Despite the dubious merits of his last two films, Cukor’s next feature, a remake of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women in 1933, began the most creative phase of his entire career.
This film was followed by two other great features, Dinner at Eight and David Copperfield, that demonstrated the evolution of Cuor’s distinctive style as a director. All three films proved to be strong and durable, and solidifed Cukor’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s best directors. But Little Women was a special and personal work in a way that Dinner at Eight was not; it became one of Cukor’s favorites.
Little Women
After seeing a preview of Bill of Divorcement, Selznick thought that Little Women would a be perfect vehicle for the young and talented Katharine Hepburn. When he approached Cukor about the project, the director confessed that he had never read the book. “It was always considered a little’s girl story,” Cukor later recalled, “it seemed awfully syrupy.” But once he read the book, Cukor found it strong-minded, full of solid virtues, and ripe for a new screen adaptation, especially with Hepburn in the lead. Hepburn was delighted at the propspect of working with Cukor again, though accused him of never having finished the book. Despite his vehement denials, this became a running joke between them.
Selznick, however, met with staunch resistance from RKO’s executives, who were concerned about the lack of commercial appeal of a period piece like Little Women. There was some pressure from studio heads to “modernize” the story, a suggestion which Selznick r ejected outright.
Finding an approach which would capture the work’s essence was foremost in Cukor’s mind. He asked himself, why had the novel survived all these years? Probing the book, Cukor found the answer in its deeply layered portrait of family life, stressing an “admirable New England sternness about sacrifice and austerity.”
Set in the Civil War in Concord, Massachusetts, the film is dominated by women. Mr. March, off fighting the war, leaves his wife, Marmee (played by Spring Byington), to take care of their four daughters. Jo (Hepburn) is an ardent tomboy; Beth (Jean Parker) gentle and sweet; Meg (Frances Dee) tender and romantic, and Amy (Joan Bennett) dainty and sly. With the exception of Jo, the sisters try to live up to their father’s expectations, to be responsible “little women,” to fit into the traditional mold of femininity and domesticity.
The oscar-winning script for Little Women, by husband and wife team Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason, was quite original for its time. Rather than tightening the loosly constructed novel, the script captures the book’s episodic quality. Things happen, but they’re not tied together, reflecting Cukor’s belief in the book’s vitality. Later, when people would comment on how well he handled the big scene, Cukor would ask, “What big scene?” Cukor didn’t feel any of the scenes was “the big one.” He didn’t think of the movie in terms of a linear progression of events and climax; this concept would have betrayed the spirit of the novel.
Cukor had great respect for his source material. Successful screen adaptation, he believed, meant accepting a book’s weaknesses as well as its strengths. For instance, Beth gets desperately sick, and it looks as if she’s going to die. Then she recovers. Then she gets sick again. Then she becomes an invalid. And finally she dies. Cukor filmed this sequence as it was written. When friends complained, “Why, the bitch seems to be dying all the time,” he concurred. She is indeed too often on her death bed, but that awkwardness was in the book.
Similarily, Cukor refused to tamper with Jo’s love interest which develops awarkardly rather late in the narrative. Cukor also insisted that a version of the script, in which Jo’s novel becomes a smash success, be modified to present a less idealized view. Cukor wanted to portray a family which accepts hardship and sacrifice as a matter of course, without being noble or self-congratulatory.
Jo, the most eccentric of the sisters, is the center of the narrative. And Hepburn’s superlative performance, singled out at the l934 Cannes Film Festival, makes her all the more prominant.
By this film, Hepburn had become an accomplished actress. She gave such an inspired performance, that the viewers went with whatever she did. Exuding charm and vitality, Hepburn brought out the elements that made the film live for many years–family love, unselfishness, and being true to one’s self.
Cukor had deep emotional affinity with Jo who, like him, who was not only an outsider but an artist. His direction conveys effectively the process by which Jo’s restlessness and frustration are actively channelled into her creative career. Her determination to make her own way as a writer, lead her to decline marriage. For her, love is “sickly and sentimental,” and she can’t understand “why is it that things always have to change just when they’re perfect.” Like Jo, Cukor was more interested in pursuing his career than love. “Look at me world, I’m Jo March, and I’m so Happy!” says Jo in a moment of genuine exhilaration.
Cukor could also relate to the idea of Jo’s tutorship by an elderly and cultured gentleman. Jo meets a shy European professor, Fritz Bhaer, played by Huagarian actor Paul Lukas, who introduces her to the sophisticated world of theater and opera, lending her his volume of Shakespeare. It was a role Cukor was to play for numerous younger men in California in his own house–one of the city’s main literary and cultural salons.
