George Cukor Research Articles

INTERSECTIONAL OPPRESSIONS THROUGH LANGUAGE: CASE STUDIES IN RACE, GENDER AND CLASS IN TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD AND MY FAIR LADY

This study aims to investigate the impact of many dimensions on language use in Harper Lee’s To kill a mockingbird and George Cukor’s My fair lady. Regarding the first one, we distinctly focus on racially charged terminology, further exploring gender and class biases portrayed in the second one. Our methodology involves in-depth discourse analysis and critical examination of linguistic nuances, societal implications and narrative contexts within the works. The main hypothesis is that language acts as both a reflection and a catalyst for societal norms, playing a pivotal role in shaping perceptions, either for inclusivity or exclusion within specific communities.

Divismo, maturità e politica sessuale negli "Hollywood film" di Anna Magnani

In the 1950s Anna Magnani played an important role in the internationalization of European stardom, becoming the first Italian actress to win an Oscar in 1955. She was 46 years old and had reached international success at the age of 37. Related to the aesthetical concerns of Italian Neorealism, and considered a pioneer in modern representation of female psychology and desire, Magnani’s case puts into question the idea that, according to Edgar Morin, grace, beauty and youth are sine qua non conditions to become a star. Between 1955 and 1960 the actress participated in three Hollywood movies along with mentoring figures such as Tennessee Williams and producer Hal B. Wallis: The Rose Tattoo (Daniel Mann, 1955), Wild is the Wind (George Cukor, 1957) and The Fugitive Kind (Sidney Lumet, 1959). Magnani’s Hollywood films suggest a kind of tailor-made melodrama, concerned in documenting her unique performative style while Hollywood experiences a great renewal of dramatic patterns and acting models. These titles also share a common subject: a passionate mature woman in crisis who, attracted to a younger man, experiences a personal rebirth closely linked to the raise of her sexuality and desire. Through the analysis of these films and how they relate to Magnani’s stardom construction in the Italian postwar, this article investigates the role of the actress in the transit of the 1950s to the 1960s. A season of great transformations in world cinema in which Hollywood, apparently interested in documenting Magnani’s uniqueness, has probably ended up discussing some of the greatest taboos in classic movies: aging over women’s bodies, erotism between mature femininity and young masculinity, or the experience of sex and passion according to a female character who remains the subject of its own desire.

My Fair Lady Entre L’Egyptianisation Théâtrale et l’Adaptation Cinématographique

My Fair Lady Between Theatrical Egyptization and Film Adaptation 
 Adapting stage techniques to cinematic functioning is one of George Cukor's major challenges in his grandiose production of My Fair Lady. How then are the theatrical and the cinematographic structured and in what way do they structure in their turn Cukor's film masterpiece? And what meaning do they take? And how to get from a Bernard Shaw theatrical piece without a declaration of love, no dancing or sung scenes, a successful romantic and choreographic musical? And how has this musical been theatrically reproduced in Egyptian style so as to defy anything that seems a limit? Is it the Egyptianization of My Fair Lady was just a simple transposition from screen to stage, or does it retain a specific character that breaks with technical conventions intimately linked to the work of Bernard Shaw? These are the questions that this research will highlight and answer.

Helga Crane’s camera obscura: Nella Larsen, Garbo’s face, and the modernist longing for plot

ABSTRACT Through an examination of Nella Larsen’s repeated viewings of George Cukor’s 1936 film Camille, this paper argues that we must understand modernism’s troubling of realist Bildung within the context of the classical Hollywood cinema and its invocations of nineteenth-century literature. Starring Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor, Camille is based on the stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’s The Lady of the Camellias (1848), a novel critical of the Balzacian Bildungsroman, predicating the self-possessing, bourgeois individualism of its protagonist Armand Duval on the expulsion of the consumptive courtesan Marguerite Gautier. Cukor’s Camille, to the contrary, integrates Marguerite, through the legerdemain of classical Hollywood style, into a bourgeois liberal plot of social arrival and self-becoming. Larsen’s fascination with Cukor’s Camille offers a new way to read her first novel Quicksand (1928), not as a rejection of novelistic plot and its racialized promises of social belonging, but as a deeply vexed and ambivalent longing for it. Building on the speculative turn in the historiography of Black literature, film, and cinematic spectatorship–as well as recent work in asynchronic literary historiography–this essay suggests that it may have been a complicated form of desire and longing that brought Larsen again and again to Camille, since she would have been primed to detect the remarkable ease with which the film stylises out of existence the skepticism about Bildung that animated Dumas fils’s novel, and the resolute impossibility of Bildung that her own Quicksand so systematically laments.

