George Cukor: Hollywood Master

One of the studio era's most famous and admired directors, George Cukor made some of American cinema's most beloved classics, including The Women, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star is Born, and My Fair Lady. Not himself a scriptwriter, he was particularly adept at choosing which properties to adapt and then managing the adaptation process with verve and skill. But what makes for a good adapter, for a talented master of ceremonies who knows where to put everything and everybody, including the camera? Who knows how to make a property his own even while enhancing the value it has as belonging to someone else? The essays in this volume, all written by prominent experts in their field, provide a series of complementary answers to those questions. Although responsible for many of the films that came to define an era, Cukor himself has received surprisingly little critical attention. With a theatrical style successfully transferred from his Broadway career, Cukor was still a man of the cinema, fascinated by the ever-developing potentials of his adopted medium, as shown by the more than fifty films he directed in a career that endured from the early sound era into the 1970s. Offering a critical discussion of every feature film Cukor directed, and including a rich trove of valuable information about their production histories, this is the first critical anthology devoted to one of the most celebrated figures from American cinema's golden age.