Maurice Tourneur(1876-1961)
- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Screenwriter and director Maurice Tourneur was born Maurice Thomas in
the Parisian suburb of Belleville on February 2, 1873, the son of a
jewelry merchant. He was trained and employed as a graphic designer and
a magazine illustrator as a young man. After serving in a French
artillery unit in northern Africa, he became an assistant to sculptor
Auguste Rodin and later to
muralist
Amélie Puvis de Chavanne before
deciding to change his life along with the changing century and make a
new life in the theater.
Tourneur's younger siblings were part of the theatrical
establishment--his sister was an actress and his brother a theater
manager--so it was not as preposterous a shift in avocation as it might
seem. After haunting the theaters of Paris, paying for cheap seats to
soak up as much theater as he could, Tourneur became an actor in 1900
with a small troupe on the outskirts of Paris. His salary was 90 francs
a month, the equivalent of about $15. Now a professional, he took the
stage name "Maurice Tourneur". After learning the stage ropes, he
joined the company of the great tragedienne
Rejane for a South American tour. He later was a
member of stage director Andre Antoine's
company.
He married Fernande Petit in 1904, and
they had a son, Jacques Tourneur
(1904-1977), who would, like his father, become a film director of
note. Maurice eventually worked as an actor and set designer for the
Theatre de la Renaissance in Paris. In 1911, after having acted in and
directed over 400 stage productions, he left the theater for the film
industry, following his friend
Emile Chautard into the new medium.
Starting as an assistant to Chautard, Tourneur had visual arts
experience surpassed by few in the nascent "7th Art," the cinema. After
working as an assistant director at Societe Francaise des Films et
Cinematographes Éclair, he was quickly promoted to director and made
films with leading French stars. The subject of his first French silent
films was often a gamin or orphan seeking love and shelter.
He had a good command of English from touring in the UK as an actor,
and in 1914 the film company Éclair, intent on expanding its US market
share, transferred Tourneur to America to manage its studio at Fort
Lee, NJ, after a March 17, 1914, fire destroyed the main studio
building and the company's negatives. Éclair American Co. went into
business in Fort Lee, America's first "Hollywood", in 1911 with a
studio designed by Éclair's French architects that incorporated the
most modern theories of movie studio design. The studio complex
consisted of glass-covered shooting stages with administrative offices,
a development laboratory, workshops, scenery storage facilities and
dressing rooms. Éclair American signed a distribution deal with the new
New Jersey-based Universal Film Manufacturing Co. of
Carl Laemmle, whose future production
chief, Irving Thalberg, would later
clash with Tourneur at MGM. Éclair American mostly produced shorts, but
increasingly moved into feature production, keeping in line with the
general evolution of the industry, and since Tourneur had experience in
directing features, it was only natural that the company hired him.
In 1915 Tourneur moved over to World Film, also headquartered in Ft.
Lee. World had been established the year before to import foreign-made
features, which dominated American screens until the middle of the
1910s, and to distribute the movies of the newly established
feature-film companies associated with producer
Lewis J. Selznick,
David O. Selznick's father. In a
familiar pattern of that time, Selznick created Equitable Pictures and
signed Vitagraph star
Clara Kimball Young to his company.
Selznick then merged with Shubert Pictures--Shubert Theatrical
Co.'s movie production company--and
Peerless Pictures, the movie production company created by motion
picture raw-film-stock magnate Jules Brulatour.
World Pictures, now under Selznick's control, released movies produced
by Equitable, Peerless, Shubert Pictures and other independent
companies. Movie production was centered at the Peerless Studio in Ft.
Lee, built in 1914, and at the Paragon Studio, built in 1916. Gradually
World began to dominate the companies whose movies it
distributed. Tourneur was the best filmmaker on the lot, whose other
employees included
Josef von Sternberg (who worked as a
film cutter) and Frances Marion, the
future Oscar-winning screenwriter.
Tourneur quickly rose to become a major director in the American movie
industry, proving to be one of the more innovative pioneers in the
development of the narrative film. Adept at using the latest technology
to give his pictures a greater visual appeal, he earned critical
acclaim and popular success. Tourneur was credited with bringing
"stylization" to the American screen through his mastery of set design
and lighting. His primary concern, however, was story: "Show the people
anything, but show them something," he declared in a May 1920 interview
with "Motion Picture Magazine". "This can be either funny or dramatic,
but there must be something."
Tourneur opposed the new star system because he felt that a good story
could not be told through one character; he also believed that the
ideal of the "gleaming personality" of the star promulgated by motion
pictures was false, a perversion of life as it actually is lived.
Tourneur was more interested in developing a means to convey
psychological effects than emphasizing physical action. In this he was
opposed to the then-dominant
pre-Konstantin Stanislavski
acting theories, rooted in the theater, that held that dialogue must be
accompanied by an appropriate physical gesture of the hands to
underscore the feeling being conveyed by the actor in a scene. Physical
action itself, the theory went, conveyed psychological meaning and
emotion. It was said that film was born as a form of entertainment for
the illiterate masses, and this style constituted a "universal
language" that the talkies not only made obsolete, but absurd (one
example of this style is the placement of the left-hand on the right
forearm, a gesture that can be seen in silent films and was carried on
by Harry Carey in his sound films. This was
an elocutory gesture that signified fortitude, and would be understood
by the silent film audience). Tourneur believed that this telegraphic
shorthand needed to be replaced. The new Soviet cinema would show the
way towards a greater psychological realism with the development of
montage.
Tourneur's film production unit had coalesced by 1915, and included
Clarence Brown, the future
six-time Oscar-nominated director who served as his assistant director
and editor; director of photography
John van den Broek and art director
Ben Carré. The Tourneur unit produced a series
of popular movies that successfully utilized both the new language of
film--including close-ups and parallel action--and new technology, such
as tracking shots and special effects. While Tourneur's work spanned
many genres, a leitmotif in his oeuvre was the romantic skullduggery
women were the victim of, or sometimes the perpetrator of, in the
pursuit of love and happiness. Today we'd call the women victims of
sexual harassment; in the 1910s, underhanded or unscrupulous predatory
behavior was generally considered part of the exigencies of love,
though Tourneur saw through the obfuscating facade. Reportedly, among
directors, only the pictures of
D.W. Griffith and
Thomas H. Ince were more popular than the
films of Maurice Tourneur. In an interview published in the July 3,
1915, issue of "The New York Clipper", Tourneur expressed the opinion
that Griffith was supreme among movie directors. He also believed that
the motion picture was the most significant development for education
since the invention of the printing press. Still, he was obsessed with
story--he stated that "nearly everything worthwhile in the pictures is
an adaptation of a book, a play, a poem." Tourneur believed that the
cinema needed to develop a new kind of author, a writer who would more
naturalistically portray human nature and move the movies away from the
simplistic Manichean machinations of plot towards a portrayal of human
motivations and interactions that more closely caught the true balance
of good and bad in human beings. He stated that "nearly everything
worth while in the pictures is an adaptation of a book, a play, a
poem."
The Tourneur oeuvre consistently displayed first-rate visuals that
compensated for some of the dramatic weaknesses of the early narrative
film, hampered as it was by dialogue constrained by the limitations of
intertitles, and by a certain overwrought telegraphic performance style
closer to elocution than what we now appreciate as acting. In many
early films the narrative can be unintelligible to a modern audience,
due to a lack of intertitles, as this style was expected to, and did,
convey information to the contemporary audience, an audience more
experienced with pantomime due to the need of performers and filmmakers
to reach an audience that spoke a babble of languages. However, the
demands of movies for this kind of signaling hampered its development
as a mature medium of artistic expression. When Tourneur tried to bring
the sophistication of Henrik Ibsen to the
screen with A Doll's House (1918),
it proved an aesthetic and box-office failure. As one critic noted, the
felicities of Ibsen's drama could only be conveyed by language itself
and the modulations of the human voice, not by stage business.
In the July 1918 edition of "Photoplay Magazine", Tourneur stated his
contrary credo: "There is an odious fallacy that a great many people
still believe, in regard to the moving picture. It is almost as
widespread as that the cinema is in its infancy [Tourneur dated the
invention of the motion picture to
Eadweard Muybridge's experiments with
multiple-exposure photography in 1878]. By that I mean the belief that
we must give the public what it wants. To me, that is absurd. As absurd
as if the fashion dictators should attempt to suit women's wishes in
costumes. In reality, the opposite is the case, is it not?" Tourneur
believed that the filmmaker's taste and preferences were essential to
the creation of a motion picture, just as in the legitimate theater,
the craft and art the director and actors applied to a written play
infused it with life and meaning. The play was not the thing, Tourneur
stated; one can always sit at home and read a play. It is the staging
of the play that creates meaning, and it is the director's control over
the photoplay that makes it an art rather than just a piece of
commerce.
