The Blue Bird (1918)
Directed by Maurice Tourneur

Film Review

The name Maurice Tourneur may not mean a great deal today but at the highpoint of his career (between 1915 and 1925) Tourneur was one of the great pioneers of film - as important as D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille in laying the foundation stones of American cinema.  A Frenchman who first found his feet in the world of theatre, his filmmaking career took off when, on the eve of the First World War he started working for the American branch of the French film company Éclair, at their studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey (the then hub of the American film industry).  Tourneur's visual flair and aptitude for experimentation, combined with a sound commercial sense, led him to make a massive impact in a short time, but he was also headstrong and something of an individualist.  The growth of the Hollywood machine, with its manufactured stars and reliance on tried and tested formulas, appalled him and led him to curtail his career in America and return to his native France.

If Tourneur is at all remembered today, it is for the handful of stylish crime dramas he directed in France in the 1930s - most notably Au nom de la loi (1932) and Justin de Marseille (1935).  These grimly realistic films not only helped to establish the policier/gangster film as an important genre in French cinema, they also defined a style that we now know as film noir, recognisable by its boldly expressionistic use of lighting and camera angles.  This distinctive stylisation is apparent in some of Tourneur's earlier silent films, perhaps none more so than The Blue Bird, one of the strangest and most beautiful of the films he made in America.

The Blue Bird is based on the well-known play L'Oiseau bleu, which was written in 1908 by the Nobel Prize winning author Maurice Maeterlinck.  In subsequent film adaptations (notably the 1940 one directed by Walter Lang and starring Shirley Temple), Maeterlinck's play is reduced to the level of a simple children's fairytale, a kind of Disney-style Peter Pan meets The Wizard of Oz.  Tourneur's film, by contrast, retains the multi-layered symbolism of the original play and is a much more ambiguous and adult piece, a mature parable on where happiness is to be found in life.  More brothers Grimm than Frank Baum, Tourneur's The Blue Bird has a nightmarish quality about it that reflects the director's love of macabre fantasy, presaging one his last great films, La Main du diable (1943) and the films that his son Jacques would later direct: Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Night of the Demon (1957).

One obvious influence on the film was the early experimental fantasies of Tourneur's countryman Georges Méliès, whose penchant for cinematic wizardry had been instrumental in establishing cinema as a medium of mass entertainment at the dawn of the 20th century.  In The Blue Bird, Tourneur makes skilful use of several early effects techniques which Méliès had perfected - superimposition, stop motion photography, reverse photography and substitution splice (or 'stop trick').  One sequence, in which the furniture in a cottage starts moving about of its own accord looks like a direct homage to Méliès's Le Locataire diabolique (1909), but the film abounds with Méliès touches.  The illusion of household items such as bread, milk and sugar acquiring a human form are achieved by simple but effective superimposition.

In both its set design and lighting, the film strongly prefigures the distinctive style of cinematic German expressionism, which originated two years later with Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920).  In one inexplicably eerie shot,  the set consists of nothing more than a painted backdrop of a castle on a hill, represented in bold silhouette.  Earlier on in the film, there had been an entire sequence shot in silhouette - the one in which the child protagonists spy on their rich neighbours, who are glimpsed as two dimensional characters seemingly enjoying the advantages of wealth and privilege.  The stark unreality of the sequence serves to emphasise the gulf between the world in which the poor children live and the world of their neighbours which they clearly covet.

The film also includes one of the earliest examples of a gimmick known as 'the breaking of the fourth wall'.  At the end of their adventures, the children turn and speak directly into the camera to drive home the film's moral.  It's hardly subtle but this sudden break from film convention, just when you least expect it, has a startling impact.  It is only then that you fully appreciate what a daring and unique film The Blue Bird is - there is literally nothing like it in the decade in which it was made.

The Blue Bird was one of the last films that Maurice Tourneur made for Adolph Zukor's Artcraft Pictures, an independently run subsidiary of Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (later to become Paramount Pictures). Tourneur's relationship with his bosses at Famous Players-Lasky was already strained and it wasn't long after The Blue Bird failed to make any money that he went off to create his own production company, Maurice Tourneur Productions.  For a while, Tourneur enjoyed sufficient influence to attract big name actors and get his films widely distributed, but the spectacular rise of Hollywood in the early 1920s and subsequent consolidation of the American filmmaking industry soon made it impossible for him to go it alone.

It is ironic that the behemoth which Tourneur had helped to create would issue him with his passport to obscurity.  Hollywood ate him and it spat him out not long aferwards.  Yet Tourneur's invisible legacy persists to this day, most notably through film noir.  The Blue Bird is a film that scorns those who shun virtue in the pursuit of vain glory.  It is fitting it should have been made by someone who ended up by rejecting Hollywood and following a stonier path towards artistic truth.

Film Synopsis

Once upon a time, there were two children, Tyltyl and Mytyl, who lived with their mother and father in a modest but homely cottage.  One day, their poor neighbour, the old widow Berlingot, asks the children to lend her their caged bird to cheer her seriously ill daughter, but Mytyl refuses to part with the treasured pet. That very night, the two children are whisked away on the strangest of adventures.  It begins when an old woman resembling Berlingot enters the cottage and identifies herself as the fairy Berylune.  After transforming herself into a beautiful winged fairy, Berylune places on Tyltyl's head a cap that allows him and his sister to see the souls of everything around them, giving them a human form.  Fire, water, milk, bread, sugar, even their cat and dog - all come to life with distinct personalities.  This strange entourage agrees to accompany the children on their quest to find the Blue Bird of Happiness, knowing that they will cease to exist once the adventure is over.  Berylune first takes the children to the Palace of Night, where they must encounter the wicked Mother of Night and her monstrous apparitions...