Films I Love #31: Holiday (George Cukor, 1938)

I've written about George Cukor's sublime Holiday here before, but any list of my favorite films would simply not be complete without it. The film is a moving, joyous parable about the importance of finding your own place in life, of not only marching to the beat of your own drummer, but of pounding out the beat with your own two hands. The film boasts one of Cary Grant's best performances, as a free-spirited self-made man who thinks he's in love with a stuffy society heiress (Doris Nolan) but seems more of a natural match for her fun-loving sister (Katharine Hepburn). Every second of screentime between Grant and Hepburn glows and sparkles with the pleasure of seeing two such vivacious performers enjoying one another's company. It's obvious from the moment they're introduced and shake hands with a playful nod, that they're the film's real couple, and Nolan is all but cast aside.

The film is a tribute to remaining youthful, and there's a childlike spirit to the way Grant and Hepburn play here: riding tricycles, doing somersaults, putting on Punch and Judy shows, not to mention the witty verbal banter and playacting of their conversations. The centerpiece of the film is a New Year's Eve party where Grant and Hepburn retreat to an upstairs room, away from the snooty society crowd, along with Grant's friends (Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon) and Hepburn's drunkard brother (Lew Ayres). This small, intimate party takes place in the only comfortable room in a palatial mansion, the only room with a normal sense of scale. Throughout the film, Cukor isolates Grant in long shots of rooms that seem to have been built for eight-foot tall giants, emphasizing his discomfort with the luxury and opulence that seems to await him if he marries into this family. It's only in the upstairs playroom, with its cozy fireplace and leftover childhood toys, that Grant and Hepburn can relax and be themselves.

Gaslight

George Cukor's Gaslight is a claustrophobic Gothic suspense piece, a haunting psychological thriller about marital control and manipulation. The beautiful young Paula Alquist (Ingrid Bergman) is devastated by the grisly murder of her aunt Alice, a famous opera singer who had raised Paula from birth. Shocked and wounded, Paula leaves behind the London house where she grew up and goes away to study music like her aunt. She soon enough finds happiness in the arms of the charming pianist Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), and the couple are married and return to the home where Alice was murdered. Paula is convinced that with her new husband she can finally forget the horrors of the past and create a new life there for them. However, once they arrive, Gregory's demeanor changes almost instantly. He begins assuming tighter and tighter control over Paula's life, forbidding her from having any visitors or going out and, through an accumulation of small incidents and details, slowly convinces her that she is going mad.

The film places its audience in a situation analogous to Paula's, trapped and tortured and manipulated by the overbearing Gregory. His vice-like grip on her mind is infuriating, and the film is frustrating to watch — a measure of how effective it is in conveying the cruel manipulations of its villain. Boyer is terrifying and sinister, with his rigid formality occasionally breaking down, revealing flashes of the monster beneath his cultivated façade. He projects quite a lot through the simple narrowing and widening of his heavy-lidded eyes, which slim down into thin slits and then suddenly open into an intense, fiery glare. It's a nasty, finely tuned performance, but it's certainly not much fun to see him reducing the noble, lovely Bergman into a cowering, stammering, confused mess, unsure of her own mind, half-convinced that she's losing her sanity.

Of course, it is never in doubt for the audience what's really going on: Gregory is the one who murdered Alice, and he's now manipulating the dead woman's niece for some obscure purpose of his own. His guilt is all but confirmed by the way he reacts, early on, to the discovery of a letter sent to Alice just two days before her death. It's an obvious cue, and the audience instantly knows what Paula will take the entire movie to discover: this man is a purely evil murderer. As a result, Gaslight is a form of highly refined cinematic torture, watching the disintegration of this lovely woman's mind and all the while knowing exactly what's really happening. The suspense in the film arises not from any mystery about what's going on, but from the simple, stomach-churning tension of the situation, as well as the unspoken questions bubbling just beneath the surface at every moment: when will Paula wake up? When will she realize what's going on? Cukor toys with this release, and there's a great scene where Paula, finally fed up with her husband's iron fist, devises a minor revolt by resolving to go out for a party. Bergman's sly, proud smile at herself in a mirror, dressed in a lavish white gown, is a reward for the audience and herself for enduring this torture.

