|
|
|
THE FILM SOCIETY OF
LINCOLN CENTER presents
THE DISCREET CHARM OF GEORGE CUKOR
26-day retrospective of the Hollywood
great
runs December 13 – January 7, 2014
Highlights will include THE ACTRESS,
ADAM’S RIB, BORN
YESTERDAY, CAMILLE, THE CHAPMAN REPORT,
DINNER AT
EIGHT, GASLIGHT, HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS,
HOLIDAY, LET’S
MAKE LOVE, LITTLE WOMEN, MY FAIR LADY,
THE
PHILADELPHIA STORY, A STAR IS BORN, THE
WOMEN
and many more!
NEW YORK, October 22, 2013
– The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today it will present
The Discreet Charm of George Cukor (December 13 – January
7). Organized in collaboration with the Locarno Film Festival, the
series runs 26 days and offers a comprehensive overview of the
Academy Award®- winning director’s work, the first presentation of
its kind in several decades in New York City.
The New York-born Cukor (1899-1983) was one of the most successful
and versatile filmmakers in the history of American cinema. Cukor,
who was honored with the Film Society’s Chaplin Award in 1978,
attempted – and mastered – multiple genres, including the musical
drama, the screwball comedy, the domestic thriller, and the literary
adaptation. He was also a legendary director of actresses, guiding
the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Judy
Holliday and Judy Garland, to career-defining performances, as well
as directing Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant and Dirk Bogarde in some of
their most memorable roles.
“George Cukor was a central figure in Hollywood’s storied Golden
Age,” said Dennis Lim, the Film Society’s Director of Cinematheque
Programming. “But while some of his films are now beloved classics,
many are overdue for rediscovery. He has been called a woman’s
director, an actor’s director, an expert at literary transposition
and theatrical adaptation, and some of his films have been
scrutinized for their latent queer content. But his body of work is
far richer and more complex than any one of these labels or lenses
suggests, as we hope to show with this tribute to one of the
medium’s all-time great entertainers.”
Cukor arrived in Hollywood at the dawn of the sound age, imported
from Broadway to serve as a dialogue director, and worked steadily
through the rise and fall of the studio system. His half-century
career was astonishing not just for its longevity but also for its
consistency. François Truffaut called Cukor “an extraordinary
director, who out of five films makes a masterpiece, three that are
good, one that is interesting.” The Discreet Charm of George
Cukor covers the entire span of his career, from the early
talkie GRUMPY (1930) to his swansong RICH AND FAMOUS (1981),
starring Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen.
Highlights include Cukor’s many collaborations with Katharine
Hepburn —including ADAM’S RIB (1949), A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT (1932),
THE CORN IS GREEN (1979), LITTLE WOMEN (1933), HOLIDAY (1938),
KEEPER OF THE FLAME (1942), LOVE AMONG THE RUINS (1975), PAT AND
MIKE (1952), THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940) and SYLVIA SCARLETT
(1935) — and with Judy Holliday, including BORN YESTERDAY (1950),
THE MARRYING KIND (1952) and IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU (1954). Actors
who won Oscars under Cukor’s direction included James Stewart in THE
PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940), Ronald Colman in A DOUBLE LIFE (1947),
and Rex Harrison in MY FAIR LADY (1964). Cukor also launched the
careers of several major stars, including Jack Lemmon (in IT SHOULD
HAPPEN TO YOU, 1954), Anthony Perkins (in THE ACTRESS, 1953), and
Aldo Ray (in THE MARRYING KIND, 1952).
Rarely screened Cukor works that will be shown include A LIFE OF HER
OWN (1950), a melodrama set in the New York fashion world and
starring Lana Turner; BHOWANI JUNCTION (1956), an Ava Gardner
vehicle set in newly post-colonial India; and TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT
(1972), a Graham Greene adaptation with Maggie Smith.
Tickets will go on sale November 21. Special holiday discounts! See
five films for only $25 with our discount package option. Single
screening tickets only $7 for Students and Seniors (62+) as well as
Film Society Members; $10 for the General Public. Visit
www.FilmLinc.com for additional information.
THE DISCREET CHARM OF GEORGE CUKOR Film Descriptions
THE ACTRESS (1953) 90 min, 35mm
Cukor filmed this tender, autumnal family comedy from an
autobiographical play by the great Ruth Gordon (her last of six
collaborations with Cukor). Jean Simmons is radiant as a young woman
itching to flee her sleepy New England town for a big-city acting
career, but the film ultimately belongs to Spencer Tracy as her
reluctant, conflicted father: a beautifully understated study in
feuding good intentions. Bathed in a wistful, nostalgic afterglow,
THE ACTRESS is a sensitive slice of Americana—with a standout turn
from first-time actor Anthony Perkins. “Among Cukor’s least known
movies,” said Peter Bogdanovich, “it is also one of his purest.”
Thursday, December 26 at 7:15PM
Saturday, December 28 at 6:30PM
ADAM’S RIB (1949) 101 min, 35mm
In Cukor’s manic, strikingly modern battle of the sexes, feuding
lawyer spouses Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy let their
domestic power struggles spill over into the public sphere when they
end up on opposite sides of a high-profile murder trial. As the film
cycles from home to courtroom and back again, it stacks up a series
of unforgettable set pieces: Tracy visualizing the trial’s key male
players as women, and vice versa; a female circus performer
matter-of-factly hoisting Tracy aloft by the feet; even a
film-within-a-film that gives Cukor a chance to reflect on his own
complicity in the proceedings. More than a classic screwball comedy,
ADAM’S RIB is one of Hollywood’s most sophisticated meditations on
the gender gap, and a genuinely moving portrait of a marriage on the
brink.
