George Cukor's People

The director of classic films such as Sylvia Scarlett, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady, George Cukor is widely admired but often misunderstood. Reductively stereotyped in his time as a "woman's director"-a thinly veiled, disparaging code for "gay"-he brilliantly directed a wide range of iconic actors and actresses, including Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Maggie Smith. As Katharine Hepburn, the star of ten Cukor films, told the director, "All the people in your pictures are as goddamned good as they can possibly be, and that's your stamp."

In this groundbreaking, lavishly illustrated critical study, Joseph McBride provides insightful and revealing essayistic portraits of Cukor's actors in their most memorable roles. The queer filmmaker gravitated to socially adventurous, subversively rule-breaking, audacious dreamers who are often sexually transgressive and gender fluid in ways that seem strikingly modern today. McBride shows that Cukor's seemingly self-effacing body of work is characterized by a discreet way of channeling his feelings through his actors. He expertly cajoled actors, usually gently but sometimes with bracing harshness, to delve deeply into emotional areas they tended to keep safely hidden. Cukor's wry wit, his keen sense of psychological and social observation, his charm and irony, and his toughness and resilience kept him active for more than five decades in Hollywood. George Cukor's People gives him the in-depth, multifaceted examination his rich achievement deserves.

Enlightening . . . McBride offers shrewd insight into Cukor’s approach to filmmaking . . . Film buffs will find plenty of food for thought. Publishers Weekly
As Joseph McBride, a film historian, argues in his splendid George Cukor’s People, what made Cukor great also makes him slippery. “The critic can describe the way Cukor gets from this to this to this,” the author notes, “but how can he freeze each frame and tell you what this is?” The answer, Mr. McBride tells us, is performance: Cukor, always known (or dismissed) as a “woman’s director,” was a guru of film actors, and it is through these actors that we see Cukor’s genius. The Wall Street Journal
McBride...is insightful on the art of screen acting. [He] is a companionable guide through the Golden Age of Hollywood, and is unafraid to speak his mind. Times Literary Supplement
McBride appraises Cukor’s craft throughout his long career of working intimately with actors in dozens of films, finding themes and throughlines. …McBride offers strong evidence that he was in fact “one of the finest actors’ directors.”… A “widely admired but little understood director” is given his due. Kirkus Reviews
Brilliant . . . exciting . . . Cukor [is] an underestimated master if ever there was one. . . . The gamble of McBride’s book is to prove without hesitation that you can be an author without having to control all the aspects of making a film. . . . McBride describes the director as a great dreamer. Positif
Entertaining as well as intelligent. A sensitive critic and an engaging historian, McBride reconfirms Cukor’s standing as a supple, imaginative, and industrious screen artist. . . . McBride makes an excellent case for the overall coherence of his work, with special attention to such frequently recurring themes as theatricality, masquerade, and the ambiguous relationship of the inner self to the persona seen by the world at large. Cineaste
George Cukor’s People is a fascinating examination of Cukor’s work and an important contribution to the study of the golden age of American film. New York Journal of Books
Film historian, Joseph McBride can be considered a titan in his field...[Mcbride] focuses on Cukor’s actors, and in doing so brings new insight to the work of a man who is 'widely admired but little understood.' The Film Stage
George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director is one of McBride’s most innovative works to date and indispensable for anyone interested not only in Cukor but in directing in general. McBride possesses a skill that few of his peers can claim: a vocabulary for critically analyzing screen acting and how its gestures and movements cohere with the director and cinematographer’s tools. IndieWire
Joseph McBride has produced a new and remarkable study, this time of longtime Hollywood filmmaker George Cukor. [McBride] brings to his work the instincts of a hard-nosed, genuinely radical investigative reporter combined with a sometimes touching romanticism. World Socialist Web Site
...magisterial and encyclopedic The Arts Fuse
McBride is...a prolific writer and gifted film teacher Open Letters Review
Joseph McBride is a natural resource, one whose unique approach to film analysis combines first-person witness, deep study of the context and history of the Hollywood production system, and an uncanny recall for the details and essence of a director’s mise-en-scène. Here, his keen and affectionate "actors-first" approach to his subject echoes Cukor's own elusive, sensitive style, forming a portrait made of portraits of others. As ever with McBride, you'll be driven to seek out films you've never even wondered about and to reencounter others that you recall only as passing dreams. -- Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel
An enticing idea—examining the work of a pantheon director through the iconic performances that adorn his films—is dazzlingly manifested here by singular film historian Joseph McBride. McBride’s fresh take on George Cukor gifts us with lively looks at his work with actors both celebrated (Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe) and less so (Lew Ayres, Fredric March, Hattie McDaniel). And he reminds us that Cukor—too often dismissed as tasteful, amusing, but lightweight—was in fact an artist of extraordinary depth, virtuosity, and understanding. -- Julie Kirgo, essayist and film historian
This is one of the best books in McBride's distinguished career, and a book that Cukor has long deserved. Critics have often described Cukor as an “actor’s director,” but nobody has done so much as McBride to analyze what the term means. He is a first-rate critic—sensitive, forthright, and eloquent. -- James Naremore, author of Some Versions of Cary Grant
For too long, Cukor's reputation has been as a studio-bound “woman’s director." Au contraire, as McBride shows us in his definitive study, which combines personal reminiscences of Cukor with a masterly analysis of his films, Cukor was an adventurous and modern filmmaker—plumbing depths in stories and performances, always visually resourceful and imaginative. -- Patrick McGilligan, author of George Cukor: A Double Life
Whether you savor Cukor’s brilliance one chapter at a time, or peruse this definitive study from start to finish, George Cukor’s People is a “must-read” for movie lovers – as well as aspiring actors and directors – of all ages. -- Jeannie MacDonald Classic Hollywood

Joseph McBride is a film historian and a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg; three books on Orson Welles; and critical studies of Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and the Coen Brothers. He acted for Welles in The Other Side of the Wind and has won a Writers Guild of America award.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.