Search Results

Chapter five returns to the European war with Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of Kathryn Hulme's The Nun's Story and explores women's perspectives on war and Resistance. Placing Kathryn Hulme's semi-biographical narrative about former nun and UNRRA nurse Marie Louise Habets in the context of the emerging popular and cinematic discourse of the Resistance and the Catholic church's collaboration with the Nazis, the chapter ranges from discussion of the touchy subject of Catholic complicity to Audrey Hepburn's unique commitment to the Belgian war heroine and her story.

This chapter discusses some of the films made by George Cukor at the end of the Golden Age, including My Fair Lady (1964), for which Cukor won an Academy Award as best director. My Fair Lady was produced by the last great studio mogul, Jack Warner, who was determined to recapture Warner Brothers’s glory as well as his own. With a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, it starred Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins. Marni Nixon was chosen to “double” Hepburn’s voice, a decision that devastated the actress. Roughly from 1963 to 1973, Cukor directed three films under his own G-D-C productions: Peter Pan, Nine-Tiger Man, and The Bloomer Girl. Abroad, particularly in France, by the mid-1960s, Cukor’s films were being saluted by film historians and scholars. The influential Cahiers du Cinema, for example, thoroughly admired his work.

Chapter 3 focuses exclusively on The Nun's Story, a film which still polarizes viewers more than fifty years after its debut. Feminist cultural critics have found it especially hard to sympathize with the inner spiritual drama of the film's conflicted protagonist Sister Luke or appreciate the all-time great film performance of Audrey Hepburn; and this chapter suggests that their animus stems from political hostility to the nun's struggles with the religious vow of unquestioning obedience. It argues that the nun has internalized an alternative code of obedience deriving from the history of her Catholic family romance, that is to say, her lifelong devotion to a loving and approving doctor father, and her core desire to emulate him professionally. It details the conflict Sister Luke experiences between her original family romance and the Catholic romance of the cloister with its surrogate family structure, and between her professional desire to do the nursing work she loves in the Congo and her religious desire to become the perfect nun her order wants her to be.

Hermes Pan was hired by Twentieth Century-Fox to stage Cleopatra’s monumental procession into Rome for the film Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor. Finishing business at Choreo Enterprises, Inc., a record company Pan established with Fred Astaire, Hermes moved to Rome where he lived and worked for nearly a year. Returning to Hollywood he was hired to choreograph the film version of My Fair Lady directed by George Cukor and starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. He returned to television to stage “Think Pretty” and The Hollywood Palace for Fred Astaire before heading off the Las Vegas with his assistant Jerry Jackson to choreograph the centennial edition of the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana Hotel. At Astaire’s request, Francis Ford Coppola hired Pan to stage the dances for Finian’s Rainbow at Warner Brothers but fired him before the picture was finished.

In the early 1960s, when Cary Grant was at the height of his popularity, he began to worry that he was too old to play the romantic leading man. He would not agree to make Charade (1963) until director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone agreed to change the script so that his young co-star, Audrey Hepburn, is seen to chase after him (rather than the other way around). In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, critics found this Hitchcockian comedy-thriller to be too violent, but it was another box-office hit and remains a fan favorite today. He did not consider himself too old to chase young women in his private life, and his relationship with actress Dyan Cannon grew more serious. When journalist Joe Hyams sued him for libel, in response to Grant’s denying that he had been interviewed by Hyams, they reached an out of court settlement. Grant agreed to collaborate with the journalist on the article that eventually emerged as “Archie Leach by Cary Grant,” a lengthy, truthful account of his family background and youth. In another hit comedy, Father Goose (1964), he broke free of his debonair image to play a drunken recluse who must look after schoolgirls stranded in the South Pacific at the beginning of the Second World War. His final film, Walk, Don’t Run (1966), was a gentle comedy set during the Tokyo Olympics, with a lively score by composer Quincy Jones, who became a close personal friend. By the time Walk, Don’t Run was released, he had married Dyan Cannon, and they had a daughter together, Jennifer Grant. This convinced Grant that it was finally time to retire.

During the early 1940s, journalists observed that after years of men controlling women’s fashion, Hollywood had become “a fashion center in which women designers are getting to be a big power.” In a town where “the working girl is queen,” it was women who really knew how to dress working women. Edith Head’s name dominates Hollywood costume design. Though a relatively poor sketch artist who refused to sew in public, Head understood what the average woman wanted to wear and knew better than anyone how to craft her image as the-one-and-only Edith Head. However, she was one of many women who designed Hollywood glamour in the studio era. This chapter juxtaposes Head’s career with that of a younger, fiercely independent designer who would quickly upstage Head as a creative force. In many senses, Dorothy Jeakins’s postwar career ascent indicated the waning of the Hollywood system and the powerful relationship between female designers, stars, and fans.