Saturday, December 14 at 7:15PM
Monday, December 16 at 1:00PM
BHOWANI JUNCTION (1956) 110 min, 35mm
“It was a different kind of experience for me,” Cukor said of
BHOWANI JUNCTION, his adaption of John Powers’ 1954 novel about an
Anglo-Indian woman torn between lovers and national allegiances in
the midst of de-colonization. “It excited me—and then we had a bad
preview.” The film was bluntly re-cut, Ava Gardner’s volatile
heroine tamed, and the film’s central political conflict muffled—but
what remains is still one of Cukor’s most daring and personal films:
an acute portrait of a nation in turmoil, and a pointed statement on
Britain’s legacy of oppression.
Saturday, January 4 at 2:00PM & 7:00pm
A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT (1932) 69 min, 35mm
Christmas Eve for the women in the Fairchild family is upset by the
unexpected return of the head of the family, after 15 years in a
psychiatric institution. His ex-wife leaves with her fiancé, but his
daughter breaks off her own engagement to be with him. The screen
debut of Katharine Hepburn—“quite unlike anybody I’d ever seen,” in
Cukor’s words. “She was born for the movies.” Cukor himself would
prove to be a master at bringing out the magnetic quality that later
made Hepburn such a great movie personality.
Friday, December 20 at 3:30PM & 9:15PM
THE BLUE BIRD (1976) 99 min, 35mm
Cukor’s unlikely adaptation of the celebrated 1908 Maeterlinck play
is a genuine oddity: the first ever American-Soviet co-production;
headlined by a trio of great Hollywood actresses (Liz Taylor, Ava
Gardner, Jane Fonda), a famous Russian circus performer named Oleg
Popov, and members of the Leningrad Kirov Ballet; plagued by
production difficulties from language barriers to cast dropouts and
inhumane work conditions. Long out of circulation, THE BLUE BIRD is
one of the most left-field projects ever made by a major Hollywood filmmaker.
Saturday, December 28 at
2:00PM
BORN YESTERDAY
(1950) 103 min, 35mm
Cukor staked out terrain he would later return to in MY FAIR LADY
with this adaptation of Garson Kanin’s celebrated Broadway play: an
unscrupulous tycoon (Broderick Crawford, in a spot-on caricature of
capitalism run boorishly amok) hires a journalist (William Holden)
to cultivate his ditsy chorus-girl mistress, but doesn’t expect the
two to hit if off so well… Cukor, for his part, nimbly transposed
Kanin’s stage-bound action onto a wide slate of
Washington landmarks. And Judy
Holliday deservedly won her only Oscar for her role as the
tough-shelled blonde whose blunt exterior (“I’m stupid and I like
it!”) hides surprising depths.
Sunday, December 29 at 3:45PM & 8:30PM
Tuesday, December 31 at 4:45PM
CAMILLE (1936) 109 min, 35mm
Greta Garbo’s magisterial turn as a doomed 19th-century Parisian
courtesan in Cukor’s lavish adaptation of Dumas, fils’ The Lady
of the Camellias is widely considered one of the all-time great
screen performances. The movie revolves around its star’s tossed-off
jokes, her sudden displays of passion, her glimmers of
coquettishness, her stifled coughing fits, and her final, iconic
death scene, but it’s cushioned by some wonderfully effervescent
photography and a great deal of attention to period detail. CAMILLE
is one of the undisputed triumphs of Hollywood’s Golden Age, a
delicate cocktail of, as Cukor later put it by way of Henry James,
“champagne and tears.”
Sunday, December 15 at 4:00PM & 8:15PM
Tuesday, December 17 at 1:00PM
THE CHAPMAN REPORT (1962) 125 min, 16mm
For this (very) thinly disguised reflection on the
then-still-contentious Kinsey Reports, Cukor cast four brilliant
actresses (Jane Fonda, Glynis Johns, Shelley Winters, and Claire
Bloom) as a handful of suburban women whose sex lives run the gamut
from icy abstemiousness to self-destructive promiscuity. They’re
being grilled by Kinsey-like researcher and his assistant (Efrem
Zimbalist Jr.), with squirm-inducing results. THE CHAPMAN REPORT was
arguably the closest Cukor ever got to directly engaging with his
own sexual identity on screen. Autobiographical echoes aside, it now
stands as a fascinating time capsule of a peculiar moment in sexual
history: the nervous, repressed years just before the revolution.
Friday, December 13 at 4:00PM & 9:10PM
THE CORN IS GREEN (1979) 99 min, 35mm
Cukor's second and final film for television is an adaptation of
Emlyn Williams's autobiographical play, previously filmed in 1945
with Bette Davis in the lead role. In their final collaboration,
Cukor regular Katharine Hepburn stars as the willful schoolteacher
Lily C. Moffat, whose efforts to set up a school in a Welsh
coal-mining town are met with local opposition. In a
reverse-Pygmalion scenario, Moffat sets out to educate one prize
pupil and send him to Oxford.
Wednesday, January 1 at 9:00PM
Tuesday, January 7 at 1:30PM
DAVID COPPERFIELD (1935) 130 min, 35mm
Cukor recruited an all-star cast of character actors for his take on
Charles Dickens’ sprawling novel: Roland Young, Elizabeth Allen,
Lionel Barrymore, Basil Rathbone, and, in a casting coup, legendary
comedian W.C. Fields (replacing Charles Laughton as the ever-hopeful
clerk Micawber). The result is still deemed one of Hollywood’s
finest literary adaptations: in Gavin Lambert’s words, “the truest
Dickens film ever made.” It’s a rich, comic, humane panorama of
19th-century British life, featuring a remarkable turn by Fields—who
jumped at the chance to finally get lost in a character. With a
screenplay by the great British novelist Sir Hugh Walpole.
