Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema

Hats off for George Cukor!

91 William Rothman Hats Off for George Cukor! The Cukor Manner In the fall of 1981, George Cukor spent several days at Harvard to help promote Rich and Famous, which turned out to be his last—and perhaps most vastly underrated—film. In preparation for his visit to the class I was teaching on film directors, I screened for my students several of his enduring classics. After our viewing of The Philadelphia Story (1940), one of his George Cukor at home in Los Angeles, 1973. Photograph by Allan Warren. 92 William Rothman greatest films, Cukor arrived to answer questions. Thirty years later my recollection of this occasion has grown hazy, but there are two moments that stand out vividly in my memory. The first was Cukor’s answer to a question a bright, mischievous student put to him. “If you were to cast Professor Rothman in a film,” my student asked, “in what role would you cast him?” Looking at me appraisingly, the director, celebrated for his shrewd eye for casting, answered with perfect comic timing—what else would one expect from the director of The Philadelphia Story, Adam’s Rib (1948), and Born Yesterday (1950)?—“A mad violinist.” Three of the films the class had watched prior to Cukor’s arrival were A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Camille (1936), and A Woman’s Face (1941). Each has a memorable scene in which a musician becomes so swept away by his ever more frenzied piano playing that his eyes burn with maniacal glee. In A Bill of Divorcement, the musician (John Barrymore), escaped from the asylum, is a poignant figure as he shows his daughter how the ending of his piano sonata should be played. In the others, the musician is a dastardly villain (Henry Daniell and Conrad Veidt, respectively). I realized that Cukor was being witty when he answered my student’s question. I was not about to give up my day job to wait by the phone for his casting call. Nonetheless, I took him at his word. I found myself quite moved that he could see in me—that he could see that the camera could see in me—such a capacity for wild abandon, or even the capacity to be startled, amused, and flattered by the idea that the camera could see this in me. In this entirely unexpected way, I gained a firsthand glimpse of Cukor’s genius as a director. I have never held a violin in my hands, much less played one. I was a writer nearing completion of my first book, Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze, and I was a Harvard professor teaching film studies. My two instruments were the IBM Selectric II typewriter and the Athena projector (which made it possible to stop a film in its tracks with the touch of a button , freezing the projected image without burning the frame so that those in the room could speak about a film moment even as its spell was lingering ). I can well imagine that the camera would have discerned in my eye the maniacal gleam that is the sine qua non of a mad violinist had Cukor been filming me while I was in the act of composing my book’s chapter on Psycho (1960), or when I excitedly hit the Athena projector’s pause button and began to think out loud in the classroom the first time I noticed that Norman Bates’s hand hesitates before he chooses, fatefully, to give Marion Crane the key to Cabin 1. In short, Cukor was right. To be sure, if I were an actor I would wish to 93 Hats Off for George Cukor! be at least considered for the kind of role Cary Grant plays in The Philadelphia Story, but I am confident that a mad violinist is a role I could play convincingly. If I were auditioning for the role of a mad violinist, I believe that I would play second fiddle to no one—at least, if the film had a director who possessed Cukor’s ability to envision in me such a capacity for imaginative existence. And yet, if my student had asked me, not Cukor, what role I could imagine playing in one of the director’s films, I would have been at a loss. I would have had no idea what Cukor believed the camera would be able to see in me. What he had...