The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (96 page)

Throughout the 1920s, Cukor worked as a stage director in Rochester and New York, rising to prominence with productions of
The Great Gatsby, The Constant Wife
, and
Her Cardboard Lover
. In 1929, he did dialogue direction for Milestone’s
All Quiet on the Western Front
, and that led him swiftly into direction, originally at Paramount, and then at RKO and MGM. These moves were made as the friend and most trusted director of David Selznick. It was a two-way exchange, for Cukor gave the producer his best films: the gentle satire of
What Price Hollywood?;
Hepburn’s debut in
A Bill of Divorcement;
the knockout comedy ensembles of
Dinner at Eight;
and the magnificent
David Copperfield
, still a landmark in literary adaptation because of its fidelity to the spirit and the look of Dickens.

It is only proper that Cukor should be admired for his work with actresses, but that is not his sole or most vital asset. For what Cukor delights in with women, and especially groups of women, is the element of play or masquerade. His abiding preoccupation is theatricality and the various human postures between acting and lying. He made so many films dealing with theatre, movies, or show business:
The Royal Family of Broadway; What Price Hollywood?; Zaza; A Double Life; The Actress; A Star Is Born; Les Girls; Heller in Pink Tights;
and
Let’s Make Love
. But many of the others turn on deception between man and woman, the attempt to alter personality or some whimsical make-believe.
Sylvia Scarlett
has Hepburn dressed as a boy.
Keeper of the Flame
is about an erroneous and manipulated public image.
Born Yesterday
and
My Fair Lady
are versions of the Pygmalion legend.
The Philadelphia Story, Adam’s Rib
, and
A Double Life
involve role-playing in the theatre of life.
David Copperfield
might have emerged from the sort of dramatic company that Dickens loved.
Gaslight
—unusually somber in the body of Cukor’s work—concerns a sinister plot to distort reality. While
Little Women, The Women
, and
Les Girls
—an unwitting trilogy—show the battling imaginations in a gathering of females beating down the chance of truth.

And what of Cukor’s actresses? His great discovery was Katharine Hepburn, and she thoroughly repaid his trust and generosity, especially in
A Bill of Divorcement, Sylvia Scarlett, Holiday, Philadelphia Story, Keeper of the Flame
, and
Adam’s Rib
, and she was denied Graham Greene’s aunt only because of studio anxiety. But Cukor did as well by Constance Bennett in
What Price Hollywood?;
Garbo in
Camille;
Vivien Leigh in
Gone With the Wind
(he prepared her and his influence remained); Ingrid Bergman in
Gaslight;
Judy Holliday in
Adam’s Rib, Born Yesterday
, and
It Should Happen to You;
Ava Gardner in
Bhowani Junction;
Sophia Loren in
Heller;
Claire Bloom in
The Chapman Report;
and Judy Garland in
A Star is Born
.

But don’t forget Grant and Stewart in
Philadelphia Story;
Barrymore in
A Bill of Divorcement;
Lowell Sherman in
What Price Hollywood?;
Grant and Lew Ayres in
Holiday;
James Mason in
A Star is Born;
Fields as Micawber; Ronald Colman in
A Double Life;
an unusually restrained Anthony Quinn in
Heller;
and the grunting naturalism of Spencer Tracy in a handful of films.

Cukor’s work was seldom assertive; he was never as sure of himself or as eager after about 1960. He seemed always comfortable within the scope of the industry and the glamour of the studios. But his kindliness and his unforced visual grace do not date, or simplify, stories. He hardly knew how to turn in an ugly frame; and he would work hard to maintain wit and originality, so long as the effort did not show. It is a body of work that will improve with age, surpassing that of many directors more highly prized at the time.

Peggy Cummins
, b. Prestatyn, Wales, 1925
As a tiny, bright-blond super-shot—as Annie Laurie Starr—in
Gun Crazy
(49, Joseph H. Lewis), Peggy Cummins was making a farewell to America. She is brilliant, dangerous, and very sexy, with a wide-eyed love of adrenaline, but her patron in the U.S., Fox, had decided already that she was through. And
Gun Crazy
was a small picture—as well as a triumph.

