by Andrew Sarris I met George Cukor only once in my life, and then only very briefly, but I have enjoyed the movies he directed through most of my other life up there on the screen , and I thought that I had written both appreciatively and perceptively of his career as a whole in The American Cinema. Nonetheless, I felt a distinct chill in his very perfunctory greeting, and I must say that I was not entirely surprised. Despite my great affection and admiration for much of the maligned output of Hollywood, I have never gone out of my way to meet its artists and craftsmen. For one thing, I have always lacked both the talent and the temperament to function as a tape-recorder critic. Foranother, I consider it a form of cheating to check my critical insights with the horse's mouth. The evidence on the screen should be sufficient. Besides, until very recently most Hollywood directors had been relatively unpublicized cogs in the production machinery of the great studios. Aside from some quaintly quirky "characters" like Lubitsch, Hitchcock, and De Mille, the Hollywood director tended to be an esoteric detail in workaday movie reviewing. Orson Welles, tried to change all that with Citizen Kane, but he was quickly driven out of Hollywood for his egotistical exhibitionism. Welles was perhaps the first self-proclaimed auteur since Griffith, Chaplin, Stroheim, and Sternberg, and look what happened to all of them!
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ne need only listen to the endless litany of gushy collectivism on the annual Academy Awards ceremony to understand how tenaciously Hollywood clings to the ideal of the team player even in a community in which every individual doubles as his own personal press agent. Also, Hollywood has never been much of a haven for film history. As far as the industry is concerned, you're only as good as your last picture, and well-meaning film historians only make matters worse by pontificating about your past glories. In Cukor's case, he had always done better with the moguls than with the mandarins anyway. Although the Selznicks, the Mayers, the Thal-
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bergs, the Warners, the Zanucks, the Zukors had not provided a picnic ground forCukor throughout his career-toward the end, particularly, they mutilated many of his most promising productions-they had accorded him also the very considerable respect due one professional from another. Without this respect he could not possibly have made the close to fifty films in a career spanning nearly half a century.
UnfortunatelY, critics and historians have been singularly condescending to Cukor. Lewis Jacobs, in The Rise of the American Film, gives short shrift to Cukor's work in the Thirties: "Although George Cukor has been directing pictures only since sound and Sidney Franklin practically grew up with movies, the qualities of these directors are fairly similar. Their productions are carefully planned and lavish, but marked by theatricalism. Like Brown and Borzage they get only the highest-priced story or play material, the biggest stars, the most expert technicians; no expense is spared to make their enterprises outstanding. It is, however, only by their fine taste and atten tion to acting that their films are distinctinve. Their renditions are for the most part static, suggesting the stage plays and stage tradition from which their style stems .... Although both directors are meticulous workers, their elaborate approach is narrow and confined, with only occasional feeling for the movie medium as such." The late Richard Griffith in The Film Till Now gave even shorter shrift to Cukor: "Among directors whose experience is confined to the sound film, George Cukor and William Dieterle were the first to assume importance. Cukor occasionally attempts to explore the medium as such-more or less after the manner of Hitchcock-as in What Price Hollywood? (1932) and Gaslight (1944), but for the most part is content with conventional adaptations of stage successes, old and new (Our Betters, 1933; Camille, 1937; The Philadelphia Story, 1940). He is, in a manner of speaking, a William De Mille or Maurice Tourneur of the talkies, tasteful, meticulous, but without interest in, or flair for, the film itself." Further on in The Film Till Now Griffith made a cryptic reference to Cukor's camera style in the midst of a favorable analysis of Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Perdoux: "The moving or panning camera, that salvation of George Cukor, is rarely employed, and then almost en-