Tourneur rebelled against the prevalent attitude in the movie industry
that the audience would automatically reject more poetic works. He
believed that what was then called The Great War had infused the mass
audience with a certain spirituality. Tourneur had faith that the
audience would accept higher-quality, more intellectual works, and that
the mass-market lowest-common-denominator paradigm of the film industry
was false. However, he could make exceptions to his opposition to
pandering to the audience; in an earlier interview published in the May
18, 1918, edition of "Exhibitors Trade Review", he believed that
filmmakers had a patriotic duty to soothe the anxieties of the wartime
audience.
"It is part of our duty as purveyors of entertainment to the great
majority, to see to it that the public gets wholesome, optimistic and,
if possible, amusing entertainment. It is up to the screen to sustain
the spirits of the nation. Let us keep away from the morbid and
gruesome and throw the tremendous power of the photoplay into the
civilized world's war for democracy." But of course, this was parcel to
his opinion that the motion picture had a great didactic function, and
could be used to educate an audience (a generation later Tourneur would
be confronted with the anxieties of quite a different audience, that of
Occupied France).
"Directing motion pictures is merely capturing life," Tourneur stated
in a piece he wrote on the art of directing for "Variety" (December 27,
1918). A director, as auteur, was born, not made. A movie director
could not be trained, as a successful director had been born with the
instincts to create a photoplay (a contemporary term Tourneur despised
and urged the industry to jettison in favor of something new and more
accurate to describe the motion picture). "Directing a picture
presupposes the possession of dramatic instinct and artistic perception
in the man entrusted with the transfer to the screen of the play of an
author," he wrote.
The photoplay had developed into quite a different form from the staged
play of the legitimate theater, and thus a different set of narrative
tools was required to make a successful movie. The director had to work
within the limits of movies, which were short in length, thus limiting
his options for both creating and presenting drama. A director had to
be an expert in finding, and using, some detail, that in the short
period of time allowed him, would elucidate the characters, the
conflicts, and themes of his film. Thus, the director had to be a great
observer of human nature and character in order to master his medium.
Optimistic about the future, and relishing the opportunity to define
the new medium, Tourneur created his own production company in 1918. He
felt that American silent film actors were superior to their European
counterparts. He believed that "America's Sweetheart,"
Mary Pickford, the Toronto native whom he
directed in two hit films in 1917, was the world's best screen actress.
He also touted stage actress
Elsie Ferguson, his Nora Helmer,
as a brilliant artist; they made four films together in 1917 and 1918.
For her part Ferguson, who hated movies and had to be coaxed into them
by generous offers from Paramount-Artcraft head
Jesse L. Lasky, said that Tourneur was
her favorite director, and that she was lucky to have had him direct
her first film.
Tourneur became increasingly antagonistic to the star system that was
becoming more important to the industry, and he resisted studio efforts
to rein in directors (and their profligate spending) by the imposition
of the central production system, in which formerly dominant directors
had to answer to producers over aesthetic choices as well as budgets.
At this point in his career his success at the box office gave him
leeway to push the frontiers of his art. In addition to making popular
movies, Tourneur became one of the most respected directors in America,
but he experienced some trouble when he began to become more
aesthetically enthusiastic.
Tourneur's heavily stylized
The Blue Bird (1918), which
featured unusual sets and costumes, was a precursor of the
expressionist German cinema, such as
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
(the Rejane company had put on the first production of "L'oisueau bleu"
in 1911, the year its author,
Maurice Maeterlinck, won the Nobel
Prize and Tourneur left the legitimate stage for the soundstage. In
1924 Tourneur wrote an article about the superiority of film to the
theater. "[M]otion pictures have reached greater artistic heights than
the stage and will continue on--years in advance of the stage," he
wrote). Another heavily stylized film,
Prunella (1918), was as critically
acclaimed as "The Blue Bird," but both failed at the box office, as the
movie industry was not as able to support artistic visions as was the
theater. Due to these economic considerations, Tourneur went back to a
naturalistic style.
Tourneur scorned what he called "machine-made" commercial pictures, but
he had to acknowledge the tyranny of the box-office. He believed that
the failure of "Prunella" was the result of its rejection by provincial
exhibitors, who did not believe their audiences would go for such
"high-brow" fare. Lacking an advertising budget and marketing monies
that would enable it to be showcased with a first-rate orchestral
accompaniment, the picture failed, cold-bloodedly murdered by the
philistine exhibitors. Tourneur believed that Griffith's hit
Broken Blossoms (1919)
would have failed, too, if he had not been backed by advertising and
marketing muscle. He also believed that
Cecil B. DeMille's
Male and Female (1919), his
adaptation of J.M. Barrie's play "The
Admirable Crichton," would have flopped it he hadn't vulgarized it. He
also scored Griffith for giving in to the exigencies of the marketplace
by pandering to the audience and turning his back on art.
It was around this time that he gave up on his idea that movies should
be used to educate the masses. In an interview published in November
1920, Tourneur told Truman B. Handy of "Motion Picture" that the forte
of film was amusement: "I do not believe in using the screen as a way
of teaching; we have the pulpit and the college. It may be a means of
propaganda, but I do not intend to use it as such. Never!" His faith
would be sorely tested under the Nazis 20 years later.
"I would rather starve and make good pictures," he wrote in 1920, "if I
knew they were going to be shown, but to starve and make pictures which
are thrown in the ashcan is above anybody's strength. As long as the
public taste will oblige us to make what is very justly called
machine-made stories, we can only bow and give them what they want."
Story, again, was essential if one was to subvert the exhibitors' and
distributors' expectations of the box office and create something
better than the "machine-made" moving picture. Tourneur had an affinity
for literary adaptations, and his career collection of adaptations
included Joseph Conrad's
Victory (1919),
Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island (1920),
James Fenimore Cooper's
The Last of the Mohicans (1920)
and R.D. Blackmore's
Lorna Doone (1922). He would later
make a French version of Ben Jonson's play
Volpone (1941).
By 1922 he came to the opinion that the future of the American film
industry lay in Hollywood, not New York, though not without regret. In
a February 1922 "Photoplay" article weighing the merits of California
versus New York as a production locale, Tourneur came out in favor of
California, since artistry was no longer a part of the moviemaking
equation. To be intellectually stimulated and remain artistically
fresh, New York would be the preferable production center, Tourneur
declared. New York, like London, Paris and Vienna, stimulated the
filmmaker toward developing fresh ideas and more ambitious projects.
However, "[f]rom the material standpoint of facilities, costs, climate
and the like there is no comparison; Los Angeles is vastly superior."
The next year he shot
The Christian (1923), an adaptation
of Hall Caine's novel, in Hollywood for
Samuel Goldwyn, but within a few years he
decided not to share his future with that of the West Coast. Though he
apparently had no problems with the mercurial Goldwyn (who would
bedevil William Wyler a decade later), the
American movie industry had evolved into a business of which he
disapproved. It was in Hollywood, under such men as Irving Thalberg,
Darryl F. Zanuck and
Hal B. Wallis, that the central producer
and production chief became the dominant force in the film industry
from the mid-'20s through the early 1950s. Hollywood became a place
where directors were often pulled off one picture in the middle of a
shoot to shoot scenes in another picture, shuffled around like the
hired hands that they had become in the increasingly centralized
industry.
Tourneur denounced the industry's reliance on realism in a February 4,
1923, interview with "The New York Telegraph" in a plea for a more
artistic, impressionistic approach to making motion pictures. He felt
that film finally had had succeeded in being able to convey
psychological effects, and had even surpassed the stage in that
respect, as it could use picture and montage to quickly convey a mental
state that it would take "countless words" to put over in the theater.
Tourneur believed that due to the literalness of the camera lens, which
did not have the mediating eye of the visual artist, the movies had
been too focused on action. However, film could be made into a plastic
art that was manipulated by the director to bring out "the psychology
of the drama--the mental action of the characters."