Saturday, December 21 at
3:30PM & 8:45PM
DINNER AT EIGHT (1933) 111 min, 35mm
“I’m going to be a lady if it kills me.” This dark, embittered
comedy of manners was shot in a flurry of just over two weeks with a
stellar cast: Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, Lionel and
John Barrymore, and the great Jean Harlow (four years before her
death at 26). They’ve all been invited to dinner by Billie Burke’s
wannabe socialite, exposing a cross-section of affairs, deceptions,
failures, and addictions. An unsparing send-up of upper-class
pretentions and a fascinating window into the anxieties—social and
economic—of mid-Depression America, DINNER AT EIGHT teeters
masterfully between stone-faced comedy and tragic farce.
Monday, December 23 at 4:00PM & 9:00PM
A DOUBLE LIFE (1947) 104 min, 35mm
Cukor’s first collaboration with screenwriters Garson Kanin and Ruth
Gordon is an incandescent, psychologically astute record of an actor
slowly cracking up. Ronald Colman, in his only Oscar-winning
performance, plays a beloved thespian whose Othello complex
ultimately drives him to madness and murder. The film is a study in
contrasts: light versus dark, aggression versus restraint, the
rarified space of the theater versus the late-night diners of a
B-movie melodrama, and, of course, performance versus reality—one of
Cukor’s career-long obsessions.
Tuesday, December 24 at 2:00PM & 6:30PM
EDWARD, MY SON (1949) 112 min, 35mm
This adaptation of Robert Morley and Noel Langley’s 1947 Broadway
play is one of Cukor’s bleakest films: a postwar noir taking in,
among other things, arson, infidelity, alcoholism, blackmail,
multiple suicides, corrupt business dealings, and spousal neglect.
EDWARD, MY SON is an essential showcase for Cukor’s gift at dramatic
atmosphere, and one of the director’s few films to center on a male
protagonist—an amoral crook of a businessman played with chilly
malevolence by Spencer Tracy (with Deborah Kerr, fresh from her
starring turn in BLACK NARCISSUS, in the role of his long-suffering
wife). Dissolute son Edward stays offscreen for the length of the
film, but it’s his animating absence that sends the movie spiraling
down towards its inevitable conclusion.
Sunday, December 22 at 4:00PM & 8:30PM
GASLIGHT (1944) 114 min, 35mm
A young opera singer haunted by the memory of her aunt’s murder
marries a handsome pianist and settles down in her relative’s
long-abandoned, overstuffed London mansion, where footsteps echo in
the attic, gaslights dim, and secrets come to light… Cukor’s
celebrated noir is a deeply ambiguous study of psychological abuse,
anchored by a terrific cast (Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and an
18-year-old Angela Lansbury in her first film role) and suffused
with a sense of creeping dread. At its famous last-act reversal of
power, GASLIGHT, transforms from a masterful woman-in-trouble
melodrama into something much more haunting: a reflection on the
origins of emotional violence, marked by a rare degree of sympathy
for the abuser as well as the abused.
Tuesday, December 24 at 4:10PM & 8:45PM
GIRLS ABOUT TOWN (1931) 79 min, 35mm
Two girls, out to make their fortune in New York, loving and leaving
wealthy businessmen, take a trip on a yacht, where they meet a
Michigan millionaire and his young associate. Cukor said: “This was
the period of the gold-diggers or playgirls, in reality, whores who
charged 50 dollars an evening. Zoë Akins wrote these parts to
perfection.”
Wednesday, January 1 at 1:00PM
Thursday, January 2 at 7:45PM
GRUMPY (1930) 74 min, 35mm
Directors: George Cukor & Cyril Gardner
In his country home, an eccentric retired barrister investigates the
theft of a diamond brought from South Africa by the fiancé of his
granddaughter Virginia. In a web of intrigue and romance, a camellia
turns out to be the clue that unmasks the thief and ensures the
young girl’s happiness. A remake of the silent film by William C. De
Mille of 1923.
Monday, December 30 at 2:00PM & 5:45PM
HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS (1960) 100 min, 35mm
A Western in name only, HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS is an imaginative,
formally daring reflection on the relationship between art and life.
Sophia Loren plays the star of a theater troupe touring the Old
West, with Anthony Quinn as her poker-faced husband and Steve
Forrest as her hired-gun object of desire. The result is a
warm-blooded romantic comedy packed with teases and deceptions and
mutual desires, one of Cukor’s most sexually outré films. But it’s
also an aggressively stylized meta-movie in which every onscreen
magic trick or optical illusion, every splotch of bright primary
color, and every tongue-in-cheek nod to Western genre convention
suggests either that the movies are radically divorced from real
life, or that life itself is a game—or both.
Friday, January 3 at 2:00PM & 7:00PM
HER CARDBOARD LOVER (1942) 93 min, digibeta
The great Norma Shearer gave her last performance in this adaptation
of a 1926 farce by the French playwright Jacques Deval (translated
by P.G. Wodehouse!) about a young woman who, in a last-ditch effort
to fend off a stubborn ex, hires a man to pose as her new lover.
Cukor had directed a production of the play in the mid-1920s, and
though there were hiccups aplenty in the transition from stage to
screen—the rise of the Legion of Decency, for instance, meant that
the ex in question had to be demoted from husband to boyfriend—he
nonetheless filled the resulting film with poignant details and
graceful comic touches.