tirely in mute scenes." It would seem, at least according to Griffith, that "a flair for the film itself' was antithetical to "the moving or panning camera. " Even a comparatively sophisticated film critic like the late Otis Ferguson had to overcome his preconceptions about Cukor before he (Ferguson) could write a whole-hearted rave about Greta Garbo in Camille: "But although George Cukor's direction has seemed to be on the consciously classic side previously, his work here with the cast, material (treatment credited to Zoe Akins, Frances Marion, James Hilton), and technical staff (the top MGM crew: Herbert Stothart, William Daniels and Karl Freund, Cedric Gibbons, etc.) is a firm and straight-out piece of film work." A few years ago, David Susskind presided over a panel of Hollywood people, three of whom were the directors Richard Brooks, George Cukor, and Fred
Zinnemann. It became clear during the course of the program that Susskind respected Brooks, revered Zinnemann, and dismissed Cukor as a "woman's director." Susskind, long considered a male chauvinist swine among male chauvinist pigs, may have simply used Gukor as a whipping boy for all the big-star women's pictures that were deplored by realist and Marxist film aestheticians over the years. Cukor, after all, had directed both Little Women and The Women (1939), not to mention more Katharine Hepburn vehicles than anyone could remember off-hand. Certainly, an anti-Hollywood snob like Susskind would hardly feel more kindly disposed toward the so-called "man's directors" like John Ford, Howard Hawks, or Raoul Walsh. To Susskind a director like Zinnemann represented neither women nor men, but rather the bloodless, sexless abstraction once designated by Stan 43
Van DerBeek as "Mankinda ," a "humanistic" balloon blown up with the hot air of social consciousness. It was against this background of Cukor-mockery that I launched my defense and revaluation of Cukor in The America n Cinema: " George Cukor's filmography is his most eloquent defense. When a director has provided tasteful entertainment of a high order consistently over a period of more than thirry years , it is clear that said director is more than a mere entertainer .... Even Cukor's enemies concede his taste and style, but it has become fashionable to dismiss him as a woman's director because of his skill in directing actresses, a skill he shares with Griffith, Chaplin, Renoir , Ophuls, Sternberg, Welles, Dreye r, Bergman, Rossellini , Mizoguchi, ad infinitum, ad g/oriam. Another argument against Cukor is that he relies heavily on adaptations from the stage and that his cinema consequently lacks the purity of the Odessa Steps. The argument was refuted in principle by the late Andre Bazin. 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."
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did not realize at the time I was writing TheAmerican Cinema, now more than a decade ago, that Cukor's critical reputation was a more complicated subject than I had imagined. Nor had I correctly added up all the pluses and minuses in his career. As it happens, I have now finally seen all his films except Grumpy, and I am thus in a better position to evaluate his ultimate position in the history of movies, a position that must take into account the fact that he began in pictures as a director of dialogue, and that his good ear for dialogue as it is spoken could alone make him a titan of talking pictures. Through the Twenties Cukor had acquired theatrical expertise in Rochester and on Broadway with such properties as The Great Gatsby, The Constant Wife, Her Cardboard Lover, The Dark, The Furies , A Free Soul, Young Love, and Broadway. Cukor himself remade Her Cardboard Lover as a Metro swan song for Norma Shearer in 1942. He came to Hollywood as a "dialogue director," and he continued to function in that capacity for the rest of his career. Curiously, the celebrated turnover of actors and actresses with the coming of
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sound did not extend to directors. Of the directors imported to Holl ywoo d expressly to handle the dialogue only Cukor, Mamoulian, and Cromwell survived into the Forties from the Broadway crop, and only Dieterle and (later) Preminger from abroad. Ford, Sternberg, Hitchcock, Hawks , Lubitsch , Lang, Capra, McCarey, Milestone, Borzage, LaCava, Vidor, Walsh, Wellman, Stevens, Stahl, Curtiz, Le Roy, Howard , King, et al. had all paid their dues to the muse of the silent cinema. It was therefore very easy to tag Cukor as a baleful "theatrical" influence on the once virginally visual cinema.
