On Helford's What Price Hollywood

American director George Cukor (1899–1983) was not unique in his conflicted Jewish identity, his having to cloak (but not fully closet) his homosexuality, or his frustration as a sophisticate in middle-brow–oriented Hollywood. What set him apart was the multifaceted manner in which he negotiated these tensions across a range of genres in a fifty-year career, as Elyce Helford impressively shows in What Price Hollywood: Gender and Sex in the Films of George Cukor.

These tensions have been explored before, as Cukor has been the subject of several biographies and analytical studies, some by Helford. What the author has accomplished with rigor and aplomb here is to view a broad spectrum of Cukor's work from a variety of perspectives and to open up entirely new avenues of discovery.

The book's main title is doubly pertinent: referring to one of Cukor's earliest and best films, What Price Hollywood? (1932), about "the meeting point of art and entertainment" (183) in the movie capital, as well as to Cukor's complex relationship, artistically and personally, with the demands of the classical studio system. Although thankfully he didn't succumb to alcoholism or suicide, as creatively frustrated director Max Carey does in the film, he learned to play the game, as did his favorite actor, Katharine Hepburn, after their attempt at stretching gender boundaries in Sylvia Scarlet (1925) proved an "overtly campy romp" (4) for contemporary critics and audiences. His experience on Gone with the Wind (1939), when Clark Gable had the known-to-be-gay Cukor replaced well into filming for allegedly privileging female star Vivien Leigh, taught him an even more traumatic and instructive lesson, one that "stayed with him for the rest of his career" (4).

As for the book's methodology, gender and sex—or as Helford puts it more precisely, "an intersectional feminist/queer approach" (183)—is the book's dominant theoretical frame. This derives logically from Cukor's having been dubbed, throughout the classical Hollywood period (1930s and 1940s) and with obvious sexist/homophobic overtones, a "woman's director." The typecasting was both descriptive and prescriptive and not entirely to Cukor's detriment. It encouraged his work with the most prominent female actors of his time, including (besides most productively with Hepburn) Greta Garbo, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Judy Holliday, among others. The pejorative sobriquet was further balanced by Cukor's more complimentary reputation as an "actor's director." When not undermined or compromised by macho types—such as Gable on Gone with the Wind or Stewart Granger on Bhowani Junction (1956), pulling rank on the "little homosexual Jew from Brooklyn" (172)—Cukor drew from women and men some of their best work, including from John Barrymore, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Lew Ayres, and Spencer Tracy (the latter most memorably in a quartet of films with Hepburn).

While feminist/queer-related issues remain What Price Hollywood's primary focus, Helford augments and nuances this through-line with notions of class, race, ethnicity (specifically Jewish), tone and genre, production context, personal biography, and historical forces. Although the array of conceptual angles might seem overwhelming, there are "hard limits" (183) to Helford's application of them, so that what emerges is not an infinity mirror of interpretations but a highly illuminating, cubist-like portrait of Cukor and his oeuvre.

In keeping with its multilayered analysis, the book's structure is thematic rather than chronological, with each chapter covering a small cluster of films, some appearing in multiple chapters, and ranging across Cukor's classical and postclassical Hollywood periods. This allows for productive and occasionally counterintuitive comparisons, such as between Cukor's earlier Our Betters (1933) and The Women (1939) and much later Rich and Famous (1981). Building on Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape and Susan Faludi's Backlash, Helford shows how the constrained female friendships in the earlier films, to be expected in...