Sunday, January 5 at
3:45PM
HOLIDAY (1938) 95 min, 35mm
What is the good life? Cukor’s gracious, delicate comic masterpiece
follows an eager young businessman (Cary Grant) with a modest
fortune and a drive for adventure as he gets engaged to a society
beauty (Doris Nolan), only to fall instead for her vivacious sister
(Katharine Hepburn). HOLIDAY was a timely reflection on the ways
wealth could allure, stifle, destroy, and protect in 1930s America,
but it’s much more besides: a celebration of imaginative play,
creativity, and performance; a nuanced study of people caught at
motivational and social cross-purposes; and one of the great
Hollywood meditations on the nature—and cost—of happiness.
Wednesday, December 18 at
1:00PM, 5:00PM & 9:15PM
IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU (1954) 86 min, 35mm
Jack Lemmon gave his breakthrough performance in IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO
YOU, Cukor’s sharp satire of modern celebrity culture. The great
Judy Holliday plays an out-of-work young model caught up in a scheme
to (literally) “make a name for herself” by way of a for-rent
billboard in Columbus Circle. At the same time, she’s drawn to
Lemmon’s young, starry-eyed documentary filmmaker, with his ideal of
freedom-by-way-of-anonymity. Shot entirely on location, with
priceless footage of Central Park in the early 1950s, IT SHOULD
HAPPEN TO YOU is a touching time capsule of a vanished New York, and
a still-relevant critique of a society obsessed with fame for its
own sake.
Tuesday, December 31 at 7:00PM
Wednesday, January 1 at 2:30PM
JUSTINE (1969) 116 min, 35mm
This intoxicating, rarely screened adaptation of Lawrence Durrell’s
beloved novel—the first in his “Alexandria Quartet”—found Cukor
working from the wreckage of a half-finished Joseph Strick project,
adapting to unfamiliar scenery (an incense-heavy, pearl-encrusted
Egypt, shot on a soundstage and bathed in perpetual magic-hour
light) and an all-star European cast (Anouk Aimée—with whom the
director was famously at odds—Anna Karina, Dirk Bogarde, and
Philippe Noiret). The result is a heady, melancholic tone poem in
which the novel’s story is blanketed over by a tapestry of
atmospheric effects and mysterious gestures—the kind that linger in
memory long after the credits roll.
Saturday, January 4 at 4:30PM & 9:15PM
KEEPER OF THE FLAME (1942) 100 min, 35mm
One of Cukor’s most explicitly political films, KEEPER OF THE FLAME,
re-united offscreen couple Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn after
their smash hit earlier the same year with George Stevens’ WOMAN OF
THE YEAR. It was an unlikely second pairing: in place of a fizzy,
domestic rom-com, audiences were met with a relatively high-minded
reflection on the persistence of the past in the present, the
conflict between personal and national duty, and the threat of
grassroots fascism. The romantic tension between Tracy, playing a
hotshot war correspondent, and Hepburn, as the widow of a national
hero with a shady political past, is surprisingly muted—but the film
moves at a crackle, and shows Cukor at the peak of his social
consciousness.
Tuesday, December 17 at
3:30PM
Wednesday, December 18 at 7:00PM
LES GIRLS (1957) 114 min, 35mm
Hailed by Andrew Sarris as a musical RASHOMON. Cukor’s glorious
CinemaScope bauble stars Gene Kelly as a dance troupe impresario who
gives one of three differing accounts when one of his dancers
accuses another of libeling her in a tell-all memoir. It was Kelly’s
first and only collaboration with Cukor, but the scene-stealer is
Kay Kendall, lively and quietly heartbreaking in one of her final
performances. (She passed away young two years later.) Featuring
songs by Cole Porter.
Sunday, December 29 at 6:00PM
Tuesday, December 31at 2:15PM
LET’S MAKE LOVE (1960) 119 min, 35mm
Marilyn Monroe shimmies legs-first into Cukor’s 1960 musical, just
before launching into a wildly uninhibited performance of Cole
Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” Little does she know that
she’s being watched mid-rehearsal by the billionaire (Yves Montand)
whose life her current show is satirizing—nor, for that matter, that
he’s about to join the cast (as himself!) to get closer to her.
LET’S MAKE LOVE found Monroe at the peak of her powers: vital,
eager, playful, sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque, in some
moments strikingly naïve, in others profoundly aware of her
influence on the men in her orbit. Her chemistry with Montand is
undeniable (and, sure enough, the two stars did spark up an off-set
affair during filming), but their tender onscreen rapport is much
more than the stuff of movie-star gossip. With cameos by Bing
Crosby, Gene Kelly, and Milton Berle.
Wednesday, December 25 at
4:30PM
Thursday, December 26 at
1:00PM
A LIFE OF HER OWN (1950) 108 min, 35mm
Cukor’s 1950 melodrama about a successful model and her ill-fated
affair with a married man had the cards stacked against it from the
start: a victim of miscasting, studio interference, and generally
low enthusiasm. The results are rough but fascinating, with a
standout lead performance by Lana Turner. Over the years, A LIFE OF
HER OWN has gathered a small but powerful base of critical
supporters, not least among them François Truffaut. As Richard Brody
recently wrote in The New Yorker: “It’s as if the entire
film, with its breath-holding look at the catastrophic love of a
single woman for a married man, stays hushed in anticipation of
romantic disaster.”
Thursday, December 26 at 9:15PM
Saturday, December 28 at 4:10PM
LITTLE WOMEN (1933) 116 min, 35mm
In a small village in New England, the March sisters are growing up
in the shadow of the Civil War, for which their father has been
mobilized. The girls’ lives are to follow very different paths.
After this adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott classic, Cukor
became, as he put it, “typed as a ‘literary’ director.” Of this
film, a Depression-era hit, he said: “It was very honest as a
picture of what America had been 60 years before.”
