DVD of the Week: “A Life of Her Own”

George Cukor’s 1950 melodrama “A Life of Her Own” (which I discuss in this clip) takes place in the splashy milieu of New York fashion modelling and the social whirl that surrounds it. But Cukor keeps the movie—and its protagonist, Lily James (played by Lana Turner)—amazingly inward and tamped-down. It’s as if the entire film, with its breath-holding look at the catastrophic love of a single woman for a married man, stays hushed in anticipation of romantic disaster. The majesty of melodrama is the exaltation of everyday people and the revelation of tragedy in the conflicts that they face. That’s also the source of melodrama’s potential for absurdity, and the reason why it veers readily into (intentional) comedy and why (unintentionally) it often elicits laughter at moments of the greatest and noblest passion. Tragedy—which yokes its grand tone to the greatness of its characters and situations, putting large-scale history on the line—comes with a degree of awe built in. But melodrama, to be effective, depends on exquisite taste and delicate control of tone. Perhaps no filmmaker achieves those two elements as consistently and with as much variety as does Cukor, who is also the director of the greatest musical melodrama, the 1954 version of “A Star Is Born.”