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On a related topic:
What Price Hollywood? (2024)
Gender and Sex in the Films of George Cukor
Subject: Director > George Cukor
George Cukor (2015)
Hollywood Master
Dir. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer
Subject: Director > George Cukor
Moment of Action (2016)
Riddles of Cinematic Performance
George Cukor's People
Acting for a Master Director
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Book Presentation:
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 McBride 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. McBride 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.
About the Author:
Joseph McBride 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.
Press Reviews:
Enlightening . . . McBride offers shrewd insight into Cukor’s approach to filmmaking . . . Film buffs will find plenty of food for thought. Publishers Weekly
Joseph McBride is a natural resource, one whose unique approach to film analysis combines first-person witness, deep study of the context and history of the Hollywood production system, and an uncanny recall for the details and essence of a director’s mise-en-scène. Here, his keen and affectionate "actors-first" approach to his subject echoes Cukor's own elusive, sensitive style, forming a portrait made of portraits of others. As ever with McBride, you'll be driven to seek out films you've never even wondered about and to reencounter others that you recall only as passing dreams. Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel
An enticing idea—examining the work of a pantheon director through the iconic performances that adorn his films—is dazzlingly manifested here by singular film historian Joseph McBride. McBride’s fresh take on George Cukor gifts us with lively looks at his work with actors both celebrated (Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe) and less so (Lew Ayres, Fredric March, Hattie McDaniel). And he reminds us that Cukor—too often dismissed as tasteful, amusing, but lightweight—was in fact an artist of extraordinary depth, virtuosity, and understanding. Julie Kirgo, essayist and film historian
This is one of the best books in McBride's distinguished career, and a book that Cukor has long deserved. Critics have often described Cukor as an "actor’s director," but nobody has done so much as McBride to analyze what the term means. He is a first-rate critic—sensitive, forthright, and eloquent. James Naremore, author of Some Versions of Cary Grant
For too long, Cukor's reputation has been as a studio-bound "woman’s director." Au contraire, as McBride shows us in his definitive study, which combines personal reminiscences of Cukor with a masterly analysis of his films, Cukor was an adventurous and modern filmmaker—plumbing depths in stories and performances, always visually resourceful and imaginative. Patrick McGilligan, author of George Cukor: A Double Life
See the publisher website: Columbia University Press
See the complete filmography of George Cukor on the website: IMDB ...
> From the same author:
The Whole Durn Human Comedy (2022)
Life According to the Coen Brothers
Subject: Director > Coen Brothers
What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (2022)
A Portrait of an Independent Career
Subject: Director > Orson Welles
What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (2006)
A Portrait of an Independent Career
Subject: Director > Orson Welles
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