Race, Nation, and Gendered Noir Anxiety

Through a more intersectional, film studies approach, this chapter interrogates Cukor’s wartime and postwar handling of film noir style and content in four films: A Woman’s Face (1941), Keeper of the Flame (1942), Gaslight (1944), and A Double Life (1947). Through focus on subjects from fascism to blackface, the chapter explores the intersection of gender, race, and national anxiety central to World War II–era Hollywood aesthetics. Joan Crawford’s Anna goes from scarred criminal to feminine object of affection; and Ronald Colman (in an Oscar-winning performance) plays Anthony John, who devolves from acclaimed actor to vengeful murderer. Katharine Hepburn plays a mysterious recluse who labors to cover her dead husband’s fascist ambitions. And Ingrid Bergman finds her character gaslighted by her devious, avaricious husband.

Introduction

The introduction argues the value of greater attention to the films of Hollywood director George Cukor than has been published to date. A brief Cukor history for the uninitiated leads into the chosen focus of the volume, based on the label of “woman’s director” that he was given during his prolific studio years in the early days of sound film. Exploring this combination of praise (for his work with strong, independent actresses) and derogation (for his homosexuality) leads into an overview of the book project, from its focus on gender and sexuality to its use of diverse feminist and queer studies approaches. The chapter concludes with an overview of each chapter.

Tone, Genre, and the Actor’s Director

Tone and genre significantly affect gender presentation within the course of a highly productive decade in Cukor’s career. The Women (1939), Susan and God (1940), and Edward, My Son (1949) are all films based on plays originally written as satire or parody. They become more complicated productions when adapted for film by “actor’s director” Cukor. By emphasizing earnest and dramatic portrayals of heavily gender-normative portrayals, the director shifts both the tone and the impact of the satirical films. In The Women, the serious, sympathetic central character detracts from the social critique of wealthy, catty wives. Susan and God shifts from romantic comedy to melodrama and holds the wife character to account for the confines of conventional marriage, excising potential social critique. Finally, Edward, My Son, one of Cukor’s major and more interesting failures, yields its satirical bite to the questionable casting and directing of its hypermasculine lead.

The Theatricality of Gender and Drag Performance

This chapter attends to a seemingly disparate trio of films, the romantic adventure Sylvia Scarlett (1935), the theatrical Western Heller in Pink Tights (1950), and the melodrama-with-music A Star is Born (1954). The three are bound by scenes in which the female protagonist appears in male drag. Katharine Hepburn plays male for almost an entire film that went on to flop hideously at the box office, while Sophia Loren impersonates Old West stage presence Adah Isaacs Menken, with outrageous impact. Perhaps most unexpected of all, Judy Garland dons boyish drag for a song-and-dance number just before breaking down over her alcoholic husband’s disastrous life. While the films’ purposes and impacts differ, together they illustrate the concept of gender-as-performance, as it bends but does not break classic Hollywood cinematic traditions.

Ethnic Assimilation and 1950s Hollywood

The final chapter turns to the subject of gender and ethnic assimilation in Cukor’s films of the 1950s, the last years in which the director would find regular work. Within a communist-baiting era heading into the long Cold War, Hollywood films of the 1950s suppressed but nonetheless (or necessarily) addressed familiar fears in new ways, from attention to a postwar version of melting-pot politics to modernized versions of gender roles for “ethnic” women. Cukor’s most successful films of the decade reveal similar concerns, despite enormous differences in focus and style. Born Yesterday (1950) and It Should Happen to You (1952) are urban romantic comedies; Bhowani Junction (1956) is an Indian epic; and Wild is the Wind (1957) is an Italian immigrant melodrama in a rustic setting.

Masculinity and the Man Who Drinks

Cukor’s most developed alcoholics are white men of privileged class who are portrayed as failing to live up to gendered social expectations. Within romantic comedies, the cause and effects of alcoholism in male characters are downplayed, as seen in the films Susan and God (1940) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). Then the chapter explores the specific figure of the Hollywood alcoholic in What Price Hollywood? (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), and A Star is Born (1954). These performances show the cost of success for male celebrities and the impact of social demands on the individual. Maintaining youthfulness, audience favor, and masculine virility depletes the men in focus in these films, and their failure after high accomplishment leads them to desperation and self-destruction.

The Woman’s Director and Women’s Friendships

Chapter 1 focuses on white, privileged women through an exploration of female friendships. The dominance of heteronormative romance is fractured by bonds between women, even when they are more tangential than central. Through the critical work of Karen Hollinger, the chapter offers close readings centered on character and narrative in Girls on the Town (1931), Our Betters (1932), The Women (1939), and Rich and Famous (1981), thus studying representations of female friendship from the beginning to the end of Cukor’s career. The chapter concludes with a coda on The Chapman Report (1962), a film about women’s sex lives that forecloses almost entirely the possibility of friendship between women.

Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the approach used and the pleasures of studying gender in the films of Cukor. It also provides examples of how such studies might be expanded through differing constellations of films.

Edelkayt

Chapter 5 illustrates an alternative to the hypermale ego by attending to more sensitive, creative male characters through the concept of Edelkayt as discussed in the work of Daniel Boyarin. The chapter begins with a transition into the subject through focus on one final alcoholic, Ned Seton in Holiday (1938). The tragic fate of the character exemplifies the importance of challenging hypermasculine norms by exploring alternatives that can offer a potential queer feminist countertype. To explore this figure, I discuss Cukor’s own identity within Hollywood alongside several of his most complex masculine characters: Macaulay “Mike” Connor in The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Paul Verrall in Born Yesterday (1950).

Queer Musical Excess

Queer reading strategies based on the approach of Alexander Doty reveal transgressive moments in Cukor’s three musical comedies: Les Girls (1957), Let’s Make Love (1960), and My Fair Lady (1964). Queer conceptualizations of the Hollywood musical, particularly the concept of “excess,” lead to readings of specific scenes that disrupt the heteronormative flow of the narratives. Gene Kelly performs a spoof of Marlon Brando in The Wild One, within a tale of a womanizer and the three women who love him; Milton Berle camps up a lesson on dating opposite Yves Montand; and Rex Harrison ponders why a woman can’t be more like a man, within a narrative that resists romantic closure.