Saturday, December 21 at
1:00PM & 6:10PM
LOVE AMONG THE RUINS
(1975) 103 min, 35mm
Made for television, LOVE AMONG THE RUINS features one of Cukor's
greatest one-off on-screen pairings: Katharine Hepburn and Laurence
Olivier. Hepburn stars as Jessica Medlicott, a widowed actress in
Edwardian London, who requires a lawyer for a sensitive personal
case. The attorney she chooses is a long-ago lover (Olivier) whose
dalliance she pretends to have forgotten. Writer James Costigan won
an Emmy for his script.
Wednesday, January 1 at
6:45PM
Tuesday, January 7 at 3:30PM
THE MARRYING KIND
(1952) 92 min, 35mm
In the chambers of a divorce court, a couple re-play their creaking
marriage blow-for-blow: the sun-dappled meeting in Central Park; the
speedy marriage; the first home; the afternoon picnic that veers
unexpectedly into tragedy; the difficulty coping; the petty
resentments; the drifting apart. With its pitch-perfect performances
by Judy Holliday and Aldo Ray, its fine screenplay by regular Cukor
collaborators Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, its vivid New York
locations, and its bold tonal shifts from light comedy to sober
drama, THE MARRYING KIND is that rarest of films: a wise, mature,
conflicted onscreen portrait of married life, from a director at the
height of his powers.
Thursday, December 19 at
4:15PM & 9:15PM
THE MODEL AND THE MARRIAGE
BROKER (1951) 103 min, 35mm
Thelma Ritter’s marriage broker enters this lovely, minor-key comedy
doing what she does best: fixing up a parade of shy and lonely souls
(including Zero Mostel) and stubbornly bottling up her own
heartbreak in the process. When she runs afoul of—and later
befriends—a young model in a state of constant romantic drift
(Jeanne Crain), she’s forced to come to terms with her own past.
From a potentially hackneyed premise, Cukor built a bittersweet,
gentle portrait of loneliness and romantic disappointment with an
undercurrent of world-weary cynicism.
Tuesday, December 31 at
9:00PM
Wednesday, January 1 at
4:30PM
MY FAIR LADY
(1964) 170 min, 35mm
MY FAIR LADY was a double adaptation: a film based on Frederick
Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner’s runaway hit musical, itself inspired by
Pygmalion, George
Bernard Shaw’s barbed 1912 satire of the British ruling class. To
Shaw’s story of a wealthy professor who resolves to transform a poor
flower girl into a society lady on a bet, Cukor brought a delicate
touch, a vast reserve of empathy, and a perfect measure of devilish
wit. Then there’s the cast, led by Rex Harrison (in an incredibly
refined performance) and Audrey Hepburn, whose natural charm never
obscures her heroine’s strength, tenacity, and fierce force of will.
The film won eight Oscars, including Cukor’s first for Best
Director, and remains one of his most beloved works: a fitting swan
song for the Hollywood musical, and a delightful, eternally relevant film in its own right.
Wednesday, December 25 at
1:00PM
Thursday, December 26 at
3:45PM
OUR BETTERS (1933) 83 min, 35mm
A biting satire on the snobbery of Britain’s upper classes in the
1930s. At her wedding reception, American heiress Pearl Saunders
overhears Lord Graystone revealing that he only married her for her
money. Years later they are living separate lives and Pearl, now a
queen of the beau monde, wishes to introduce her sister Bessie to
London society.
Monday, January 6 at 8:45PM
PAT AND MIKE (1952) 95 min, 35mm
Cukor re-united with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn for this
delightfully mellow portrait of a determined athlete who escapes the
clutches of her controlling boyfriend, only to get dangerously close
to her gruff promoter. Encounters follow with a parade of real-life
athletes and a gaggle of easygoing, decidedly non-threatening
gangsters, as one of Hollywood’s most relaxed, organic love stories
slowly blossoms into view. “The whole thing has a degage
air,” Cukor later said. “It’s not played from point to point, but
let the chips fall where they may.”
Saturday, December 14 at 9:30PM
Monday, December 16 at 3:15PM
THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940) 112 min, 35mm
THE PHILADELPHIA STORY is one of Cukor’s most beloved films, a
shining relic from a moment in studio moviemaking when minds could
freely meet and talents combine across disciplines—at least
occasionally. Everyone’s just on, from screenwriter Donald
Ogden Stewart to the unbeatable cast (centered on warring trio
Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Cary Grant) to Cukor himself,
who proves to be every bit as fine of a visual stylist as some of
his showier peers. Compared to its fellow comedies of remarriage,
THE PHILADELPHIA STORY never fully aims for the anarchic heights of
BRINGING UP BABY or the romantic ecstasies of IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT.
Instead, it’s a worldly, pragmatic reflection on the complex
affinities people have for one another, remarkable today for its
sexual frankness, its nuanced attention to character motivation, and
its balance of empathy and cruelty. Of all the
Hollywood classics, few have aged
so little, or so well.
Saturday, December 28 at 8:30PM
Sunday, December 29 at 1:20PM
RICH AND FAMOUS (1981) 117 min, 35mm
Cukor’s final film follows two college friends through 20 years of
marriage, success, jealousy, frustration, falling outs, and
reconciliations. Liz (Jacqueline Bisset) and Merry (Candice Bergen)
become fast friends in their first year of college, then go their
separate ways—one a celebrated author, the other a Malibu housewife
with dreams of literary stardom. Eventually the tables are turned,
then turned again, and soon everything is turning: time, fortune,
happiness, friendship. RICH AND FAMOUS is a wistful and ultimately
bitter swan song for Cukor’s remarkable half-century career,
anchored by two performances that this famed director of actors
could be proud to go out on. With Meg Ryan in her first acting role
as Bergen’s teenage daughter.
