George Cukor
84 connections found
Filmography
Born Yesterday 1950 
Gaslight 1944 
My Fair Lady 1964 
A Star Is Born 1954 
Little Women 1933 
David Copperfield 1935 
The Philadelphia Story 1940 
A Life of Her Own 1950 
A Double Life 1947 
Camille 1936 
Adam's Rib 1949 
Pat and Mike 1952 
The Women 1939 
Holiday 1938 
Sylvia Scarlett 1935 
What Price Hollywood? 1932 
Romeo and Juliet 1936 View:
Connections, in both directions
A Star Is Born (2018)
Directed by Bradley Cooper
influenced by A Star Is Born (1954), What Price Hollywood? (1932)
Plot
In Bradley Cooper’s strong feature directorial debut A Star Is Born – a remake of the three namesake films that came before, touchstones of their generations as much as this one will be – Lady Gaga makes her indelible mark as a true blue movie star of the highest calibre, a designation earned only by her undertaking considerable risk that has paid off against odds more stacked than one might readily admit.
Cooper isn't the first one to go down the film's familiar road: This is the fourth “A Star Is Born,” which tosses in references and story points from earlier iterations – notably, the 1954 film with Judy Garland and James Mason, as well as the 1976 version starring Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand.
Telling the downfall story requires more finesse than A Star Is Born is able to manage — the Garland version does this very well and it’s inevitable that this version will always be compared to the ones before it.
The parallel trajectory of a star on the rise and another on the downhill skid has been popular fodder for Hollywood since its first incarnation in the 1932 drama What Price Hollywood?
Bradley Cooper makes an assured directorial debut with this fourth mounting (fifth if you count the original inspiration, 1932's What Price Hollywood?) of the venerable tale of two talents falling in love as their careers head in opposite directions.
The earliest riff on the story, also directed by Cukor and produced by David O. Selznick, is frankly titled What Price Hollywood?, with certain different details—a love triangle, a child—but the outcomes and themes the same.
There are echoes of Ingrid Bergman in this performance – not only from Gaslight but from Notorious.
There are parallels here to the classic 1944 film "Gaslight," about a man who bullies and manipulates his wife into thinking that she is going crazy.
Following their doubts, an abused partner eventually stands up to their abuser to the audience’s satisfaction: see 1944’s Gaslight to 2002’s Enough , with many other examples in between and beyond.
Moss plays Cecilia Kass, the abused partner of a controlling tech entrepreneur who is developing advanced optics technology—and apparently watching 1944’s Gaslight on his down time.
No one believes her that her dead, invisible, abusive ex-boyfriend is pulling off the greatest gaslighting job since Charles Boyer in "Gaslight."
The Princess Diaries (2001)
Directed by Garry Marshall
influenced by My Fair Lady (1964)
Themes Plot
A similar theme in My Fair Lady was also acceptable to me.
This is, of course, the same kind of Pygmalion story which launched Andrews herself to fame as Eliza Doolittle in the Broadway production of My Fair Lady all those years ago.
It's also a treat to have Andrews -- the actress who rose to fame playing such protegees as Eliza Doolittle in "My Fair Lady" and "Cinderella" in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical of the same name -- back on the screen again, brightening up every one of her scenes just by being there.
Those of us who've fretted for years over Julie Andrews being dumped for Audrey Hepburn for the screen version of "My Fair Lady" can finally calm down — sort of.
So the story is a kind of "My Fair Lady," with Andrews taking on the Henry Higgins role of giving the girl a spectacular makeover, teaching her manners, filling her with noblesse oblige and overcoming her heel-dragging reluctance.
Adapted from Meg Cabot's novel by Gina Wendkos ("Coyote Ugly"), "The Princess Diaries" blends bits of "My Fair Lady," "Anastasia," and "Pocketful of Miracles" for its tale of a commoner whose royal grandmother grooms her for a global stage.
Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
influenced by My Fair Lady (1964)
Characters Plot
Director Matthew Vaughn mixes a wallop of James Bond with a bit of Austin Powers, stirs in a little “Hunger Games,” adds a flavor of “My Fair Lady,” and finishes it off with a dash of “28 Days Later.”
Cross-genre pollination has brought us My Fair Lady meets James Bond, Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer.
With nods to John Steed (the umbrella) and Harry Palmer (the glasses), this finds Taron Egerton’s “Eggsy” recruited by an elite super-spy unit of gentlemanly spooks who attempt to transform him from effing estate kid to Old Etonian killer in My Fair Lady fashion.