He elaborated: "The screen is a better medium than the dramatic stage
for getting over psychological effects. We can drive ideas across. For
instance, what better way is there to express corruption than to show a
close-up of the check with which a man has bribed . . . The Goldwyn
company agreed with me that you can get more to the spectators by
showing a banging shutter, by indicating the howling of the wind, or
the shrieking of a woman, than by numberless words. Motion pictures,
first of all, should be impressionistic."
Later that year, in the July 1st edition of the same newspaper,
Tourneur declared that the great motion pictures would be produced by
the next generation, now that the pioneers had developed a new mode of
expression. He stated his belief that the director, and not the
producer, should be fully responsible for a motion picture production.
"To relieve him of any of these responsibilities and to compel him to
confine his efforts to adapting himself to the ideas of a half-dozen
'experts' will strike at the very foundation of successful pictures."
He predicted that the meddling of producers would doom motion pictures'
popularity with the mass audience as it would result in inferior movies
that the movie-goers would reject.
It was just the type of interference that Tourneur warned about in 1923
that led to his quitting the American film industry. The last film he
directed in the US was
The Mysterious Island (1929),
which he abandoned soon after the commencement of principal
photography. Tourneur would not work under MGM's assigned production
supervisor, so he quit the picture and repatriated himself to his
native France in 1926, to make movies there and in Germany.
Tourneur was not welcomed back to France, since he was viewed as a
draft dodger by many in a country in which 11% of the population had
been killed or wounded in The Great War
(Charles Chaplin had been similarly
criticized by British hawks). During a visit to his homeland in 1921,
some French journalists demanded that Tourneur not be allowed to return
to the US. Jean-Louis Crozet of the
periodical "Comoedia" denounced Tourneur for having spent 1914-18 in
America, and thus avoiding military service in World War I, which
claimed the lives of approximately 1.4 million French soldiers. Crozet
accused the director of cowardice for having emigrated to America to
"[save] his life, while so many of his compatriots lost theirs."
Tourneur made his second movie in Germany after leaving the US,
The Ship of Lost Men (1929)
("Ship of Lost Men"), which starred
Marlene Dietrich in one of her first
important roles. His son Jacques--who would go on to become an
important director in the US in the 1940s--served as Tourneur's
assistant and editor on the film. Jacques would continue to assist his
father on his shoots until the
mid-'30s.
Divorced from his first wife in 1923, Maurice married actress Louise Lagrange
(1898-1979), whom he met while shooting
L'homme mystérieux (1933).
During the Nazi occupation of France (1940-44) times were tough for
French filmmakers who wouldn't collaborate with the Germans, and things
were no different for Tourneur, the man who vowed in 1920 that he would
never make propaganda films. Even the "sitzkrieg", or Phony War, period of
September 1, 1939, to May 9, 1940, disrupted the cinema as actors and
craftsmen were called up for military service. Tourneur's shooting of
"Volpone" was interrupted, and did not resume production until March
23, 1940, less than two months before the Nazi invasion of May 10th. On
June 22nd the brief Battle of France came to an end when World War I
hero Marshal Philippe Pétain asked the
Germans for an armistice. Part of the peace accord mandated the
partition of France, with the northern part to remain under German
domination and the capital of the new government, headed by Petain, to
be in Vichy. Vichy France, as the collaborationist government was
known, also was to obey Germany in matters of cultural and racial
policy.
On November 2, 1940, new regulations for the French movie industry were
issued. All movie professionals were required to carry an identity
card, except for Jews, who were not allowed one. At the end of the year
'Jean Renoir' (I)' emigrated to the
US and was given a contract by 20th Century-Fox. The great actor
Jean Gabin
also made it to America and a contract with Universal, appearing in his
first American film, Moontide (1942),
opposite Ida Lupino in 1942.
French movie theaters were required to show Nazi propaganda movies, in
accordance with Germany's policies towards all occupied countries. In
1940 Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan turned
Lion Feuchtwanger's novel "Jew Suss"
into a vicious anti-Semitic German-language film, the notorious
Jud Süß (1940), the climax of which
justifies pogroms against the Jewish people. When the film was released
in Paris on February 14, 1941, the reaction of the French audience was
very positive. On June 30 of that year the great French filmmaker
Abel Gance was arraigned before the head of
the French movie industry for the "crime" of being Jewish, and was
required to prove his Aryan origins. He fled to Spain, not returning
from exile until late 1945.
In September 1941 German censorship was enforced over French movies,
and on the last day of the year, the Propaganda Division issued six new
statutes, one of which banned Jews from the movie industry. The power
to "green-light" French movies was reserved for the German High
Command, and a new studio was created, Continental Productions, which
was a subsidiary of Germany's state-owned UFA, headed by the German
Alfred Greven and financed by French
capital. The company, a.k.a. Continental Films, became the most
important French movie production company during the Occupation.
By January 1942 film receipts were up by 68% over the previous year. A
month later Jews and foreigners were forbidden from working in the film
industry under a pseudonym, and on October 15th all American and
English films were banned in France. French cartoons began to become
popular early that year, possibly a sign of escapism, or of the
indigenous industry's desire not to make propaganda for the enemy, and
of the audience's desire not to be exposed to it. In 1943, fearing an
Allied invasion from England, the Germans banned the filming of movies
on the French coast. On January 15, 1944, reacting to the release of
Vautrin the Thief (1943), the newspaper "Le Pilori"
denounced beloved French character actor
Michel Simon as a Jew, and wrote,
"The cinema has condemned us to seeing the base, disgusting, revolting
face that Michel Simon gives to 'Vautrin'." However, the mood in
France, as the Allied invasion grew more imminent, began to change.
The Committee for the Liberation of the Cinema was an active element of
the Maquis, which was the name given to the Resistance, publishing an
underground newspaper, "L'Ecran francais". The Committee organized
resistance within the film industry controlled by the Nazis and their
collaborators, and coordinated insurrections and the "liberation" of
many filmmaking facilities during the time of the Allied invasion of
France, which began on June 6th. On July 18, 1944, "L'Ecran francais"
published an article "Toward a Cinema with Clean Hands", declaring that
collaborators with the Germans would not be tolerated in the liberated
French film industry (in 1946 actor
Robert Le Vigan was sentenced to 10
years at hard labor, and all his belongings were confiscated, for
openly collaborating with the Germans and broadcasting anti-Semitic
propaganda on the radio. The French made a distinction between those
who had to cooperate with the Germans due to economic considerations
and those who intellectually cooperated with the Nazis and propagated
their ideology).
Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944, three days after film curator
and cinema buff Henri Langlois held the
first showing of
Gone with the Wind (1939) in
Paris at his Cinematheque française. The movie theaters of Paris had
not yet been opened, but that didn't stop Langlois; at that point, his
regular exhibition of movies had been suspended for a year.
Marcel Carné's classic
Children of Paradise (1945),
shot during the Occupation, had its gala premiere on March 9, 1945. It
originally had been scheduled to be shot at the Victorine studios in
Nice in mid-August 1943, but the production was interrupted when the
company was ordered back to Paris after the Allied invasion of Sicily.
On April 14, 1945, all the theaters and entertainment venues in Paris
were shut for the day to pay respect to the late US President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had
died two days earlier.
During the Occupation the Germans had encouraged French filmmakers to
maintain their high production standards in order to create more
effective propaganda and to create superior product to soothe the
anxieties of French movie-goers. However, those who were less
cooperative had to get along with less. While Tourneur continued to
direct under the Occupation, he was forced to use the ends of reels of
raw film stock to shoot his pictures.
Maurice Tourneur is a character in
Bertrand Tavernier's 2002 film about
the French film industry under Vichy,
Safe Conduct (2002) ("Safe
Conduct"), the title of which refers both to the after-curfew pass
filmmakers were issued due to the odd shooting hours of the film
industry and also to the movie business' laissez-faire atmosphere
during the occupation, which included hiding and utilizing Jewish film
professionals who, of course, could not be credited. The film's story
deals with French screenwriter
Jean Aurenche, a rogue who did not want to
work for the Nazis, and Jean Devaivre, an
assistant director involved with the Resistance. Tavernier was inspired
to make his three-hour epic by the experiences of his father
René Tavernier, an editor and
screenwriter confronted with the same dilemma as Jean Aurenche,
characterized by his son as, "[W]hat can you write in a period of such
censorship under a regime you despise?"
Tavernier believes that Americans can understand the dilemma if they
equate French filmmakers during the Nazi occupation with American
filmmakers under McCarthyism. Of the question, "'[H]ow can you work for
a German company without compromising
yourself?' It's very simple. I
say to the American critic, just replace the German element with
Senator McCarthy [Red-baiting Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy]
and everything will be clear!"
