Permit me a moment of film geekdom, in which I ramble on (probably at length) about how incredibly awesome I think George Cukor is. Together, he and Howard Hawks directed most of my favorite Golden Age movies. There is, I suppose, a rather important difference between a director being a brilliant director and a director with a continuous output of much-loved films, but then again, the two often coincide as well.
So, the awesomeness of George Cukor. Firstly, a list of his films that I feel licensed to comment upon, being as I’ve seen them: A Bill of Divorcement, Dinner at Eight, Little Women, Camille, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam’s Rib, A Star is Born, Pat and Mike, My Fair Lady. Also, unfortunately for him, Cukor was slated to direct and then kicked off both Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (1939 could not have been a good year for him), both after effecting important changes in the films. I’ve read that without his input Dorothy would have had long blond hair, an image that gives me horrified shivers every time I think about it.
Anyway, the reason that I love Cukor, and not just because he makes films in a variety of genres (melodrama, screwball comedy, romantic comedy, suspense, musical), is because how he handled what could have been a very great detriment to his career. Being homosexual in Golden Age Hollywood wasn’t a career-killer (plenty of people were) but it was something that had to be handled delicately and could never be put right out in the open for what it was. George Cukor was perhaps one of the most overtly homosexual characters I’ve read about, who was nonetheless tactful about it. Instead of forming an identity as a “gay director,” he became widely known as a “woman’s director.” Generally, all his films starred strong leading women (he had a special friendship with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, directing at least seven films with Hepburn and several with the pair of them). This reputation was reportedly the reason for his being removed from Gone With the Wind, where leading man Clark Gable was uncomfortable with his closeness with the female cast members. Still, I admire Cukor greatly because he carved a niche out for himself where he could make films with sensibilities that he understood and admired himself, and became greatly successful because of this. And while he was put in a category by the industry and the media, it was a category based on the type of films he made, not on a characteristic that he possessed personally. Thus Cukor was free to make films in a variety of genres, and in doing so produced any number of classic films.