Adapted by Vaughn and Jane Goldman from the Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons comic as a kind of self-aware riff on Pygmalion or, really, My Fair Lady, the writers keep things moving.
It's the story of a streetwise London youth named Eggsy (Taron Egerton) who is rescued from his life of petty crime and run-ins with the law by a posh secret agent named Harry Hart (Colin Firth) and trained to be a new generation of spy (as the film cheekily points out, it's basically "Pretty Woman" or "My Fair Lady," but with way more guns), working for a top secret, privatized spying operation.
"She's All That" is basically yet another tale of how clothes make the girl, another brick in the "My Fair Lady"/"Guys and Dolls"/"Pretty in Pink" wall.
A modern take on Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, She’s All That really offers nothing new.
There have been numerous versions of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion story produced on big and small screens, the most popular of which is probably 1964's My Fair Lady.
Of course it is an unbreakable rule of this formula that the ugly duckling is a swan in disguise: Rachael Leigh Cook is in fact quite beautiful, as was Audrey Hepburn , you will recall, in "My Fair Lady."
La La Land (2016)
Directed by Damien Chazelle
influenced by A Star Is Born (1954), My Fair Lady (1964)
Themes Visuals Plot
As their fortunes start to seesaw, the film acquires some of the stormy turbulence of “A Star Is Born,” as well as glimmers of the doubt and disconnection of “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.”
Does it reinvent or improve upon “Singin’ in the Rain”, “A Star is Born”, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and the legions of classic films and musicals it references, borrows from?
And throughout “La La Land,“ there are references to many musicals, from the faux Paris dance finale of “An American in Paris” and the career trajectory melodrama of the 1954 version of “A Star is Born,” as well as the dream ballet from “Oklahoma” and the jazz club scenes from “Funny Face.”
That’s what Chazelle has done with musicals like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and A Star Is Born and Singin’ in the Rain.
The story, a star-crossed romance between a down-and-out actress (Emma Stone) and a brooding jazzbo (Ryan Gosling), may echo Martin Scorsese's New York, New York (1977) and, earlier still, George Cukor's A Star Is Born (1954).
The plot—her artistic career competes with his artistic career—is an old one, A Star Is Born for the iTunes generation.
You would never guess it from the trailer, but "Miss Congeniality" was probably inspired by either the musical "My Fair Lady" or its inspiration, George Bernard Shaw's stage play "Pygmalion."
"Miss Congeniality" has a hard time getting past its by-the-numbers, routine plot that pulls in the usual chestnuts of undercover cop tale, "My Fair Lady," fish-out-of-water story and, for good measure, a romance.
Little surprise, really, that Miss Congeniality was not only better as My Fair Lady , but also better as a straight farce a year earlier with Drop Dead Gorgeous .
From Katharine Hepburn's bizarre early disaster Sylvia Scarlett on, the concept of girls being boys never really seems to take onscreen.
Instead, he’s billed it as a “Gothic romance” in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca or George Cukor’s Gaslight.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
influenced by My Fair Lady (1964)
Plot Themes
Thus here is a bigger and sillier movie, albeit one not nearly as clean and well-structured as 2015’s My Fair Lady by way of axe-wielding superspies.
It was a spy version of My Fair Lady, and it worked, because in it’s world building of an original action series, it was also a tongue in cheek parody of the James Bond franchise, to the degree of creating brand excitement for young people in it’s audience to consider the purchase of sharp, tailored suite carried by the Mr. Porter brand in the same way Bond timelessly sports a Timex watch and drives an Aston Martin.
2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service has a fairly succinct premise: an ultra-violent, laddish James Bond crossed with My Fair Lady, from Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn.
While not shy on carnage, the earlier “Kingsman” focused on Eggsy’s transformation from a streetwise hood into a dapper young super-spy — basically, the movie was “My Fair Lady” meets James Bond, as Eggsy learned to dress smart, talk properly and save the world, taking his shirt off just often enough to remind what the movie was really selling.
If the first film drew its magic from a “My Fair Lady”-like attempt by Firth to prove breeding doesn’t determine gallantness, the sequel lacks a central idea.
At the end of the first film, he’d gone through his My Fair Lady-riffing transformation to become a fully-fledged member of the titular secret service operation; this one drops us, Bond-style, into the midst of a big set piece involving a former rival and a ludicrously violent and over-the-top punch-up in the back of a speeding cab.