The great paradox of the French film industry under the Occupation,
which thrived despite the wartime shortages and terror directed by the
Nazis towards the French population, is that French filmmakers working
for the German-financed and -controlled Continental, the most powerful
studio in France, maintained a good deal of independence. Unlike
newspapers and book publishing and radio broadcasting, which were
tightly controlled, the Germans allowed French filmmakers more latitude
in order to create entertaining movies to distract the French populace.
Thus, many French filmmakers were able to incorporate allegories and
parables alluding to the Occupation. According to Tavernier, of the
approximately 30 feature films made at Continental between 1940 and
1944, most have a kind of integrity that belies their ostensible ends
as Nazi and Pétainist propaganda. "That's the first act of resistance,"
he claims.
Aurenche and René Tavernier hated Vichy and the indigenous intellectual
collaborators with the regime, and Aurenche allegedly used coding in
his Continental screenplays to defy the Nazis (director
Martin Scorsese, citing the American
directors of the 1940s and 1950s, calls this process "smuggling,"
introducing themes on the sly beneath the ken of studio owners and
censors). Bernard Tavernier believes it was the directors, and not the
screenwriters, who should be blamed for the sins of the Vichy cinema
and the postwar, pre-Nouvelle vague bourgeois cinema, although that
statement seems to indicate some kind of counter-Oedipal complex. His
argument about McCarthyism smacks of a relevance that many Americans
might find dismaying, as the French screenwriters of Vichy he lionizes
were defying a foreign power, whereas many of the American
screenwriters initially persecuted by McCarthyism were secret members
of the Communist Party, accused of putting in coded messages for a
foreign power with which the United States was locked in a Cold War.
Actually, the real nexus of the two groups' experiences can be summed
up by the dilemma that Robert Sklar, in his
book "Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of the American Movies,"
posits as a struggle "over issues that had agitated American culture
ever since movies first appeared: Whom makes the product? Who runs the
show? Who decides what the show should say?" It was a battle Tourneur
joined in America, and then quit in 1926 when the machine-made movie
philistines won the war.
Maurice Tourneur and other cine-artists in America, wanting a more
artistic, expressionistic type of film that would offer something
beyond the simple lowest-common-denominator cultural dualities of good
and evil that the money-men insisted was all that the box office could
bear, had to resort to "smuggling" in their own themes, their own bits
of telling detail that would illuminate the psychological motivations
of characters and audience alike. Vichy France and McCarthyite America
were no different in kind (if not degree) in that the money-men, the
producers, had always constrained the creative people, who resulted to
subterfuges to make the films they wanted, whether in Paris or
Hollywood. Even
Sergei Eisenstein, the great
Soviet filmmaker, survived the terrors of
Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union only to have
his soul crushed again and again by a tyranny that makes the regimes of
the classic Hollywood mogul much lamented by the creative talent
laughable in comparison.
In Vichy France a filmmaker could be tortured or shot for not hewing to
the Nazi line; while it is true that many an uncooperative leftist
wound up in jail for defying the notorious House Un-American Activities
Committee, the damage for those who did not defy but did not cooperate
was mostly limited to the loss of high-paying jobs and the
psychological torment of being abandoned by friends and losing one's
career. However, the challenge to both Vichy screenwriter and Hollywood
screenwriter in what Lillian Hellman
called the "Scoundrel Time" was the same: If one could not compromise,
if one could not tailor one's beliefs to fit the fashion of the times,
one could not work. So, in this sense, there is a similarity as
suggested by Tavernier, but like many paradoxes of Anglo-French
relations, Tavernier's argument doesn't completely add up; it does,
however, help elucidate the tough spot and paradoxical milieu that
movie-makers like Maurice Tourneur found themselves in. The Devaivre
character, in Tavernier's film, has to take over directing a movie from
Tourneur when the director goes into shock upon hearing that his wife
has been taken prisoner by the Germans.
In 1942 Maurice Tourneur directed his first French horror film, a genre
in which his son Jacques thrived in the US during the war.
Carnival of Sinners (1943)
(released as "Carnival of Sinners" in the US and "The Devil's Hand" in
the UK) is an adaptation of
Gérard de Nerval's 1832 short story "La
main enchantée" ("The Enchanted Hand"). The film is about a failed
artist's pact with the Devil, a Faustian dilemma that would have
resonated with audiences in Occupied France. The artist, Roland, buys
the severed though-still-alive left hand of a man, a grisly talisman
owned by the Devil himself, from the restaurateur Mélisse, who informs
Roland that in the future, he can only sell off the charm at a loss.
Under the threat of eternal damnation, Roland seals his Faust-pact,
with the proviso from the Devil that Roland can return the charm--at a
price. The catch is, the longer he keeps the charm, the higher the
price is, as it doubles each day. Tourneur cast a frail and
harmless-looking actor as his Mephistopheles, a man who looks like a
small-town bailiff and effectively doubles as a Vichy civil servant.
Despite the unprepossessing look of the Devil, Tourneur created a sense
of fear by emphasizing the consequences of the Faust-pact rather than
the Devil's power. Tourneur had become a master of psychological
filmmaking.
Roland becomes a great success, but at the cost of his individual
identity as the charm makes him a different person. In a meeting with
previous "owners" of the hand, Roland discovers that he is the last in
a succession of men who took advantage of the charm, which links him to
a history that ostensibly is not his own, but in fact is. The hand
binds him to the first owner, a monk who refused to use his artistic
talents for the glory of god, and it is under the monk's name, Maximus
Léo, that Roland creates the art that ensures his fame and fortune,
with the caveat that the expression of the hand is not his own.
He is done in by the vanity and greed of his mistress, when she
purloins money from his safe to buy herself a luxury, money that he
intended to use to payoff the Devil. He no longer will be able to buy
his way out of the Faust-pact, and save his soul. At the end of the
story, he is the one who now owns the hand and must pay the debt for
all the previous owners who attempted to profit from it. Although he
resents his fate, he must bear the responsibility for his collaboration
with the Devil, and for the collaborations of the others who came
before him. (Vichy government propaganda held that the French people
brought on the Occupation themselves to make them accept it as their
just desserts.)
Despite the travails of Occupied France and the German-dominated
industry, Tourneur managed to create a classic psychological horror
film. If Martin Scorsese and Tavernier's
theme of smuggling is correct, then "La Main du diable" and other
horror films made during the Occupation used the genre to smuggle
unacceptable themes past the censors. French films made during the
Occupation never directly refer to the military and political
situation, but they do convey the anxiety and paranoia, indeed, the
horror and fear of losing one's soul via collaboration, felt by the
Occupied French.
In the July 3, 1915. "New York Clipper" interview, it was reported that
"M. Tourneur's ambition is to produce strong and appealing detective
stories. He believes they interest the greatest number of people."
Tourneur's movie-making career continued until 1949, when he lost a leg
in a car accident. His interests were painting in oils and watercolors
and reading. After his forced retirement from the cinema due to his
disability, he occupied himself by translating English-language
detective novels into French.
Maurice Tourneur died on August 4, 1961, in Paris, and was interred in
the City of Lights' Père Lachaise Cemetery. As a filmmaker, posterity
has praised Tourneur for the subtlety and lingering moods of his
movies, particularly those in the mystery and fantasy genres. He was
one of the few American directors to create a new aesthetic, which
exerted a strong influence on Josef von Sternberg. His use of
rectangular compositions in
Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915)
inspired Fritz Lang's
The Spiders - Episode 1: The Golden Sea (1919),
and may also have influenced the Japanese director
Yasujirô Ozu.
Hollywood director Clarence Brown, who graduated from the University of
Tennessee at age 19 with a double degree in engineering, credited
Tourneur with making him a filmmaker. Within a few months of being
hired, he was editing Tourneur's films, and by 1917 he was shooting
parts of Tourneur's films (uncredited) himself. He learned from his
mentor the power of lighting and composition, although he developed a
more sympathetic approach to directing actors than his teacher. Brown
told cinema historian Kevin Brownlow,
"Tourneur was my God. I owe him every thing I've got in the world. For
me, he was the greatest man who ever lived. If it hadn't been for him,
I'd still be fixing automobiles." Brownlow reported that Brown had
tears in his eyes when he made this confession.