This victory is short-lived, however, and ultimately the film's most frustrating quality is that it doesn't allow Paula to solve her predicament herself. She remains, throughout almost the whole film, the helpless, weak, easily controlled woman she seems to be right from the start. It takes the deus ex machina intrusion of a knight in shining armor, the Scotland Yard assistant inspector Brian Cameron (Joseph Cotten), to finally shake Paula out of her stupor. Cameron is awkwardly inserted into the plot, simply appearing at intervals spying outside the couple's home, led on only by vague intuition. His role in the film denies the audience the satisfaction of a more feminist resolution: Paula fighting back for herself, redeeming herself. The film subjects Paula to such extremes of suffering at the hands of a man that even the suggestion of a newly blossoming romance between Paula and Cameron at the denouement is somewhat distasteful — no sooner is she free of her murderous, monstrous husband than she seems to be gravitating towards a new coupling to replace her destructive marriage. Cameron's presence in the film succinctly states the limitations of classical Hollywood: even in a film about the horrors of romance, the film can't manage to present a more compelling solution than simply a better romance.


Still, despite Cameron's part in triggering Paula's belated recovery of her identity and strength, the ending does provide a stunning and deeply satisfying showdown between Paula and her tormentor. Before he's hauled off by the police at the end, Gregory is displayed to Paula trussed up and tied to a chair, their positions finally reversed, with Gregory at last helpless before his wife. True to form, he tries to manipulate her into freeing him, but discovers that he has lost his hold on her. In a marvelous scene, Paula taunts and cajoles him, bitterly mocking him, teasing him with the possibility of freedom before turning him over to the police. The film is a barbed satire of society's contempt for women, and particularly the tendency to reject their concerns, to label them mad, to threaten them with the asylum. Paula's final opportunity to turn the tables on her husband is thus especially satisfying in that she's able to turn his words back on him, to take the words that he used to control her and turn them to her own purposes. It's a complex and potent scene, and Bergman's performance, sensitive and multi-layered throughout the film, is here extraordinary, a masterful display of passion and long-delayed rage spilling over.

Cukor lavishes attention on the film's atmosphere and setting, perfectly capturing a vision of period London: flickering gaslight lamps, foggy gray streets with rain-streaked stone walks, velvety shadows draped over every surface. In this respect, Bergman's face is treated as a surface as well, brushed with the warm glow of the lamps, the shadows tracing along the rounded edges of her cheek bones, the light playing within the depths of her wet, expressive eyes. Cukor frequently highlights his main actress in closeups, often lingering on nearly silent shots of her simply looking around. The direction is finely attuned to the nuances of her performance, the movement of her eyes, the way she holds her face, the subtle touches with which she fleshes out her character and makes her suffering palpable. Even when the focus isn't on Bergman, nearly every frame of the film is sumptuous and enveloping, a study in the oppressive, womb-like atmosphere of this dark, shadowy house.

Cukor's attention to detail, coupled with the great performances of the two leads, makes it easier to overlook the film's shortcomings, but it's undeniable that the script is a silly and contrived piece of work. With the exception of the confrontation between Paula and Gregory, the final act dissipates the film's eerie atmosphere into banality, particularly once Gregory's motivations for what he's done become known. On the plus side, the airless claustrophobia of the plot is relieved slightly by the sporadic presence of a trio of fine character actresses in bit parts: the house's near-deaf cook (Barbara Everest), the couple's gossipy, murder mystery-loving neighbor (Dame May Whitty) and the tart, snippy young maid (Angela Lansbury in her first role; though why Gregory would show her the least bit of amorous attention with Ingrid Bergman right upstairs is one of the film's most insoluble mysteries). Gaslight is at times frustrating and doesn't go far enough in exploring its ideas about marriage and gendered power struggles, but it's nevertheless a dark, interesting chamber thriller.

The Women (1939)

George Cukor's The Women is an overwrought, bitchy melodrama in which, true to its title, the male presence is entirely eliminated in order to focus on the gossip, backbiting, betrayals, and catfights that go on among a group of society women. The film, adapted from a successful play, is a deliberately high camp satire. With its ripe, hilariously barbed dialogue, it perfectly captures a certain kind of shrill, endlessly chattering upper-class milieu, with women so isolated from their husbands and the male world in general that the men in their lives need not even appear in the film. Cukor went to great lengths to ensure that there was no male representation onscreen, even casting female animals for the scenes where dogs, horses, and monkeys appear.

