The Books of My Life: George Cukor

Gene Phillips in his book George Cukor (Twyane Filmmakers Series, Boston: Twayne, 1982), argues that director George Cukor, the director of 50 feature films between 1930 and 1981, is an auteur, a conductor of filmmaking collaborators.  For Phillips Cukor is an auteur-conductor because the vast majority of his films are characterised by a common theme--that it is dangerous to get lost in fantasy worlds--a common visual style--camera work that is creative and innovative and cinematographic, something critics of Cukor said Cukor's films were not--and a common mise-en-scène strategy in which what is within the Cukor frame helps tell the narrative tale Cukor is telling.

In order to study Cukor's feature films, Phillips groups Cukor's feature films into five categories: two categories of adaptations--one theatrical and one literary--two categories that revolve around the films he did with leading female actors of his era--films he did with leading ladies such as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford,  Judy Holliday, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Anna Magnani, and Sophia Loren, and films he did with Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and Hepburn and Tracy--and, finally those films he directed in one Hollywood genre, the musical. While I understand the logic of Phillips grouping Cukor's films into five categories for analytical purposes, these groupings seem to me to distort the historical contexts of Cukor's films, require unnecessary repetition, and lead to overlap between the categories raising, in the process, questions about the logic of the organisation itself. Cukor's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel Little Women, for instance, a film one would logically assume Phillips would place in the literary adaptations group, is instead placed in the theatrical category for reasons that are arguable, at least to me.

Phillips's book on Cukor seemed to me, as I was reading it, rather chatty. It seemed to me to be a kind of film scholar version of the TV show meets promotion for Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, or akin to one of the film magazines of the classic era of the studio system that served as promotional venues for Hollywood spiced up, as it is, with reflections on the brilliance of Cukor films, the brilliant performances Cukor got out of his actors, and comments by actors on what an education and a joy it was to work with Cukor. This promotional aspect of Phillips's monograph seemed to me to undermine most, if not all, of the scholarly intent behind Phillips's approach to the films of George Cukor. In the end, I thought that Phillips's book would have made a much better article tightly focused on Cukor's themes, his use of the camera, and his mise-en-scène, rather than an almost 200 page book.