Movies Til Dawn

Above I've posted a TV interview with Joan Crawford from the 1960s. I don't know who the English moderator with the poofy hair is but Joan looks pretty damn sleek and comports herself well. (Sort of. The first minute is spent semi-dissing Elizabeth Taylor.) But at 1:07 in, she's asked about George Cukor and she becomes a very different Joan. She warms up and becomes very un-Crawford like in a happy and sincerely admiring way. They made four films together and the portrait she paints of him is akin to the attitude he displayed in the audio seminar I posted yesterday (scroll down for Chrissakes). He was both irascible and funny, warm and firm. It sounds like he put on his actors in a way that freed them instead of shutting them down. She says that he was the first director who helped her not take herself so seriously. No easy feat, that. Of their four collaborations, the one that stands out in both the interviews and my mind is ' A Womans Face ', a 1941 film noir ...

If you reading this blog I don't need to tell you about director George Cukor, who came from the New York stage in the 1920s, directed his first film in 1930, was one of MGM's premiere directors of the 30s, 40s and some of the 50s, was known as one of filmdom's greatest 'woman directors' (translation: he was gay), was fired from 'Gone With The Wind' because he was friends with a male prostitute who serviced Clark Gable and Gable found out and couldn't look his director in the eye (a theory, yes, but a nice one), directed at least a dozen incredibly still-watchable high-comedies, had a very famous house in the Hollywood hills,  strangely drifted off into semi-employment after finally winning an Oscar in 1964 for 'My Fair Lady', returned to filmmaking via some high-class TV movies (one of which incredibly starred Olivier and Hepburn) and finally wound up his career in his eighties with 1981's 'Rich and Famous' which contained a then...