RSS
 

Archive for the ‘DIRECTED BY George Cukor’ Category

Sylvia Scarlett

16 Jul

Sylvia Scarlett – directed by George Cukor. Grifter Romance. Unruly disguises rule. 90 minutes Black and White 1935.

★★★★★

I like all grifter dramas, stories about people gulling other people out of their eyeteeth. Here Cary Grant is the principal con-man, and of course he is first-class at it, and has a lot of fun bringing his good old English carnival shill energy into it.

He is aided and abetted by the great Joe August who filmed it and by the brilliant trick-writer John Collier who was one of the three adapters of Compton MacKenzie’s novel, and it runs well as we hook into Edmund Gwenn and his daughter disguised as his son, as escapees from consequences in France to the luckier shores of England where they fall under the tricky Grant and the dubious spell of a musical hall chanteuse sexpot Dennie Moore. To earn a quick buck they become travelling vaudevillians. Then Brian Aherne turns up to derail the scams by becoming the object of the love interest of Katharine Hepburn, who up until this time is disguised as a boy. Her competition with Aherne is played by The Countess Natalia Pavlovna Von Hohenfelsen (whose biography would make your hair curl or uncurl, depending.)

Well!!! – as Jack Benny so eloquently put it.

The conglomeration travels on unexpected tracks at the start, and this is welcome – but, when romance insists on elbowing in, the movie looses it fascination, energy, imagination, and fun, and turns routine.

What is not routine is Katharine Hepburn as a hobbledehoy! For as a boy she is quite different than what she appears to be as a girl. As a boy she is quite convincing. As a girl she is quite unconvincing. As a boy she is swift, daring, direct, and true. And you really believe she is a boy. As a girl she is arch, sentimental, coy, extravagant, and meretriciously phony. You never believe in her at all. As a boy uninterested in romance, you swallow her whole. As a girl making goo-goo eyes she is a wretched fraud.

So when is she acting?

And when is she just playacting?

And why?

As a boy, Sylvester Scarlett, she delivers one of the greatest acting performances ever laid down on screen.

As a girl, Sylvia Scarlett, she gives one of the worst.

Don’t miss it. Hepburn was one of the great personalities of The Twentieth Century and one of the great things. The movie has a bunch of rewards and the biggest one is Hepburn acting more naturally as a male than any other male in the movie.

 
Comments Off on Sylvia Scarlett

Posted in 1930s, ACTING STYLE: ENGLISH COMEDIC, CAMERAMAN: Joseph August, Cary Grant: Screen God, DIRECTED BY George Cukor, Edmund Gwenn, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Katharine Hepburn, ROMANTIC COMEDY

 

Pat and Mike

26 Jul

Pat and Mike – directed by George Cukor. Comedy. A third rate sports promoter takes on a multitalented female athlete, who has a jinx. 95 minutes Black and White 1952.