The United States Library of Congress' National Film Registry,
established to help preserve American films deemed "culturally
significant," has two Tourneur films on its list,
The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917)
and
The Last of the Mohicans (1920).
the Parisian suburb of Belleville on February 2, 1873, the son of a
jewelry merchant. He was trained and employed as a graphic designer and
a magazine illustrator as a young man. After serving in a French
artillery unit in northern Africa, he became an assistant to sculptor
Auguste Rodin and later to
muralist
Amélie Puvis de Chavanne before
deciding to change his life along with the changing century and make a
new life in the theater.
Tourneur's younger siblings were part of the theatrical
establishment--his sister was an actress and his brother a theater
manager--so it was not as preposterous a shift in avocation as it might
seem. After haunting the theaters of Paris, paying for cheap seats to
soak up as much theater as he could, Tourneur became an actor in 1900
with a small troupe on the outskirts of Paris. His salary was 90 francs
a month, the equivalent of about $15. Now a professional, he took the
stage name "Maurice Tourneur". After learning the stage ropes, he
joined the company of the great tragedienne
Rejane for a South American tour. He later was a
member of stage director Andre Antoine's
company.
He married Fernande Petit in 1904, and
they had a son, Jacques Tourneur
(1904-1977), who would, like his father, become a film director of
note. Maurice eventually worked as an actor and set designer for the
Theatre de la Renaissance in Paris. In 1911, after having acted in and
directed over 400 stage productions, he left the theater for the film
industry, following his friend
Emile Chautard into the new medium.
Starting as an assistant to Chautard, Tourneur had visual arts
experience surpassed by few in the nascent "7th Art," the cinema. After
working as an assistant director at Societe Francaise des Films et
Cinematographes Éclair, he was quickly promoted to director and made
films with leading French stars. The subject of his first French silent
films was often a gamin or orphan seeking love and shelter.
He had a good command of English from touring in the UK as an actor,
and in 1914 the film company Éclair, intent on expanding its US market
share, transferred Tourneur to America to manage its studio at Fort
Lee, NJ, after a March 17, 1914, fire destroyed the main studio
building and the company's negatives. Éclair American Co. went into
business in Fort Lee, America's first "Hollywood", in 1911 with a
studio designed by Éclair's French architects that incorporated the
most modern theories of movie studio design. The studio complex
consisted of glass-covered shooting stages with administrative offices,
a development laboratory, workshops, scenery storage facilities and
dressing rooms. Éclair American signed a distribution deal with the new
New Jersey-based Universal Film Manufacturing Co. of
Carl Laemmle, whose future production
chief, Irving Thalberg, would later
clash with Tourneur at MGM. Éclair American mostly produced shorts, but
increasingly moved into feature production, keeping in line with the
general evolution of the industry, and since Tourneur had experience in
directing features, it was only natural that the company hired him.
In 1915 Tourneur moved over to World Film, also headquartered in Ft.
Lee. World had been established the year before to import foreign-made
features, which dominated American screens until the middle of the
1910s, and to distribute the movies of the newly established
feature-film companies associated with producer
Lewis J. Selznick,
David O. Selznick's father. In a
familiar pattern of that time, Selznick created Equitable Pictures and
signed Vitagraph star
Clara Kimball Young to his company.
Selznick then merged with Shubert Pictures--Shubert Theatrical
Co.'s movie production company--and
Peerless Pictures, the movie production company created by motion
picture raw-film-stock magnate Jules Brulatour.
World Pictures, now under Selznick's control, released movies produced
by Equitable, Peerless, Shubert Pictures and other independent
companies. Movie production was centered at the Peerless Studio in Ft.
Lee, built in 1914, and at the Paragon Studio, built in 1916. Gradually
World began to dominate the companies whose movies it
distributed. Tourneur was the best filmmaker on the lot, whose other
employees included
Josef von Sternberg (who worked as a
film cutter) and Frances Marion, the
future Oscar-winning screenwriter.
Tourneur quickly rose to become a major director in the American movie
industry, proving to be one of the more innovative pioneers in the
development of the narrative film. Adept at using the latest technology
to give his pictures a greater visual appeal, he earned critical
acclaim and popular success. Tourneur was credited with bringing
"stylization" to the American screen through his mastery of set design
and lighting. His primary concern, however, was story: "Show the people
anything, but show them something," he declared in a May 1920 interview
with "Motion Picture Magazine". "This can be either funny or dramatic,
but there must be something."
Tourneur opposed the new star system because he felt that a good story
could not be told through one character; he also believed that the
ideal of the "gleaming personality" of the star promulgated by motion
pictures was false, a perversion of life as it actually is lived.
Tourneur was more interested in developing a means to convey
psychological effects than emphasizing physical action. In this he was
opposed to the then-dominant
pre-Konstantin Stanislavski
acting theories, rooted in the theater, that held that dialogue must be
accompanied by an appropriate physical gesture of the hands to
underscore the feeling being conveyed by the actor in a scene. Physical
action itself, the theory went, conveyed psychological meaning and
emotion. It was said that film was born as a form of entertainment for
the illiterate masses, and this style constituted a "universal
language" that the talkies not only made obsolete, but absurd (one
example of this style is the placement of the left-hand on the right
forearm, a gesture that can be seen in silent films and was carried on
by Harry Carey in his sound films. This was
an elocutory gesture that signified fortitude, and would be understood
by the silent film audience). Tourneur believed that this telegraphic
shorthand needed to be replaced. The new Soviet cinema would show the
way towards a greater psychological realism with the development of
montage.
Tourneur's film production unit had coalesced by 1915, and included
Clarence Brown, the future
six-time Oscar-nominated director who served as his assistant director
and editor; director of photography
John van den Broek and art director
Ben Carré. The Tourneur unit produced a series
of popular movies that successfully utilized both the new language of
film--including close-ups and parallel action--and new technology, such
as tracking shots and special effects. While Tourneur's work spanned
many genres, a leitmotif in his oeuvre was the romantic skullduggery
women were the victim of, or sometimes the perpetrator of, in the
pursuit of love and happiness. Today we'd call the women victims of
sexual harassment; in the 1910s, underhanded or unscrupulous predatory
behavior was generally considered part of the exigencies of love,
though Tourneur saw through the obfuscating facade. Reportedly, among
directors, only the pictures of
D.W. Griffith and
Thomas H. Ince were more popular than the
films of Maurice Tourneur. In an interview published in the July 3,
1915, issue of "The New York Clipper", Tourneur expressed the opinion
that Griffith was supreme among movie directors. He also believed that
the motion picture was the most significant development for education
since the invention of the printing press. Still, he was obsessed with
story--he stated that "nearly everything worthwhile in the pictures is
an adaptation of a book, a play, a poem." Tourneur believed that the
cinema needed to develop a new kind of author, a writer who would more
naturalistically portray human nature and move the movies away from the
simplistic Manichean machinations of plot towards a portrayal of human
motivations and interactions that more closely caught the true balance
of good and bad in human beings. He stated that "nearly everything
worth while in the pictures is an adaptation of a book, a play, a
poem."
The Tourneur oeuvre consistently displayed first-rate visuals that
compensated for some of the dramatic weaknesses of the early narrative
film, hampered as it was by dialogue constrained by the limitations of
intertitles, and by a certain overwrought telegraphic performance style
closer to elocution than what we now appreciate as acting. In many
early films the narrative can be unintelligible to a modern audience,
due to a lack of intertitles, as this style was expected to, and did,
convey information to the contemporary audience, an audience more
experienced with pantomime due to the need of performers and filmmakers
to reach an audience that spoke a babble of languages. However, the
demands of movies for this kind of signaling hampered its development
as a mature medium of artistic expression. When Tourneur tried to bring
the sophistication of Henrik Ibsen to the
screen with A Doll's House (1918),
it proved an aesthetic and box-office failure. As one critic noted, the
felicities of Ibsen's drama could only be conveyed by language itself
and the modulations of the human voice, not by stage business.
In the July 1918 edition of "Photoplay Magazine", Tourneur stated his
contrary credo: "There is an odious fallacy that a great many people
still believe, in regard to the moving picture. It is almost as
widespread as that the cinema is in its infancy [Tourneur dated the
invention of the motion picture to
Eadweard Muybridge's experiments with
multiple-exposure photography in 1878]. By that I mean the belief that
we must give the public what it wants. To me, that is absurd. As absurd
as if the fashion dictators should attempt to suit women's wishes in
costumes. In reality, the opposite is the case, is it not?" Tourneur
believed that the filmmaker's taste and preferences were essential to
the creation of a motion picture, just as in the legitimate theater,
the craft and art the director and actors applied to a written play
infused it with life and meaning. The play was not the thing, Tourneur
stated; one can always sit at home and read a play. It is the staging
of the play that creates meaning, and it is the director's control over
the photoplay that makes it an art rather than just a piece of
commerce.
