Meeting George Cukor’s People

Many decades ago I was thrilled to interview film director George Cukor at his home (some called it a villa) in the hills above the Sunset Strip. He was then 80 years old, with a long string of hits behind him. After four previous nominations he’d finally won an Oscar for his lavish, charming screen adaptation of My Fair Lady. Late in life, he’d discovered the challenges of television, and had just finished directing close friend Katharine Hepburn in The Corn is Green. When we spoke, largely about his views on old Hollywood and its star system, he was unfailingly candid and witty. As he said to end our chat, “Don’t you think we’ve talked an awful lot? I think I’ve done it thin. And I sparkled!”

 Back in 1978, I’d seen many Cukor films in theatres and on television, but DVDs and streaming services did not yet exist. So I went into my quickly-arranged interview without an in-depth knowledge of Cukor’s career as a whole. Happily, I now possess a fascinating new book, George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director, which puts Cukor’s fifty years in Hollywood into perspective. Its author is Joseph McBride, whose credentials make him the perfect choice to see Cukor whole. Joe has been, in the course of his own long career, a film journalist and a screenwriter. (Like me, he has a Roger Corman connection, and is credited with writing Rock n’ Roll High School.) He was also a novice but dedicated actor in Orson Welles’ last film, The Other Side of the Wind. He has taught film studies at San Francisco State for decades, and his twenty-plus books include much-admired studies of Hollywood directors John Ford, Frank Capra, and Billy Wilder. I haven’t read each and every McBride book, but I’m convinced George Cukor’s People is one of his very best.

 McBride avoided writing about  Cukor for many years, because he wasn’t sure how to approach the career of a man whose films covered such a wide range of styles and subjects. Recognizing that Cukor’s close work with actors was the key to his success, McBride has now chosen to zero in on the way he handled his stars, drawing out brilliant performances from luminaries ranging from John Barrymore (in Dinner at Eight) to Greta Garbo (in Camille) to Maggie Smith (Travels with My Aunt). He also identifies Cukor’s favorite subjects: dreamers, outsiders, the legend of Pygmalion creating (and then falling in love with) Galatea, and life as a performance.

 Of the book’s 28 chapters, I was perhaps most taken with McBride’s sensitive analysis of Cukor’s contributions in Gone With the Wind before he was fired by David O. Selznick, and with his appreciation for the brilliant Technicolor work in 1954’s A Star is Born, despite the film’s mangling by studio execs. His close analysis of Ingrid Bergman’s Oscar-winning performance in Gaslight  (he told her to visit a mental institution and study the patients) is memorable as well. And he ends with a tender paean to a TV film I too love: the teaming of a late-in-life  Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier in 1975’s scintillating but sweet Love Among the Ruins.

 What makes McBride’s work so memorable is that he combines the erudition of a scholar and the savvy of an insider with the soul of a poet who loves movies. Here’s his take on Love Among the Ruins: it “serves as one of the purest expressions of Cukor’s career-long dedication to the transcendent power of the dreamer and the role of the theatre in heightening and improving upon reality.”  Beautifully said. 

 

Joe Mankiewicz Sticks His Finger in “The Honey Pot”

The Mankiewicz brothers were genuine Hollywood legends.  Elder brother Herman co-wrote Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and literally hundreds of other classic films, starting in 1926 and ending not long before his early death in 1953. But Herman was something of an underachiever compared to younger brother Joseph. Joe (1909-1993) is credited with writing almost 40 films, and directing 22. In 1950-1951 he achieved the remarkable feat of winning four Oscars, two for directing and writing the adapted screenplay of A Letter to Three Wives, and two more for writing and directing All About Eve. He nabbed his last Oscar nomination in 1973 for directing his last film, Sleuth. (The expert in all this is my colleague Sydney Ladensohn Stern, for her fascinating 2019 study, The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics.)

 It was near the end of Joe Mankiewicz's fabulous career—which also included everything from the notorious Cleopatra to a documentary on Martin Luther King—that he wrote and directed 1967’s The Honey Pot. This dark-hued farce, set in a Venice palazzo, has some of the qualities demonstrated by  Rian Johnson in 2019’s Knives Out. In both there’s a lavishly decorated set, a cluster of mismatched people, and more than a whiff of murder most foul. Knives Out boasts, along with a lot of clever business, a subtle and highly amusing Stephen Sondheim joke. The Honey Pot is even more esoteric, basing its plot on Ben Jonson’s black comedy from 1605, Volpone. As a true English major, Mankiewicz clearly enjoyed esoteric references to his source material. His leading character’s surname, Fox, is a clear nod to the “sly fox” of Volpone’s English translation. And Fox’s henchman (Mosca in the original) is now William McFly. (Get it?)