English madrigals filmed

Somewhat surprisingly, given its reputation for pictorialism, the madrigal makes few appearances in cinema. The use of Thomas Morley’s Sing we and chant it and Now is the month of maying in George Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet (MGM, issued 1936, 125′) is fairly typical, performed diegetically as accompaniment to a dance, representing Shakespeare’s England rather than Renaissance Verona. Such nationalist orientation was evident early on, signposted by the appropriative title of Thomas Watson’s Italian madrigals Englished (1590), which championed Italian composers like Luca Marenzio and at the same time pointed the way forward by including two settings by William Byrd. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries madrigals were a standard part of the repertory of glee and catch clubs, and E. H. Fellowes’s 36-volume edition of The English madrigal school (London: Stainer and Bell, 1913–24) was born of the belief that the repertory represented ‘our finest School of national composition’. There is no doubting Fellowes’s enthusiasm, though the image of the madrigal has tarnished somewhat since. Kingsley Amis deftly skewered the eagerness of the genre’s supporters in his campus novel, Lucky Jim, first published in London in 1954, where the young lecturer Sam Dixon finds himself press-ganged into a weekend of madrigal singing: ‘“Of course, this sort of music’s not intended for an audience, you see”, Welch said as he handed the copies round. “The fun’s all in the singing. Everybody’s got a real tune to sing—a real tune”.’

Melodramatic Masculinity: Object Relations Theory in George Cukor's Keeper of the Flame (1942)

:This article offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of Keeper of the Flame (1942), George Cukor's melodrama pairing the legendary screen duo, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. I adopt Melanie Klein's object relations theory as a lens because this film addresses an idealized and paranoid infantile male fantasy of womanhood.

Queering the Cattle: Hitchcock and Performance

Queering the Cattle: Hitchcock and Performance Thomas Leitch (bio) Dan Callahan, The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xviii + 251 pp. $34.95 cloth. Considering the critical attention that has been lavished on so many aspects of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, the relative neglect of his collaborations with performers is as striking in its way as Hitchcock’s own well-documented neglect of performers who cried out in vain for more active direction. Doris Day despaired over her leading performance in the American remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much because Hitchcock “never said anything to me, before or during or after a scene, and I was crushed”; Thelma Ritter emerged from Rear Window with the wisdom that “if Hitchcock liked what you did, he said nothing. If he didn’t, he looked like he was going to throw up.”1 Apart from the anecdotes liberally sprinkled through Hitchcock’s biographies about the director’s relationships with the actors who brought his nightmares to life, critical studies of acting in Hitchcock include James Naremore’s penetrating chapters on Cary Grant’s performance in North by Northwest and on Rear Window as a performance text; Doug Tomlinson’s “‘They Should Be Treated Like Cattle’: Hitchcock and the Question of Performance”; Susan White’s essay “A Surface Collaboration: Hitchcock and Performance”; Carey Martin’s “The Master of Suspense and the Acrobat of the Drawing Room: How the Relationship of Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock Shaped Their Collaboration in Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest”; and Lesley L. [End Page 63] Coffin’s Hitchcock’s Stars: Hitchcock and the Hollywood Studio System.2 None of these contributions, not even the last, amounts to a compelling full-dress examination of acting in Hitchcock’s films. Now at long last Dan Callahan has undertaken to provide just such a study. He approaches his subject not as a Hitchcockian—his brief bibliography does not include any of these earlier books or essays, and he nods only rarely and briefly at previous Hitchcock scholarship—but as a highly regarded expert on Hollywood acting, the author of Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman (2012), Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave (2014), The Art of American Screen Acting, 1912–1960 (2018), and The Art of American Screen Acting, 1960 to Today (2019). The warm reception that has greeted all of these projects, especially the last two, would seem to make Callahan the logical candidate to write a definitive study of acting in Hitchcock’s films. Callahan enters a field in which he has only a few competitors with several notable advantages over them. His volume is extensive in its coverage, discussing every one of Hitchcock’s completed features from The Pleasure Garden to Family Plot. He displays an engaging zest for his subject, and his confident, intimate prose makes that zest infectious. Most important, he assumes from the start that acting for Hitchcock is an obvious subject for a monograph in a way that acting for George Cukor or Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino would not be. This is partly because of the contempt for performers Hitchcock communicated in his famous pronouncement, “Actors are cattle,” which was scarcely mitigated by his elaboration years later: “I would never say such an unfeeling, rude thing about actors at all. . . . what I probably said was that all actors should be treated like cattle” (quoted in Callahan ix). Instead of concurring or registering ritual disapproval of the director’s famous remark, Callahan shrewdly contextualizes it: He made his “actors are cattle” statement because the [stage-trained] English actors he was working with in [End Page 64] the 1930s, like John Gielgud, who starred in Secret Agent (1936), and Michael Redgrave, who was the lead in The Lady Vanishes (1938), treated movie work too lightly. . . . Gielgud didn’t take Hitchcock’s movie thrillers as seriously as he did his Shakespeare, and this hurt and annoyed Hitchcock. (xiv) Callahan is equally deft in distinguishing between what might be called actors’ cinema, which seeks to evoke emotions by presenting them explicitly, especially in the “‘big scenes for players” that were “anathema” to “Hitchcock’s approach” (94), and...