"George Cukor is a Dialogue Director Extraordinary and a discoverer ofthe magical spaces around the actors on the screen. I have enjoyed the movies he directed through most of my other life up thereon the screen. " Still, there were plays and there were plays. Cukor never seemed to get the rough, lusty, muscular, and, above all, messagey assignments like Anna Christie, Street Scene, The Petrified Forest, Dead End, The Children's Hour and Idiot's Delight. The Harlow-Beery roughhouse in Dinner at Eight was about as raucous as a Cukor project ever became. Cukor did not choose to prowl around the dark alleys of the gangster movie with its desedem-dose dialogue, nor to roam the wide open spaces of the Western with its long silences. He was interested instead incivilized men and women with a certain amount of spunk in them, and one would think that this particular orientation would have struck a responsive chord among the members of the proverbial Algonquin Circle. Unfortunately,
the New York intelligentsia made it a point of honor to despise all movies indiscriminatel y, and Cukor was never given a chance to make points with his proper constituency. Also, his career hit several snags. At Paramount he became embroiled in a feud with Lubitsch over One Hour With You. Two of the finest films of the Thirties by any current standard-Dinner at Eight and Holiday-were inexplicably underrated . Far from looking like canned theater today, these two masterpieces of modulation vibrate with a distinctively cinematic sensibility. Similarly, Little Women and David Copperfield have been dismissed as canned novels despite their fierce beauties of expression. Rowdy fun movies like Girls About Town and What Price Hollywood? got lost in the shuffle, and out-and-out boxoffice bombs like Sylvia Scarlett and Zaza never acquired the cult following they eminently deserved.
T h e story was that Cukor thrown off Gone With the "Find because of Clark Gable's suspicion that his performance was being neglected for sake of Vivien Leigh's and Olivia de Havilland's probabl y consolidated the canard of the woman's director, particularly when Cukor was reassigned to The lI'omen , a project in which no male appears on the screen. But Cukor never got credit for directing Leigh's two best scenes: Melanie's childbirth sequence in silhouette, and the shooting of the Yankee deserter at Tara. Under Victor Fleming's lackluster direction, Leigh's performance is spectacularly uneven, and her final parting from Rhett is bungled. It is not simply a question of Cukor's being a better director of actresses than Fleming. Performances do not flower in a vacuum. One must direct the time and space around the performers through choices of pace and focal length. Hence, a full-fledged movie director had to emerge out of the exquisite performances of Ina Claire in The Royal Family of Broadway, Tallulah Bankhead in Tarnished Lady, Kay Francis and Lilyan Tashman in Girls About Tow11 , Lowell Sherman in What Price Hollywood? Katharine Hepburn and John Barrymore in A Bill of Divorcement, John Barrymore, Marie Dressler, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, and Karen Morley in Di11ner at Eight, Hepburn, Jean Parker, Paul Lukas, and Edna May Oliver in Little Women, Roland Young, W.C. Fields,
Edna May Oliver, Basil Rathbone , Maureen O'Sullivan , and Madge E vans in David Copp erfield , Hepburn , Cary Grant, Edmund Gwenn , and Natalie Paley in Sylv ia Searle!!, Greta Garbo and Rex O'Malley in Camille, and just about all the women in The /I 'omen.
