George Cukor | What Price Hollywood? / 1932

the director as clown

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jane Murfin, Ben Markson with contributions by Gene Fowler, Roland Brown, Allen Rivkin and Louis Stevens (screenplay, based on a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns), George Cukor (director) What Price Hollywood? / 1932

 

George Cukor’s RKO-produced What Price Hollywood? might be described as the original stencil for the later A Star Is Born films, the first of which, the 1937 William A. Wellman United Artists imitation, Cukor was asked to direct, and the second of which, the 1954 Warner Brothers musical version with Judy Garland and James Mason, Cukor also directed.

     Wellman’s version perhaps is the better movie and Cukor’s Garland vehicle is certainly the most popular, but in many ways I most enjoyed watching the 88-minute train-wreck of a movie for the same reason that most critics have liked it, the rapport between star Constance Bennett playing Mary Evans and Lowell Sherman as Max Carey, the man who “discovers” Evans.

     Perhaps he doesn’t discover her as much as she discovers him, Mary being a self-convinced Streisand-like figure (who, might recall, also directed and stared in a version of the film) who’s certain to become a star if she can only connive a way to get a director like Carey to give her a chance. She has her chance to convince him when, drunk just enough to see everything as a comical conundrum he drops into the Brown Derby, where she’s a waitress, on his way to a premiere of one of his movies.

      And so the fun begins as he passes out gardenias he’s just bought off an old flower seller who he’s sent off home in his limousine. He bumps into a young lesbian woman to whom he apologizes, “I beg your pardon, old man,” inquiring about her tailor.

      Soon after, finally seated, he orders up several glasses of water and a cup of strong coffee, which Mary serves up promptly without any questions. The gardenias are set into the water glasses and he swallows down the coffee for its temporary sobering effects.

       Impressed by the service and by another diner’s attestation of her beauty, he prepares to whisk her away to the premiere as his date—he having failed to show up at his other date’s home (“I forgot to pick her up, and she forgot she was a lady.”)

       Meanwhile spying a man who can’t get his jalopy started, he offers to buy it if by a miracle he should get it moving just as the man cranks it into motion, he and Mary Evans arriving in the smoking auto antique as studio head Julius Saxe (Gregory Ratoff) has about given up on his appearance. Asked to speak the radio audience, Mary pretends to be a duchess, transforming everything in an almost screwball comedy-like lark.

      And frankly my dear, I wish it might have stayed that way instead of getting so damn serious. So far, Cukor has made a place for his film in my Richard Barrios-influenced gathering of “persnickety sissies and female toughs,” but he almost immediately goes whole hog by having Max awaken in his own bed where he attempts to recall how he could have possibly gotten there. Told by his butler (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson) that a woman has brought him home and now sleeps on his living room couch, Max suddenly gets nervous, putting on his very best dressing gown to visit his sleeping beauty in order discover whether or not he might have done anything… well, “untoward” to his delightful good Samaritan. When she assures him he has not, the relieved director takes her up on her insistence that he give her chance to act in a small role, thus proving that, as we might have expected, Max is a gentleman of the old school, who openly flirts with the girls but chooses to never take them into his bed. No pansy is he, but neither is Max of the marrying kind; and throughout Cukor’s film, the director he directs as his stand-in is a staid, closeted gay-coded man who instead of inviting beautiful boys to his poolhouse on weekends as did Cukor, prudently prefers to take out his frustrations by seeing the world through the eyes of a comic drunk.

       You know the story. Mary tries out the couple of lines Max has tossed her to prove she has utterly no acting talent. Yet she still returns home with an itch for the camera that she can only scratch by repeating her two assigned lines over and over, running up and down her boarding-house stairway until she gets it just right, a wonderful representation of how actors come to learn their craft.

       Insisting that Max give her another opportunity, she performs the stupid routine to such great perfection that when producer Julius sees it, he calls for the girl—whom he’s just ejected from the viewing room—and signs her up for a seven-year contract, which results tout suite in her becoming a MOVIE STAR!

       By the count of 10 she’s already become a kind of diva who when she hears that the handsome polo player, the playboy Lonny Borden (Neil Hamilton) has no interest in dumb blonde-headed movie actors, puts him through ringer by demanding a closed dinner in the hotel dining room with a 30-piece orchestra, caviar, pheasant, and gold-platted dinner service. He whips it up all in a few hours, but she doesn’t show, and again as if Cukor might be considering turning his Hollywood exposé into a screwball comedy after all, Lonny breaks into Mary’s bedroom where she’s pretending to sleep, and swoops her up in her nightgown which with his borrowed tuxedo coat as for propriety’s sake she is forced to dine on lobsters and pheasant until she she’s so satiated that she falls in love with the dumb cluck.