She made her debut as a teenager in
Dr. O’Dowd
(40, Herbert Mason);
Salute John Citizen
(42, Maurice Elvey);
Old Mother Riley Detective
(43, Lance Comfort);
Welcome Mr. Washington
(45, Leslie Hiscott);
English Without Tears
(44, Harold French).

At that moment, with great fanfare, Cummins was recruited by Fox to play the world-famously sexy lead in
Forever Amber
. But she was as quickly abandoned and replaced with Linda Darnell. The studio tried to recover by casting her as Ronald Colman’s daughter in
The Late George Apley
(47, Joseph L. Mankiewicz), but she was reckoned a failure again in
Moss Rose
(47, Gregory Ratoff). So she was put with horses in
Green Grass of Wyoming
(48, Louis King) and sent back to England to make
Escape
(49, Mankiewicz);
If This Be Sin
(49, Ratoff); and
Operation X
(50, Ratoff).

Back in Britain, she made
Who Goes There?
(52, Anthony Kimmins);
Street Corner
(53, Muriel Box);
Always a Bride
(53, Ralph Smart);
Love Lottery
(54, Charles Crichton);
To Dorothy a Son
(54, Box);
Carry On Admiral
(57, Val Guest);
Hell Drivers
(57, Cy Endfield), where she needs to be a good deal sexier;
Night of the Demon
(57, Jacques Tourneur);
The Captain’s Table
(58, Jack Lee);
Your Money or Your Wife
(59, Anthony Simmons);
Dentist in the Chair
(60, Don Chaffey);
In the Doghouse
(61, D’Arcy Conyers).

Jamie Lee Curtis
, b. Los Angeles, 1958
She is the second daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, born soon after
Touch of Evil
. (She is also the godchild of Lew Wasserman.) Her father had left her mother by the time
Psycho
opened, and so Jamie Lee was raised by Janet Leigh and her next husband, Robert Brandt. She has said that while her home life was secure, it was still a lonely childhood. For years she hardly knew her father; then they became druggies together. A toughness has been left in her face, a hardness that is eerily at odds with her “perfect” and intelligently revealed body.
Blue Steel
(90, Kathryn Bigelow) was the first film that hinted at her androgynous quality, and it was a picture too conscious of its own style, too devoid of human exploration. But this ambiguity accounts for the Curtis cult, and makes her hard to cast well.

She did
Operation Petticoat
on TV before she got the role of the threatened and eventually angered girl in
Halloween
(78, John Carpenter), a film that drew on her iron-jawed air of integrity. Thereafter, she was in a run of scary rip-offs:
Prom Night
(80, Paul Lynch);
Terror Train
(80, Roger Spottiswoode);
The Fog
(80, Carpenter), with her mother;
Road Games
(81, Richard Franklin); and
Halloween II
(81, Rick Rosenthal).

For television, she was in a replicant
Private Benjamin—She’s in the Army Now
(81, Hy Averback)—and she was impressive in
Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story
(81, Gabrielle Beaumont). But
Love Letters
(83, Amy Jones) was the best part she has ever had, as a young woman who has an affair with an older man as she begins to realize the secret her recently dead mother kept from her.
Love Letters
is a small gem, and Curtis made herself achingly naked and vulnerable for it. At the same time, there was a hint of limits or guards in her that did not want to put feelings on show. In her best performance so far, she seemed to be letting us see her distrust of acting.

She had the female lead, as a hooker, in a big picture,
Trading Places
(83, John Landis);
Grandview U.S.A
. (84, Randal Kleiser); and
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
(84, W. D. Richter). But
Perfect
(85, James Bridges) was a career-stopper, and a movie made to be mocked. Since then, she has never regained her place (or her need?) to dominate movies. The TV series
Anything But Love
(89–90) may have fulfilled her as much as
Dominick & Eugene
(88, Robert M. Young);
A Man in Love
(87, Diane Kurys);
Amazing Grace & Chuck
(87, Mike Newell); and
As Summer Dies
(86, Jean-Claude Tramont) on TV with Bette Davis.
A Fish Called Wanda
(88, Charles Crichton) was a hit and her best opportunity for comedy. But
Blue Steel
wiped the smile off everyone’s face. Since then, she has been in
Queens Logic
(91, Steve Rash);
My Girl
(91, Howard Zieff);
Forever Young
(92, Steve Miner);
Mother’s Boys
(94, Yves Simoneau); and
True Lies
(94, James Cameron).

