George Cukor: A Life of Grand Gestures
by Dan Sallitt
This article appeared in the L.A.
Reader on February 4, 1983.
A few weeks ago, when the editor and I were trying to come
up with ideas for a film column during an empty week, we jokingly
speculated
that perhaps an old-time film maker would die before my deadline and
solve the
problem. On January 24, 1983, George Cukor obliged us, putting me in a
moral
position akin to that of Farley Granger in Strangers
on a Train. Well, if Cukor’s death should become an excuse for me
to write
about one of America‘s greatest directors, I can at least say in my
defense
that the medium encourages such callousness. The immortality that the
cinema
conveys upon its artists is some compensation for the fact that the
loss of a
film maker never completely registers upon us. Film buffs all over the
world
will go on speaking of Cukor in the present tense.
Has anyone noticed, by the way, how much trouble film
critics have been having saying anything distinctive about Cukor in
their
obituaries? This vagueness is not due to a temporary lapse of critical
power:
Describing Cukor’s elusive style has always been one of the major
stumbling
blocks of film analysis. The politique
des auteurs, which first turned critical attention toward directors
in the
fifties and sixties, was intended to elevate personal artists and
demote
directors with no apparent stylistic or thematic obsession. Yet, though
none of
the founding fathers could satisfactorily explain why Cukor should be
considered a more personal director than such bêtes noirs as Huston, Wyler,
and Zinnemann, collective
intuition preserved his reputation and bracketed him with more
assertive
artists such as Preminger, Minnelli, and Sirk. Seemingly vulnerable to
downward
reevaluation, Cukor has remained respectable over the years,
withstanding both
the periodic assaults of revisionists and the equivocation of his
defenders.
What makes his reputation so insecure is the single-minded emphasis
that
auteurists have always placed on visual expressiveness, an aspect of
film
making that Cukor never chose to ram home to audiences.
Born in 1899 in New York City, Cukor made a reputation as
one of Broadway’s top directors while still in his twenties. He was
brought to
Hollywood in 1930, when studios were importing East Coast theater
talent
wholesale to help them cope with the introduction of sound. Cukor’s
first two
films are of no particular interest; his third, The Royal
Family of Broadway (1930), an adaptation of the Ferber-Kaufman
play about the Barrymores, is an entirely mature effort and one of his
finest
works. Though his style was to go through many changes, Cukor’s basic
attitudes
were to remain constant to the end of his career, and Ina Claire’s
rueful
meditation on abandoning the theater for marriage in Royal
Family is almost exactly reproduced in Jacqueline Bisset’s
good-humored existential desperation in Rich
and Famous (1981), Cukor’s last film.
Cukor directed nineteen films before the thirties ran out,
including What Price Hollywood?
(1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Little
Women (1933), David Copperfield (1935), Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Romeo and Juliet
(1936), Camille (1937), Holiday (1938),
and The Women
(1939). His 1932 film A Bill of
Divorcement marked the debut of Katharine Hepburn, whose ten-film
association with Cukor is the main reason for the director’s celebrity.
I’ll
stop short of making the outrageous claim that Cukor created Hepburn
the
actress, but the fact remains that Hepburn became famous for an acting
style
that Cukor elicited from nearly all of his important actors both before
and
after his work with Hepburn.
Cukor’s direction of actors is characterized by the
opposition of two psychological impulses. On the one hand, the actor is
encouraged into immoderate emotional self-revelation: Cukor’s films
often
display a continuous, rapturous outpouring of emotional fantasy such as
would
weaken unto death a normal human being. But along with the emotionality
– and
here is the essence of Cukor’s approach – comes a self-consciousness
that
continually pulls the actor back from fantasy into an awareness of
being
observed. The two pulls operate simultaneously, and as a result Cukor’s
actors
acquire a much greater sense of realism than if they had simply drifted
unchecked into rapture: With Cukor, we never assume that extreme
reactions are
simply a matter of dramatic overkill, because the performer always
refers us
back to the reality of the everyday with a shy smile, a breakdown of
speech, or
a nervous motion of the eyes. And because Cukor has found a way of
assuring us
that his characters’ emotions are grounded in the context of real human
interaction, he can afford to push his players further into stylization
without
breaking the illusion of naturalism. He values the self-consciousness
for its
own sake but also uses it as a clever cover for his love of theatrical
extravagance.
That Cukor always directs our attention back to the reality
that contains his characters, or at least to the characters’ awareness
of that
reality, makes us question the traditional view of Cukor put forth by
Andrew
Sarris. (One cannot discuss the style of any American director without
either
borrowing from or reacting against Sarris, which is a tribute to that
critic’s
influence.) To quote the essay on Cukor in Sarris’s The
American Cinema: “The director’s theme is imagination, with the
focus on the imaginer rather than the thing imagined. Cukor’s cinema is
a
subjective cinema without an objective correlative. The husbands never
appear
in The Women, and Edward never
appears in Edward, My Son.”
