Maurice Tourneur

Biography: life and films

Maurice Tourneur's real name was Maurice Félix Thomas. He was born on 2nd February 1876, in the Epinettes district of Paris, France. The son of a jewel merchant, he first found work as a graphic designer and magazine illustrator. After serving in the French artillery in North Africa, he became assistant to the sculptor Auguste Rodin and painter Amélie Puvis de Chavannes. In 1900, he decided to change tack and become an actor, following his siblings into the theatre. Adopting the stage name Maurice Tourneur, he first started out with a small theatre company in Paris before joining Gabrielle Réjane's company on a tour of South America. After this he became a member of André Antoine's illustrious theatre company in Paris. In 1904, he married Fernande Petit, who later that year bore him his son Jacques Tourneur, who later followed his father's profession as a film director.

By 1911, Maurice Tourneur had acted in over 400 stage productions, but by now he was more interested in the cinema. Giving up acting, he made the decision to become a film director, after working for a short time as an assistant to his friend Émile Chautard. He made his first films for the Société Française des Films in 1913 and was then taken on by Cinématographes Éclair. Because of his fluency in English, the latter company sent Tourneur to the United States to work at their Fort Lee studios in New Jersey. Not long afterwards, he moved to William A. Brady's World Film Corporation, where he directed some notable films: Alias Jimmy Valentine, The Cub and Trilby. By now, Maurice Tourneur was shaping up to be one of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers. One of the most important pioneers of early American cinema, he played as big a part in developing and defining the language of cinema as D.W. Griffith, whom he greatly admired.

In 1917, Tourneur moved to Adolph Zukor's Artcraft Pictures Corporation where he directed Mary Pickford in The Pride of the Clan (1917) and The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917). He worked with several other important actors of the day but was thoroughly opposed to the star system, as he regarded this as damaging to the integrity of cinema. Craving artistic independence, he founded his own film production company (Maurice Tourneur Productions) in 1918, and this gave him the freedom to experiment with new forms of cinematic expression, moving away from the naturalistic style of his previous films to a more expressionistic, dream-like aesthetic, exemplified by his silent masterpiece The Blue Bird (1918). Although his more stylised films won praise from the critics, they struggled to find an audience, so Tourneur soon returned to his more realistic style, finding box office success with such films as The Last of the Mohicans (1920).

By the early 1920s, it was apparent to Tourneur that Hollywood was destined to become the hub of the American film industry. Having directed The Christian (1923) for Samuel Goldwyn and wound up his own company in the mid-1920s, Tourneur settled in Los Angeles to work for the big studios, Universal and Paramount (amongst others). In 1923 he separated from his first wife. It was not long afterwards that Tourneur became disenchanted with Hollywood, the movie-making mass production factory that now offered limited scope for creativity and originality and was focused solely on making money. His American career ended after he was taken off MGM's production of The Mysterious Island in 1928 following disagreements with his producer Irving Thalbeg . His return to France coincided with the arrival of sound cinema.

The most significant impact that Maurice Tourneur had when he started making films back in France was in the crime-thriller genre. He directed several highly influential films of this kind, all showing the emergence of the distinctive film noir style that would come to define the genre on both sides of the Atlantic in the next decade. These include Accusée, levez-vous! (1930), Au nom de la loi (1932), Justin de Marseille (1934) and Obsession (1933). It was during the making of the latter film that the director met the actress Louise Lagrange, whom he married not long afterwards. Tourneur also lent his talents to comedies - Les Gaietés de l'escadron (1932), Lidoire (1933) - and period dramas - Les Deux Orphelines (1933), Koenigsmark (1935), Volpone (1941). At the time of the Nazi Occupation, he worked for the German run company Continental on a number of films, some with a pro-Vichy slant. These include: La Main du diable (1943) , Le Val d'enfer (1943) and Cécile est morte (1944). After the war, he concluded his filmmaking career with two atmospheric noir melodramas: Après l'amour (1948) and Impasse des Deux-Anges (1948).

In 1949, Maurice Tourneur was involved in a car accident that left him without the use of his legs. Wheelchair-bound, he devoted the rest of his life to writing crime novels, whilst his son Jacques made a successful career for himself as a director in America. Tourneur died in Paris on 4th August 1961, aged 85 and is now buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles bears testament to his importance as one of the great luminaries of cinema in its formative years.

Filmography

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