Abstract
If an auteur is, as Andrew Sarris once explained, necessarily a director with a “distinguishable personality,” whose work “must exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style which serve as his signature,” how can a filmmaker who insisted that a director “should remain unostentatious” become an auteur? Almost everyone would agree that George Cukor made a lot of good movies, but very few people can identify his distinctive style. Solving this Cukor “problem” requires looking closely at the successful decisions he made in shooting three of his best movies.
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Notes
- 1.
A student of mine once protested a paper assignment on Howard Hawks by saying that “Hawks isn’t doing anything.”
- 2.
Paulette Bane called my attention to this scene and many of its important elements. My comments begin from her observations.
- 3.
Glen Lindquist alerted me to the elevator’s function in this scene.
- 4.
I have written at length about The Philadelphia Story in The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 85–156. Some of my comments here also appear, often in slightly different form, in that book.
- 5.
Spencer Chalifour alerted me to the effect of the tree branches in this shot.
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Ray, R.B. (2020). The Cukor “Problem”: David Copperfield, Holiday, and the Philadelphia Story. In: The Structure of Complex Images. Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40631-8_10
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