Pretty Woman (1990)
Directed by Garry Marshall
influenced by My Fair Lady (1964)
Visuals Plot Characters
(Roberts in the red gown is meant to remind us of the transformed Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.)
Written by newcomer J.F. Lawton, the comedy is a mosaic of "Moonstruck," "Splash," "The Fabulous Baker Boys," "Working Girl," "My Fair Lady" and "An Officer and a Gentleman," among others.
Elizondo plays the My Fair Lady game as solid as I’ve ever seen, and Alexander plays the soulless short asshole as only he can.
There are points where Whitney feels a little bit like George Cukor's 1950s version of A Star Is Born, a film whose domestic conversations and confrontations have a bracing chill because the camera keeps its distance and the moments aren't excessively hyped with background music.
There’s also a touch of shorthand in the depiction of Brown, what with the story’s “A Star Is Born”-like aspects as her career soars while his operates on a more mortal plane.
DaCosta and other cast members, including Arlen Escarpeta as Brown and Mark Rolston as music mogul Clive Davis , almost manage to overcome a cliche-ridden script by Shem Bitterman that proves, if nothing else, that he’s seen either George Cukor ’s “What Price Hollywood” or various versions of its spawn, “A Star Is Born.”
As if it’s isn’t enough to have such an intelligent pairing that includes odes to Casablanca , The Philadelphia Story , and references to Sartre, Camus, and even Powell’s Books, there’s also another tender platonic love story in the growing friendship between Ellie and Paul, who could’ve easily come off as a dumb jock stereotype if he weren’t so tenderly written and played with sweet intensity by Diemer.
The specter of those films is balanced by the classic movies (including “Casablanca,” “The Philadelphia Story” and “Wings of Desire”) Ellie watches with her father that cast a thematic glow over the proceedings.
That’s how it starts, cribbing sentiments from the old film romances (“Casablanca,” “Wings of Desire,” “The Philadelphia Story”) her dad watches, nonstop.
Phantom Thread (2017)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by My Fair Lady (1964)
Plot Characters
In something of a “My Fair Lady” theme, Alma eventually comes to live at Reynold’s house, starts to learn the craft of dressmaking, and becomes his latest muse for fashion.
But this is not “Funny Face” or “My Fair Lady” or “Pretty Woman” or any number of “ugly” duckling turns to swan with the help of a hairbrush/expensive clothes/great man stories.
At times he recalls Professor Higgins in Shaw’s “Pygmalion” and in its musical version, “My Fair Lady,” as well as other protagonists from the British theater and cinema – characters who manage their lives with unswerving rigor and impose their egocentric authority on those around them from the heights of the upper class.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a three-hander on an epic canvas, a corrosive analysis of America’s colonialist and capitalist excesses as refracted through a marital melodrama in the vein of George Cukor’s Gaslight or Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion. As those artists did in those films, Scorsese cultivates a spellbinding air of uncertainty, even though it’s clear from the moment Ernest courts Mollie at his uncle’s insistence that little good will come from their pairing.
Black Swan (2010)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
influenced by A Double Life (1947), A Star Is Born (1954)
Themes
It's reminiscent of older, better movies: the late-'40s backstage dramas A Double Life (Ronald Colman plays Othello and becomes fatally jealous of his actress ex-wife) and the classic ballet melodrama The Red Shoes; and of films about tender, troubled psyches ?
Wild and woolly, the movie is a breathtaking head trip that hails from a long tradition of backstage melodramas: 42nd Street, A Star Is Born, All About Eve, and, yes, that kitschy '90s relic, Showgirls.
But in addition to Ingrid Bergman in “Gaslight,” one can recall actresses as different as Barbara Stanwyck and Doris Day involved in such claptrap, the former in “Sorry, Wrong Number” and the latter twice, in “Julie” and “Midnight Lace.”
The best romantic movies aren't these dreamy tales of lovers destined for happiness; they're the movies--Gone With the Wind, His Girl Friday and Adam's Rib come to mind--that dramatize exactly why two characters are perfectly matched.
Before long, Montag has secreted away a copy of David Copperfield, and his new life is born with expected complications.
The sheer accumulated anticipatory goodwill of the audience is almost enough to carry the first hour of the film, and King has sated appetites with come-hither shots of Manhattan at its creamiest, funny cameos by some of Broadway’s most employed thespians, and a plethora of fashion parades—the hundreds of outfits sported by the four leads make this the most couture-heavy movie since the great days of Norma Shearer in Riptide and The Women.