‘George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director’
By Joseph McBride
Columbia University Press, 536 Pages

“Sylvia Scarlett,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “Gaslight,” “Adam’s Rib,” “A Star is Born,” and “My Fair Lady” are just some of the films George Cukor directed with exquisite attention to scripts that he faithfully interpreted as he attuned himself to the styles and sensibilities of actors. Joseph McBride draws on more than five decades of experience as a screenwriter, actor, and critic to demonstrate how subtly and firmly Cukor counseled actors such as Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, and Marilyn Monroe.

Mr. McBride notes that Cukor has sometimes been devalued because his subtle, psychological approach to cinema is less visible to critics who have not developed a vocabulary tensile enough to describe the way the director made the collaboration with his stars an expression of his own gay sensibility.

Working in the Hollywood studio system at a time when he had to remain closeted, Cukor chose film properties like “Sylvia Scarlett” that capitalized on Hepburn’s androgyny, a risky effort that failed at the box office and damaged Hepburn’s popularity but now seems groundbreaking in the cinematic treatment of sexuality.

Scotching the myth that Cukor was “only a woman’s director,” Mr. McBride shows Cukor’s reciprocal relationship with actors like Tracy and Grant, learning as much from them as they did from him. Some actors, male and female, resented Cukor’s quiet yet voluble suggestions, preferring to work by themselves. In the main, however, Cukor adapted to different acting styles — as he did with leading man Lew Ayres, realizing that the actor worked better without quite so much direction.

Yet Mr. McBride does more than focus on Cukor’s triumphs. He shows that even in films like “Let’s Make Love” — not considered one of his best — he managed to work with Marilyn Monroe to achieve a nuanced performance while admitting that Milton Berle’s brilliant comic performance stole the show.

Mr. McBride has the advantage of having interviewed Cukor several times over many years, watching the director thrive (with setbacks) in the disintegrating  studio system and then triumphing in his late television masterpiece, “Love in the Ruins,” successfully teaming Sir Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn for the first and only time in their careers.

Gradually, Cukor came out of the closet — not all the way but enough to express, for example, his great admiration for director Paul Morrissey’s work, with its explicit treatment of sexuality that simply was not possible in Cukor’s Hollywood prime.

Mr. McBride discounts some performances — such as Ronald Colman’s in “A Double Life,” which seems to me to begin with a deliberate awkwardness that is Colman’s brave way of showing how an actor playing Othello has to grow into the role. Mr. McBride does not quote Cukor’s comments about coaxing the actor to embrace his character’s violence. 

Similarly, I’m puzzled by his treatment of Marilyn Monroe’s last, incomplete film, “Something’s Got to Give.” Cukor, Mr. McBride insists, was sympathetic to Monroe, but at the same time certain she could no longer perform on screen, because moviemaking had become just too traumatic. She supposedly behaved as though “under water.”

Yet Mr. McBride has seen the footage from “Something’s Got to Give,” as I have, and there is no sign of Cukor’s Monroe, the one who did not have the stamina or concentration to continue. In take after take, she seems to have her role in hand, and Mr. McBride does indeed praise her acting. So what are we to make of Cukor’s belief in her incapacity?

In my experience, assessments of acting are quite hazardous to make and depend on how much the critic sees eye to eye with the actors. Watching Cukor through Monroe’s eyes, by the way, yields a less positive view of the director, even though Mr. McBride quotes a complimentary message she sent to Cukor.  

Reviewer’s quibbles aside, however, this is one of the greatest books on acting I have ever read. I second Mr. McBride’s comments on how so many critics do not have a vocabulary to describe and assess acting. I tried in my biography of Monroe, as Mr. McBride has done, to develop a language for acting that he rightly says still remains elusive in the lexicon of most critics.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress,” and “Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero.”