George Cukor

Hollywood Master

Murray Pomerance, R. Barton Palmer

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2015
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9780748693573
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

George Cukor is one of the studio era's most famous and admired directors, with many of the American cinema's most beloved classics to his credit, including The Women, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star is Born, and My Fair Lady to his credit. Not himself a scriptwriter, he was particularly adept at choosing which properties to adapt and then managing the adaptation process with verve and effectiveness. 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. Though many of his films are celebrated, Cukor has hitherto not received appropriate critical attention. 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 successful Broadway career, including the outsized, often flamboyant handling of emotionality. Yet Cukor was also a man of the cinema, fascinated by the ever-developing potentials of his adopted medium, as shown by the more than fifty films he directed in a career that endured from the early sound era into the 1970s.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction — R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance
• Chapter 1 — Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage: Dinner at Eight, No More Ladies, The Women, and The Marrying Kind — Maureen Turim
• Chapter 2 — George Cukor’s Late Style: Justine, Travels With My Aunt, and Rich and Famous — James Morrison
• Chapter 3 — Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names: It Should Happen to You, Les Girls, Camille, and Romeo and Juliet — Dominic Lennard
• Chapter 4 — The Cukor “Problem”: David Copperfield, Holiday, and The Philadelphia Story — Robert B. Ray
• 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 — Lee Carruthers
• Chapter 6 — Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor: The Royal Family of Broadway, A Bill of Divorcement, A Double Life, and Bhowani Junction — Michael DeAngelis
• 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 — Charlie Keil
• 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 — Bill Krohn
• Chapter 9 — George Cukor’s Theatrical Feminism: Gaslight, Heller in Pink Tights, A Life of Her Own, and A Star is Born — Linda Ruth Williams
• Chapter 10 — The Furthest Side of Paradise: Two-Faced Woman, A Woman’s Face, Hot Spell, Wild is the Wind, and Winged Victory — R. Barton Palmer
• Works Cited and Consulted
• Index