The film's plot, based on a real piece of gossip overheard by playwright Clare Boothe Luce, centers on Mary Haines (Norma Shearer), who initially seems to be the only person in town who doesn't know that her husband Stephen is running around on her with the wily, man-stealing shopgirl Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford). All of Mary's supposed friends express fake sympathy, while eagerly spreading the news far and wide, none of them more than the cheerfully gossipy Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell, in an amazing comic turn). Indeed, Mary is surrounded by these gossiping women, virtually a who's who of female MGM talent at the time the film was made: the nosy Edith (Phyllis Povah), naïve young Peggy (Joan Fontaine), the brash four-time divorcee Countess de Lave (Mary Boland), and the foxy former chorus girl Miriam (Paulette Goddard), a more benign man-stealer than the blatantly gold-digging Crystal. The cast is, obviously, top-notch, and they're given a lot of red meat to dig into. The script is hilarious, packed with memorably bitchy lines and patter, as all these women trade barely concealed barbs, openly insulting one another while maintaining at least an appearance of decorum and manners.

Only Crystal herself, with her lower-class background, is crass enough to let the veil slip aside, and her quips are more unfettered than those of the other women. When Mary, having finally learned about the affair, confronts Crystal and insults her taste in clothes, Crystal retorts without missing a beat, "Thanks for the tip, but when anything I wear doesn't please Stephen, I take it off." Crawford doesn't get as much screentime as one would expect to justify her top billing — she can't be onscreen for more than a half hour total — but she makes the most of what she gets, delivering frankly sexual lines like that with a raised eyebrow and a lewd leer. Later, she's the only character in the film to get as close as the Production Code would allow to calling another woman a bitch, when she not so subtly references a word that "isn't used in high society... outside of a kennel."


Cukor and the cast have an obvious ball with this lurid material, and whenever the cattiness of the women is the focus, the film crackles with energy. Cukor's camera groups the women into tight clusters, documenting their warm, friendly manner, their propensity to hug and smile and laugh together, even as their dialogue cloaks venom in a sweet, light coating of sugar. At other times, the film often lapses into over-the-top sentimentality, especially with regards to Mary, who is devastated by learning that her husband — who she thought of as an equal and a partner — is cheating on her. There's more than a hint of anti-feminist ideology in the script, which positions Mary as a proto-feminist figure who takes pride in her ability to fish and ride horses as well as her husband, and who engages in friendly competition with him over such manly pursuits. The implication is that it's only natural for the never-seen Stephen to seek out the arms of another woman, since Crystal offers him only sex and uncompetitive femininity. In the end, Mary becomes happy only when she's able to sacrifice her pride and accept her husband back, for the first time using the catty ways of her friends to win him back.

The film also falters whenever it indulges the over-the-top melodrama of the story too much, as it does in practically all of the overwrought scenes between Mary and her wide-eyed daughter (Virginia Weidler), which have a saccharine, unsubtle sentimentality that fits uncomfortably with the film's overall bitchiness. Indeed, it's somewhat hard to buy Mary's passionate and enduring love for her husband when the film's central conceit keeps the men, including Stephen, completely out of the picture. This choice makes perfect sense when it comes to the other women, who seem to treat the men in their lives like accessories, to be changed as though putting on a new hairstyle, whenever the old one gets boring. It's no surprise that nasty Sylvia's husband never shows up onscreen, given that his only function in her life seems to be for bragging rights and the stability of a society marriage. Mary is somewhat alone among the women in the film in loving her husband a great deal, even when his affair — and the gossipy meddling of her friends — sets the couple on the road to divorce.

At times, Cukor devises ingenious methods of keeping Stephen hidden even when pivotal scenes demand to be shown. The couple's breakup is narrated by a maid who listens outside their room to the argument, then runs downstairs to spill it all to the cook, acting out both parts with obvious relish. Thus, Stephen's words get into the film even when he himself does not. There are also several telephone calls between the couple, where Cukor shows only a closeup on Mary, trusting her reactions to communicate what's happening on both sides of the phone. In one heartbreaking sequence, right after she's learned of the affair but before she's confronted him, Mary speaks to him over the phone, trying to pretend that everything's alright as he excuses himself from dinner. She tells him it's all fine, trying to put a smile into her voice, but the tears well up in her eyes nevertheless. It's melodramatic, but it's one of the few scenes in the film where such theatrics seem genuine and moving rather than nauseating. Elsewhere, the absence of Stephen is more distracting, especially in the film's final moments, when Mary's joyfully teary reunion with him is conveyed by another of those gauzy closeups, accompanied by sweeping, romantic music. It's hard to celebrate, with her, the return of a guy who's never even been seen, and who seems to have treated her terribly, just because the script has Mary continually expressing her love for him even despite his straying.

