The Nocturne as Confessional: George Cukor, Frédéric Chopin, and the Gendered Soundscapes of Classical Hollywood

Chopin’s music, which had been included as cinematic accompaniment since as early as the silent era, was given new meaning and dramatic function in the female-oriented melodramas of the late-1930s and early-1940s. Film director George Cukor’s significant contribution to the rise of the ‘woman’s film’ that emerged around this time forms a contextual parallel with the way that Chopin’s music shaped narrative expression in classic cinema in the years leading up to US involvement in the Second World War. This article explores how Cukor used Chopin’s compositions in diegetic storytelling, closely interweaving the Polish composer’s music in his approach to dialogue, dramatic tension, and character transformation, especially with the actresses who starred in his productions such as Joan Crawford and Ingrid Bergman. These iconic women were protagonists in Cukor’s A Woman’s Face (1941) and Gaslight (1944) respectively, films in which Cukor employs Chopin’s musical works as an extension of his filmic arsenal to explicitly emphasise female interiority. This specific use of Chopin was arguably a strategic choice by Cukor amid Hollywood’s broader paradigmatic shift toward screen melodramas expressing gendered conflicts. Dreamy and intimate, Chopin’s smaller-scale piano compositions served as both narrative agents and social commentary in Cukor’s cinema. By analysing moments of diegetic music performance and their interactions with the mise-en-scène, film script, and underscore, I argue that Cukor capitalised on the cultural commerce of Chopin’s music (involving the distribution and sales of his music) that created a distinctive niche by intertwining his melodies with the sound of classic Hollywood.