The Actress (Cukor, 1953)
My Winter Movies # 3
__________
Cukor remarked that «anyone who looks at something special, in a very original way, makes you see it that way forever.» He will always, he said, see the South Seas through Maugham’s eyes, and a row of plane trees beside a river in France the way post-Impressionists painted them. This is what Cukor’s own art is about. For me, I know, he fixed once and for all the texture of New England life, its stern charm and austere optimism, in Little Women and The Actress; the glitter and corruption of mid-nineteenth century Paris in Camille; the pre-World War II East Coast rich, luxuriously trapped by selfishness and charm, in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, the «ordinary» middleclass marriage that becomes extraordinary, precariously balanced between the tragic and the trivial, in The Marrying Kind; the India of «grandeur and exposed electric wires» in Bhowani Junction and the romantic yet visceral Hollywood of A Star is Born. Brutally cut by order of studio executives, this movie was shown in a restored version a few months after Cukor died and emerged, in Eric Rohmer’s words, as «one of the greats.» Some directors reveal themselves through a single world. Others, like Cukor, through several worlds. (Gavin Lambert)