Tourneur rebelled against the prevalent attitude in the movie industry
that the audience would automatically reject more poetic works. He
believed that what was then called The Great War had infused the mass
audience with a certain spirituality. Tourneur had faith that the
audience would accept higher-quality, more intellectual works, and that
the mass-market lowest-common-denominator paradigm of the film industry
was false. However, he could make exceptions to his opposition to
pandering to the audience; in an earlier interview published in the May
18, 1918, edition of "Exhibitors Trade Review", he believed that
filmmakers had a patriotic duty to soothe the anxieties of the wartime
audience.
"It is part of our duty as purveyors of entertainment to the great
majority, to see to it that the public gets wholesome, optimistic and,
if possible, amusing entertainment. It is up to the screen to sustain
the spirits of the nation. Let us keep away from the morbid and
gruesome and throw the tremendous power of the photoplay into the
civilized world's war for democracy." But of course, this was parcel to
his opinion that the motion picture had a great didactic function, and
could be used to educate an audience (a generation later Tourneur would
be confronted with the anxieties of quite a different audience, that of
Occupied France).
"Directing motion pictures is merely capturing life," Tourneur stated
in a piece he wrote on the art of directing for "Variety" (December 27,
1918). A director, as auteur, was born, not made. A movie director
could not be trained, as a successful director had been born with the
instincts to create a photoplay (a contemporary term Tourneur despised
and urged the industry to jettison in favor of something new and more
accurate to describe the motion picture). "Directing a picture
presupposes the possession of dramatic instinct and artistic perception
in the man entrusted with the transfer to the screen of the play of an
author," he wrote.
The photoplay had developed into quite a different form from the staged
play of the legitimate theater, and thus a different set of narrative
tools was required to make a successful movie. The director had to work
within the limits of movies, which were short in length, thus limiting
his options for both creating and presenting drama. A director had to
be an expert in finding, and using, some detail, that in the short
period of time allowed him, would elucidate the characters, the
conflicts, and themes of his film. Thus, the director had to be a great
observer of human nature and character in order to master his medium.
Optimistic about the future, and relishing the opportunity to define
the new medium, Tourneur created his own production company in 1918. He
felt that American silent film actors were superior to their European
counterparts. He believed that "America's Sweetheart,"
Mary Pickford, the Toronto native whom he
directed in two hit films in 1917, was the world's best screen actress.
He also touted stage actress
Elsie Ferguson, his Nora Helmer,
as a brilliant artist; they made four films together in 1917 and 1918.
For her part Ferguson, who hated movies and had to be coaxed into them
by generous offers from Paramount-Artcraft head
Jesse L. Lasky, said that Tourneur was
her favorite director, and that she was lucky to have had him direct
her first film.
Tourneur became increasingly antagonistic to the star system that was
becoming more important to the industry, and he resisted studio efforts
to rein in directors (and their profligate spending) by the imposition
of the central production system, in which formerly dominant directors
had to answer to producers over aesthetic choices as well as budgets.
At this point in his career his success at the box office gave him
leeway to push the frontiers of his art. In addition to making popular
movies, Tourneur became one of the most respected directors in America,
but he experienced some trouble when he began to become more
aesthetically enthusiastic.
Tourneur's heavily stylized
The Blue Bird (1918), which
featured unusual sets and costumes, was a precursor of the
expressionist German cinema, such as
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
(the Rejane company had put on the first production of "L'oisueau bleu"
in 1911, the year its author,
Maurice Maeterlinck, won the Nobel
Prize and Tourneur left the legitimate stage for the soundstage. In
1924 Tourneur wrote an article about the superiority of film to the
theater. "[M]otion pictures have reached greater artistic heights than
the stage and will continue on--years in advance of the stage," he
wrote). Another heavily stylized film,
Prunella (1918), was as critically
acclaimed as "The Blue Bird," but both failed at the box office, as the
movie industry was not as able to support artistic visions as was the
theater. Due to these economic considerations, Tourneur went back to a
naturalistic style.
Tourneur scorned what he called "machine-made" commercial pictures, but
he had to acknowledge the tyranny of the box-office. He believed that
the failure of "Prunella" was the result of its rejection by provincial
exhibitors, who did not believe their audiences would go for such
"high-brow" fare. Lacking an advertising budget and marketing monies
that would enable it to be showcased with a first-rate orchestral
accompaniment, the picture failed, cold-bloodedly murdered by the
philistine exhibitors. Tourneur believed that Griffith's hit
Broken Blossoms (1919)
would have failed, too, if he had not been backed by advertising and
marketing muscle. He also believed that
Cecil B. DeMille's
Male and Female (1919), his
adaptation of J.M. Barrie's play "The
Admirable Crichton," would have flopped it he hadn't vulgarized it. He
also scored Griffith for giving in to the exigencies of the marketplace
by pandering to the audience and turning his back on art.
It was around this time that he gave up on his idea that movies should
be used to educate the masses. In an interview published in November
1920, Tourneur told Truman B. Handy of "Motion Picture" that the forte
of film was amusement: "I do not believe in using the screen as a way
of teaching; we have the pulpit and the college. It may be a means of
propaganda, but I do not intend to use it as such. Never!" His faith
would be sorely tested under the Nazis 20 years later.
"I would rather starve and make good pictures," he wrote in 1920, "if I
knew they were going to be shown, but to starve and make pictures which
are thrown in the ashcan is above anybody's strength. As long as the
public taste will oblige us to make what is very justly called
machine-made stories, we can only bow and give them what they want."
Story, again, was essential if one was to subvert the exhibitors' and
distributors' expectations of the box office and create something
better than the "machine-made" moving picture. Tourneur had an affinity
for literary adaptations, and his career collection of adaptations
included Joseph Conrad's
Victory (1919),
Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island (1920),
James Fenimore Cooper's
The Last of the Mohicans (1920)
and R.D. Blackmore's
Lorna Doone (1922). He would later
make a French version of Ben Jonson's play
Volpone (1941).
By 1922 he came to the opinion that the future of the American film
industry lay in Hollywood, not New York, though not without regret. In
a February 1922 "Photoplay" article weighing the merits of California
versus New York as a production locale, Tourneur came out in favor of
California, since artistry was no longer a part of the moviemaking
equation. To be intellectually stimulated and remain artistically
fresh, New York would be the preferable production center, Tourneur
declared. New York, like London, Paris and Vienna, stimulated the
filmmaker toward developing fresh ideas and more ambitious projects.
However, "[f]rom the material standpoint of facilities, costs, climate
and the like there is no comparison; Los Angeles is vastly superior."
The next year he shot
The Christian (1923), an adaptation
of Hall Caine's novel, in Hollywood for
Samuel Goldwyn, but within a few years he
decided not to share his future with that of the West Coast. Though he
apparently had no problems with the mercurial Goldwyn (who would
bedevil William Wyler a decade later), the
American movie industry had evolved into a business of which he
disapproved. It was in Hollywood, under such men as Irving Thalberg,
Darryl F. Zanuck and
Hal B. Wallis, that the central producer
and production chief became the dominant force in the film industry
from the mid-'20s through the early 1950s. Hollywood became a place
where directors were often pulled off one picture in the middle of a
shoot to shoot scenes in another picture, shuffled around like the
hired hands that they had become in the increasingly centralized
industry.
Tourneur denounced the industry's reliance on realism in a February 4,
1923, interview with "The New York Telegraph" in a plea for a more
artistic, impressionistic approach to making motion pictures. He felt
that film finally had had succeeded in being able to convey
psychological effects, and had even surpassed the stage in that
respect, as it could use picture and montage to quickly convey a mental
state that it would take "countless words" to put over in the theater.
Tourneur believed that due to the literalness of the camera lens, which
did not have the mediating eye of the visual artist, the movies had
been too focused on action. However, film could be made into a plastic
art that was manipulated by the director to bring out "the psychology
of the drama--the mental action of the characters."
He elaborated: "The screen is a better medium than the dramatic stage
for getting over psychological effects. We can drive ideas across. For
instance, what better way is there to express corruption than to show a
close-up of the check with which a man has bribed . . . The Goldwyn
company agreed with me that you can get more to the spectators by
showing a banging shutter, by indicating the howling of the wind, or
the shrieking of a woman, than by numberless words. Motion pictures,
first of all, should be impressionistic."