Veronica Pravadelli, Classic Hollywood: Lifestyles and Film Styles of American Cinema 1930–1960

This book by Veronica Pravadelli is an impressive undertaking, which effectively confronts critical approaches to classical Hollywood. Its core aim – ‘to historicize classical American cinema’s modes of representation’ (p. 5) – most directly challenges David Bordwell et al.’s essential theory of a classical form and style that consistently framed an era spanning six decades to 1960. Pravadelli audaciously tackles the limitations of this foundational position, exploring through a myriad theoretical approaches the shifting contexts of social norms, attitudes and definitions of identity that, she argues, play out in cinematic forms that are often the antithesis of classicism. The chapters providing the most convincing support for Pravadelli’s assertion are those that explore 1930s Hollywood cinema, in which she argues that the decade can be defined by a first half acutely tied to notions of spectacle founded in early cinema, and a second wherein the formalities of classicism take shape. Here, and throughout the book, the breadth and precision of the author’s arguments are consistently impressive as she draws them through historical context and close analysis of form, structure and style, making clear how the latter is born directly out of shifting cultural attitudes and social norms. Considering both the treatment of women as visual spectacle and the focus on female narratives in early 1930s cinema alongside the USA’s experience of modernity, she argues for a necessarily gendered reading of spectacle quite specific to this historical moment. Examining the opening imagery in George Cukor’s 1932 film What Price Hollywood? (a tale of film stardom predating his 1937 A Star is Born), which combines images of the lead character’s body with fan magazine photos and the character’s mirroring makeup routine, Pravadelli explains how the stylistic device of the ‘urban dissolve’ aims to position this budding star as a representative of dynamic, modern, urban womanhood and the cultural significance of Hollywood and its fandom. The precision of her analysis clearly outlines how stylistic devices, historical attitudes towards gender and the city, and the blossoming relationship between cinema and audience combine to demand highly specific readings of the position of spectacle during this period.

On Thomson's <em>Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio</em>

On Thomson’s Warner Bros:The Making of an American Movie Studio Stephen J. Whitfield Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio. By David Thomson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 220 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-19760-0 (hardcover). US $25.00. This sprightly volume is titled Warner Bros, not Warner Brothers, and the distinction is important. Although David Thomson has submitted an entry for Jewish Lives series, his book traces the history of a company—Hollywood studio Warner Bros.—and the legacy it gave moviegoers. The collective biographical portrait of Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack is rather sketchy when contrasted with the author’s analysis of films like Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), or with his account of the contribution made by Darryl F. Zanuck (the chief of production in the 1920s and early 1930s—and incidentally a Gentile) to the success of the studio. Though commerce and art are entwined in all sorts of intriguing ways in the annals of American film, a paradox must be noted: Warner Bros is not—as the title hints—an addition to the field of business history. The careers and roles of stars like James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and Olivia de Havilland—all the way to Clint Eastwood—pique the author’s curiosity far more than front-office machinations or stockholder reports. Despite the rubric of Jewish Lives, the rationale for this lack of balance is obvious. Sam Warner died a few hours before the premiere of The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), the first sound movie, which made the studio’s reputation. [End Page 107] Sam basically disappears from the book by page 63. Treasurer Albert Warner was essentially a silent partner who lived uneventfully in New York. He died four decades after Sam, after spending the day at the race track (his chief pleasure) in Miami. That left Harry, the president of the company, an upright, solid citizen and a committed Jew, and Jack, who succeeded Zanuck and Hal B. Wallis as head of production. Jack Benny’s quip (“Jack Warner would rather make a bad joke than a good picture” [33]) isn’t quite fair; just think of The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), and Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967). But when Thomson conjectures that Jack may be “the biggest scumbag ever to get into a Jewish Lives series” (2), his inclusion on a list made lustrous by Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Primo Levi, and Rabbi Akiva isn’t the only reason Warner Bros belongs uneasily on the shelf of new releases from Yale University Press. The exact relation between the accountants and the artists in the evolution of Warner Bros. is not a subject Thomson tackles directly. The bottom line certainly had primacy. It could not have escaped the brothers that in making a dog known as Rin Tin Tin (who starred in twenty-seven silent films between 1923 and 1925) famous, they were getting a star who “never complained or got a lawyer or an agent” (69). At virtually the same moment, the studio lost Ernst Lubitsch to Paramount; his comedies, Harry Warner told the émigré director, were “too subtle” (66). Hard bargaining and excessive demands provoked George Jessel to spurn the offer to reprise his Broadway role as Jack Robin—but can anyone besides Al Jolson be imagined as starring in The Jazz Singer? For large sections of this book, while Thomson covers gangster pictures, Busby Berkeley musicals, and forlorn tales of vulnerable women requiring toughness to survive, the brothers disappear entirely from the text. When they (mostly Jack) happen to reemerge, the episodes do not inspire confidence that the art was appreciated or understood. (None of the brothers graduated from high school, so they might be given some slack.) Although Jack Warner had sold the controlling interest in the studio to Seven Arts Productions in 1966, pocketing $32 million for himself, he wanted to have a hand in Bonnie and Clyde. Producer Warren Beatty showed him the film. But Warner apparently found the change in tone from jaunty comedy to bloody violence baffling. In a famous exchange...

