The Virtuous Sin

George Dewey Cukor was an American film director. He mainly concentrated on comedies and literary adaptations. His career flourished at RKO and later MGM, where he directed What Price Hollywood? , A Bill of Divorcement , Dinner at Eight , Little Women , David Copperfield , Romeo and Juliet and... Camille . He was replaced as the director of Gone with the Wind , but he went on to direct The Philadelphia Story , Adam's Rib , Born Yesterday , A Star Is Born and My Fair Lady . He continued to work into the 1980s. Cukor was born on the Lower East Side of New York City, the younger child and only son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants Victor, an assistant district attorney, and Helen Ilona Cukor. His parents selected his middle name in honor of Spanish–American War hero George Dewey. Unlike the Jews of Poland and Russia whose first language was Yiddish, Hungarian Jews did not adopt Yiddish as their primary language. Therefore, the Cukor family, subscribing to the norm of their country of origin, was not a Yiddish speaking household.
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Louis J. Gasnier was a French film director. Born in Paris, Gasnier was working in theatre when Pathé hired him to direct films in the earliest days of cinema. He directed comedian Max Linder in many of his early short comedies. In 1912 he emigrated to the United States, where he made his... name working on several fairly prestigious productions, most notably the serial The Perils of Pauline starring Pearl White, with whom he made several other star vehicles. Gasnier's career declined with the advent of sound, and he was later confined to making low-budget B movies. Arguably his most famous film, although not for artistic reasons, is the anti-marijuana opus Reefer Madness, made in 1936. The film's over-preachy, over-the-top propaganda message has earned it a dedicated cult following, which remains strong to the present day. It is widely available in the public domain and on DVD, and has been frequently shown on many terrestrial and cable TV channels, quite remarkable for an ultra cheap exploitation movie of the 1930s that apparently had very scant distribution when it was originally released.
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