Later that year, in the July 1st edition of the same newspaper,
Tourneur declared that the great motion pictures would be produced by
the next generation, now that the pioneers had developed a new mode of
expression. He stated his belief that the director, and not the
producer, should be fully responsible for a motion picture production.
"To relieve him of any of these responsibilities and to compel him to
confine his efforts to adapting himself to the ideas of a half-dozen
'experts' will strike at the very foundation of successful pictures."
He predicted that the meddling of producers would doom motion pictures'
popularity with the mass audience as it would result in inferior movies
that the movie-goers would reject.
It was just the type of interference that Tourneur warned about in 1923
that led to his quitting the American film industry. The last film he
directed in the US was
The Mysterious Island (1929),
which he abandoned soon after the commencement of principal
photography. Tourneur would not work under MGM's assigned production
supervisor, so he quit the picture and repatriated himself to his
native France in 1926, to make movies there and in Germany.
Tourneur was not welcomed back to France, since he was viewed as a
draft dodger by many in a country in which 11% of the population had
been killed or wounded in The Great War
(Charles Chaplin had been similarly
criticized by British hawks). During a visit to his homeland in 1921,
some French journalists demanded that Tourneur not be allowed to return
to the US. Jean-Louis Crozet of the
periodical "Comoedia" denounced Tourneur for having spent 1914-18 in
America, and thus avoiding military service in World War I, which
claimed the lives of approximately 1.4 million French soldiers. Crozet
accused the director of cowardice for having emigrated to America to
"[save] his life, while so many of his compatriots lost theirs."
Tourneur made his second movie in Germany after leaving the US,
The Ship of Lost Men (1929)
("Ship of Lost Men"), which starred
Marlene Dietrich in one of her first
important roles. His son Jacques--who would go on to become an
important director in the US in the 1940s--served as Tourneur's
assistant and editor on the film. Jacques would continue to assist his
father on his shoots until the
mid-'30s.
Divorced from his first wife in 1923, Maurice married actress Louise Lagrange
(1898-1979), whom he met while shooting
L'homme mystérieux (1933).
During the Nazi occupation of France (1940-44) times were tough for
French filmmakers who wouldn't collaborate with the Germans, and things
were no different for Tourneur, the man who vowed in 1920 that he would
never make propaganda films. Even the "sitzkrieg", or Phony War, period of
September 1, 1939, to May 9, 1940, disrupted the cinema as actors and
craftsmen were called up for military service. Tourneur's shooting of
"Volpone" was interrupted, and did not resume production until March
23, 1940, less than two months before the Nazi invasion of May 10th. On
June 22nd the brief Battle of France came to an end when World War I
hero Marshal Philippe Pétain asked the
Germans for an armistice. Part of the peace accord mandated the
partition of France, with the northern part to remain under German
domination and the capital of the new government, headed by Petain, to
be in Vichy. Vichy France, as the collaborationist government was
known, also was to obey Germany in matters of cultural and racial
policy.
On November 2, 1940, new regulations for the French movie industry were
issued. All movie professionals were required to carry an identity
card, except for Jews, who were not allowed one. At the end of the year
'Jean Renoir' (I)' emigrated to the
US and was given a contract by 20th Century-Fox. The great actor
Jean Gabin
also made it to America and a contract with Universal, appearing in his
first American film, Moontide (1942),
opposite Ida Lupino in 1942.
French movie theaters were required to show Nazi propaganda movies, in
accordance with Germany's policies towards all occupied countries. In
1940 Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan turned
Lion Feuchtwanger's novel "Jew Suss"
into a vicious anti-Semitic German-language film, the notorious
Jud Süß (1940), the climax of which
justifies pogroms against the Jewish people. When the film was released
in Paris on February 14, 1941, the reaction of the French audience was
very positive. On June 30 of that year the great French filmmaker
Abel Gance was arraigned before the head of
the French movie industry for the "crime" of being Jewish, and was
required to prove his Aryan origins. He fled to Spain, not returning
from exile until late 1945.
In September 1941 German censorship was enforced over French movies,
and on the last day of the year, the Propaganda Division issued six new
statutes, one of which banned Jews from the movie industry. The power
to "green-light" French movies was reserved for the German High
Command, and a new studio was created, Continental Productions, which
was a subsidiary of Germany's state-owned UFA, headed by the German
Alfred Greven and financed by French
capital. The company, a.k.a. Continental Films, became the most
important French movie production company during the Occupation.
By January 1942 film receipts were up by 68% over the previous year. A
month later Jews and foreigners were forbidden from working in the film
industry under a pseudonym, and on October 15th all American and
English films were banned in France. French cartoons began to become
popular early that year, possibly a sign of escapism, or of the
indigenous industry's desire not to make propaganda for the enemy, and
of the audience's desire not to be exposed to it. In 1943, fearing an
Allied invasion from England, the Germans banned the filming of movies
on the French coast. On January 15, 1944, reacting to the release of
Vautrin the Thief (1943), the newspaper "Le Pilori"
denounced beloved French character actor
Michel Simon as a Jew, and wrote,
"The cinema has condemned us to seeing the base, disgusting, revolting
face that Michel Simon gives to 'Vautrin'." However, the mood in
France, as the Allied invasion grew more imminent, began to change.
The Committee for the Liberation of the Cinema was an active element of
the Maquis, which was the name given to the Resistance, publishing an
underground newspaper, "L'Ecran francais". The Committee organized
resistance within the film industry controlled by the Nazis and their
collaborators, and coordinated insurrections and the "liberation" of
many filmmaking facilities during the time of the Allied invasion of
France, which began on June 6th. On July 18, 1944, "L'Ecran francais"
published an article "Toward a Cinema with Clean Hands", declaring that
collaborators with the Germans would not be tolerated in the liberated
French film industry (in 1946 actor
Robert Le Vigan was sentenced to 10
years at hard labor, and all his belongings were confiscated, for
openly collaborating with the Germans and broadcasting anti-Semitic
propaganda on the radio. The French made a distinction between those
who had to cooperate with the Germans due to economic considerations
and those who intellectually cooperated with the Nazis and propagated
their ideology).
Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944, three days after film curator
and cinema buff Henri Langlois held the
first showing of
Gone with the Wind (1939) in
Paris at his Cinematheque française. The movie theaters of Paris had
not yet been opened, but that didn't stop Langlois; at that point, his
regular exhibition of movies had been suspended for a year.
Marcel Carné's classic
Children of Paradise (1945),
shot during the Occupation, had its gala premiere on March 9, 1945. It
originally had been scheduled to be shot at the Victorine studios in
Nice in mid-August 1943, but the production was interrupted when the
company was ordered back to Paris after the Allied invasion of Sicily.
On April 14, 1945, all the theaters and entertainment venues in Paris
were shut for the day to pay respect to the late US President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had
died two days earlier.
During the Occupation the Germans had encouraged French filmmakers to
maintain their high production standards in order to create more
effective propaganda and to create superior product to soothe the
anxieties of French movie-goers. However, those who were less
cooperative had to get along with less. While Tourneur continued to
direct under the Occupation, he was forced to use the ends of reels of
raw film stock to shoot his pictures.
Maurice Tourneur is a character in
Bertrand Tavernier's 2002 film about
the French film industry under Vichy,
Safe Conduct (2002) ("Safe
Conduct"), the title of which refers both to the after-curfew pass
filmmakers were issued due to the odd shooting hours of the film
industry and also to the movie business' laissez-faire atmosphere
during the occupation, which included hiding and utilizing Jewish film
professionals who, of course, could not be credited. The film's story
deals with French screenwriter
Jean Aurenche, a rogue who did not want to
work for the Nazis, and Jean Devaivre, an
assistant director involved with the Resistance. Tavernier was inspired
to make his three-hour epic by the experiences of his father
René Tavernier, an editor and
screenwriter confronted with the same dilemma as Jean Aurenche,
characterized by his son as, "[W]hat can you write in a period of such
censorship under a regime you despise?"
Tavernier believes that Americans can understand the dilemma if they
equate French filmmakers during the Nazi occupation with American
filmmakers under McCarthyism. Of the question, "'[H]ow can you work for
a German company without compromising
yourself?' It's very simple. I
say to the American critic, just replace the German element with
Senator McCarthy [Red-baiting Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy]
and everything will be clear!"
