George Cukor: A Double Life by Patrick McGilligan (1991)

The unmovable camera [in the early days of sound] may have dictated another unusual aspect of Cukor's approach.  Throughout his career -- as he did in the days of codirecting -- Cukor often relied on someone else to "suggest" the camera setups.  It was not unusual to find a Hollywood director who did not peer through the camera lens; many, astonishingly, never did.  However, it was certainly unusual to find a director who delegated the actual placement and camera angles to someone else as regularly as Cukor did.                                                                                                                                                                         -- Patrick McGilligan, George Cukor: A Double Life (St. Martin's Press, 1991)

When I first became interested in movies I enjoyed Cukor's films for their humor and the performances of his actors.  Gradually, however, it became apparent that Cukor was extremely dependent on his script writers and his cameraman and had little or no visual style, i.e., once one has seen one of Cukor's films there is nothing new to be discovered in seeing it again.  Cukor directed Katherine Hepburn beautifully in ten movies and his movie with Garbo, Camille (1937) was one of Garbo's best. But in his musicals (A Star is Born, Les Girls, My Fair Lady) there was little dancing and the singing performances were handled by someone else. As McGilligan makes clear, Cukor was more of a craftsman than an artist.

McGilligan struggles with Cukor's homosexuality, something Cukor revealed only to his "secret unit" of friends and of course to the young men he regularly paid for sex.  Some people think Cukor got his reputation as a director of women because of his sexuality; he was supposedly fired from Gone  with the Wind because Clark Gable felt that the women in the cast were getting too much of his attention.  McGilligan's book is fully researched and well-written but he can't seem to find a relationship between Cukor's homosexuality and his work as a film director (perhaps there is none?).  Cukor came to Hollywood in the early sound era after success in theatre direction and McGilligan does a superb job of limning Cukor's work in the context of the film business and changing mores of the world from Cukor's stage work in the twenties to his final film (Rich and Famous) in 1981.