Veteran film writer McBride clearly esteems Cukor\u2019s \u201crich, multifaceted, deeply personal\u201d worldview as expressed in his oeuvre. He ascribes Cukor\u2019s masterful conveyance of nuance in human behavior, of subtext, to the director\u2019s own \u201cdouble life\u201d\u2014Cukor\u2019s outsider status as a \u201cpartially closeted\u201d gay man, a son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. McBride appraises Cukor\u2019s craft throughout his long career of working intimately with actors in dozens of films, finding themes and throughlines. Cukor elicited such landmark star turns as Greta Garbo in Camille (1936), Joan Crawford and others in The Women (1939), Judy Garland and James Mason in A Star Is Born (1954), and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam\u2019s Rib (1949), the \u201chigh tide of American sophisticated comedy.\u201d Indelible performances by Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (1964) reflect the \u201cseamless match of this Pygmalion-like director with his material\u201d in what McBride characterizes as Cukor\u2019s most personal film and the only film to win Cukor an Academy Award as Best Director. A career-long fascination with sexual unconventionality and gender fluidity culminated in Cukor\u2019s \u201clate journey of self-revelation\u201d and such camp turns as Maggie Smith in Travels With My Aunt (1972). Trained in theater, Cukor saw all \u201chuman interaction, and romance in particular, as a form of performance.\u201d Appropriate to the director\u2019s body of work, McBride examines Cukor\u2019s professional excellence by foregrounding the classic performances he was able to draw out from his famous actors. Although Cukor was \u201creductively stereotyped as a \u2018woman\u2019s director\u2019\u201d (code for gay), McBride offers strong evidence that he was in fact \u201cone of the finest actors\u2019 directors.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Veteran film writer McBride clearly esteems Cukor\u2019s \u201crich, multifaceted, deeply personal\u201d worldview as expressed in his oeuvre. He ascribes Cukor\u2019s masterful conveyance of nuance in human behavior, of subtext, to the director\u2019s own \u201cdouble life\u201d\u2014Cukor\u2019s outsider status as a \u201cpartially closeted\u201d gay man, a son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. McBride appraises Cukor\u2019s craft throughout his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1383,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}