Thursday, December 19 at 1:30PM
ROCKABYE (1932) 73 min, 35mm
A Broadway actress is denied custody of her adopted daughter after
testifying on behalf of an embezzler in a corruption trial. Years
later she returns from Europe with a new hit play, Rockabye, in which she plays the role of a mother.
Offstage she is in love with the playwright, but after discovering
he has a newborn child she leaves him for her devoted manager.
Monday, December 30 at
7:30PM
ROMEO AND JULIET
(1936) 125 min, 35mm
Cukor’s biggest production—and his sole Shakespeare adaptation—is an
opulent, beautifully crafted re-telling of the Bard’s legendary
romance. It’s an overtly literary movie, but one that’s invigorated
by Cukor’s dynamic visual stylings and a catalogue of refined,
vulnerable performances (Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard as the two
lovers, with John Barrymore in a scene-stealing turn as Mercutio).
Shearer was married at the time to producer Irving Thalberg, and
ROMEO AND JULIET is as much Thalberg’s monument to his bride as it
is Cukor’s tribute to Shakespeare. Watch for a stunning ball
sequence choreographed by a young Agnes de Mille.
Monday, December 23 at
1:30PM & 6:30PM
THE ROYAL FAMILY OF BROADWAY
(1930) 82 min, 35mm
Directors: George Cukor & Cyril Gardner
Cukor’s first movie on the world of show business and its dazzling
play of mirrors is also a parody of his friends the Barrymores,
America’s first theatrical family. The grand finale sees the queen
of the stage dying in the theater, surrounded by her
offspring—including son Tony, just back from
Europe, and daughter Julia, who takes over her mother’s role after the
interval. Cukor claims that shooting the scene in which Freddie
March is followed by his family up the big staircase was the
“beginning of a breakthrough,” a discovery of how much more mobile
his unwieldy camera could be at a time when cranes were
hand-operated.
Monday, December 30 at
3:45PM & 9:15PM
A STAR IS BORN
(1954) 154 min, 35mm
A musical remake of the 1937 Janet Gaynor/Fredric March drama, A
SATR IS BORN was produced as Garland’s return to the screen after a
four year absence. Everything was done to create a genuinely
beautiful film—from the Moss Hart scenario to the new songs by
Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin, the CinemaScope craftsmanship of
director Cukor, and the nonpareil casting of James Mason, Jack
Carson, Charles Bickford, and Tom Noonan.
Garland won an Academy Award
nomination as Best Actress—and, as one appreciative critic noted,
could have been cited as well as Best Singer, Best Dancer, Best
Comedienne, and Best Mime. Painstakingly reconstructed in 1983 to
its original three-hour running time, A STAR IS BORN has now once
again been saved from the brink of celluloid extinction using
digital technology to correct damaged elements and return the film’s
vibrant colors to their initial luster.
Wednesday, December 25 at 7:00PM
Friday, December 27 at 3:00PM & 8:30PM
SUSAN AND GOD (1940) 117 min, 35mm
Cukor’s first of two collaborations with Joan Crawford was this
daring tragicomic study of a society woman whose frivolous,
self-satisfied tendencies take on a dangerous tint when she falls
under the sway of a popular religious cult. Inspired by Frank
Buchman’s influential Moral Re-Armament movement and based on a hit
Broadway play by Rachel Crothers, SUSAN AND GOD found Cukor nimbly
treading the line between light comedy and social critique. (“If you
really look at anything,” he’d later say, “there’s always a comic
note. A painful note too.”) Watch for a brief but prominent
appearance by then-rising star Rita Hayworth, on loan from her
contract at Fox.
Friday, December 20 at
1:00PM
Sunday, December 22 at 1:30PM
SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935) 95 min, 35mm
The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum once called SYVIA SCARLETT “the most
interesting and audacious movie George Cukor ever made.” With its
gender-swapping conceit—a young woman (Katharine Hepburn) disguises
herself as a man in order to flee France with her criminal father,
only to attract the romantic attention of everyone, boy and girl, in
her path—the film sparked a major controversy on release. Since
then, it’s become a cult hit—a strange cocktail of theater,
deception, and Cockney accents (the latter courtesy of a young Cary
Grant). “The film,” Rosenbaum wrote, “changes tone every few
minutes, from farce to tragedy to romance to crime thriller, rather
like the French New Wave films that were to come a quarter century
later… One of the most poetic, magical, and inventive Hollywood
films of its era.”
Sunday, December 15 at
2:00PM
Friday, December 20 at
7:15PM
TARNISHED LADY (1931) 83 min, 35mm
Gender battles intertwine with the need to keep up appearances in
New York high society. After marrying a wealthy suitor, a
worldly-wise woman realizes her mistake and attempts to get back
with the writer she believes she loved. But the Wall Street crash,
her husband’s ruin, and the birth of her child will force her into a
new outlook on life. This is one of Cukor’s first films shot on
location and the first sound film of the great stage actress
Tallulah Bankhead.
Thursday, January 2 at 4:00PM & 9:15PM
TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT (1972) 109 min, 35mm
Maggie Smith is a vivacious septuagenarian with a fortune-teller
lover and some shady business dealings in Cukor’s quick-footed,
emotionally nuanced Graham Greene adaptation. She’s on a
cross-country journey across Europe with her middle-aged nephew (or so we’re led to believe) to rescue the
love of her life from a band of violent extortionists (or so
she’s led to believe).
Along the way, nephew Harry sparks up a tentative romance with a
train-bound American hippie, sums of money and severed appendages
change hands, and buried secrets come to light—until, in the words
of Renata Adler, it all stops right on a dime.
