George Cukor's People by Joseph McBride

George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director

by Joseph McBride

Columbia University Press 2025

For reasons escaping human comprehension, Columbia University Press brought out Joseph McBride's new book, George Cukor's People:Acting for a Master Director, in the great gap, the Romulan Neutral Zone, the void stretching between the end of one year and the beginning of another, existing in a weird state of quantum indeterminacy where the book has a late December 2024 publication date on Amazon but an early January 2025 publication date on CUP's website. Not that such confusion will largely matter, since both release periods are veritable kisses of death, set after all the 2024 reviews and 'best of' lists have long since concluded but before the collective hangovers of every publisher, editor, and publicist have begun to abate. McBride, a film historian and professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, has written a cracking good book here, the latest in Columbia's “Film and Culture” series (which includes, among other things, Debashree Mukherjee's excellent Bombay Hustle), and if the Graces are kind, the critical world will actually notice that fact.

There's a grubby little irony connecting the book's timing to the book's subject, since Cukor frequently whined about being trapped in a kind of void himself (as McBride notes, he pleaded backstage with Sidney Poitier in 1968 as Poitier was about to go onstage to accept Katharine Hepburn's Oscar for Cukor's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, “Would you tell them who I am?”). And it's partly true, at least among film snobs: he's often been seen as a cog in Hollywood's old studio system, a very talented cog, but hardly a ashtray-hurling firebrand enfant terrible.

McBride, bless him, is no film snob, is in fact a prolific writer and gifted film teacher, and he naturally defends his subject on such charges, contenting that “although his detractors often use his long and mostly happy work at MGM, RKO, and other studios as proof of their claim that he was more a product of 'the genius of the system' than an artist with a personal vision ... Cukor transcended the label of journeyman by making the system work in his favor.” He won his only Academy Award for My Fair Lady, but Cukor also directed half a dozen other movies that are universally acknowledged as Hollywood classics, including Dinner at Eight, Camille (with a once-iconic performance by Greta Garbo), Holiday, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star is Born (featuring an equally-iconic performance by Judy Garland), and a couple of Marilyn Monroe vehicles that could easily have been painfully disastrous if they hadn't known that's what they were, as they certainly wouldn't have known, in the hands of a less self-effacing director, although that doesn't save them in McBride's estimate, since he says they were “shabby and unworthy” of both Monroe and Cukor. But since he also describes Cukor's absolutely wonderful 1979 remake of The Corn is Green as “relatively routine” and his dodgy, slightly dyspeptic 1975 team-up of Hepburn and Olivier, Love Among the Ruins, as a “masterpiece,” readers will quickly learn the page-turning joy of disagreeing with this writer.

Cukor's People positively shines with such argument-starting judgements, which more than compensates for the book's somewhat patchy presentation. McBride has opted for an episodic film-by-film approach, with Sylvia Scarlett getting one chapter, Pat and Mike getting another, and so on. This is perfect for a browser, although it'll naturally be less satisfying to readers looking for a narrative overview of Cukor's evolution as an artist, far, far less his actual personal biography (for this, readers will probably still need to repair to Patrick McGilligan's dishy but accurate book from 30 years ago). Readers will get a great deal more insights about Cary Grant or, particularly, Katharine Hepburn (who's very much in character here by upstaging the entire book) than they will about the book's putative poor little acid-tongued wallflower subject.

There are some odd digressions lodged here and there throughout the book, anecdotes that maybe-possibly spring from the matter under discussion but usually never quite manage to circle back to it. When discussing Cukor's (and one of Hollywood's) greatest movies, The Philadelphia Story, for instance, McBride touches on the caustic way one character refers to Hepburn's icy character Tracy Lord as “virginal” and launches off from there to Camelot:

When I asked a friend who covered the Kennedy White House for the Wall Street Journal if he and his fellow reporters knew of the president's philandering and why they did not write about it, he said they did know but let it go unreported because they were told by the White House press office simply that 'Jackie is frigid.' That was enough, the reporters said, to stop them from writing about her husband's carrying-on.

OK, if you say so.

Cukor kept working until just a couple of years before he died in 1983, and although McBride is excellent on every stage of this director's long career, he's particularly gentle and winning when writing about Cukor's later work. “Cukor's adventurousness and adaptability in his old age was the happy byproduct of his lifelong resilience in the face of turmoil and changing times,” he writes, and he gives some of those winter works wonderfully fresh appraisals. And who knows? Maybe it's time to give Love Among the Ruins another viewing.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News