George Cukor
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Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations: My Fair Lady, The President’s Analyst, The Hand
A glorious last gasp of the classical Hollywood studio system gets a reference quality upgrade with Paramount’s 4K disc of My Fair Lady, the best of the gargantuan musicals that would hit their commercial apex with The Sound of Music in 1965 and nearly sink the industry with Doctor Dolittle and Star! just a few years later. Released in 1964, My Fair Lady is an early entry in the cycle and an expertly modulated one thanks to the firm hand of director George Cukor, whose work was always characterized by a harmonious interaction between performance, composition, camera movement and cutting—Cukor […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jun 4, 2021 -
Lubitsch, Cukor and Quine: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing (and Reading) Picks
I once took a class with the late, great silent film historian David Shepard, who introduced a screening of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg by saying, “Watch closely. You can learn how to make movies from this man.” An hour and forty-five minutes later I understood what he meant; every composition, cut, and camera movement was purposefully and powerfully designed to convey the characters’ emotional states in ways that were clear and simple yet opened the film up to multiple interpretations and nuances. Yet there’s always been something just a touch ineffable about Lubitsch’s style and how […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jul 6, 2018