Working together for the second time, Cukor and Hepburn were developing an intense relationship imbued with forthright honesty and humor. During the shoot, there was a sound strike. They were filming the scene in which Beth was dying for the nth time, Hepburn weeping at ger bedside. There were at least 20 takes of the weeping scene, Hepburn weeping day after day, but the amateur soundman couldn’t get any of them right. Cukor was growing increasingly impatient–he could see Hepburn’s hard work, but didn’t like the results. One day, after crying so much, Hepburn was so tired and frustrated she threw up. Unsympathetic to her, Cukor said, “well, that’s what I think of the scene too.”
At one point during the filming, Cukor became so enraged, he acturally struck Hepburn. In the scene, Hepburn was to run upstairs with a plate of food. Beforehand, Cukor warened her, “be careful, don’t laugh, because I’ll kill you if you do.” But in making her way up the stairs, she slipped and spilled the ice cream on her one and only dress. Furious, Cukor hit her, screaming, “You, amateur.” Hepburn was taken aback, but she tried not to show it. “I probably didn’t hit her hard enough,” Cukor mused in later years.
But Cukor’s touch was usually much more light-hearted. At one point in the story, Jo goes to New York and sees opera for the first time. She is transfixed, suddenly wanting to be an opera singer. In the scene, Hepburn was twirling around with great exhuberance and verve, in an exquisite dress that had been copied from one of her grandmother’s. Cukor thought the actress was too high-minded, fancying herself a bit too much. To make his point, after a long take as Hepburn sank to the ground in a curtsy, Cukor had a large ham tied to a rope lowered into view!
Cukor was sensitive to his performers, and very aware of their problems. During the shoot of Little Women, he fired a schoolteacher, who was on the set, because she had a destructive influence on the actors. “People are rather insensitive,” Cukor said, “they have no hesitation of coming here and standing in front the actors and watching them. The actors, instead of looking into their own imagination and letting that work, are thus confronted with cold eyes.”
If Hepburn was a natural choice for the tomboyish Jo, it did not initially occur to Cukor that Joan Bennett might be right for the role of Amy, her mischievous sister. Cukor perceived Bennett as a somewhat hard-bitten actress, certainly not a character out of Alcott’s book. The part of Amy, as he saw it, called for a soft and comedic touch. One night Cukor ran into Bennett at a party in which she was slightly tipsy and very amusing. It was there and then that he got the wild idea to cast her as Amy. Unbeknownst to Cukor, though, Bennett was pregnant, which as the film progressed, threatened the credibility of Amy’s slim girlishness.
Cukor’s friend, Douglass Montgomery, was cast as Jo’s love interest, the romantic Laurie. Montgomery looked strange in this film, wearing too much make-up and lipstick, but he gave a sensitive performance. Cukor was very fond of him and later considered him for the lead of David Copperfield and as Ashley in Gone With the Wind.
The only disappointing performance, in an otherwise uniformly good cast, was Spring Byington as Marmee. Little Women was Byington’s flim debut–Cukor gave her a break–and though she later improved as an actress, her performance in this film was too sugary and sentimental to capture the “tall, stately lady” the author intended.
The film’s other false note, that Cukor never liked, was Max Steiner’s insistently sentimental score. Steiner was riding high, on account of his score for King Kong that year, hailed as a music breakthrough in film scoring.
Little Women was shot entirely on the RKO lot, including the winter scenes which required the use of artificial snow. (Growing up in New York, Cukor was very sentimental about snow.) While most of the narrative takes place indoors, the film conveys a sense of small-town life through its careful recreation of Civil War austerity.
While working on this film, Cukor discovered how stimulating the research process could be. The authenticity of the film’s look is a tribute to Cukor’s insistence on meticulous attention to detail. He sent set designer Hobe Erwin to Concord, Massachusetts to get a feel for the place, and insure that the sets reproduced the locale with historical accuracy.
A humorous incident during on the set Little Women also taught Cukor the need to be discriminating about choosing his consultants. Hepburn insisted, “In New England, there is always poinsettia on the breakfast table, it’s an absolute law.” Cukor dutifully obliged, and had a plant brought in. But when they shot the scene, a crew member said, “What is that doing on the table?” “Well,” Cukor said, “you should know, you’re from New England.” “I never saw one before,” the man said. Cukor learned an important lesson — “Be careful of what advice you take and from whom.”