The film is occasionally hard to bear whenever it ventures into this kind of sappy, audience-pleasing tripe, but that's perhaps to be expected of a film that is so openly intended as a woman's picture. The film even incorporates an interlude, in eye-popping Technicolor, where the women go to witness a fashion show. Cukor, as is to be expected, treats it like a theatrical showcase, a square of color initially inset into the film's black and white reality before expanding to encompass the entire screen. As the models parade around a brightly artificial succession of sets — including, of course, a theater where the women exit onto the runway at the conclusion of a play — they show off a series of outrageous outfits, proving that high fashion was every bit as ridiculous and disconnected from reality in 1939 as it is today. This bit of eye candy is an obvious nod to the film's intended audience, even if much of the rest of the film has a somewhat jaundiced perspective on that same audience of women. The Women is, for the most part, a delightfully nasty satire, as bitchy and tiger-clawed as its protagonists.

Heller in Pink Tights

Heller in Pink Tights is the only Western ever made by George Cukor, better known for his sly, clever comedies, so it's no surprise that this is an extraordinarily idiosyncratic Western. In fact, it's really a sly, clever comedy disguised as a Western, one where all the traditional Western trappings — the badass gunslinger, the swarms of marauding Indians, the corrupt small-town businessman with the posse of thugs — exist at right angles to the main story. These Western archetypes are pushed aside here by the focus on the theatrical troupe of Tom Healy (Anthony Quinn) and his flirtatious mistress Angie (Sophia Loren), as they struggle to make ends meet and flee from town to town with the law (prompted by Angie's con games) always one step behind them. Along the way, this unlikely troupe stumble into the middle of a classical Western story, when they run across the gunman-for-hire Mabry (Steve Forrest), who has killed three men and is now a target for his employer, the sleazy De Leon (Ramon Novarro), who doesn't want to pay the agreed fee. This intrigue, though fully developed and fraught with tension in its own right, inevitably plays second fiddle to Cukor's apparently greater interest in the troupe's memorably awful theatrical numbers and the milieu of the theater in general.

The result is a film in which individual disconnected moments are much more powerful than the film as a whole can support, but the strength of these moments more than makes the whole worthwhile. The film's subtext, literally unspoken but constantly present, is sex, and its verbal absence is highlighted early on when two of the actresses are discussing the relationship between Healy and Angie, asking why they should have to get married if they're already... and then the actress is cut off. The film is full of such coy references to sex; Cukor seems to be as much of a "tease" as Angie herself, and the film constantly dances around the naughty bits with a lightfooted grace that makes such discretion funny and exhilarating rather than simply frustrating.

Sex is the film's big white elephant, always there, in every one of Sophia Loren's seductive glances, and in the bantering dialogue. It's also there in a scene where Angie and the outlaw Mabry size each other up by looking only at each other's bottom halves. Angie is on a staircase, her upper torso hidden from the view of Mabry, who's standing below her and watching with admiration. She senses his stare, and bends down to look at him, but the ceiling obscures her view of his upper half as well, and she only sees him from the belt down to the boots. It's a wonderful scene, in which the way Cukor divides and chops up the frame also chops up the characters, accentuating their sexuality by literally focusing on their sexual organs. It also serves to point out the nature of Angie's connection to Mabry — they are essentially introduced to each other through sexuality — as a contrast to the dialogue-based interactions between her and Healy.

In another beautifully handled scene, Angie observes Mabry by looking through a sliding panel with a painting of a reclining nude woman on it. As Angie slowly slides the two panes of the window apart, inserting her gorgeous face in between, the effect is of her seeming to emerge from within the nude, the halved naked woman driving home the sexual nature of Angie's gaze. As if it wasn't already obvious from the earlier scene where she checks out his lower half! Such sexual division is one of the film's key subtexts, the way Mabry (and to some extent, Angie too) views sex as a dehumanized commodity, a matter of mere mechanics and body parts. This, too, is driven home even further when Mabry wins Angie in a card game where she puts up "herself" (read: her body) as the ultimate collateral. As he continually reminds her, she then becomes his "property," indicating a conception of sexuality entirely removed from real human interaction.

If sex is the film's driving force, it's also apparent that Cukor has a great affection for the theatrical milieu which these characters populate. The grandiose, kitschy stagings of classical plays and operas put on by Healy and company involve awkwardly read lines, ridiculous costumes, and a spectacle involving a "wild" horse that charges around the theater and then runs along a carefully concealed treadmill to provide the illusion of a race through a forest backdrop. This latter touch turns the theatrical stage into a kind of movie theater, an effect that Cukor enhances by placing the charging horse in a frame towards the back of the stage, so that its continuous running-in-place seems to be happening on a screen rather than directly there on the stage. Just as Cukor's film encompasses the theater of his characters, so their theater has room for a primitive realization of cinema, a bow towards the motion-capture photos of Eadweard Muybridge, one of the earliest progenitors of the cinema. It's an implicit acknowledgment from Cukor, who had at times worked in both forms, that the art of cinema had long since supplanted the theater in terms of mass entertainment.

