The director of classic films such as Sylvia Scarlett, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam’s Rib, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady, George Cukor is widely admired but often misunderstood. Reductively stereotyped in his time as a “woman’s director”—a thinly veiled, disparaging code for “gay”—he brilliantly directed a wide range of iconic actors and actresses, including Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Maggie Smith. As Katharine Hepburn, the star of ten Cukor films, told the director, “All the people in your pictures are as goddamned good as they can possibly be, and that’s your stamp.”
In this groundbreaking, lavishly illustrated critical study, Joseph Mc Bride provides insightful and revealing essayistic portraits of Cukor’s actors in their most memorable roles. The queer filmmaker gravitated to socially adventurous, subversively rule-breaking, audacious dreamers who are often sexually transgressive and gender fluid in ways that seem strikingly modern today. Mc Bride shows that Cukor’s seemingly self-effacing body of work is characterized by a discreet way of channeling his feelings through his actors. He expertly cajoled actors, usually gently but sometimes with bracing harshness, to delve deeply into emotional areas they tended to keep safely hidden. Cukor’s wry wit, his keen sense of psychological and social observation, his charm and irony, and his toughness and resilience kept him active for more than five decades in Hollywood. George Cukor’s People gives him the in-depth, multifaceted examination his rich achievement deserves.
Tabella dei contenuti
Introduction: Is George Cukor an Auteur? And Why Does That Matter?
1. Lew Ayres in All Quiet on the Western Front and Holiday
2. Fredric March and Ina Claire in The Royal Family of Broadway
3. Kay Francis in The Virtuous Sin and with Lilyan Tashman in Girls About Town
4. Lowell Sherman in What Price Hollywood?
5. Katharine Hepburn and John Barrymore in A Bill of Divorcement
6. John Barrymore and Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight
7. Katharine Hepburn in Little Women; the Ensemble of David Copperfield
8. Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Sylvia Scarlett
9. Greta Garbo in Camille
10. Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Holiday
11. Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Hattie Mc Daniel, and Butterfly Mc Queen in Gone with the Wind
12. Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Fontaine in The Women
13. Joan Crawford in Susan and God with Rita Quigley and in A Woman’s Face
14. Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story
15. Ingrid Bergman and Angela Lansbury in Gaslight
16. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib with Judy Holliday and in Pat and Mike
17. Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, The Marrying Kind with Aldo Ray, and It Should Happen to You with Jack Lemmon
18. Thelma Ritter and Company in The Model and the Marriage Broker
19. Spencer Tracy and Jean Simmons in The Actress
20. Judy Garland and James Mason in A Star Is Born
21. Ava Gardner in Bhowani Junction, Kay Kendall in Les Girls, and Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn in Heller in Pink Tights
22. Marilyn Monroe in Let’s Make Love and Something’s Got to Give
23. Claire Bloom, Jane Fonda, Glynis Johns, and Shelley Winters in The Chapman Report
24. Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady
25. Anna Karina and Dirk Bogarde in Justine
26. Maggie Smith, Alec Mc Cowen, Lou Gossett, Robert Stephens, and Cindy Williams in Travels with My Aunt
27. Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen in Rich and Famous
28. Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier in Love Among the Ruins
Acknowledgments
Filmography
Notes on Sources
Index
Circa l’autore
Joseph Mc Bride is a film historian and a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg; three books on Orson Welles; and critical studies of Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and the Coen Brothers. He acted for Welles in
The Other Side of the Wind and has won a Writers Guild of America award.
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