Little Women

All the schools should teach this film, because you can see from the first frames that Cukor knows how to make a movie, and it’s as good as any. Cukor believes that directing means being direct. This gives him means whereby an action scene (a lapdog plunging onto the floor, a girl skidding on snow) registers itself simply, and when Jo March wants a moment of privacy, he is there with his camera already waiting. Time passing is a luxurious stretch in a sleepy actress, and drama is what thespians do. Cukor is there to record it as best he may, with his camera.

The acerbity of Alcott’s view of history, when it comes to the making of an artist (or its birth), has precisely the transparency always fancied by Cukor. The lighted screen full of images coming from somewhere you watch in a dark room, “it’s a system, girls,” as Moe Axelrod says.

David Copperfield

The Dickens epic displayed for all it’s worth, right down to the ground and building up into monumental images of enormous self-satisfaction, greed, monstrosity and their contraries.

Camille

Here is the basis of technique in Gaslight for the milieu in the opening shot and My Fair Lady for a unique inattention to anything that is not the actors except in the one pictorial shot at the gaming parlor, where the entire situation is exposed by means of composition. In a private room, Marguerite is humiliated (lower left), the scene is divided by an open doorway (right, top to bottom) in which Armand stands crowned by the chandelier in the background which may be said to figure in Karel Reisz’s The Gambler.

Cukor elsewhere situates his actors in front of the camera to do business, Greta Garbo and Lionel Barrymore are the acrobats and stars of this, Verdi is forgotten, each member of the cast is treated very attentively in various backgrounds toward which they extend like comets’ tails. This is especially notable in a gathering of the demimonde that resembles backstage life at The Blue Angel, they are floaters in a pool recognizable with Prudence as that of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Elles, the Baron sustains Marguerite but flees her sickness.

Armand is there every day, the diplomatic service awaits him, his father brushes aside the tender obstacle. Cukor’s attention to the facts of the drama in terms of dialogue spoken in settings as described is unwavering, a million associations are enkindled along the way, he lets them recede, sink back into the drama, like the marrons glacés of Cyrano de Bergerac ordered specially by Armand and never delivered.

The final scene is remembered by Fritz Lang in Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse.

A masterpiece admired in its day. If Little Women ought to be run in cinema schools, Camille is for artists.

Holiday

A brisk venture, droll and virtuous, played like a violin, “the padded cells of the well-to-do.”

The Women

Even if you imagine how funny women can be, conceived as a pure sex in a laboratory environment or bouncing like balls on green baize, you were better served to like them, although in the abstract they are devious, cunning, subtle, etc. The dithering world of an imagination unkept by any discourse, the plum of all puddings, the rational equivalent of a divorce filing read as comedy filler.

It’s a blisteringly hot comedy on the worm (Norma Shearer) turning, and in which Adrian rises to a diapason of increasing visual intensity. Fellini couldn’t touch it (nobody could), so he incorporated it as the foundation garment of Giulietta degli Spiriti.

The Philadelphia Story

Here you have all the makings of a critique, or a riposte to a critique, The Painted Word played out and run up the mast for an ensign. Even if you are not disabused, why, you have been invited.

Whether or not Macaulay Connor the Poet looks at Tracy Lord and really says (as it sounds), “That’s the blank unholy surprise of it,” the screenplay is of uncommon brilliance and justifies the ancient glory of a now-forgotten playwright.

Viridiana is a fine mocking analysis. When, in Cassavetes’ Big Trouble, Alan Arkin and Robert Stack enter the vault piled high with golden bric-à-brac and objets d’art, this is the “hock shop” referred to by James Stewart which the Lords “must be running” on that extensive sideboard.

The calm of Philip Barry’s elaborate, refined construction, which is one of the ingredients of Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice, is brought to bear on the performances with rich results. Connor must marry Liz (“Mrs. Joe Smith”), despite her pinchin’ from Uncle Willie. George Kittredge the Self-Made Man is sent empty away. Mr. and Mrs. Lord are simply parents. Dinah the Bridesmaid watches the Rape of Tracy in a comic anticipation of Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur, and delivers her punchline at the wedding, where Sidney Kidd of Spy must be reduced to taking snapshots.

C.K. Dexter Haven the Skipper, for whose aid and benefit Barry modernizes the Shakespearean villain as Kidd, must come safely to harbor.

Cukor’s Hollywood lighting is like the sun that shines on rich and poor alike. He finds sport in a couple of images: Tracy out of her Little Lord Fauntleroy pantsuit taking an elegant dive into the pool with that toy boat True Love; Uncle and Sis trotting off in a little pony cart.

Keeper of the Flame

A reportorial investigation à la Citizen Kane into the man behind the headlines is balked when the great man’s widow fails to cooperate. She’s rightly suspected of killing him, he was a Fascist with massive plans to take power, this fact is made known by the Press.