Monday, January 6 at 6:30PM
TWO-FACED WOMAN
(1941) 90 min, 35mm
“Just one of those things,” Cukor sighed retrospectively about this
mistaken-identity romantic comedy, his biggest critical flop. A ski
instructor falls for a bigshot magazine editor; they marry; he
returns to the city on business; she follows him disguised as her
flirtatious (and nonexistent) sister. Soon, the jig is up, and
husband and wife wind up stuck in a spiral of mutual deception.
TWO-FACED WOMAN has at least one invaluable asset: the radiant Greta
Garbo, fresh from her recent triumph in NINOTCHKA, giving what would
turn out to be her last onscreen performance. (Shaken by the film’s
failure, she hesitated for years to take on another project; when
her next picture fell apart, she retired. She would live on for a
half-century more without making another film.)
Sunday, December 15 at
6:15PM
Wednesday, December 18 at 3:00PM
THE VIRTUOUS SIN (1930) 80 min, 35mm
Directors: George Cukor & Louis Gasnier
Cukor adapts a Hungarian play to a fairy-tale Russian setting, with
modern and unconventional characters. During the First World War a
wife offers herself to a general in order to save her husband from
the firing squad. In her search for freedom the young woman finds
true love with the general, and her husband eventually agrees to let
her go her way.
Thursday, January 2 at
2:00PM & 6:00PM
WHAT PRICE
HOLLYWOOD?
(1932) 88 min, 35mm
Cukor’s first film with David O. Selznick was a prototype for the
various versions of A STAR IS BORN, with an insider’s view of
Hollywood that follows the rise to stardom of waitress Mary Evans,
“discovered” by ace director Max Carey. Mary goes on to achieve
celebrity, marrying a rich young man, Max falls into a tragic
decline.
Friday, December 27 at 1:00PM & 6:15PM
WILD IS THE WIND (1957) 114 min, 16mm
Cukor directed Italian screen legend Anna Magnani for the first and
only time in this wild, melodramatic story of domestic unrest and
forbidden love. A wealthy Nevadan rancher (Anthony Quinn) loses his
wife and, in a gesture of VERTIGO-like perversity, tries to re-make
her—in the form of her sister (Magnani), whom he imports from Italy
and treats as a carbon copy of his beloved. She has other plans,
including falling for her new husband’s adopted son (Tony
Franciosa). The three performances at the heart of WILD IS THE WIND
represent a fascinating cross between old-fashioned Hollywood acting and the modern Method style, suggesting that Cukor, the great
classical director of actors, was still willing to strike a balance
between the old and the new. The film earned Magnani her second
Oscar nomination in three years.
Sunday, January 5 at 5:45PM
A WOMAN’S FACE
(1941) 106 min, 16mm
When Cukor made A WOMAN’S FACE—a dreamlike, psychologically acute
noir about a disfigured woman stuck in a life of crime, adapted from
a Swedish Ingrid Bergman vehicle—his star Joan Crawford was on shaky
career ground. It was a risk for her to appear onscreen half-caked
in grisly makeup, but the gamble paid off: her performance here is
one of her finest, a sensitive portrait of a woman consumed by
shame, resentment, and fear. (Special notice goes to her extended,
burnt-out confessional speech mid-film.) It’s a beautifully shot and
often highly stylized movie—which, somehow, makes it no less
effective at probing the relationship between physical and moral
ugliness.
Sunday, January 5 at
1:30PM &
8:10PM
THE WOMEN (1939) 133 min, 35mm
“It’s all about men!” ran the original poster tagline for this
deliciously overwrought ensemble melodrama. Norma Shearer, Joan
Fontaine, and Rosalind Russell lead a gaggle of New York society
women who spend their days in gossip, petty rivalries, divorce ranch
showdowns, and copious chatter about, well, men—despite the fact
that, in a daring move, there’s not a single man so much as glimpsed
among the film’s 135 characters. (Per Cukor’s orders, even the
onscreen dogs and horses were female.) This was the role that
established Russell’s status as a great comic actress, but the
greatest pleasure of the acting is cumulative: watching the rest of
the cast bounce off and bristle against Shearer’s wronged housewife.
With its scenery-chewing performances and stinging, rapid-fire
putdowns, THE WOMEN is an acid delight.
Friday, December 13 at 1:15PM & 6:30PM
Saturday, December 14 at 4:30PM
ZAZA (1938) 83 min, 35mm
Claudette Colbert gives a radiant lead performance in this drama of
infidelity set in and around a meticulously designed open-air Paris
cabaret near the turn of the century. The plot—which centered on a
young singer’s affair with a married man—suffered major cuts by the
Hays office, which did little to dim ZAZA’s many virtues: Cukor’s
textured sense of period time and place, Charles Lang’s glowing
photography, the one and only known instance of Colbert singing
onscreen, and a movingly understated turn by celebrated vaudevillian
Bert Lahr—best known as Oz’s Cowardly Lion—as Zaza’s
devoted traveling companion.