Hitler and Film: The Führer's Hidden Passion by Bill Niven

Reviewed by: Hitler and Film: The Führer's Hidden Passion by Bill Niven Jan-Christopher Horak (bio) Hitler and Film: The Führer's Hidden Passion By Bill Niven. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018. 295 pp. Given the large number of books published on the Nazi film industry in general and on Adolf Hitler in particular, I was skeptical initially that Bill Niven's book, Hitler and Film, would offer anything more than a rehash of information available elsewhere, even if scattered. However, Niven's book does present new research, making it worthwhile reading for specialists, even if some chapters are only of interest to general readers with no prior knowledge of the subject. Niven begins by discussing Hitler's film-viewing habits at his mountain retreat at the Berghof and also in Berlin's Reich Chancellery. It is well known in academic circles that Hitler, like Stalin, was an incurable movie buff, but just what he saw has been less clear, as was the fact that Hitler apparently watched movies obsessively every night from the mid-1930s to the start of the war. He had a preference for films with rich visuals and a bias against dialogue-heavy films, privileging the newest German productions, but also was a big fan of Laurel and Hardy. Indeed, Hitler viewed many foreign films that were banned in the German Reich, including American films, such as Shirley Temple's Captain January (1936) and Greta Garbo's Camille (1936), the latter despite its Jewish director, George Cukor. Hitler was apparently also sometimes involved in the banning of a film or in lifting a ban. Thus, Hitler initially banned a couple of anti-Communist propaganda films, White Slaves (1937) and Strong Hearts (1937), until the filmmakers had made changes, making the works even more stringently anti-Communist. When Paramount asked Hitler to lift a ban on The Jungle Princess (1936), the Film Censorship Office released the film in [End Page 205] March 1938, despite its director, Wilhelm Thiele, being a German-Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany (37). At other times, Hitler advocated for the production of specific propaganda films, even though he personally preferred mindless entertainment. Thus, Hitler got involved in the production of a documentary short about euthanasia, Victims of the Past (1937), arguing that its repellent images would convince Germans of the need for such a policy. He was also directly involved in the production of a Karl Ritter film about the Spanish Civil War, In Battle Versus the World Enemy: German Volunteers in Spain (1939), but it was of course his sponsoring of Leni Riefenstahl and her Nazi Party Rally films that demonstrate most clearly Hitler's propagandistic agenda to produce films of high artistic quality and still convey ideology, as Niven notes: "Politics, then, must find expression in culture, and culture must be imbued with politics; the two were intertwined, for Hitler, in a reciprocal relationship" (59). As Niven's fifth chapter indicates, Adolf Hitler was ubiquitous in the German newsreels, at times attending premieres of German films he wished to support, including Dawn (1933), a film about World War I U-boats, and Hitler Youth Quex (1933), about a Hitler Youth who becomes a martyr for the cause. But Hitler's appearance in the newsreels was specifically designed to create the cult of personality that was Hitler. An Ufa short, Our Führer (1934), was released specifically for the German "elections" in August 1934, which formally ratified the unification of chancellor and president in Adolf Hitler. The weekly newsreels thereafter took pains to portray Hitler as a man of the people, always in attendance at major holidays and events, and a man of peace who was reluctantly forced to wage war against enemy aggressors, even as he planned invasions behind the scenes. The high point of Hitler's visibility was the period of Nazi victories from September 1940 to the defeat of France in 1940. Thereafter Hitler's image became ever scarcer, as the war took its toll on his physical appearance. As Niven notes, "Because many Germans had abandoned themselves to Hitler, when he abandoned them by not showing himself, some of them, at least...

Novel Circulations: Old Acquaintance, Rich and Famous, La Flor de Mi Secreto

Across three women's films, the status of the literary novel in the midst of changing media environments is melodramatically plotted through the figure of “old acquaintance.” Vincent Sherman's 1943 Old Acquaintance pits the meager output of celebrated writer Katherine “Kit” Marlowe (Bette Davis) against the stream of popular, lowbrow novels written by her friend Millie Drake (Miriam Hopkins). This contest of literary style and production is closely adapted in George Cukor's 1981 film Rich and Famous. In Pedro Almodóvar's 1995 La flor de mi secreto, friction between literary styles and markets is subdued through melodrama's focus on affective rather than taste-making practices, appearing as a viable metaphor of the fate of book-objects in a zero-sum marketplace. This article focuses on Rich and Famous, which explores the question of affinity between women, lowbrow and highbrow, and the fate of the novel circa 1980. The particular and volatile experience of “alikeness” that founds friendship and the possibility that literary value is volatile—that high- and lowbrow are alike—are imagined in its nuanced representation of what Ronald Britton termed “publication anxiety” and in its use of cinematic space to stage the possibility of amicable if incongruous contemporaneity.