★★★★

Two things must be remembered about Katharine Hepburn. The first is that she is the type for the personality actress. The second is that, as Mildred Dunnock said of her, her talent grew with time. Indeed, she is the only film actress of her era of whom this can be said. It is not just that she was a careerist par excellence, or that she became an American institution and went on acting into her eighties; it was also that she became interested in developing her gift; so that she took on the great classical roles, Hecuba in Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Desdemona in Othello, Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Mad Woman of Chaillot, Shaw’s The Millionairess, and Albee’s A Delicate Balance. No other film actress of her era entered or even touched upon the classical drama. Bette Davis performed The Night Of The Iguana badly, but that was it. Hepburn performed The Glass Menagerie badly but she also performed Suddenly Last Summer superbly. She made relatively few movies considering her longevity, for, unlike all the other female film stars, she never left the live theatre. Just before making this picture, she launched into her series of Shakespeare comedies with the longest female role in the cannon, Rosalind in As You Like It. In it she showed off her terrific legs and they are well on view here as she plays a twin-threat athlete. Hepburn had been a champion golfer as a teenager and took up tennis when she came to Hollywood. She was a natural athlete and physically fearless. She breezes across the campus with a change of clothes in her hands and leaps across the back of her boyfriend’s convertible and ducks down to change her duds — remarkable! But she is deeply co-dependent to this boyfriend, who jinxes her whenever he appears at her competitions, although one senses it was part of her nature, a substitute for sex, in which she was not interested. So she weeps and it plays as self-pity, and is an error she makes throughout her career. When she is supposed to fall in love with a man, a very entertaining Spencer Tracy in this case, she gets gooey, another error. Or she gets dreamy, as Alice Adams. She is not only repellent, but worse, she is unconvincing. Their screen duets were, except for the first, Woman Of The Year, not based on sex. In fact sex was probably not an important ingredient in their relations off-screen either. Their chemistry is the chemistry of perfect human dove-tailing. And you find it, not in their romantic scenes but in their playing. In actual life they spent relatively little time together. She was off on her career, coming back to him for occasional rescue operations, but spending most of her time on the East coast. (She never had a Hollywood home.) But she is a great personality actress. She had a peculiar voice and accent and a face like none other. She had a strong sense of delivery and physical ease and authority. She had too many identifiable traits for her ever to be called a character actress, but there is nothing wrong with that. She had an honesty and forthrightness that was admirable and appealing. She could level with you like no one else. She was the top flight high comedienne of film of her era. She was too particular and too peculiar to be able to submerge herself into parts that required strong disguise, accents, or traits not her own, as evidenced in Dragon Seed. But she was a great and unique energy, with a talent that she sought to develop all her life. She never sought to play heavies or villainesses. She chose roles with noble outcomes. She was aware of her public in terms of what she was willing to bring to them, and not bring to them, and the public respected her for it. It is idle to complain that she is only playing herself. It would be more correct to say that she is playing herselves. She was not a great actress at all, but in acting she was great many times and many times over. She was always what she set out to become, fascinating. She was a great Thing. She was the only one who lasted.

 

 
Comments Off on Pat and Mike

Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Aldo Ray, DIRECTED BY George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn, Light Comedy, MASTER CINEMA-PHOTOGRAPHER: William Daniels, Spencer Tracy, SPORT

 

Adam’s Rib

20 Jul

Adam’s Rib – directed by George Cukor. Comedy. Married lawyers on opposite sides of an attempted murder case. 101 minutes Black and White 1949.

★★★★

It feels as though ten years go by between this and The State Of The Union, whereas it was only 10 months. Once again Tracy and Hepburn are married, and once again Sydney Guilaroff has done Hepburn’s hair to perfectly suit her profession. But she is badly costumed once again by Walter Plunkett, who as in Sea Of Grass, can’t seem to get Hepburn right, and her hats are awful. But that’s not the trouble. The story is just fine – Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin wrote it. It’s the execution that’s flat. Mind you, the film was a top money-maker, but if you compare it to The State Of The Union what’s clear as a bell is that Frank Capra is a lot of fun as a director and George Cukor is not much fun at all. So it is the story that carries the film, rather than the way it is told, and it is certain set pieces in the script – the scene with the hat in the middle of the bedroom on a chair, while each of them is off camera getting dressed and talking, a Lubitsch touch and a nice one. Hope Emerson picking up Tracy and waving him about like an American flag is hard to swallow and not really funny since it demeans the character. Cukor’s sense of pace is lax: the country scene on the home movies goes on too long. And David Wayne as the swain next door is a pain in the neck; that he plays the character for all it’s worth only exposes its worth. A comic force in the structure carries the picture, rather than the acting, which is convincing but wanting in eccentricity. This is particularly true of Hepburn, whose movement lacks limberness. I seem to be crabbing about a film which has its talent to please. It brings to the screen Judy Holliday in her first film role, but she was a one-note actress, the note being a whine. Tom Ewell is an unlikely bit of casting as a two-timing wife-beater, but he works out very well indeed, as does the great Jean Hagen, as his doxy. But I still have to crab. Cukor has no sense of crowd scenes, no energy for court-room drama, which is what this film is. His court scenes feel as though he were filming a postcard. What he is good at is two-scenes, and those between Tracy and Hepburn are pretty good, while the scene between Hepburn and Holliday is absolutely terrific – not because of Holliday but because of the focus Hepburn bestows on her. Cukor likes two-scenes to run long, which is one of their virtues, but he has no sense of pacing them with other sorts of scenes; although the script-writers give them to him, he doesn’t seem to know how to handle them differently or imaginatively. Of course, he became Hepburn’s house director; she did many films with him – perhaps because she fascinated him, perhaps because she guaranteed work, perhaps because he let her do as she pleased.

