Here's the Cukor problem in a nutshell:
In 1962, Andrew Sarris asserted that one of the auteur theory's central prem¬ises “is the distinguishable personality of the director … Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style which serve as his signature” (Sarris, Primal Screen 50). In a long interview with Peter Bogdanovich, however, Cukor insisted that a director “should remain unostentatious; because if you do a lot of fancy footwork, maybe they notice you as a director, but I think it hurts the story … I think one should not be aware of technique of any kind” (Bogdanovich 445, 449).
Cukor, in other words, was a good citizen of Hollywood's invisible-style regime, which assumed the primacy of star and story. And when he worked in comedies, his stylistic “signature” seemed to retreat even further from view. V. F. Perkins has argued that with comedy,
the picture exists solely for what it shows and we gain nothing by attempting to interpret its structure. Its qualities as an image are submerged in its function as a document … That is why the great comedies, with their insistence on action and their indifference to cinematic elaboration, have proved difficult to assess within the terms proposed by traditional film theory. (Perkins 98)
And yet, Cukor made good comedies, and other important directors (George Stevens, for example) did not.1 If Cukor seems to fall into the same category, we might recall that he abandoned the theater for the reason he gave Bogdanovich: “I think the role of a stage director is not terribly interesting, whereas a movie director's job is much more interesting, much more comprehensive and he affects the work much more” (Bogdanovich 442).
Cukor thought he was doing something, and he thought that what he did affected his movies. But detecting that something, which involves recovering the decision-making behind his films’ transparent surface, proves more difficult than with a more “ostentatious” director like John Ford. Adrian Martin has noted that film criticism “favours those genres (film noir, horror, romance, melodrama) … that trade in what I would call eyeball subjectivity … It is far less interested in film styles marked by a certain everydayness” (Klevan Disclosure 64).
