George Cukor was a perceptive architect of scenarios which dramatize the commodification of women, in stories of trading and ownership through employ¬ment as well as through the prison-house of marriage. A range of his films feature women as working spectacles, literal ‘show girls’ who trade their bodies or talents as entertainment or who perform in the private arena of home-as-theater. The films under scrutiny here reflect the generic diversity of Cukor's work (a musical, a western, a gothic-thriller, a modern melodrama), but with the common concern of women on show, women in the spectacle marketplace: movie star Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester in A Star is Born (1954), traveling theater stalwart Angela Rossini in Heller in Pink Tights (1960), and model Lily James in A Life of Her Own (1950) trade their performance skills. Even the archetypical paranoid woman, Paula Alquist in Gaslight (1944) is an opera singer, if also more of an unwitting player in a highly theatrical drama stage-managed by her husband. Cukor ‘pantomimed’ the actor's lines in rehearsal, playing them first for imitation, then mouthing them as the actor worked and the cameras rolled (which some found hard to get used to). Cukor's early career as an actor himself is reflected as he mimics the position of the women from whom he garnered such brilliant performances.

I term Cukor an ‘architect’ of scenarios because of the skill with which he organ¬izes the spaces of performance as well as the style and content of what is performed. His stars’ physical occupation of space is important to his sense of effective drama. Like the repertory director he was before Broadway, he found and made theatrical spaces everywhere. Here I risk identifying Cukor as a theatrical director who lacked cinematographic sensibility: Gene Kelly told critic Kenneth Tynan “basically Cukor is a theatre man who neither cares about nor understands the camera” (McGilligan 250). Gary Carey begins his early overview of Cukor's career, “The theatre is the keynote of Cukor's films” (9), not just because he has adapted so many theater plays for the screen or because his directing virtues (staging, working with actors, adherence to a great script) are theatrical as well as cinematic, but because he has a “predilection for back stage stories” which suggests that “he, like most theatre people, relishes shoptalk” (Carey 9).