She works steadily, usually in family comedies or the obligatory horror films (which also fit her increasingly haunted look—or is that just keeping in such tip-top condition so long?):
My Girl 2
(94, Zieff);
The Heidi Chronicles
(95, Paul Bogart);
House Arrest
(96, Harry Winer);
Fierce Creatures
(97, Fred Schepisi and Young);
Homegrown
(98, Stephen Gyllenhaal);
Nicholas’ Gift
(98, Robert Markowitz);
Halloween H2O
(98, Miner);
Virus
(99, John Bruno);
Drowning Mona
(00, Nick Gomez);
The Tailor of Panama
(01, John Boorman);
Halloween: Resurrection
(02, Rick Rosenthal);
Freaky Friday
(03, Mark S. Waters);
Christmas with the Kranks
(04, Joe Roth);
Beverly Hills Chihuahua
(08, Raja Gosnell).

How about a group effort—one great work for Jamie Lee?

Richard Curtis
, b. England, 1956
2003:
Love Actually
. 2009:
Pirate Radio
.
I list Curtis as a director because it now seems unlikely that he will bother with other camera managers as he spreads his sweet, thin honey across the world. I suspect that as writer-producer he has always been the effective auteur on his flimsy but engaging string of romantic comedies. In addition, he is one of the most barefaced subscribers to the notion of unfettered fantasy ever produced by the movies. What is even more startling is how this shameless stress on wish fulfillment has been glossed as hip and modish.

It has not always been this way. After an education at Oxford, he began work writing for the TV series
Not the Nine O’Clock News
(1979 onwards), a satire on broadcasting mores, and then he teamed up with the comic Rowan Atkinson, who is steadily in the tradition of comic idiot, silly faces, and slapstick. Throughout the eighties, Curtis wrote for Atkinson’s
Blackadder
shows, and would have been the subordinate figure in that partnership (whereas now, Atkinson gets mercifully small parts in Curtis pictures).

The change began with
The Tall Guy
(89, Mel Smith), in which Atkinson was tamed by the very cool style of Jeff Goldblum. It was a sign of Curtis’s interest in American underplaying and his larger attraction to America as whole—especially big box office. Far more successful—indeed, a breakthrough—was
Four Weddings and a Funeral
(94, Mike Newell), where American Andie MacDowell was romantically wistful for Hugh Grant (who seemed to be a far happier model for Curtis). This film also introduced the skilled interweaving of several stories and the resulting short takes of action, all of which had the habit of being cute meeting scenes. And there was a happier sense of sexual variety, of gayness sometimes fueling a real gaiety.

Notting Hill
(99, Roger Michell) was the climax of Anglo-American relations, and it is so ribbon-tied as to be absurd. But Julia Roberts had seldom been used more tenderly (Curtis grasped how old-fashioned she is), and the fantasy is as heady as it is daft. Above all, now, a kind of seething romantic sensuality was at play—that old wisdom that people go to the movies to dream of fucking the screen’s beauties.

The next two steps were
Bridget Jones’s Diary
(01, Sharon Maguire), a big hit even if its stress on the woman’s point of view is not quite what Curtis is about. But
Love Actually
was a triumph—and yet again, the film had Emma Freud as script advisor, Curtis’s companion and the mother of his children. How long can it all go on? Well, maybe another
Bridget Jones
is not the best prospect, but for all the slick guile of these films I prefer their touching lightly on the human heart to all those movies that survey the glum shells of the computerized. I can’t see any reason for Curtis to improve. But he is truly smart, and a wonderful show master. Maybe he’s been too successful, or too blessed by fate, to have learned the need to be wounded or unlucky.

Alas, woe and worse—
Pirate Radio
(a promising subject) is just a collection of ideas for such a film, loosely wrapped in great music, but such a waste of the sublime Bill Nighy that one might be ready to let these pirates rot in gaol.