Nothing is more quintessential Cukor, in fact, than PAL AND MIKE, that comedy without a belly laugh, that love story without an embrace. Like them, he did his thing and kept his cool, never moralized or intruded on his subjects. Yet they remain his, and no one else's. He will always, he said, see the South Seas through Maugham's eyes, and a row of plane trees beside a river in France the way post-Impressionists painted them. This is what Cukor's own art is about.
Some directors reveal themselves through a single world.
Others, like Cukor, through several worlds. In creating these different worlds, Cukor's style has the great virtue of rightness in relation to its subject, and he brought a strong but subtle freshness to existing genres. You have to have it, but so completely that you know how to disguise it. Another clue to Cukor's style is his treatment of the past. He approaches it as if it were the present.