 The crafty Fox is played to perfection by frequent Mankiewicz star Rex Harrison. I’ve heard obnoxious stories about the real-life Harrison, but in this film he’s delightfully devious. (Serious hilarity comes from the fact that, as a man obsessed with ballet, he madly pirouettes around his home to endless repetitions of Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.” Yes, that’s the piece to which the hippos cavort in Disney’s Fantasia.)  Other major players include Cliff Robertson as the sidekick Fox recruits for his nefarious schemes, as well as the salty Susan Hayward,  the elegant Capucine, and the brassy Edie Adams, all of them playing former loves who are tricked into appearing at Fox’s fake deathbed in hopes of inheriting his fortune. I need a separate mention for Maggie Smith, who also takes part in the macabre festivities, in the role of Hayward’s rather prim and veddy British nurse and companion. In 1967, Smith was not brand-new to films. But she was hardly the legendary dowager she has since become in such productions as Gosford Park and TV’s Downton Abbey. In her early 30s, she was a pretty and rather vulnerable-looking redhead, one who had just received an Oscar nomination for playing Desdemona opposite a blackfaced (but highly impressive) Laurence Olivier in a filmed version of Othello. Her role in The Honey Pot seems modest at first, but proves to have hidden depths that take us by surprise. Her scenes of give-and-take with Harrison, in which she plays the innocent and he offers a nicely ironic disquisition on the passage of time, are at the heart of this film.

 

But all is not perfection. Along with the movie’s wit and such inspired moments as the crafty local police detective watching TV’s Perry Mason dubbed into Italian, there are key plot strands that simply make no sense. Maybe that’s part of the joke too.

 

Julian Sands Tragically Sought a Hike with a View

Last January, L.A. radio stations announced that English actor Julian Sands had gone missing. A seasoned hiker, the sixty-five-year-old Sands had set out for a solo excursion near Mt. Baldy, the highest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains. In a year marked by massive amounts of snow in Southern California, the search for Sands was repeatedly delayed. But eventually scores of volunteers hit the trail, looking for any trace of the missing actor. It was not until June that his remains were discovered and identified.

 The sad news of Sands’ demise led me to return to his breakthrough role, as handsome young George Emerson in 1985’s A Room with a View. This screen adaptation of a work by E.M. Forster set the standard for the cinematic transformations of major novels, through the collaboration of James Ivory (director), Ismail Merchant (producer), and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (writer). This longstanding team, specializing in sumptuous, intelligent costume dramas, was once a powerful force in the movie industry, particularly in the last two decades of the 20^th century. As Merchant put it, “It is a strange marriage we have at Merchant Ivory . . . I am an Indian Muslim, Ruth is a German Jew, and Jim is a Protestant American. Someone once described us as a three-headed god. Maybe they should have called us a three-headed monster!”

 A Room with a View captures  the elegant yet repressive mores of Edwardian England, circa 1908. Its opening scenes are set in Florence, Italy, where a group of well-endowed  English travelers gather over dinner at a local pensione. The youngest of them, newcomer Lucy Honeychurch (Helen Bonham Carter), laments that her room lacks the promised view of the River Arno. Whimsical Mr. Emerson (Denholm Elliott) volunteers that he and his son will gladly swap rooms, but Lucy’s stuffy guardian, cousin Charlotte (Maggie Smith), is reluctant to do anything unseemly.

 Throughout the film, Lucy is torn between the wish to obey social norms and a youthful eagerness to experience life in the raw. Her chance to elude her chaperone’s supervision comes when she visits the basilica of Santa Croce, only to find herself steps away from a violent stabbing. She faints, but is rescued by Mr. Emerson’s strapping blond son (Sands), a young man nearly bursting with a strongly romantic temperament. From this point forward, George Emerson finds moments to express his ardor for Lucy. This upends her Florentine sojourn: Charlotte whisks her back to her family’s country estate, where she tries hard to resume the life of a demure young English lady.

 Quickly there’s an engagement to Cecil Vyse, a supercilious English intellectual (Daniel Day-Lewis), who looks with disdain on anything that might smack of impropriety. (He haughtily scorns a delightful scene of Lucy’s brother and others cavorting in the buff in a neighborhood pond.) But inevitably Lucy will discover the need to rethink her choice of a husband. The film’s ecstatically happy ending provides love, rapturous kisses, and of course a room with a view.

 Sands’ character is presented on-screen as something of a conundrum, even to his loving father. Saved by family wealth from the need to choose a profession, he seems to live to revel in beauty in all its forms. His lust for life is distinctive, especially when he’s placed among his more prosaic countrymen. Obviously, a man is more than the sum of the characters he plays on screen. Still, it’s easy to imagine George Emerson’s life being suddenly snuffed out on a solo hike into the wilderness. I hope that Sands enjoyed a wonderful view before he died.