THE REPRESENTATION OF BASQUE IMMIGRATION IN AMERICAN CINEMA: Wild is the Wind (1959) or the Quest for Elucidating What a Basque Is

ABSTRACT In previous studies I have presented a general overview of the way American Cinema depicted Basque people, and especially Basque immigrants in the American West, and its evolution since the times of silent cinema to our days. In this article I will analyse one of the very first films in which a Basque character is presented, not in a secondary role, but as a protagonist. Wild is the Wind (George Cukor, 1959) represents also one of the first approaches to the representation of Basque identity by a Hollywood A-movie (this is, a film with a high budget, produced by major company, with the participation of well-known actors and actresses under the control of a renowned director) Firstly, I will summarize the main elements that characterized and conditioned the image of Basque immigrants, and Basque people as a whole, up to the decade of 1990 in the cinema of Hollywood. Secondly, I will describe the process of ellaboration of the film since its first steps, highlighting when, why and by whom was decided to introduce a Basque character in the plot. Finally, I will analyze how this Basque character is depicted in the film, both by the means of external (race, language, clothes...) and internal features (mainly, the dialogues), putting them in the context of previous and contemporary films and tv movies in which Basque characters also appeared.

Film Chronicle:

Film Chronicle: Jefferson Hunter (bio) Labyrinth of Lies, directed by Giulio Ricciarelli (SPE, 2016) Fury, directed by Fritz Lang (Warner Home Video, 2005) Anatomy of a Murder, directed by Otto Preminger (Criterion Collection, 2012) Witness for the Prosecution, directed by Billy Wilder (Kino Lorber, 2014) The Trial, directed by Orson Welles (Amazon Instant Video) The Defenders: Season One, created by Reginald Rose (Shout! Factory, 2016) Have Gun—Will Travel: The Complete Series, created by Sam Rolfe and Herb Meadow (Paramount, 2016) The Bride Wore Black, directed by François Truffaut (MGM, 2015) Adam's Rib, directed by George Cukor (Warner Home Video, 2000) The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus 16-ton Megaset, directed by Ian McNaughton et al. (A&E, 2005) Two and a half thousand years ago, in The Eumenides, the concluding work in the Oresteia, Aeschylus dramatized the trial of Orestes for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra. The Furies are the prosecutors, while citizens of Athens make up the jury, Apollo acts as Orestes' counsel, and Athena presides over the trial on the Hill of Areopagus. The themes of the first two plays of the Oresteia, implacable hatred and death-for-death vengefulness, with the Furies following the spoor of Orestes' blood guilt like a pack of hunting dogs, are now replaced by reasoned judgments and an eventual verdict, which exonerates Orestes. Moreover it provides the Furies an honored place in civilized Athenian society and a complimentary, euphemizing name change to the Eumenides, or the Kindly Ones. In other words, the principle of justice prevails. As Aeschylus views it, justice may be imperfect, a work in progress, messy in the way democracy itself is messy, but still a cause for celebration. It is an ideal to which our own courts have aspired ever since. Artistically speaking, The Eumenides establishes the genre of courtroom drama, employing features—the cut-and-thrust of forensic argument, outbreaks of passion on the witness stand, crucial decisions made by the judge, even the sleaziness of certain legal tactics (Apollo introduces dubious scientific evidence)—which have subsequently become standard onstage. And onscreen: over and over again, the cinema has been summoned to the courts. There have been legal films set in small Southern towns (To Kill a Mockingbird), in Manhattan, where what's being bitterly litigated is the custody of a child (the five-Oscar-winning Kramer vs. Kramer), and in Boston, where an ambulance-chasing hack played by Paul Newman brings malpracticing doctors to justice (Sidney Lumet's The Verdict). Films [End Page 266] have depicted court martials (The Caine Mutiny, A Few Good Men, Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory) and kangaroo courts set up by criminals to try one of their own (Fritz Lang's M and Joseph Losey's remake of M, where the kangaroo court meets in a parking garage). Environmental degradation has gone on trial (Erin Brockovich), as has discrimination against AIDS victims (Philadelphia) and the theory of evolution (Inherit the Wind, one of numerous film adaptations of a courtroom stage play). Many will have seen Stanley Kramer's Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), which with ponderous earnestness examines the complicity of German jurists in the Nazi regime; fewer the excellent, modestly budgeted German film Labyrinth of Lies (2014), directed by Giulio Ricciarelli. This drama follows the idealistic young prosecutor Johann Radmann as he happens upon Nazis who have risen to positions of power in 1950s Frankfurt and tries to call them to account. Ricciarelli's is actually a pre-courtroom film, that is, one which forswears the drama of a trial to focus instead on the tedious preparations for it, the research in warehouses crammed full of paper records, the slow assembly of a forensic team, and the often fruitless search for witnesses. It also focuses on the psychological damage done to Radmann as he grows more frustrated, even despairing, at the obstacles put in his way. He lives in a West Germany grown prosperous in the Wirtschaftswunder and determined to stand mute about some of its citizens' wartime activities, as the original German title indicates: Im Labyrinth des Schweigens, "In the Labyrinth of Silence." In the end, a kind of justice is achieved, a kind...