Walter Plunkett approached the costumes with the same attention to detail and accuracy. His designs reflected the notion that the girls were poor but high-minded. Plunkett arranged that one of the girls would wear a certain dress for one occasion, but then another would borrow it from her. The costumes were interchanged among the actresses in different scenes to suggest their frugal way of life. This struck a chord among the viewers, as Little Women was released during the height of the Depression.
In the context of the 1930’s, the film’s treatment of social class was quite relevant. The March family, once rich, had lost its fortune. Poverty, hunger, and infant mortality are also in the background, along with Beth’s illness and death from Scarlet Fever. Tallulah Bankhead was vacationing in California when she saw a rough cut of the picture at Cukor’s house. No one else had seen it. There was a frightful scream at the end of the screening. Typically flamboyant, Bankhead threw herself into Hepburn’s arms, hugged her and burst into tears. On her knees, holding three wet handkerchiefs, she was terribly moved and shattered by the film and Hepburn’s performance. Cukor looked at her with a rather cruel eye and said, “Tallulah, you’re weeping for your lost innocence.”
Under Cukor’s delicate direction Little Women is a powerful depiciton of lost innocence–a film about the making of a sensitive writer and the maturation of a small-town girl who transcends her milieu while retaining its heritage. Little Women was nominated for three Oscar Awards, including Best Picture and Cukor’s first nod as Best Director, which he lost to Frank Lloyd (Cavalcade) For many years, Little Women was dismissed as a sentimental period piece. But over the last two decades, the film has been reassessed in the new context of feminism, of which Hepburn was an early exemplar.
David Selznick produced Little Women again in l948 at MGM, but early on he realized that something basic was missing. He called Cukor and asked for his honest opinion. “It’s perfectly all right,” Cukor said after looking at the rushes, “but it hasn’t got magic.” Cukor felt that the l948 version made the mistake of slicking the novel up, and the acting did not measure up to his version. June Allyson, who played Jo, was no Hepburn. Cukor knew that it was Hepburn’s great performance that cast magic over his film.
Dinner at Eight
Selznick moved to MGM in February 1933, to head up one of its production units. It was not very difficult for him to persuade Cukor to once again follow him. Ruled with a firm and efficient hand by Louis B. Mayer, MGM was the most prestigious studio in Hollywood, The all-star adaptation of Dinner at Eight, based on George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s popular Broadway play, was Cukor’s first film at MGM.
For Cukor, Kaufman was not a profound writer, but he could write funny dialogue. Like Bill of Divorcement, Dinner at Eight was a straightforward, unobtrusive adaptation of a stage work, with little attempt to go beyond a proceneum perspective. Neither film contained a single exterior shot.
Unlike Bill of Divorcement, however, Dinner at Eight still maintains its contemporary edge. For audiences in 1933, the ambience of the film was particularly timely. There’s an underlying sense of the Depression behind the comedy, a sense of anxiety below the surface. Most of the characters are either bitter or insecure: Husbands cheat on their wives, millionaires are scared of going broke, actors lose their looks and jobs.
The story revolves around a dinner party given by Mrs. Jordan (Billie Burke), a foolish snob, obsessed with social status. As the guests arrive, her carefully planned evening falls apart. Her husband, seriously ill and in danger of loosing his buisness, invites crass industrialist Packard (Wallace Beery) and his vulgar girlfriend Kitty (Jean Harlow), in an attempt to salvage their fortunes. Their daughter Paula (name) falls in love with Renault (John Barrymore) a pathetic, fading matinee idol and abandons her fiancee.
The script was written in four weeks by Herman Mankiewicz and Frances Marion. Later, Selznick brought in Donald Ogden Stewart, who had scripted Tarnished Lady, to make some additional contributions. Stewart wrote the classic exchange between Kitty and Charlotta (Marie Dressler.) “I was reading a book the other day,” Harlow says, “machinery is going to take the place of every profession.” With a pointed glance at her sexy rear, Dressler retorts, “Oh, something you need never worry about, my dear.” Dressler’s quip became one of the most memorable lines in movie lore.
The script preserved the play’s caustic sense of humor, but softened some elements of the story. Goaded by Kitty, for example, Packard decides agains wresting control of Jordan’s shipping company. And when Paula learns Renault is dead, she returns to her fiance, who knows nothing of the affair. These concessions were made to accomodate perceived audience tastes at the time.