B u t the early Forties found Cukor locked into a series of Metro vehicles, most of which broke down long before the final fade-out. Crawford , Hepburn , Garbo , Shearer gave their all, but only Hepburn emerged unscathed: The Philadelphia Story recharged her career in the company of Cary Grant and James Stewart, and Keep er of the Flame, an otherwise flawed political melodrama, revealed her at her most stunningly beautiful opposite Spencer Tracy. Crawford continued her long slide at Metro with Susan and God (despite Fredric March's vulnerably pensive accompaniment) and A Woman 's Face (despite Conrad Veidt's demonic brilliance). Garbo retired after Two-Faced Woman and Shearer after Her Cardboard Lover , at which point Cukor himself was marked as an unresisting company man for MGM . Otis Ferguson' s commentary on the Cukor Two-Faced Woman could have served as the director's epitaph as a creative force in Hollywood: " Now Miss Garbo is seen in another company, but with the direction of George Cukor, who is apparently a director careful to the point of elegance but always at the mercy of what the boys have cooked up for script. Since he is in the pleasant, easy latitudes of the top-budget 'A' group, he can take his time in following the tortuosities of a script that waste the audience's. If a writer lugs his uncle's wife into the story for no other purpose than that of padding out the chore of his contract, Mr. Cukor will apparently be patient and even elegant on the job of importing the writer' s uncle's wife. The writers of Two-Faced Woman were Samuel Behrman, Salka Viertel , and George Oppenheimer, and occasionally they seemed tired. At such points the director yawned himself, out of carefulness, elegance, and politeness. " By the time of Pearl Harbor, Cukor was thus being written off as a docile contract director. No one knew at the time that he had two dozen more films in his system, and that he would manage to ride out the industrial convulsions that would eventually convert even mighty Metro into a mausoleum. Up to 1944 only James Stewart had won an Oscar in
a C ukor movie , and Stewart' s award for The Philadelphia Story was widely regarded as delayed compensation for his not getting an award for Mr. Sm ith Goes to Washington. But in the next twenty years Ingrid Bergman won for Gaslight , Ronald Colman for A Double Life, Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday, Rex Harrison and finall y Cukor himself for My Fair Lady, Cukor's collaboration with Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin led to seven of his brightest and most venturesome works: A Double Life, Adam's Rib, Born Yesterday, The Marrying Kind, Pat and Mike, Th e A ctress and It Should Happ en to You . Curiously, both Cukor with Greta Garbo on the set of Camille (/936). Born Y esterday and My Fair Lady were relatively stodgy, ov erblo w n wani ), Sophi a Loren ( H eller) , Jane works like Romeo and J uliet (1936) and Fonda and Claire Bloom (Chapman), and Edward, My Son (1949). By contrast, e ven Maggie Smith in Travels. Admore conventionally plotted movies like vanced film scholars solemnly debated A Life of Her Own and The Model and The the stylistic contrasts between Cukor Marriage Broker revealed a new virtuosity and Minnelli. Doctoral theses were subin establishing mood and ensemble inmitted on the treatment of transvestism terplay despite the glamorously superfiin Cukor (Sylvia Scar/eft, Adam's Rib) and ciallead performances of Lana Turner Hawks (Bringing Up Baby, I M arried a and Jeanne Crain respectively. Male War Bride). But after My Fair Lady the old box-office magic was completely Cukor's association with special color gone, and the bleached bones of The adviser George Hoyningen-Huene beBlue B ird were chewed up b y the gan with A Star Is Born in 1954. This bottom-line vultures. achievement in dazzling wide-screen modernist compositions prompted a critic for Cahiers du Cinema to declare: "A DIRECTOR IS BORN! " With his first color film (and Judy Garland, James Mason , and Harold Arlen besides), Cukor left behind the old black-and-white studio tradition of the Thirties and Forties, and became a critically chic director for the Fifties and Sixties and (in some quarters at least) the Seventies with such chromatically delirious canvases as Bhowani Junction , Les Girls, H eller in Pink Tights, The Chapman Report, Travels With My Aunt, and Love Among the Ruins. And suddenly Cukor unveiled a very imaginative form of sensuality in the suggestive performances of Ava Gardner (Bho-
It is no wonder that Cukor was cool to me. I probably represented all the wellmeaning amateurs of Academe who had come to embalm him with admiration while he was still trying to line up one more big project. For my own part, I may have once overrated Cukor-and I apologize for this act of critical overcompensation-but it is well and good that most of the voices that ridiculously underrated him are now forever silent. The Film Society of Lincoln Center has made an unusuall y perceptive move in choosing to honor George Cukor, Dialogue Director Extraordinary, and yet discoverer also of the magical spaces around the actors on the screen. ~ 45