      I wouldn’t go as far as one Letterboxd commentator who describes Hamilton as being either a “psychotic or a total bore,” but he certainly does lack the sense of humor that made us love Max. Increasingly, as the demanding studio shootings intrude upon not only their time together but the public, whipped by the publicists, even steal away their few moments of their bedroom kisses, Lonny grows incensed, violent, and finally utterly exasperated enough that he permanently leaves the screen goddess, without the knowledge that she is pregnant.

      Meanwhile as Max is transformed into his Star Is Born counterpart, Norman Maine we realize that the drunken Sherman—who is rumored to have based his performance on personal experience—has none of the grace of James Mason or even Fredric March! The clown becomes the tormented Pagliaccio, fired from his job and friendless except for the endless kindnesses and handouts by his former protégée. After she bails him out from a cheap jail, he admits that he no longer feels anything, even his formerly laughable behavior having turned into reckless self- destruction. As the same commentator who hated Hamilton’s character (evidently a female named Gentry Austin) smartly quipped: “And seriously, people of the 1930s, please stop leaving loaded guns in your desk drawer! A gay-coded character will find it, and they will shoot themselves with it!”

     Which is precisely what Max does, proving "La commedia è finita!!" and Vito Russo was always right.

      Along the way, there are some wonderful moments of insight into the reality of Hollywood producers, actors, and the thousands that make up the crews. At one moment by a pool Mary, Max, Julius, and a chorus of screeching screenwriters, perhaps not unlike the six or more individuals who worked on this film, argue for the emptiness or the virtues of absolutely worthless cinema properties which Julius has bought without reading, including metaphysical, religious, and family epics, the latter of which dares to allow the star to have a baby—after her marriage.

     At another moment Cukor takes us into a scene that might remind us Dietrich’s café number in Morocco, only without Mary wearing a tuxedo (she’s already worn the coat earlier, if you recall). The din as the actors attempt to remember their lines, the lighting men work to perfectly line up their spots, the piano player practices, the director pointlessly shouts, and Mary keeps forgetting the lines to a French song is suddenly called into silence, the move star moving toward the camera to sing her French ditty with near perfection as she moves out into the pretense of a audience, stroking one man’s beard, toying with another’s tie, etc.

       Max calls “cut,” chastising Mary for having paid more attention to Lonny sitting out of camera sight than to her on-screen male patrons, and for one moment he seems prepared to play out the scene for her as a gay man might, just on the verge of strutting effeminately in and out of the tables to provide her with an example. We look with great expectation in his direction. But the real director Cukor’s camera sweeps us away from the set to observe Mary’s and Lonny’s conversation with all prudence, as if a member of the Hays code board might possibly be looking over his shoulder to censor Max’s female imitation. When the camera returns to the set, all we see is Max kissing the bald pate of one old man.

      And in the end, it is not Hollywood that gets exposed in Cukor’s movie, but we ourselves as the audience who, idolizing the studio favorites, cannot permit them to live as real individuals with children to raise, families to make love to or, even worse, friends they might want to protect. Staring into their windows from the outside we interpret their every move as a possible transgression. As a Hedda Hopper-like interviewer who visits Mary and Lonny asks, “Mightn’t I have just a few private intimate details?” almost demanding, in fact, to know how they might react to each other’s infidelity and what plans they have for realizing sex outside of their private lives.

      When Lonny divorces Mary and Max is found dead in her house, it’s suddenly made apparent to her audiences that the reason her former husband left was that she was having an affair with her the man who discovered her and made her famous. The truth matters far less than the prurient imaginations of her fans who can’t bear to believe their screen gods might be real people who have actual friendships, loyalties, and devotions. Mary’s career collapses as quickly as it was created, the media surrounding her villa like buzzards ready to devour any remnants of her life she may still imagine to be hers alone.

      It’s clear that by the end of this now film noir, Cukor no longer cared about what happened to Mary Evans. Fine. Give her happy ending, with her upper-class polo boy who temporarily kidnaps her son just to gain entry to her house in order to tell her he still loves her, particularly since she’s left Hollywood and moved to France! Just like Max, Cukor no longer had any feeling left for the carcass his writers had left him to gnaw on.

     Fortunately, unlike Max, Cukor was no lush and had dozens of films left in the future to polish up and endless numbers of beautiful boys each Sunday afternoon to cruise and fondle.

 

Los Angeles, November 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).