Cukor and Collaboration: Subjective Displacement in America’s Postwar Years

Abstract

Abstractions explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained: there are no such things as universals, there's nothing transcendent, no Unity, subject (or object), Reason; there are only processes, sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just processes all same. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations The artist is man without content, who has no other identity than a perpetual emerging out of nothingness of expression and no other ground than this incomprehensible station on this side of himself. Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content Please recall that wonderful night on veranda / Amanda. Cole Porter, Farewell, Amanda (Music and Lyrics from Adam's Rib) IF THERE IS SOME SENSE OF A COLLABORATIVE AUTEUR in American director George Cukor's extensive filmography, pundits might agree that such collaboration arguably reached a kind of apogee when director teamed up with husband-and-wife screenwriting duo of Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon World War II. Starting in 1946, and for next seven years, such memorable films as A Double Life (1947), Adam's Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), and Pat and Mike (1952), to name only high points, were stellar results of this extraordinary artistic alliance. In first part of this essay devoted to Cukor, I shall focus attention especially upon second of these titles because another element of collaboration becomes further foregrounded in Cukor's middle period: great acting duo of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Already well-known from their first appearance together in director George Stevens's hit film Woman of Year seven years earlier, Hepburn/Tracy duo would appear only to heighten Cukor's participant relationship with his that, according to Robert Emmet Long, a creative collaboration, just as it was with technical team he employed--designers and cameramen [and screenplay writers]--who were among best in their field and gave his movies their romantic gloss, warmth, and excitement (xii; further on 45, 56, 70). An entire directorial career spent working within the Hollywood system at beck and call of various autocratic movie moguls could have felt considerably oppressive to Cukor. And yet in a late interview granted to Peter Bogdanovich in 1983, Cukor admits: I've found I can function in this climate; technically, one is bedazzled here [because] [t]here is a spirit about malting pictures in Hollywood--everybody really involved--that I like so much. I may be sentimental about this ... but I think [that vitality] still exists to some extent (469-70, emphasis in original). Later, in second part of essay, I shall turn to Hepburn and Tracy's very first pairing together in aforementioned Stevens vehicle filmed during war years (1942). There, my purpose shall be to contrast rather more singular vision of Stevens's brand of Hollywood filmmaking when set beside Cukor's unique collaborative style to reveal just how controversial filmic collaboration might be in America's intrawar and postwar climate, for, according to Paul Cronin, Stevens vehement that director retain absolute control of his work and be able to affect every element of a film's production, Observes Cronin further: Always anxious to assert his rights as a director, something he did no matter whose feathers were ruffled in process, Stevens never hesitated to ensure he had everything needed to construct precisely film he wanted ... Stevens's friend, director Joseph Mankiewicz, explains that after actors were gone, technicians were gone, there was nothing left but George and his film ... And that's why malting of films, I thought, for George was a very private, personal thing, (xi, emphasis added) (1) Clearly, controversy surrounding collaboration makes a very clear separation between two quite disparate approaches to American filmmaking last century. …