 
Comments Off on Adam’s Rib

Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Clarence Kolb, DIRECTED BY George Cukor, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Hope Emerson, Judy Holliday, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Tom Ewell, Upper Class Romantic Comedy

 

Keeper Of The Flame

10 May

Keeper Of The Flame – directed by George Cukor. WW II Melodrama. A gigantic American hero dies and a foreign correspondent tries to uncover the truth about him through questioning his wife.

★★★

To say George Cukor was a so-so director is not to stretch the bounds of praise. He had no sense of narrative proportion. He so loved the beauty and truth of actresses that he lumbered his films with scenes lengthened to glamorize them. For he loved women. What he did not love was men and women. He had no sense of the sexual energy between them, and you will find that most of his films are not about mating. This one certainly is not. So, as a follow-up of Woman Of The Year, by a director who certainly loved men and women, George Stevens, it is a baffling folly. However, in glamorizing Katharine Hepburn it is a triumph – one she carries admirably. With her carved visage, slim figure, and large hands, she is a goddess, not in the sense of a deity but in the sense of something carved out of stone. Indeed she enters the film draped by Adrian, in white like sculpture. It is one of the great opening scenes for an actress ever shot. And that is because the great William Daniels is filming it, lighting it, and choosing the floor-up angle to exalt it. The creator of Garbo in silents and sound, he is a photographer who could make every movie he shot look like a concerto. You’re not consciously aware of it, but each scene in the picture becomes alive and important because he is filming it to make it look like a Greek Tragedy. Which Greek Tragedy? The one in which, as E.B. Browning once said, Cassandra smells the slaughter in the bathroom. It is pointless to expatiate now how this picture could be improved (only to warn the viewer parenthetically that the idea of a fascist threat inside America during WW II was hooey). What one can say is that Hepburn plays all her scenes quietly, her cheeks held still, her sometimes grating volatility left outside the door. She exudes a convincing, mysterious and necessary calm. Excellent is what she is. And for that we can credit Cukor. Spencer Tracy plays the world-famous reporter, her part in Woman Of The Year, and again he is up against Hepburn’s devotion to a cause greater than anything that could lie between them. As in Woman Of The Year with Dan Tobin, she is almost under the control of her assistant Richard Whorf. Both men are played as fruits, which confuses their treachery with their sexual orientation, a combination which is truthful to neither. Are we supposed to hate fruits because they are treacherous or hate traitors because they are fruits? You see the absurdity of the matter. A strong supporting cast is put to abuse; Frank Craven as the doctor, Stephen McNally as the investigative journalist, Margaret Wycherly as the balmy mother of the great man, Howard Da Silva as the doorkeeper whom he saved and who hates him, Percy Kilbride as the smug yokel, Forrest Tucker as the great big jock, Donald Meek as the meek little hotel manager, and Audrey Christie as the newspaper dame whose sexual sallies tell us Tracy is not interested in women of any kind at all. During production, Hepburn and Donald Ogden Stewart the adapter fought badly over this story’s treatment and she won. Too bad. She fancied herself as a writer, but if you read her autobiography, you can see she was not one at all. As with Summertime and other ventures, her interference in the area of story are almost always wrong. It comes out of her desire to control, also known as, wanting to make things better, but in her case it springs from a fear at no place evident in this fine performance, which ends with one of the longest monologs ever to be given to the temptation of an actress to venture out upon. As she emerges from the shadows to do it, Tracy retreats into them. And William Daniels, quite right, has his way.

 
Comments Off on Keeper Of The Flame

Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Audrey Christie, DIRECTED BY George Cukor, Donald Meek, DRAMA, Forrest Tucker, Frank Craven, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Howard Da SIlva, Katharine Hepburn, Margaret Wycherly, MELODRAMA, MURDER MYSTERY, Percy Kilbride, PERSONAL DRAMA, POLITICAL DRAMA, Stephen McNally, TURGID MELODRAMA

 
 
Rss Feed Tweeter button Facebook button Technorati button Reddit button Myspace button Linkedin button Webonews button Delicious button Digg button Flickr button Stumbleupon button Newsvine button