Friday, December 20 at
5:15PM
Sunday, December 22 at
6:30PM
Screening Schedule
Screening Venue (unless
otherwise noted):
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street
Friday, December 13
(All screenings at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th
Street)
1:15PM
THE WOMEN (133 min)
4:00PM
THE CHAPMAN REPORT (125 min)
6:30PM
THE WOMEN (133 min)
9:10PM
THE CHAPMAN REPORT (125 min)
Saturday, December 14
7:15PM
ADAM’S RIB (101 min)
9:30PM
PAT AND MIKE (95 min)
Sunday, December 15
2:00PM
SYLVIA SCARLETT (95 min)
4:00PM
CAMILLE (109 min)
6:15PM
TWO-FACED WOMAN (90 min)
8:15PM
CAMILLE (109 min)
Monday, December 16
1:00PM
ADAM’S RIB (101 min)
3:15PM
PAT AND MIKE (95 min)
Tuesday, December 17
1:00PM
CAMILLE (109 min)
3:30PM
KEEPER OF THE FLAME (100 min)
Wednesday, December 18
1:00PM
HOLIDAY (95 min)
3:00PM
TWO-FACED WOMAN (90 min)
5:00PM
HOLIDAY (95 min)
7:00PM
KEEPER OF THE FLAME (100 min)
9:15PM
HOLIDAY (95 min)
Thursday, December 19
1:30PM
RICH AND FAMOUS (117 min)
4:15PM
THE MARRYING KIND (92 min)
9:15PM
THE MARRYING KIND (92 min)
Friday, December 20
1:00PM
SUSAN AND GOD (117 min)
5:15PM
ZAZA (83 min)
7:15PM
SYLVIA SCARLETT (95 min)
9:15PM
A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT (69 min)
Saturday, December 21
1:00PM
LITTLE WOMEN (116 min)
3:30PM
DAVID COPPERFIELD (130 min)
6:10PM
LITTLE WOMEN (116 min)
8:45PM
DAVID COPPERFIELD (130 min)
Sunday, December 22
1:30PM
SUSAN AND GOD (117 min)
4:00PM
EDWARD, MY SON (112 min)
6:30PM
ZAZA (83 min)
8:30PM
EDWARD, MY SON (112 min)
Monday, December 23
1:30PM
ROMEO AND JULIET (125 min)
4:00PM
DINNER AT EIGHT (111 min)
6:30PM
ROMEO AND JULIET (125 min)
9:00PM
DINNER AT EIGHT (111 min)
Tuesday, December 24
2:00PM
A DOUBLE LIFE (104 min)
4:10PM
GASLIGHT (114 min)
6:30PM
A DOUBLE LIFE (104 min)
8:45PM
GASLIGHT (104 min)
Wednesday, December 25
1:00PM
MY FAIR LADY (170 min)
4:30PM
LET’S MAKE LOVE (119 min)
7:00PM
A STAR IS BORN (154 min)
Thursday, December 26
1:00PM
LET’S MAKE LOVE (119 min)
3:45PM
MY FAIR LADY (170 min)
7:15PM
THE ACTRESS (90 min)
9:15PM
A LIFE OF HER OWN (108 min)
Friday, December 27
1:00PM
WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? (88 min)
3:00PM
A STAR IS BORN (154 min)
6:15PM
WHAT PRICE
HOLLYWOOD?
(88 min)
8:30PM
A STAR IS BORN (154 min)
Saturday, December 28
2:00PM
THE BLUE BIRD (99 min)
4:10PM
A LIFE OF HER OWN (108 min)
6:30PM
THE ACTRESS (90 min)
8:30PM
THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (112 min)
Sunday, December 29
1:20PM
THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (112 min)
3:45PM
BORN YESTERDAY (103 min)
6:00PM
LES GIRLS (114 min)
8:30PM
BORN YESTERDAY (103 min)
Monday, December 30
2:00PM
GRUMPY (74 min)
3:45PM
THE ROYAL FAMILY OF BROADWAY (82 min)
5:45PM
GRUMPY (74 min)
7:30PM
ROCKABYE (73 min)
9:15PM
THE ROYAL FAMILY OF BROADWAY (82 min)
Tuesday, December 31
2:15PM
LES GIRLS (114 min)
4:45PM
BORN YESTERDAY (103 min)
7:00PM
IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU (86 min)
9:00PM
THE MODEL AND THE MARRIAGE BROKER (103 min)
Wednesday, January 1
1:00PM
GIRLS ABOUT TOWN (79 min)
2:30PM
IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU (86 min)
4:30PM
THE MODEL AND THE MARRIAGE BROKER (103 min)
6:45PM
LOVE AMONG THE RUINS (103 min)
9:00PM
THE CORN IS GREEN (99 min)
Thursday, January 2
2:00PM
THE VIRTUOUS SIN (80 min)
6:00PM
THE VIRTUOUS SIN (80 min)
7:45PM
GIRLS ABOUT TOWN (79 min)
Friday, January 3
2:00PM
HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS (100 min)
7:00PM
HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS (100 min)
Saturday, January 4
2:00PM
BHOWANI JUNCTION (110 min)
4:30PM
JUSTINE (116 min)
7:00PM
BHOWANI JUNCTION (110 min)
9:15PM
JUSTINE (116 min)
Sunday, January 5
(All screenings at the Elinor
Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street)
1:30PM
A WOMAN’S FACE (106 min)
3:45PM
HER CARDBOARD LOVER (93 min)
5:45PM
WILD IS THE WIND (114 min)
8:10PM
A WOMAN’S FACE (106 min)
Monday, January 6
6:30PM
TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT (109 min)
8:45PM
OUR BETTERS (83 min)
Tuesday, January 7
1:30PM
THE CORN IS GREEN (99 min)
3:30PM
LOVE AMONG THE RUINS (103 min)
Film Society of
Lincoln Center
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the
Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and
emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the
awareness, accessibility and understanding of the moving image. Film
Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated
selection of the year's most significant new film work, and presents
or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including
Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film
Festival, LatinBeat, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York
African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish
Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-vous With
French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film
Comment Magazine, Film Society recognizes an artist's unique
achievement in film with the prestigious "Chaplin Award." The Film
Society's state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin
Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for
year round programs and the New York City film community.
The Film Society receives
generous, year-round support from Royal Bank of Canada, Jaeger-LeCoultre,
American Airlines, The New York Times, Stonehenge Partners, Stella
Artois, illy café, the Kobal Collection, Trump International Hotel
and Tower, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York
State Council on the Arts.
For more information, visit
www.filmlinc.com
and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.
 |
