Cukor’s first collaboration with screenwriters Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon is an incandescent, psychologically astute record of an actor slowly cracking up. Ronald Colman, in his only Oscar-winning performance, plays a beloved thespian whose Othello complex ultimately drives him to madness and murder. The film is a study in contrasts: light versus dark, aggression versus restraint, the rarified space of the theater versus the late-night diners of a B-movie melodrama, and, of course, performance versus reality—one of Cukor’s career-long obsessions.