Cukor has great fun with the more theatrical scenes here, playing up the hammy quality of the troupe and their dismal productions, staged with would-be grandeur that only makes their ragged costumes and makeup-caked faces all the more pathetic. But the film's best celebration of theatrical performance is also a subversion of cinema, or at least of the specific conventions of the Western cinema form. Cukor builds up to an Indian attack with all the solemnity and earnest suspense to be expected of such a scene, especially with the foreboding buildup of menacing music on the soundtrack. The stage is set for an epic chase scene, but what Cukor delivers is much stranger and more satisfying for being so unexpected, defusing the conventional menace of the Indians' assault. As the troupe flees on horseback, leaving their wagons behind them, a marauding wave of Indians swoops over the wagons, but instead of directly following, they linger at the wagons, turning their hunting party into a game of dress-up as they play with the costumes and props left behind by the actors. Cukor shoots this scene as though it's a teenage slumber party rather than an attack, with feathers flying everywhere from broken-open pillows, dresses twirling through the air, and several Indians donning animal-head masks or blowing harsh notes on a tuba. The scene is a brief respite from the tension of the chase, a moment of celebratory joy that's enough to make one forget that, just moments before, these Indians were the enemies, the subject of the building suspense that drove away the film's main characters. This interlude ends soon enough, as the Indians torch the wagons and are promptly left behind by the narrative, never to be seen again as the film returns to the acting troupe. It's an example of Cukor's occasional indulgence of his whims at the expense of the narrative, his purely visual delight in this scene entirely trumping its narrative purpose. The Indians are just a plot device to get the troupe moving into the mountains with Mabry as their guide, and once this is accomplished they're summarily dropped from the film. But not before Cukor allows them a moment of their own to have some fun.

Heller in Pink Tights is bursting with great scenes like this, visually exciting moments of great sensuality and energy, underpinned by Cukor's themes of sexuality and the theater. It's always apparent that he's not quite as engaged by the prosaic machinations of the plot, which in the second half of the film largely follows a standard Western adventure line, twisting and turning but never approaching the electric thrill of the scenes where Cukor isn't concerned with fulfilling any narrative purpose. The cast of the theatrical troupe, which features some great character actors like Eileen Heckart and Edmund Lowe, isn't given much to do, and neither is Anthony Quinn, who's totally wasted here. Even so, it isn't necessarily a mistake that the film focuses so fixedly on Loren, who simply radiates sexuality and desire, acting mostly with her expressive eyes, which Cukor wisely highlights again and again in closeups, especially ones where the rest of her face is obscured by a scarf or blanket. The film is carried by her charm and beauty, as well as by the strength of that handful of scenes where Cukor's visual wit is on full display. Not a perfect or fully realized film by any means, Heller is nonetheless a genuinely entertaining and stylish entertainment, the kind that the Healy theater company's productions aspire to be — thrilling, intelligent, knowingly sexual, and totally free-spirited.

Stereo/Sylvia Scarlett

Stereo is an early student film project from David Cronenberg, an hour-long feature made almost entirely on his own, on such a shoestring budget that he decided to entirely forgo sound recording. The result is a film that, even in its extreme minimalism and obvious amateur nature, is pure undistilled Cronenberg, an early indication of the themes and obsessions that would continue to haunt him throughout his later films. The film's central conceit is that the footage shown here is documentary material from something called the Canadian Academy for Erotic Enquiry (only in Canada!), where the mysterious Professor Stringfellow is conducting strange experiments in telepathy and sexuality with a group of eight young men and women. The bulk of the film is entirely silent, with the only sound being provided by an occasional voiceover, reading clinical and scientific descriptions and analyses in a detached, objective tone. Otherwise, the film plays out in a dead silence. This eerie stillness may have been necessitated by budgetary constraints, but it is nevertheless a perfect aesthetic complement to the film's inquiry into sensory deprivation, human communication, and the objective/subjective divide, especially as regards scientific research.