At the least, it should be noted that the extremity of this
dramatic ploy in The Women and Edward, My
Son (1949) is a sure way of
drawing attention to the missing objects of the characters’ concern.
Even if we
restrict ourselves to the thirties – Cukor’s later development is
inexplicable
in terms of Sarris’s analysis – the concept of Cukor as a purely
subjective
director doesn’t satisfy. If I run down a list of my favorite scenes
from
Cukor’s early films – Hepburn’s painful first flirtation with artist
Brian
Aherne in Sylvia Scarlett; the
fascinating, erotic moment when Garbo yields to impulse and kisses
Robert
Taylor’s face in Camille; Hepburn’s
New Year’s Eve dance with Cary Grant in Cukor’s masterpiece Holiday
– I find that in every case the
point of view is external and incorporates the reactions of both
characters,
and that in every case but one the characters are more remote and
inscrutable
to us than in the surrounding scenes. I certainly won’t deny that Cukor
often
wants to get as close to his characters as possible and communicate
their
feelings without directorial intervention, but he also feels the
intermittent
need for an external perspective to place their emotionality in
context, even –
or perhaps especially – at climaxes.
Cukor’s films in the early forties, including The
Philadelphia Story (1940), A Woman’s Face (1941),
and Gaslight (1944), show his increasing
interest in decor and atmosphere, and after the war he developed a new
concern
with spatial continuity and the long take, a concern that peaked in his
vastly
underrated Lana Turner melodrama A Life
of Her Own (1950). The style of acting in the films of this period
is not
radically different from that of the thirties films, but Cukor’s camera
style
puts a greater and more continuous emphasis on the reality that is a
counterpoise to the characters’ emotionality. My reservations about
this period
of Cukor’s career – reservations not shared by most Cukor enthusiasts –
center
on his collaboration with screenwriters Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon in
the
films A Double Life (1948), Adam’s Rib
(1949), Born Yesterday (1950), The
Marrying Kind (1952), Pat and Mike
(1952), The Actress (1953), and It Should
Happen to You (1954).
Kanin-Gordon scripts always seem to me both condescending to the
“little
people” who are so often their subjects and laden with
character-destroying
gimmicks. The affiliation with Cukor is particularly unfortunate:
Kanin-Gordon
characters tend to have no perspective on themselves, and
self-consciousness is
an intrinsic element of Cukor’s characterizations.
The widespread use of color and CinemaScope in the late
fifties stimulated yet another development in Cukor’s style. Working
closely
with color consultant George Hoyningen-Huene and art director Gene
Allen, Cukor
developed a visual plan characterized by lavish decor and rich, bold
color
contrasts for films such as A Star Is Born
(1954), Bhowani Junction (1956), Les Girls
(1957), and Heller in Pink Tights (1960). The design
of these films suggests a comparison to Vincente Minnelli, and in fact
Sarris’s
comments about a subjective cinema without an objective correlative
apply to Minnelli
far more than to Cukor. Minnelli’s decor and use of color is always
intended to
throw a subjective emotional experience out onto the screen in place of
objective reality; his world is a world created entirely out of
imagination.
Cukor’s decor remains a backdrop, more often indifferent to his
characters’
feelings than in harmony or in counterpoint to them. Often Cukor uses
touches
of documentary realism, like the spotlights glaring into the camera
lens in A Star Is Born and Les Girls,
to help us accept his larger-than-life decor as reality,
just as he uses his actors’ self-consciousness to help us accept their
theatrical emoting as reality. He loves the grand gesture, and his art
is
devoted to making it plausible at any level of experience.
Cukor’s ability to continue producing first-rate work in the
turbulent years after 1960, when most other directors of his stature
faltered,
has been one of the most heartening spectacles of the last twenty
years. Most
of his devotees agree that My Fair Lady
(1964), the film that won him an Oscar for best director, is something
of an
aberration in his career; but Travels
With My Aunt (1972) won lasting critical acclaim, and the poignant,
made-for-television Love Among the Ruins
(1975) certainly ranks among Cukor’s best-loved works. A bittersweet
comedy
starring Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier (with Olivier playing
the
tremulous, flustered role usually given to Hepburn) about lovers
reunited after
fifty years’ separation, Love Among the
Ruins would have been the perfect last film for an aging director.
But
Cukor, not inclined to make that particular grand gesture, directed
three more
movies, including the excellent Rich and
Famous, and went out at age eighty-three having had no apparent
plan to
retire. No other film maker who has died at Cukor’s age has deprived us
of the
prospect of future masterpieces, so that even the least sentimental of
us has cause
for regret at his passing.