The reporter (Spencer Tracy), the great man’s greatest admirer, bears the same relationship to his colleagues as Huntley Haverstock in Foreign Correspondent. The widow (Katharine Hepburn) is first seen in white replacing chrysanthemums below her late husband’s glowering portrait.

Critics have had so much trouble with this that Cukor had to partially disavow it as a failure. Sarris in The American Cinema evidently has it confused with Capra’s Meet John Doe, for instance.

The apparatus of fame is identified with the work of advertising agencies, hero-worship with godlessness. France and Poland are specifically mentioned.

The technique is very close to Gaslight in luminous interiors with a special leaning to enigmatic views of foreground objects in the great man’s mansion gone out of focus.

A second theme is the utilitarian aspect of the political wife signified in several ways, the reporter gets a room at the crowded hotel by signing the register as a lady colleague’s husband, for example.

The debilitating effects of idolatry are medical and psychiatric. The great man’s mother is a fount of information, as far as it goes.

He wasn’t always a Fascist, the wife notes, he simply “changed”. The structure is acknowledged in Touch of Evil as a murder investigation mysteriously correct.

Gaslight

Dickinson’s witty original is largely stripped of its humor. The best analysis of the result was made by Polanski in two different ways, a very close study as Repulsion, and the larger scheme of Rosemary’s Baby. It will be observed that the theme is stood on its head in Repulsion, which absolutely clarifies the structure for the useful registration of certain effects, such as the oppressive ceiling.

A prima donna has been strangled, her niece takes up singing as well, unknowingly marries the pianist who murdered her aunt, and is persuaded by him that she’s losing her mind, while he rifles the attic each night for a set of crown jewels given the victim by an admirer.

The Italian music lesson in the shadow of the cathedral is a reconsideration of the scene in Naughty Marietta which gives birth to the song, “Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you.”

The estate agent opens the door at No. 9, Thornton Square. “That lock needs oiling.” The house is ten years vacant, the view is priceless, a narrow hallway, dark as gloom can be, a veritable hell of torments awaiting.

Cukor gives himself up wholeheartedly to the demands of this singular nightmare, compared to Little Women, for example, the style is photographic and exclusively governed by chiaroscuro, as will be seen in the morning freshness of Inspector Cameron’s rooms. Night and fog are the world of No. 9, in which the white gown, gloves and hat of the wife are like a cloud out of season. The saturation of darkness is correlated with a richness of attention to the period in costumes and décor, Cukor uncharacteristically is made to stand still, or sit in his director’s chair, rather than be ahead of his game in prompt movement, therefore he lades every shot with a permanence of aggravation, precisely what makes the nightmare.

On the other hand, it is thoroughly characteristic to find all the acting equally fine, according to its varying demands. The allegory is presently understood to be of the world war, and just as tenaciously of the artist.

A Double Life

When you talk about the Southey school of criticism, you have a Satanic vision of the Shakespearean villain, when he is a catalyst in truth for a consummation devoutly to be wished in the face of (in the case of Othello, another variant of King Lear, or vice versa) mere good manners.

Adam’s Rib

This Lear is very cool and very funny because, if truth be told, Shakespeare’s is cool and funny likewise, or so Yeats thought.

The technical competence of Cukor figures in two scenes: the 10-minute take of Judy Holliday’s jail interview, and the static camera on Tracy and Hepburn hurriedly dressing for dinner. A foreglimpse of the later Cukor might be seen in Holliday’s complicated response to her handiwork at the scene of the crime.

This is a benchmark production, and Cukor knows it. Any failure to rate it among cinema’s masterpieces would be a naïve delusion, or rather an inability to grasp or even perceive so vast a composition at one go, and a foxy cry of sour grapes.

At least part of the breadth and spaciousness of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? comes from a long consideration of its well-meditated gags at several points of congruence.

The idea that taking the law into your own hands is tasting Eden’s forbidden fruits must be considered among Garson Kanin & Ruth Gordon’s most elegant.

The Marrying Kind

The central gag of The Jerk is derived from this savage beating about the bush. Divorce Court is a comical place, an arena where the discourse of modern history rattles its way around the personality by daylight.

Pat and Mike

This is a streamlined version, a re-arrangement or re-composition of Woman of the Year featuring the same cast of characters re-grouped for a more successful analysis. David Raksin doesn’t have the trouble Franz Waxman had following the affair.

Nothing beats George Stevens’ implacable camera in long static takes (compare Wyler’s symphonic interludes), and it may be that Cukor’s lengthy golf games and tennis matches reflect this.

The first shot of Hepburn in Woman of the Year follows Tracy through the door where the camera sees her leg, then tilts up to take in the rest of her. When it gets to the top it bounces slightly and dips back down for her facial response seeing him. That bounce, if I’m not stretching the point, is everywhere in Pat and Mike, it’s a very fluid camera, or rather a lively one.

Where the analysis insists on clarifying the point is Hepburn’s rescue of Tracy from the thugs. The romance (the deal) is off, everything’s gotta be five oh five oh, and that’s when the major overhaul comes into play, turning the Gerald launched by Tracy into the Collier who wants to make Hepburn jollier. “Wrong jockey for this horse,” says Tracy, and what could be plainer?