The great paradox of the French film industry under the Occupation,
which thrived despite the wartime shortages and terror directed by the
Nazis towards the French population, is that French filmmakers working
for the German-financed and -controlled Continental, the most powerful
studio in France, maintained a good deal of independence. Unlike
newspapers and book publishing and radio broadcasting, which were
tightly controlled, the Germans allowed French filmmakers more latitude
in order to create entertaining movies to distract the French populace.
Thus, many French filmmakers were able to incorporate allegories and
parables alluding to the Occupation. According to Tavernier, of the
approximately 30 feature films made at Continental between 1940 and
1944, most have a kind of integrity that belies their ostensible ends
as Nazi and Pétainist propaganda. "That's the first act of resistance,"
he claims.
Aurenche and René Tavernier hated Vichy and the indigenous intellectual
collaborators with the regime, and Aurenche allegedly used coding in
his Continental screenplays to defy the Nazis (director
Martin Scorsese, citing the American
directors of the 1940s and 1950s, calls this process "smuggling,"
introducing themes on the sly beneath the ken of studio owners and
censors). Bernard Tavernier believes it was the directors, and not the
screenwriters, who should be blamed for the sins of the Vichy cinema
and the postwar, pre-Nouvelle vague bourgeois cinema, although that
statement seems to indicate some kind of counter-Oedipal complex. His
argument about McCarthyism smacks of a relevance that many Americans
might find dismaying, as the French screenwriters of Vichy he lionizes
were defying a foreign power, whereas many of the American
screenwriters initially persecuted by McCarthyism were secret members
of the Communist Party, accused of putting in coded messages for a
foreign power with which the United States was locked in a Cold War.
Actually, the real nexus of the two groups' experiences can be summed
up by the dilemma that Robert Sklar, in his
book "Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of the American Movies,"
posits as a struggle "over issues that had agitated American culture
ever since movies first appeared: Whom makes the product? Who runs the
show? Who decides what the show should say?" It was a battle Tourneur
joined in America, and then quit in 1926 when the machine-made movie
philistines won the war.
Maurice Tourneur and other cine-artists in America, wanting a more
artistic, expressionistic type of film that would offer something
beyond the simple lowest-common-denominator cultural dualities of good
and evil that the money-men insisted was all that the box office could
bear, had to resort to "smuggling" in their own themes, their own bits
of telling detail that would illuminate the psychological motivations
of characters and audience alike. Vichy France and McCarthyite America
were no different in kind (if not degree) in that the money-men, the
producers, had always constrained the creative people, who resulted to
subterfuges to make the films they wanted, whether in Paris or
Hollywood. Even
Sergei Eisenstein, the great
Soviet filmmaker, survived the terrors of
Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union only to have
his soul crushed again and again by a tyranny that makes the regimes of
the classic Hollywood mogul much lamented by the creative talent
laughable in comparison.
In Vichy France a filmmaker could be tortured or shot for not hewing to
the Nazi line; while it is true that many an uncooperative leftist
wound up in jail for defying the notorious House Un-American Activities
Committee, the damage for those who did not defy but did not cooperate
was mostly limited to the loss of high-paying jobs and the
psychological torment of being abandoned by friends and losing one's
career. However, the challenge to both Vichy screenwriter and Hollywood
screenwriter in what Lillian Hellman
called the "Scoundrel Time" was the same: If one could not compromise,
if one could not tailor one's beliefs to fit the fashion of the times,
one could not work. So, in this sense, there is a similarity as
suggested by Tavernier, but like many paradoxes of Anglo-French
relations, Tavernier's argument doesn't completely add up; it does,
however, help elucidate the tough spot and paradoxical milieu that
movie-makers like Maurice Tourneur found themselves in. The Devaivre
character, in Tavernier's film, has to take over directing a movie from
Tourneur when the director goes into shock upon hearing that his wife
has been taken prisoner by the Germans.
In 1942 Maurice Tourneur directed his first French horror film, a genre
in which his son Jacques thrived in the US during the war.
Carnival of Sinners (1943)
(released as "Carnival of Sinners" in the US and "The Devil's Hand" in
the UK) is an adaptation of
Gérard de Nerval's 1832 short story "La
main enchantée" ("The Enchanted Hand"). The film is about a failed
artist's pact with the Devil, a Faustian dilemma that would have
resonated with audiences in Occupied France. The artist, Roland, buys
the severed though-still-alive left hand of a man, a grisly talisman
owned by the Devil himself, from the restaurateur Mélisse, who informs
Roland that in the future, he can only sell off the charm at a loss.
Under the threat of eternal damnation, Roland seals his Faust-pact,
with the proviso from the Devil that Roland can return the charm--at a
price. The catch is, the longer he keeps the charm, the higher the
price is, as it doubles each day. Tourneur cast a frail and
harmless-looking actor as his Mephistopheles, a man who looks like a
small-town bailiff and effectively doubles as a Vichy civil servant.
Despite the unprepossessing look of the Devil, Tourneur created a sense
of fear by emphasizing the consequences of the Faust-pact rather than
the Devil's power. Tourneur had become a master of psychological
filmmaking.
Roland becomes a great success, but at the cost of his individual
identity as the charm makes him a different person. In a meeting with
previous "owners" of the hand, Roland discovers that he is the last in
a succession of men who took advantage of the charm, which links him to
a history that ostensibly is not his own, but in fact is. The hand
binds him to the first owner, a monk who refused to use his artistic
talents for the glory of god, and it is under the monk's name, Maximus
Léo, that Roland creates the art that ensures his fame and fortune,
with the caveat that the expression of the hand is not his own.
He is done in by the vanity and greed of his mistress, when she
purloins money from his safe to buy herself a luxury, money that he
intended to use to payoff the Devil. He no longer will be able to buy
his way out of the Faust-pact, and save his soul. At the end of the
story, he is the one who now owns the hand and must pay the debt for
all the previous owners who attempted to profit from it. Although he
resents his fate, he must bear the responsibility for his collaboration
with the Devil, and for the collaborations of the others who came
before him. (Vichy government propaganda held that the French people
brought on the Occupation themselves to make them accept it as their
just desserts.)
Despite the travails of Occupied France and the German-dominated
industry, Tourneur managed to create a classic psychological horror
film. If Martin Scorsese and Tavernier's
theme of smuggling is correct, then "La Main du diable" and other
horror films made during the Occupation used the genre to smuggle
unacceptable themes past the censors. French films made during the
Occupation never directly refer to the military and political
situation, but they do convey the anxiety and paranoia, indeed, the
horror and fear of losing one's soul via collaboration, felt by the
Occupied French.
In the July 3, 1915. "New York Clipper" interview, it was reported that
"M. Tourneur's ambition is to produce strong and appealing detective
stories. He believes they interest the greatest number of people."
Tourneur's movie-making career continued until 1949, when he lost a leg
in a car accident. His interests were painting in oils and watercolors
and reading. After his forced retirement from the cinema due to his
disability, he occupied himself by translating English-language
detective novels into French.
Maurice Tourneur died on August 4, 1961, in Paris, and was interred in
the City of Lights' Père Lachaise Cemetery. As a filmmaker, posterity
has praised Tourneur for the subtlety and lingering moods of his
movies, particularly those in the mystery and fantasy genres. He was
one of the few American directors to create a new aesthetic, which
exerted a strong influence on Josef von Sternberg. His use of
rectangular compositions in
Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915)
inspired Fritz Lang's
The Spiders - Episode 1: The Golden Sea (1919),
and may also have influenced the Japanese director
Yasujirô Ozu.
Hollywood director Clarence Brown, who graduated from the University of
Tennessee at age 19 with a double degree in engineering, credited
Tourneur with making him a filmmaker. Within a few months of being
hired, he was editing Tourneur's films, and by 1917 he was shooting
parts of Tourneur's films (uncredited) himself. He learned from his
mentor the power of lighting and composition, although he developed a
more sympathetic approach to directing actors than his teacher. Brown
told cinema historian Kevin Brownlow,
"Tourneur was my God. I owe him every thing I've got in the world. For
me, he was the greatest man who ever lived. If it hadn't been for him,
I'd still be fixing automobiles." Brownlow reported that Brown had
tears in his eyes when he made this confession.
The United States Library of Congress' National Film Registry,
established to help preserve American films deemed "culturally
significant," has two Tourneur films on its list,
The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917)
and
The Last of the Mohicans (1920).