On Eforgan’s <em>Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor</em>

On Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (revised 2d edition). By Estel Eforgan. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013. 296 pp., 978-0853039150 (pb). US $32.95.When actor and screenwriter Leslie Howard died in a mysterious plane crash over Bay of Biscay in June 1943, Guardian obituary described his most outstanding quality: the intensely English quality which made him popular everywhere.1 Even today, Howard is remembered primarily for his roles as English aristocrat in films such as The Scarlet Pimpernel (Harold Young, UK, 1934) and Pygmalion (Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard, UK, 1938), or as tragic hero in productions like Of Human Bondage ( John Cromwell, USA, 1934) and Gone with Wind (Victor Fleming [George Cukor], USA, 1939). As a symbol of refinement and gentlemanliness, Howard's character spoke to social instability British audiences were experiencing due to political crisis and war. It was a time when conceptions of Englishness were being challenged-not least because of influx of Jewish migrants and refugees escaping persecution in Europe who created a space of difference in British society. Howard, as Estel Eforgan's meticulously researched biography, Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor, reveals, was nothing if not aware of social and political influences of his dramatic persona.Eforgan's biography is a compelling and thorough overview of Howard's life and career within context of social and political upheaval, migration, and war. As such it makes an important contribution to fields of media and cultural studies, as well as Jewish studies, revealing influential role that actors and filmmakers played in political arena. As Eforgan uncovers, there was more to Howard's persona as ideal Englishman than most people consider. Leslie Howard Steiner, whose father was a Jew and whose mother's origins were also Jewish (from Russia and East Prussia), was intensely committed to political activism and anti-Nazi efforts in years leading up to World War II. And while biography covers much more than that-including Howard's career on English stage in 1920s and launch of his stardom in New York and Hollywood-Eforgan makes clear that by mid-1930s Howard was making career and life choices that were influenced by politics. More specifically, he began to use his fame as a tool to resist Hitler's rise to power and persecution of Jews in Europe.Eforgan's sympathy for her subject will strike a chord with readers and personalize exhaustive amount of detail on Howard's life. The chapters that trace Howard's development as an actor, screenwriter, producer, director, and public intellectual from 1920s to 1940s are filled with lively anecdotes as well as with valuable comments on social and cultural milieu. Some of most entertaining points in biography include Eforgan's musings on Howard's stage mishaps and love affairs, and colorful characters who peppered actor's professional and personal lives. Yet it is way Eforgan frames Howard's career in connection with Jewish migration and persecution during rise of Nazism and at start of World War II that makes this biography especially noteworthy. Eforgan's view that these elements played a key role in actor's life is underscored in way biography is bookended by Leslie Howard's little-known Jewish roots. The work begins with a story of Howard's real family history in Vienna and England (3), and ends with his last speech before his death, when he laughed at someone's suggestion that he was idealised picture of perfect Englishman. He surprised press when he publicly admitted, suppose we do not have to tell them that I began as a Hungarian (229).Indeed, there is a good deal to discover about British Jewish migration, as well as assimilation, at turn of century from Eforgan's description of Leslie Howard's background. …