Bhowani Junction

The opening sequence comprises many scenes and capitalizes on flashback and voiceover to compress an exhaustive treatment of social and political conditions in India toward the end of the Raj, a fact which makes incomprehensible some critical asseverations that such matters are dealt with insufficiently. The significance of the opening is furthermore the introduction of Col. Savage at the railway station giving a concise image of the British presence in India.

The immensity of the film is the major obstacle to understanding, though we have before us Henry King’s Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing as a clear precedent, giving the key of Bhowani Junction in the colonel’s departure from India and planned return, this time for love.

Cukor’s model for the vast scope of action and many details is Gone With the Wind. The finale in a railway tunnel cites The Third Man. Apart from these structural and strategic allusions are more succinct and fleeting evocations of The Rains Came in a rooftop dance and Anna Karenina in the heroine’s despair. China Seas and Ziegfeld Follies are advertised at a movie theater.

The only limitation evident from the studio’s re-cutting (as reported) is perhaps in two one-second inserts between the planting of dynamite on the railroad tracks and the scene of the wreckage. It is possible that Cukor’s control of the form might be fuller in his original cut.

It seems likely that critical imperception of Bhowani Junction impaired the reception of Justine, as critical errors always multiply until they are corrected. Cukor’s compositions favor the use of widescreen as an undefined field, articulated or not. The discussion of the colonel’s return to England takes place at night with a background of indeterminate receding columns, a slight change of angle placing the heroine against a lighted window on the left, as she explains that her home is India. Isolated elements appear in other shots governed by lighting.

The dynamic construction of scenes is characterized by Cukor’s enjoyment of the inner complexities of his film and by his sense of the overriding conclusion. Thus, the Sikh wedding takes a calmly realistic view of the ceremony and a revelatory close-up of the heroine as bride, followed by a vertical shot of the mandala-ceiling, and her withdrawal from the marriage.

Nowhere is Cukor’s felicity of invention more eloquent than in the railway strike. The long exposition has set forth the terms of this encounter, a daylight exterior at the station with crowds and troops and train. A voiceover supplies the final touch, the drama is set, and two surprises avert it, the colonel’s response and the heroine’s reaction.

The scene of the attempted rape by night has steam on the actors as a train crosses the low overpass, an effect from Renoir or Lang.

Lionel Jeffries as the lecherous junior officer is impeccable. Several of the performances have been noted, such as Bill Travers’ stationmaster and Abraham Sofaer’s Brahmin protester, for their brilliance, but none of the acting is less than brilliant. Ava Gardner is in a class by herself, owing to the combined work of makeup, hair, director and actress to present a visually stunning effect in her opening scenes as a counterpoint to the running narrative commentary. Stewart Granger’s sharp rendering of the colonel is beyond praise.

It all takes place as a conversational flashback aboard a train, like Buñuel’s Cet Obscur Objet du Désir. Godard in Cahiers du Cinéma named it among the ten best films released in France that year, with Welles’ Mr. Arkadin, Renoir’s Eléna et les hommes, Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Logan’s Bus Stop, Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet, Sternberg’s The Saga of Anatahan, Bresson’s Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, Rossellini’s Fear and Quine’s My Sister Eileen. British critics have been particularly reluctant to see its merits.

Cukor’s scene of the railway demolition begins after help has arrived, tilting down from the wrecked engine to bodies arrayed beside the tracks. The drama of the various characters is not lost in the monumental handling of the rescue, as the colonel urges the heroine (an Army lieutenant seconded to his station detachment) in her new white sari to do her duty, the stationmaster wields a crane to tear the roof from a burning railway car and jumps inside while hoses play over the flames, and the whole thing is filmed with sureness and authenticity.

Les Girls

The furious whirlwind of its manifestation does no harm, as Gene Kelly is carefully chosen for the part, swinging with its punches and barreling over its falls with a dapper grin.

Heller in Pink Tights

Ozu had an idea about actors, something about a locomotive stalled resembling a tea kettle on its flame. The local madness of a theatrical troupe in the painted desert, wending its way across tracks of waste in a wagon full of costumes, with Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren, from Louis L’Amour.

Something’s Got to Give

The remnant shows why Cukor did a remake of Kanin’s perfect comedy, My Favorite Wife, it was to have Charisse on her honeymoon night upstairs and Monroe in the swimming pool and Martin helpless in-between, a close study of style.

Even the other actors (Steve Allen, Phil Silvers, Wally Cox, John McGiver) respond extraordinarily to this arrangement and give unusual performances.

The hearing before Judge McGiver would appear to show Cukor’s known technique most evidently, if assembled by other hands.

Tom Tryon as “Adam” takes his flying leap not from the available high board but the prow of a power yacht nearby, surrounded with bathing beauties.

I, Claudius and Something’s Got to Give, fragments of unfinished works.