This divide between objective and subjective is most present in the gulf between image and sound in this film. While the voiceover impassively discusses the nature of telepathy and describes the theories and experiments of Stringfellow, the images present a messier world of social interaction and sexuality, far removed from the dry, textbook-style readings on the soundtrack. This gulf is almost never bridged, and as a result the sound and image seem to exist on different planes, commenting on and feeding into one another, but rarely coming completely into sync. The voiceover rarely ever seems like it's actually talking about the events of the images, which it purports to describe.

The best way to capture the film's mood is perhaps to quote from one of these lightly absurdist but earnest monologues: "We understand that the unique way in which an individual perceives and reacts to his environment is a function of his own experiential space continuum," the narrator says halfway through the film. "When object events enter the experiential space continuum of that individual, they become an integral, organic part of that space... But we are now feeling with telepathists, in theory, the interior space continua of two or more telepathists can merge, can blend together to an extent far beyond the range of normal human experience. What would be the organic nature of communal experiential space, shared among eight psychosomatic entities?"

Obviously, this psychological mumbo-jumbo points forward in many ways to Cronenberg's own Scanners, just as the film's clinical exploration of sexuality would later be taken up in Dead Ringers and Crash. This film is concerned, as many of Cronenberg's films would be, with alternative modes of human society and interaction, the creation of a new "experiential space." This expansion of human capability is located, as it usually is in these films, in the human mind itself, in expanded use of brain functions usually left undeveloped. Just as the community of telepaths in Scanners represented a new human social unit, tightly knit together within their own minds rather than through sensory or verbal interaction, the experiment depicted in Stereo is an attempt to reach a similar new paradigm in human society. The obvious subtext in these scenarios is an awareness of the inadequacy of society as it is now, and Cronenberg's films often represent imaginative recreations of social functioning in order to create a new and better society. That these transformations inevitably necessitate tremendous psychological and physical violence can be seen as a byproduct, an indicator of the rigidity and strength of the social norms being broken.

These themes are less developed in Stereo, really just a skeleton of the ideas they would later blossom into, but the film is nevertheless interesting, especially for Cronenberg admirers. The imagery of the film consistently belies the objective tone of the narration, as the camera (handled by Cronenberg himself) fluidly glides through the distinctive, angular corridors of the CAEE (actually the University of Toronto). While the voiceover maintains a clinical distance, the camera swoops in on the telepathic volunteers at the institute in even their most intimate moments. As an early sketch in the career of a director who would later fill in this broad outline with much richer details, Stereo is perhaps most worthwhile as a beginning, a starting point. But it is by no means worthless on its own merits, and its coolly detached examination of human subjectivity and relationships is a seminal example of David Cronenberg's keen eye for such subjects.

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George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett is a deliriously strange and unsettling mess of a film, an irreconcilable collision of gender-bending sexual mutability with old-fashioned Hollywood normative romance and melodrama. The film casts Katharine Hepburn as young Sylvia, who disguises herself as Sylvester in order to help her father (Edmund Gwenn) escape an embezzling charge in France. The duo flee to London in disguise, as father and son, and along the way pick up the lowlife smuggler and thief Monk (Cary Grant). Together, the trio attempts to make a dishonest living by pulling cons. There are a great many twists and turns after that, especially when the trio is joined by a Cockney maid (Bunny Beatty) who the father falls for, and the quartet starts up a traveling vaudeville-type show performing for the rich all across the countryside. But the narrative is largely unimportant to the film's successes, and its increasingly baroque machinations are clearly not where Cukor's interests lie. Rather, the first half of the film is a clever inquiry into gender and sexuality, as the cross-dressing Hepburn charms both Grant and the upper-class artist Michael (Brian Aherne) with her boyish ways, while also seemingly attracting several women.

This bisexual play animates the film as long as Hepburn remains in drag. She is, it should be added, an almost totally unconvincing man, but it doesn't particularly matter, since the film as a whole is so unconcerned with being convincing in any regard. It starts with the accents, which are uniformly horrid and in any case keep slipping away and then back again at random. Grant is supposed to be sporting a lower-class Cockney drawl, which is bad enough, but he constantly forgets and falls into his standard Cary Grant persona — it's to his credit that he's such a natural that the shift is often barely even noticeable. It's harder to figure out quite what is going on with Hepburn's accent. She's supposed to be half French and half English, so I guess in some sense her all-over-the-place melange of accents and voices might represent her mixed heritage and upbringing, but it's still distracting, especially in the more melodramatic scenes. In lighter moments, she allows the accents to fall away, forgotten, and that's a relief, since her voice and natural comic poise go hand in hand, as in her more conventional screwball comedies. She's especially good at projecting her character's awkward attempts to sound like a man, as well as the moments when she forgets and slips up. This babble of voices, faked and put on, results in a meta-layer in which it's difficult to tell when the characters are meant to be faking a voice, and when it's the actors who are faking and forgetting. The scenario complicates things further by having the group pose as rich society folk for one of their scams, with Sylvia's father affecting an upper-class British whine for the ruse. It's a film about "passing," in terms of gender, sexuality, and class, and the emphasis is always on the voice as a marker of identity — one reason that the actors' missteps with their accents are so galling and ironic.