Lady Macbeth Goes to Hollywood

Lady Macbeth Goes to Hollywood Melissa Bradshaw (bio) An iconic photograph taken at a party at New York’s Gotham Book Mart commemorates Edith and Osbert Sitwell’s first lecture tour of the United States in 1948, and, more specifically, Edith Sitwell’s triumphant performance of Façade at the Museum of Modern Art. The Sitwells, seated on chairs, stare with great dignity into the camera, relics of a high modernist moment several decades past, while American literati, including Marianne Moore, Tennessee Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop, gather around them, standing, kneeling, leaning against bookshelves, even hanging off a ladder, to fit into the frame. By all accounts, the tour was a success, with the Sitwells giving readings and interviews and being feted as literary royalty in parties around the city and across the country. When Edith Sitwell returned to the United States two years later for the second tour, she had even bigger plans: more dates, and more cities, including a trip to Hollywood, where she would meet with George Cukor, who was considering a film based on her 1946 Fanfare for Elizabeth. Importantly, the attention would all be on her this time, as Osbert was by then too weak from Parkinson’s to participate. Lincoln Kirstein planned a staged spectacle starring Sitwell for the opening of her tour at MoMA, centered on a new poem he had commissioned her to write about the role of England in poetry, set to an original score and accompanied by dancers from his School of American Ballet. As Kirstein envisioned it, Sitwell would appear as “an Elizabethan Queen figure, partly conceived as a chess piece, partly out of Zuccaro.”56 When these plans fell through, in part because Stravinsky, Sitwell’s choice of composer, declined to participate, Sitwell insisted on taking the stage as Lady Macbeth to perform [End Page 23] the sleepwalking scene among others, though she was warned that this would be a bad idea. Asked why she chose to portray Lady Macbeth, Sitwell responded, “because she amuses me. Because the part suits my voice. And because she was one of my ancestresses” (Pearson, The Sitwells, 419). On stage, Sitwell declaimed Shakespeare’s lines in a loud, trilled monotone. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 6. Edith Sitwell as Lady Macbeth, by George Platt Lynes. © Estate of George Platt Lynes. Sitwell’s baffling performance as Lady Macbeth, as well as photographer George Platt Lynes’s portraits taken in conjunction with that performance, offer provocative possibilities as camp modernism (fig. 6). The reviews were uniformly bad. John Mason Brown, for example, described her performance in the Saturday Review of Literature as “all boom and incantation, less designed for dialogue than for a Gregorian chant,… lacking in any emphasis except a maintained and indiscriminate overemphasis,” and complained that “Shakespeare had been murdered along with Duncan and Banquo.”57 The spectacle of the distinguished visiting British poet onstage at MoMA, costumed as a queen, both as Kirstein originally planned it and as it eventually went down, reads as campy in all the obvious ways: the elaborate costumes, the hammy overacting, the disconnect between Sitwell’s age and the role she’s playing (Sitwell was sixty-three). [End Page 24] She takes morbid pleasure in the doomed, crazed Lady Macbeth. Surely this meets Susan Sontag’s famously depoliticized definition of camp as a “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” and might also be an example of what she calls naïve camp, that is, art that attempts “a seriousness that fails” (“Notes on ‘Camp,’” 275, 283). But I find more fitting Moe Meyer’s assertion that camp is always, and only, a queer cultural critique, whose function is “the production of queer social visibility” (introduction to The Politics and Poetics of Camp, 5). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 7. Edith Sitwell as Lady Macbeth, by George Platt Lynes. © Estate of George Platt Lynes. The camp spectacle of Edith Sitwell performing Lady Macbeth to an audience of elite New Yorkers (and later, Hollywood royalty) becomes even campier when put in context as a queer collaboration between Sitwell, George Platt Lynes, Lincoln Kirstein, and New York’s reigning power couple...

“The Hard Shining Brightness of You”: Witnessing the Assumption of a Body in George Cukor's A Woman's Face

This essay focuses on George Cukor's A Woman's Face (US, 1941), a film that complicates a dominant narrative in studies of Joan Crawford's work that locates Mildred Pierce (dir. Michael Curtiz, US, 1945) as inaugurating the star's pronounced, albeit disparaged, iterations of masculinity. Not only does A Woman's Face anticipate displays that, as in Mildred Pierce, register challenges to normative gender and sexual identities, but it also exceeds them in range and degree. Cukor's tale of Anna Holm (Crawford), whose facial scarring codes her as a marginal figure, spawns an image of a woman who performs a masculinity that persists even after she is presumably cured through plastic surgery and conventional garb, indicating that masculinity is not necessarily aligned with appearance or anatomy. Crucially, Anna's felt sense that her scars persist after their removal—evoking the phenomenon of phantom limb pain—becomes especially suggestive for charting how Cukor's film contests established notions of doing gender and the body. By revealing—at precisely those moments when conventional gender expression is presumably reestablished—that the able body's contours extend beyond its visible borders in space, the film illustrates how psychoanalytically and phenomenologically informed, expansive notions of the body and perceptual field matter for understanding transgender and other forms of gender dissonance. Drawing on disability studies, queer theory, and transgender theory, this essay demonstrates that, however unwittingly, Cukor offers an expansive, fluid notion of the body and being.

An Historical Examination of the Film Theories and Avant-Garde Mediation of Slavko Vorkapich in Hollywood

Early film theorist Slavko Vorkapich, a talented European emigre who became one of the first avant-garde filmmakers in the United States, articulated his conception of cinema as a unique, distinctive artistic endeavor. I will historically examine extensive original primary archival materials from the Slavko Vorkapich Collection to historically contextualize his film theories, montage techniques, and investigate how he envisioned his cinematic philosophy and visual aesthetic in his theoretical writings on motion pictures regarding “Film As A Visual Language,” “The Motion Picture as an Art” and “Motion and the Art of Cinematography” in 1926 which he went on to stylistically employ in his independent avant-garde films, such as The Life and Death of 9413 ? A Hollywood Extra (Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey [with Gregg Toland]; US, 1928), and in montage sequences for an extensive number of Hollywood studio films, including What Price Hollywood? (George Cukor, RKO Pathe; US, 1932). Vorkapich’s diverse array of work embodies the dynamic representation of his aesthetic philosophy encompassed in both his studio and independent productions. Notable is that he manages to successfully bridge the conceptual economic and artistic abyss between the dominant commercial industry and the avant-garde. Moreover, an analysis of montage sequences in the commercial film What Price Hollywood? reveals how his avant-garde stylistic mediation functions to transform the overall narrative film text by appropriating his innovative experimental aesthetic techniques expounded on in his film theories within the mainstream commercial production environment of the classical Hollywood studio system.

