Word: cukor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Fleming's largely underappreciated work in Gone With the Wind, which he took over from George Cukor halfway through shooting: "Most accounts of Gone With the Wind focus on everything [producer David O.] Selznick did before Fleming arrived ... but rewrites continued during filming, and as [F. Scott] Fitzgerald wrote of Fleming for a 1939 lecture tour by [Sheilah] Graham: '[He was a] fine adaptable mechanism - which in the morning could direct the action of two thousand extras, and in the afternoon decided on the colors of the buttons of Clark Gable's coat and the shadows on Vivien Leigh...
...testify to his originality in film criticism, and to his influence, certainly in the acceptance of the "male action film." Carrie Rickey called him "a man's man, and some of Manny's preference for Hawks and Walsh films over the warmer, daintier ones of, say, George Cukor, may reflect a man's impatience with women's problems and their need to talk about them. You could say his take prefigures today's movies, where women are absent or subservient and guys get to do guy things...
...Paramount, where he made nearly a quarter of his films and no strong impression. He was noticed opposite Mae West and Marlene Dietrich, but it was in 1936, on a loan-out for an RKO flop, Sylvia Scarlett, that he finally "felt the ground under his feet," as George Cukor, the film's director, would put it. He played a type he had known in his past, a Cockney con man with a chipper way of expressing a gloomy view of human nature. Here, for the first time, he achieved that quicksilver quality that was the basis of his stardom...
...Philip Barry comedy she had performed in on Broadway. Cannily, she let her character be pushed around--literally, by Cary Grant--while radiating a patrician glow even Cate Blanchett couldn't match. James Stewart is the working-class fella who briefly obscures the Grant-Hepburn limelight, and George Cukor directs with his usual quiet mastery. Those lusciously long takes remind viewers that star quality, not editing, is the essence of classic Hollywood cinema. The DVD has some cool extras, including Hepburn's 1993 documentary self-portrait All About Me and a fine study of the Cukor touch by TIME...
...among the hundreds of stage actors lured west. He had a contract at Fox (?The Devil?s Lottery,? ?Charlie Chan?s Chance? and the first talkie version of ?Black Beauty?), but his two notable films were made at Paramount - where he co-starred with Tallulah Bankhead in George Cukor?s first solo directorial feature, ?Tarnished Lady? - and MGM, where he got third billing (above Robert Young, Maureen O?Sullivan and other stars-to-be) playing the calf-like husband who can?t keep Norma Shearer from Clark Gable in the adaptation of O?Neill?s ?Strange Interlude...