Maurice Tourneur

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Maurice Tourneur
Tourneur in 1916
Born
Maurice Félix Thomas

(1876-02-02)2 February 1876
Épinettes, Paris, France
Died4 August 1961(1961-08-04) (aged 85)
Paris, France
Resting placePère Lachaise Cemetery
Spouse(s)
Fernande Petit
​
​
(m. 1904, divorced)​

Louise Lagrange
ChildrenJacques Tourneur

Maurice Félix Thomas (French pronunciation: [mɔʁis feliks tɔmɑ]; 2 February 1876 – 4 August 1961), known as Maurice Tourneur (pronounced [tuʁnœʁ]), was a French film director and screenwriter.[1]

Life

Born Maurice Félix Thomas in the Épinettes district (17th arrondissement of Paris), his father was a wholesaler. As a young man, Maurice Thomas first trained as a graphic designer and a magazine illustrator but was soon drawn to the theater. In 1904, he married the actress Fernande Petit. They had a son, Jacques (1904–1977), who would follow his father into the film industry, establishing his own reputation as a director of American films in the 1940s and 1950s.[2]

Using the

Éclair company. A quick learner and an innovator, within a short time he was directing films on his own using major French stars of the day such as Polaire
.

The Velvet Paw (1916)

In 1914, with the expansion of the giant French film companies into the United States market, Tourneur moved to

The Cub (Martha Hedman's only screen performance) and Trilby, the last starring Clara Kimball Young and noted stage actor Wilton Lackaye as Svengali. Before long, Maurice Tourneur was a major and respected force in American film and a founding member of the East Coast chapter of the Motion Picture Directors Association. As the feature film evolved in the mid 1910s, he and his team (comprising screenwriter Charles Maigne, art director Ben Carré, and cameramen John van den Broek and Lucien Andriot
) coupled exceptional technological skill with unique pictorial and architectural sensibilities in their productions, giving their films a visual distinctiveness that met with critical acclaim.

“Making pictures is a commercial business, the same as making soap and, to be successful, one must make a commodity that will sell. We have a choice between making bad, silly, childish and useless pictures, which make a lot of money, and make everybody rich, or nice stories, which nobody wants to see...the American film producers will have to change entirely their machine-made stories and come to a closer and truer view of humanity...” - Maurice Tourneur in Shadowland, May 1920.[3]

Tourneur admired

D.W. Griffith and considered the skill level of American actors at the time ahead of their counterparts in Europe. Of the actresses he worked with, he called Mary Pickford the finest screen actress in the world and believed that stage actress Elsie Ferguson was a brilliant artist. However, Tourneur opposed the evolving star system that Carl Laemmle had begun with his advertising campaign for actress Florence Lawrence
.

Advertisement (1919)
In 1920, photographed by Fred Hartsook

After directing several innovative films for

naturalized citizen of the United States. By 1922 he believed that the future of the film industry lay in Hollywood and the following year he was hired by Samuel Goldwyn to go to the West Coast and make a film version of the Hall Caine novel The Christian. However, Tourneur's career in the United States faltered in the 1920s as his pictorialism sometimes hampered the narrative drive of his later films, and he also separated from his wife Fernande in 1923. He was removed from production on Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's version of Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island
in 1928, and this marked the end of his American career.

After his trouble with MGM, Tourneur decided to move back to his native France. There, he continued to make films both at home and in Germany, easily making the change to

talkies. In 1933 he met his second wife, actress Louise Lagrange (1898–1979), while shooting his film, L'Homme mystérieux
. Tourneur went on to direct another two dozen films, several of which were crime thrillers, until a 1949 automobile accident in which he was seriously injured and lost a leg. Health and age prevented him from directing more films, but a voracious reader and a skilled hobby artist, he kept busy painting and translating detective novels from English into French.

After his death in 1961, Maurice Tourneur was interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Maurice Tourneur was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6243 Hollywood Blvd.

His 1917 film,

National Archives of Canada have been cooperating on the restoration of Tourneur's 1915 film, The Cub.[4]

Partial filmography

Footnotes

  1. ISBN 9780786409570
  2. ISBN 9780801865619
  3. ^ Koszarski, 1976 p. 76, p. 79 composite quote.
  4. ^ [1] IMDb listing

References

  • Koszarski, Richard. 1976. Hollywood Directors: 1914-1940. Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 76-9262.

External links

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