“How Long Does It Take?”: The Resurrection of Marilyn Monroe and Something's Got to Give (1962)

Amidst the raw footage and few completed sequences that remain of Something's Got to Give (1962, director George Cukor), Marilyn Monroe's final, unfinished film, is a scene between the actress and ...

I Think, I Am Mad. Derrida, Gaslight and the Irony of the Cogito

At the climax of George Cukor's Gaslight, a film melodrama from 1944, the female protagonist utters the phrase ‘I am mad’ which Stanley Cavell takes to reveal her Cogito. As such, the formula seems to be a perfect exemplification of Derrida's central point in Cogito and the History of Madness, namely that there is ‘a value and a meaning of the Cogito’, detectable in Descartes's Mediations, which welcomes madness as its genuine and necessary possibility. But how can we conceive of the ‘I think’—the supreme principle of transcendental philosophy constituting the objectivity of cognition and experience—as embracing unreason as its own condition? This article attempts to highlight a quasi-transcendental interpretation of Derrida's answer to this question: deconstruction reveals a certain irony at the core of the primary text of transcendental philosophy. I argue that the formula ‘I am mad’ contains the decisive key to the argument: the irony of the Cogito consists in the fact of its double transcendental functioning—a transcendental function in the ‘middle’ form and a transcendental function in the active form.

Home Is Where the Self Is: Monodrama, Journey Play Structure, and the Modernist Fairy Tale

The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed the creation of two of the most beloved works of children's literature ever produced: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck. Baum's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900 and was presented dramatically on a Chicago in 1902 and on Broadway a year after that (Gjovaag). Maeterlinck's Blue Bird enjoyed extremely successful productions on stages in Moscow (at the Moscow Art Theater, 1908), London (Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 1909), and New York (The New Theater, 1910) within two years of 1908 publication. Both works received significant film adaptations. Directed by Victor Fleming and starring Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz was immortalized by 1939 production. The Blue Bird began receiving film treatments as early as 1910 and was filmed by such landmark directors as Maurice Tourneur (1918) and George Cukor (in a remarkable 1976 joint Soviet-American production), but perhaps best known film version came in 1940, with Shirley Temple in a starring role-a clear attempt to recapture the magic and success of Wizard. The two films even share the cinematic framing device of having the dreary worlds of Kansas and Tyltyl and Mytyl's bedroom in black and white, only to change to vivid Technicolor when the fantastic journeys begin. Both The Wizard of Oz and, to a lesser extent, The Blue Bird have become deeply ingrained in the cultural memory and construction of childhood in both Europe and the United States.But although reception of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has come almost entirely within the confines of fairy tales and children's literature, Maurice Maeterlinck's status as one of the leaders of the symbolist avant-garde has ensured that The Blue Bird experienced a much broader reception from critics. Looking at Maeterlinck's fairy play in terms of place in a history of experimental drama, rather than solely in the context of children's literature, yields a more complex reading not only of The Blue Bird but also of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and offers a unique wrinkle to the interpretation of earlier works that may seem less likely analogues to these great works for children. In this essay I explore links between the structure and themes of The Blue Bird and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and earlier works penned by pioneers of the modem drama: Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1867) and August Strindberg's Lucky Per's Journey (1881-1882) and The Road to Damascus (1898-1901). The works in question share not only a kinship in journey structure but also a deep concern with the expression of interiority and the development of personal subjectivity, characteristic of a particular strain of modem (and arguably Romantic) drama. An examination of the relationship between these two pairs of works offers an intriguing extension of the groundbreaking work that has emerged in fairy-tale studies in recent years, suggesting that the theoretical interventions offered by scholars such as Jack Zipes and Maria Tatar might be used to analyze dramatic and theatrical works well beyond the boundaries of theater for children.In addition, such an analysis may lead to a more complex analysis of the representation of the fairy tale and related works on the stage. The fairy tale had long held a place (albeit a lesser place) alongside mythology as material for spectacle in the English theater, but by the mid-nineteenth century, J. R. Planche had given the fairy tale its definite and prominent place on the Victorian stage and laid the groundwork for a lasting (and continuing) tradition (MacMillan 790). There is little doubt that the 1902 Wizard of Oz and 1909 Blue Bird productions enter directly into this tradition, but the genre itself must be seen as part of a chronology in which each genre (fairy tales and avant-garde styles of theater) developed independently but with some significant shared influences, most notably the influence of the Romantics. …