Some of the reviewers, however, were still troubled by the film’s ruthless cynicism–which is precisely what attracted Cukor to the material. People’s deceits and self-deceptions, their double and triple natures, is at the film’s themeatic core. (“You’re two people really. One’s magnificent and the other’s very shaddy,” says the wife o her philandering husband at one point.) These motifs, deception and self-delusion, would become prevalent in Cukor’s work.
Budgeted at 420,000 dollars, Dinner at Eight was made in the Thalberg tradition of literary quality, a modern drama with meaningful text. Because MGM had just released Grand Hotel, which won the l932 Oscar Award, invidious comparisons between the two movies were inevitable. Like Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight was a contemporary, multi-character drama. And like the l932 film, Dinner at Eight cashed in on MGM’s great gallery of stars.
But unlike the troubled and bumpy production of Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight got off to a smooth start on March 16, 1933. Cukor was able to complete shooting in four short weeks. “That was a wonderful record,” Cukor later recalled, “I owed it all to these marvelous performers; with them behind me, everything seemed possible.” The fact that the film contains almost no lenghty or sustained scenes undoubtedly contributed to his ability to make it so quickly.
Initially, L.B. Mayer did not want to cast Jean Harlow as the “dumb blonde.” Unconvinced of her talent, Mayer feared she might suffer in comparison to Marie Dressler, who played Carlotta, the aging actress–but Cukor fought for Harlow and won. He admitted that Harlow had given weak and self-conscious performances in The Public Enemy and Hell’s Angels, but in Red Dust (with Clark Gable), Cukor took note of her natural talent for comedy.
Like Mae West, who was also popular at the time, Harlow was a wise-cracker who conveyed at once toughness and vulnerability — a combination of qualities that made her attractive to both male and female viewers. Though considered by many the quintessential dumb blonde, Cukor found her to be shrewd and subtle. Harlow had an uncanny knack for delivering her lines as if she had no idea of what she was saying.
During the shoot, Cukor got to know Harlow quite well. “She was a real actress,” he later said, “with beautiful manners, a rather lady-like creature. She’s gone to private schools and all that.” He was irritated by the lurid stories that circulated in Hollywood about her.
Cukor brought out the best in Harlow in his acute direction of her big scene where she tells off Wallace Beery. Beery finds her lying in bed wearing a new black hat in an all-white bedroom. She sits up, pushes back her hat (like she was sitting on the toilet, as Cukor put it) and, without pulling any punches, yells, “You big windbag!” When he plays the bigshot, telling her he has to go to Washington, she looks at him, clearly bored but still impressed, and says, “Yeah, you better go and fix things.” Cukor would orchestrate a similarly effective scene with Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford in Born Yesterday.
Barrymore’s superb portrayal of the tragic actor Renault was done as black comedy. Playing a second-rate actor — which, of course, he was not–Barrymore’s subtlety and wittly turned Renault into an ignorant ham. An expert at shading his performance, Cukor thought that Barrymore’s ability to immerse himself into a character, and let that character transcend his own personality was remarkable. In his first shot, Barrymore is on the telephone trying to impress a society woman; his speech is well observed and accurate. But when he turns to demand a drink from the bellhop, his fake grandeur disappear in an instant.
Cukor was particularly fond of a scene where Renault learns he has lost the job he desperately needs, becasue he is not British. “I can be English.” he says. “I can be as English as ahnnybohdy.” “Oh, that is wonderful, Jack!” Cukor would enthusiastically say whenever the actor surprised him. “Well, it ought to be,” Barrymore retorted, “This is a combination of Maurice Costello (his father-in-law), Lowell Sherman (his brother-in-law), and me.”
Under Cukor’s direction, Barrymore was most effective in his death scene, one of the screen’s most vivid and pathetic suicides. Cukor suggested that Renault, always the actor, would die in a picturesque way, but that he should botch his suicide–like everything else in his life. As shot, Barrymore, again drawing heavily on Lowell Sherman and Maurice Costello, walks very grandly across the room, then trips over a stool, gets up, pulls himself together, sits down in a chair and turns his profile to the light–in a suitable death pose. This marvelous scene taught Cukor an important lesson: “If first-rate actors respect you, they’ll try anything you suggest.”
As a whole, the casting of the film was perfect. Marie Dressler was outstanding as the gaudy and comical dowager. The biggest star of her time (after Min and Bill), Dressler’s specialty was low comedy. Dressler would mug and carry on, but she knew how to play an actress with great aplomb. A homely woman, Dressler herself found it hard to believe that she was playing an ex-beauty, with a host of suitors. To make Carlotta more creditable, Cukor proposed a tongue-in-cheek approach to the character.