Despite this sometimes awkward execution, Hepburn's adventures as a man are riotously fun, and the closeted gay Cukor was clearly having a ball with this resonant scenario. From the moment Hepburn and Grant meet, there's a weird chemistry between them that clearly hints at some underlying (homo)sexual tension. At one point, getting ready to bunk up on a cold night, Grant tells Hepburn that "he" will make "a nice hot water bottle" to cuddle up next to. In another scene, Hepburn is kissed on the mouth by her father's lover, and later the lover of the man she wants (Aherne) can't resist giving her a peck on the cheek either. She seems to gather attention almost without regard to conventional sexuality, as though the confusion of gender roles serves to make her attractive to all genders and sexualities at once. Cukor stretches this material as far as it will go, and presumably as far as the strictures of 1930s Hollywood would allow; it's hard to imagine him getting away with much more, and even the obvious innuendo here considerably stretches the boundaries of the Hollywood romance. Nevertheless, this obviously couldn't be sustained for the whole picture, and the film inevitably has to unmask Hepburn and return her to her proper sex role, which is precisely the point when it ceases to be exciting and begins to drag and falter.

The plot complications necessary to affect this role reversal quickly descend, in the second half of the film, into trite melodrama — the kind where characters run out into the rain and scream, or jump to their deaths in the ocean — and it's obvious that Cukor loses much of his interest in the plot once Hepburn sheds her suit for a dress. There's a delightful moment, when Hepburn reveals herself as a girl to Aherne, when he simply cackles and yells out, "So that's why I was talking to you the way I was!" It's a telling line, suggesting that even before he knew she was a woman, Aherne was feeling the stirrings of attraction for her, and that while her revelation might sanction those feelings, make them acceptable, it doesn't substantially change the feelings themselves. This understanding of sexuality as a universal fact not always bound by traditional male/female dynamics is quickly discarded by the narrative, however, in favor of some much more conventional Hollywood theatrics. Cukor is so disinterested in this fluff that at one point he obviously dubs in a whole conversation of exposition while no one on screen is moving their lips at all. Sylvia does briefly change back into Sylvester during the second half, though, and Cukor takes the opportunity to insert a prison sequence with a knowing wink, having the two "men" spend the night in a jail cell together on the flimsiest of pretexts.

What all this adds up to, ultimately, is a totally confused and uneven film that's nevertheless a joy to watch, messiness and all. There are plenty of moments of great fun and pleasure, and the handful of rioutous party scenes look forward to Cukor's own later Holiday with their celebratory free spirit. The second half's melodrama often drags, and the conventional romantic resolution is something of a disappointment, if only because the film's first half promised such freshness, candor, and originality with regard to the Hollywood treatment of romance. That the film doesn't quite deliver on that promise doesn't diminish the sloppy, sporadic brilliance of much of this film, which in fits and starts serves to question and undermine the whole heterosexual, upper-class foundations of the Hollywood cinema.

12/19: The Philadelphia Story

George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story is an epitome of stylish wit and charm, evincing the same concern with class and life decisions as Cukor's earlier (and much superior) Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn vehicle Holiday. Hepburn plays Tracy Lord, a society heiress with a long history as a tabloid gossip mainstay, especially in regards to her marriage to and angry divorce from Grant's C.K. Dexter Haven (a brilliant high-class name if ever there was one). The opening scene perfectly captures the antipathy between these two, in a quick and wordless evocation of the end of their marriage: Hepburn breaks Grant's golf club over her knee, and Grant palms her face and shoves her backwards, after first feigning a punch. But when Tracy plans to get remarried, to the nouveau-riche George Kittredge (John Howard), Dexter returns into her life, dragging with him a pair of gossip-rag journalists who he plans to introduce as friends of his.

