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George CukorHollywood Master

Edited by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer

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£19.99

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About this book

A critical analysis of the films and career of George Cukor

One of the studio era’s most famous and admired directors, George Cukor made some of American cinema’s most beloved classics, including The Women, Gaslight, Adam’s Rib, A Star is Born, and My Fair Lady. Not himself a scriptwriter, he was particularly adept at choosing which properties to adapt and then managing the adaptation process with verve and skill. But 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, all written by prominent experts in their field, provide a series of complementary answers to those questions.

Although responsible for many of the films that came to define an era, Cukor himself has received surprisingly little critical attention. With a theatrical style successfully transferred from his Broadway career, Cukor was still 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.

Offering a critical discussion of every feature film Cukor directed, and including a rich trove of valuable information about their production histories, this is the first critical anthology devoted to one of the most celebrated figures from American cinema’s golden age.

Reviews

An MGM-style all-star cast of critics provide innumerable fresh insights into Cukor's rich and surprisingly varied career, his working methods and his signature subjects. The self-effacing Cukor believed in not calling attention to his craft, but he would have appreciated the sophistication and nuance with which these scholars illuminate his achievements.Professor Matthew Bernstein, Emory College of Arts and Sciences
Table of contents
Acknowledgements; Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage: Dinner at Eight, No More Ladies, The Women, and The Marrying Kind, Maureen Turim; George Cukor’s Late Style: Justine, Travels With My Aunt, and Rich and Famous, James Morrison; Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names: It Should Happen to You, Les Girls, Camille, Romeo and Juliet, Dominic Lennard; The Cukor “Problem”: David Copperfield, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Robert B. Ray; 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; Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor: The Royal Family of Broadway, A Bill of Divorcement, A Double Life, Bhowani Junction, Michael DeAngelis; 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; 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; George Cukor’s Theatrical Feminism: Gaslight, Heller in Pink Tights, A Life of Her Own and A Star Is Born, Linda Ruth Williams; George Cukor: 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
About the contributors

Murray Pomerance

Murray Pomerance is an independent scholar living in Toronto and Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is the author of The Film Cheat: Screen Artifice and Viewing Pleasure (2020), Grammatical Dreams (2020), Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic (2019), A Dream of Hitchcock (2019), and Cinema, If You Please: The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory (2018), among many other volumes, and editor or co-editor of more than two dozen books including The Other Hollywood Renaissance (2020). He edits the “Horizons of Cinema” series at SUNY Press and the “Techniques of the Moving Image” series at Rutgers. A Voyage with Hitchcock and Color It True: Impressions of Cinema are both forthcoming.

R. Barton Palmer

R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature Emeritus at Clemson University. He is the author, editor, or general editor of many books including Hollywood’s Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir (1994), After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality (2006), and A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film (2011). He is the series editor for EUP’s traditions in World Cinema, Traditions in American Cinema and International Film Stars series, and he is co-editor of five recent EUP books: Michael Mann, George Cukor, Film Noir, International Noir and The Other Hollywood Renaissance.