Cukor’s only regret was the “great disservice” he did Billie Burke by casting her as the feather-brained “flibbertigibbet.” Burke was so convincing that, unfortunately, she was typecast in similar roles for the rest of her career. But Cukor knew that Burke forgave him; it was not in her character to hold grudges.
The film’s cast did not escape the biting humor of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, commenting on Cukor’s ability to coax performances from his stars. “It must be awful tough for you to show Marie Dressler how to perform an old actress who’s very ill,” he quipped, “and I can see the difficulty in making Lionel Barrymore understand the emotions of a man who has an extravagant wife, or Jack Barrymore comprehending the feelings of a fading matinee idol.” Mankiewicz also “sympathized” with Cukor for trying to make a sexy tarty girl out of Jean Harlow, and an uncouth creature out of Wallace Beery.
Indeed, details of Barrymore’s rwal biography–he talks about his profile and drinking–were used to enhance his part as an unsuccessfyl actor. The interplay between the actors’ offstage and onstage personalities enriched the plot and its meaning.
Dinner at Eight is considered to be the best film made from a Kaufman play. Cukor achieved a fine balance of comic and serious tonalities, and managed to blend a broad range of acting styles (Harlow’s natural charm, Beery’s mugging. and Dressler’s grand delivery among them) into a coherent ensemble piece. Yet each star enjoyed at least one special vignette that lingered in memory–a tribute to Cukor’s directorial skills.
Having directed half a dozen films, Cukor felt he had begun to know his way around the camera. Dinner at Eight marked a significant change in Cukor as a director. Here, Cukor showed a deeper understanding of the kind of acting that worked in movies–and the difference between stage and screen performances.
Maureen O’Sullivan who, a year later, played Dora in David Copperfield, singled out Cukor’s reading of lines and his depth of knowing what it was all about, as opposed to some directors who would just say, ‘do it.’ She remembered talking to Lou Ayres, Billy Bakewell and Russell Gleason, who had worked with Cukor in All Quiet on the Western Front. “They were eternally grateful to George,” she recalled, “because they didn’t know how to act in film, how to act for the camera.” O’Sullivan learned from Cukor “the intimacy” of the camera, “what it shows and what picks up.” Cukor showed her how to do the intimate things, “a kind of second level of thinking for the camera.”
Throughout his career, Cukor trained many performers, who had come from the stage, how to act for the camera. Cukor helped, for example, Ruth Hussey acquire a movie technique, guiding her to an Oscar-nominated performance in The Philadelphia Story. “He showed me,” Hussey said, “that screen technique was different, quieter and more subtle than the one for the stage.” Cukor gave her one piece of advice that she always used: “Keep your emotions near the surface, so that you can call on them when you need to.” Hussey had performed on stage before doing movies, but working with Cukor on two films (the other was Susan and God), she realized how different a technique screen acting was. On the screen, she said, “more has to show in your face, whereas on the stage, you do a lot with your voice and your body, your gestures are broader.”
Dinner at Eight was a hit; Cukor’s biggest to date. The night of the premiere, in the pouring rain, police had to keep back the crowds who gathered in front of the Astor Theater to watch the arrival of Hollywood’s greatest stars. A live radio broadcast, from the theater’s lobby, filled the airwaves with excitement. The rain continued for days, but it did not keep audiences away from the box-office.
Like Little Women, the film was loved by the critics as well as the public. The NY Daily Mirror critic called the film “wholly splendid” and a “much improved version of play.” Among the barrage of congratulatory letters, Cukor received an emotional note from Irene Selznick. “What are words?” she wrote, “Nothing! But you must know how very great my feelings toward you are. My appreciation is no end.”
Tallulah Bankhead, who has been too ill to attend the premiere, wrote him a fan letter after seeing the movie. Tickets were so hard to find, she and her companion had purchase them from scalpers–at a hefty price. Watching the movie, Bankhead kept repeating to herself over and over again, “That’s like George–I know him.”
Dinner at Eight was so successful that Selznick wanted to make another film with Cukor and the Barrymores. He appreciated Cukor’s ability to handle the usually tempermental siblings without the slightest difficulty–the only director who could. Cukor was very enthusiastic about Selznick’s idea to film John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, with the Barrymores, but the project never materialized.
