” (McGilligan). It is also remains one of Cukor's recurring if
most striking evocations, comparable to those of Jean Renoir, of a world halfway
between theatre and life. The dramatic and comedic cross-gender implications of
a young woman masquerading as a boy encountering Cary Grant in a troupe of
itinerant actors, were apparently too perplexing for both the audience and the
critics. The film was a resounding flop, fuelling the notion amongst the
nation's theatre managers that Hepburn was “box office poison.” Cukor spoke of Sylvia
Scarlett as “Cary Grant's picture: he had a special quality that no film
before had managed to capture. He was both charming and crooked, very romantic,
giving him the image he needed.”
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| Hepburn, Grant, Holiday |
Hepburn co-starred
with Grant again in Holiday (1938). The couple gradually come together
through Cukor's typical restraint. The Philadelphia Story (1940) was her
successful comeback from public rejection which Cukor attributed to the way she
always challenged the audience (clearly the case with Sylvia Scarlett)
which he said wasn't then the fashion. Philip Barry had written both plays
(adapted to the screen by Donald Ogden Stewart) especially for her. Cukor's
direction, apparently at the service of the players, is skilfully paced with
the same mastery of comic tempo displayed in Holiday. Both Hepburn and
Cukor received Oscar nominations.
The Keeper of
the Flame (1942) is a
political allegory made in the charged atmosphere leading up to the war. Cukor said they didn't actually know what it
was all about, “a picture Metro wished they had never made.” He identified
Hepburn's role, living in the shadow of
'a great man', as an uncharacteristic part for her and “too contrived as
written.” In his first film with Hepburn, Spencer Tracy played a dogged
reporter. For Cukor there is greater stylistic engagement in Gaslight (1944) played out largely
within the confines of an extensive single set but with an elaborate texture,
dark and claustrophobic, maintained in the mise en scène throughout.
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| Spencer Tracy, Hepburn, Adam's Rib |
At the end of the
forties during which he was mainly off-track with the projects assigned to him,
Cukor returned to comedy with Adam's Rib (1949) in his three picture
collaboration with Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin (plus several more separately
with each), their writing at its peak. Hepburn and Tracy star with Judy
Holliday coming straight from Broadway into her first film role. All worked to
put her at ease in front of the camera as, through nervousness, she struggled
to remember her lines to the point of handing out tickets to the play she was
in to the crew so that they could see for themselves that she could act.
Holliday soon graduated to handling one of Cukor's several very long takes in
the film, a five minute scene in two shot, Hepburn delivering the lines driving
it although apparently, back then at Kate's insistence, the camera remains
trained throughout on Holliday's responses. Holliday went on to make three more
films with Cukor.
Cukor was most
attuned to films in which the emotional life is based on love and friendship.
The rapport between actors, director and the writers, with Adam's Rib,
produced a perfectly rounded comedy which, as with such comic masterpieces,
rarely dates. The success of the director-writing team was such that they were
given a completely free hand on these films by the studios, Columbia and Metro.
Harry Cohn actually gave the Kanins a $100,000 blank cheque to write any script
they wanted. They were full of ideas about every stage of the productions which
Cukor readily assimilated.
Hepburn and Tracy
were a fascinating combination of opposites. According to Cukor, while Kate
liked to talk and always had lots of ideas, Tracy was one of those “naturally
original actors that didn't let you know what he was doing” and would take no
part in Cukor-Hepburn-Gordon-Kanin read-throughs and conferences. On the set
they were very deferential to each other in contrast to the battle of the sexes
being played out on the screen, something which the director needed to override
which he did very successfully. In Adam's Rib and the companion
collaboration, Pat and Mike (1954), the emphasis is on characterisation
over plot, the couple interacting at their most relaxed on the theme (also in
the Judy Holliday films), to quote Molly Haskell, of “the delicate equilibrium
between a man and a woman and between a woman's need to distinguish herself
(from) the social demands on her.”
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| Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, LoveAmong the Ruins |
It was two decades
before Cukor made another film with Hepburn, an “exquisitely mounted”
production filmed in England for TV, Love Among the Ruins (1975), in
which he finally realised his wish to direct Laurence Olivier. Hepburn had a major hand in conjuring up the project
for Cukor who in the decade since My Fair Lady (1964), with the collapse
of the studio system, had only completed Travels with My Aunt (1972), a
maverick production and a major Cukor film, on a par with Sylvia Scarlett
as his most personal and experimental work about “a restless theatrical spirit
(played by Maggie Smith) as Cukor liked to imagine himself.” The two central
characters played by Maggie Smith and Alec McCowen can be seen as two sides of
Cukor himself. McGilligan adds that, although ostensibly it had its origins in
a Graham Greene novel, it is actually based almost entirely on the script by
Hepburn with the lead intended for herself but, after much prevarication,
played by Smith. McGilligan comments that “Cukor's self was always channelled
through Hepburn in all his films with her. In the studio age she had been a
stand-in, for him, of the poetic yearning and sexual ambiguity in Sylvia
Scarlett” and through their other major films together – Holiday, The
Philadelphia Story, Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike.
Cukor's films in colour, most notably A Star is Born (1954) also
in CinemaScope followed by Bhowani Junction in 1956 (colour but non Scope), Les Girls
(1957), colour and Scope and a unique western, Heller in Pink Tights
(1960), and later Travels with My Aunt, both with their links to Sylvia
Scarlett, in a sense amounted to Cukor's 'swan songs'. These five
films each presented a challenge which stimulated his engagement with mise en
scène. This was the beginning of his on-going collaboration with an innovative
photographer George Hoyningen-Hume (as colour consultant) and his longtime
aide-de-camp Gene Allen (on set design) while also taking on CinemaScope with
cinematographers Sam Leavitt and Robert Surtees [iii]. This is
a subject I hope to return to in a later post on Film Alert 101.
[i] Nineteen of the 26
films (73%) that Cukor directed from 1930-44 were based on stage plays while
between 1944-64 there were only four (21%) adapted from the stage.
[ii] Homosexuality was prevalent in certain of
the creative crafts in the industry and film people, especially those from a
theatre background, were generally accepting. As a director at the top of the
industry Cukor was almost unique. Only a few frontline if less high profile
directors - James Whale, Mitchell Leisen, Charles Walters – were openly known
to be gay. Cukor shocked a friend when he told him that 'only two things really
interested him: sex and his work'. “He
pursued sexual gratification with the same fervor that he applied to his
career.” (see McGilligan 114-126).
[iii] Gene Allen
spoke of how Cukor's stubborn insistence on going outside Hollywood channels
for his pictorial consultants, dating back to Little Women, often put
him offside with studio department heads whose staff were frequently as good as
Cukor's 'imports'.
Main Sources: Gavin Lambert,On Cukor (1973); Carlos
Clarens, Cukor (1976); Patrick McGilligan, George Cukor;A Double Life
(1991).
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