From then on, the film is a game of appearances and realities, with nothing ever quite what it seems. Dexter is seemingly out for revenge by showing up at the wedding and bringing sleazy journalists with him, but he actually has more altruistic motives in mind. And the journalists, Connor (James Stewart) and Liz (Ruth Hussey), must maintain their facades while gathering information about the Lord family. Meanwhile, Tracy sees right through her ex's ruse immediately, but is forced to accept the journalists as friends anyway, due to a blackmail plot by the tabloid's editor. All this is established with perhaps too much detail, and the first 20 minutes of the film drag ponderously with exposition that brings the plot up to this point. It's only then that the first genuine sparkle appears in the film, as Tracy and her sophisticated young sister Dinah (Virginia Weidler, in one of those annoyingly precocious little kid roles) playact before the befuddled journalists, hoping to present a super-exaggerated portrait of the society lifestyle for their benefit. This scene is hilarious, and the smooth-talking, constantly quipping Hepburn quickly proves a strangely compelling counterpart for the laconic Stewart.

The duo achieves an uneasy rapport almost as soon as they're onscreen together, totally different from Hepburn's already established rapport with Grant as her ex. In Grant, Hepburn has a true onscreen equal, someone with a sharp wit to match hers and an ability to trade barbs back and forth with ease. Stewart, in his best folksy personality, can be witty too, but his conversations with Hepburn aren't so much back-and-forth as give-and-take, up-and-down, going from periods of rapid-fire exchanges to more halting moments of withdrawal and uncertainty. The difference between the two male leads and their complicated connections with Hepburn provides the film's central spark and tension. It's telling that, from the very beginning, the prospective husband George is sidelined in favor of not just one, but two other leads. He's a stuffy cipher, a man who pulled himself up from nothing to be a successful businessman, and who has now totally bought into the status and self-importance of his new class. In contrast, both the impoverished Stewart and the born-rich Grant seem much more natural, relaxed in their skins and not overly concerned with appearances or traditions.

As this précis suggests, Cukor's interest in class is complex and not at all couched in the usual simplistic terms. The Lord family is undoubtedly upper-class, and they accept their privilege with casual ease, while Connor is nearly a pauper, a struggling writer working way beneath his talent just to pay the bills. Connor is understandably resentful of the riches around him at the Lord home, but his resentment cools as he grows to know Tracy better, although their discussions still often have a tinge of class warfare about them. This is especially apparent when Tracy offers Connor the use of a country house for private writing, and he rejects her by saying that the concept of wealthy patronesses has gone out of style. Connor just wants to be his own man, even if it means struggling, and this ultimately is the film's primary message. Both Connor and Dexter are comfortable with who they are, while George and Tracy aren't — Tracy, especially, seems uncertain about what direction to go in her life, or even what kind of person she is. She's repeatedly told, sometimes in insult, sometimes with the best of intentions, that she is a cold, distant, and self-centered goddess, and only Connor seems to see the warmth and intelligence in her.

Cukor deftly juggles this introspective subtext with the romantic interest of the central love triangle (actually complicated into a hexagon by the additional points of George and Liz), and a great deal of humor. The film is at its peak in the scenes between Connor and Tracy, especially a remarkable sequence in which the two of them grow progressively drunker and drunker over the course of a night as they ramble and talk and drink. The scene is a series of back-and-forth movements and gestures, with each of them moving towards each other and then backing off; several times, in the midst of quietly phrased arguments, their faces are close enough to kiss, and then they back away again. Cukor handles this beautifully, subtly increasing the romantic tension in the scene even as the tone of the dialogue largely remains friendly and unsentimental. When they finally kiss, the music soars romantically and then jolts to a halt, as though pausing to breath, and in the silence between kisses Hepburn simply whispers, "Golly." It's a moving, hilarious, wonderful moment, a perfect movie kiss. Without resorting to typical Hollywood grandstanding or manipulation, Cukor simply evokes the emotional depth of that kiss.

The Philadelphia Story abounds in moments like this, the result of Cukor's ability to organically combine witty dialogue, emotionally complicated characters (and performances to draw them out), and the subtle use of formal elements to gently nudge the scene towards its meaning. In this film, Cukor neatly shifts between light humor, low-key drama, and intellectual ruminations on identity, purpose, and the decisions made at crucial junctures in life. The film never quite settles into any of these modes, but it never quite feels disjointed either. Its story flows organically, and best of all, it doesn't rely on stock clichés or conventions. Its complex denouement somewhat defies the logic of Hollywood endings (though it's definitely a happy one), because it arises from the characters and their actions rather than from any clever twist or sop to audience expectations. The film as a whole isn't as dazzlingly fun as Holiday, which dealt with similar themes and ideas, nor is it as rigorous in developing these ideas. But it's still a fine work, and once it gets past the speedbump of the opening 20 minutes, it's very satisfying indeed.