1876-1961
Important French director Maurice Tourneur was born Maurice Félix Thomas on this day in the Épinettes region of Paris on this day. For someone who is so well known as a film director, particularly from the silent era, Tourneur came to the medium late in his career. Thomas actually trained as an artist as a young man, he had formal training as a graphic designer and first went to work as a magazine illustrator. It was not long after this that he became interested in acting; he began appearing on the stage in bit parts and worked his way up from there. It was at this time that he began using the name "Maurice Tourneur" and was credited as such in theatrical flyers. He actually toured in locations in South America with the French theatrical actress/troupe owner Gabrielle Réjane's company. He eventually graduated to directing theater. By the time Tourneur broke into the film business, he had been involved in over 400 theatrical productions. Tourneur was friendly with Émile Chautard, who started directing at Eclair in 1910; Tourneur became interested in the pursuit after hearing Chautard praise his own experiences. In fact, Tourneur's first film credit appears to be as an assistant director to Chautard on the film The Kind Old Man in 1912. He was an assistant to Chautard on two more films before moving on with his own solo directorial project at Eclair: The Guerrillas of Algiers; or, The Mosque in the Desert in late 1913. It turned out that Tourneur was not only a talented director of people (something he had obviously honed with his work in the field in theater), but also had a talent for the camera side of directing. A fast learner, he was soon innovating his own approaches to film-making. He also wrote scenarios for many of his own films. He stayed with Eclair in France through 1913; pleased with his work, they sent him to Fort Lee, New Jersey in the middle of 1914 to work on their expansion program in the United States. It was not long before American production facilities began to take notice of his work. William A. Brady managed to poach Tourneur and he soon had his films distributed by World Film. His first film for Brady's production company was Mother, released in September of 1914, Tourneur adapted a Jules Eckert Goodman play for the script himself. His next film, Man of the Hour, was his very first feature, again Tourneur adapted the script from a popular play; starring Robert Warwick, the film--clocking in at 50 minutes--garnered very good reviews. He next directed the 54 minute feature The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old England (November 1914); based on an Owen Davis play, the film had some tinted content (thought lost, a print was discovered in the UK and in 2012 it was selected for preservation for the National Film Registry). He quickly followed these two films on with The Pit (1914); while not the first version of Frank Norris' 1903 novel (Griffith's short A Corner in Wheat from 1909 has that distinction), Tourneur's version had the involvement of Brady, writer Channing Polloc and actor Wilton Lackaye, who had all been involved with very successfully bringing the novel to the Broadway stage in 1904. A case could be made that 1915 was Tourneur's banner year for his film making. He started out directing Alias Jimmy Valentine (February 1915) a crime film filled with scenes from the underworld and sporting tinting of the sort that would later be used in films like Nosferatu. He next directed directed stage star Martha Hedman in the comedy The Cub (July 1915); it would turn out to be her only film appearance. He added the mystery genre to his repertoire with The Ivory Snuff Box (September 1915); the film has a plot that involves French element to it, which is a nice twist, given Tourneur's nationality. His fourth film of the year was Trilby (September 1915) starring Clara Kimball Young as the titular character; he again casts Lackaye as Svengali, a role that Lackaye would be associated with for the rest of his life given the makeup job that was applied to him (scary stuff!). He ended the year with A Butterfly on the Wheel (November 1915), a domestic melodrama starring Vivian Martin and Holbrook Blinn. Not that his work after 1915 wasn't excellently directed and critically acclaimed, in fact his first two films in 1916: Pawn of Fate and The Hand of Peril were both very well received (unfortunately they are both thought lost). He also directed one of writer Gardner Hunting's screenplays (Hunting only wrote screenplays for a short period of his writing career) with the production of The Velvet Paw (September 1916). One curiosity from 1917 bears mentioning by me the Universal Monster fan that I am, his film The Undying Flame bears a HEAVY resemblance to Karl Freund's 1932 The Mummy with Karloff; it includes every aspect of the later film except the horror elements of the mummy creature itself. He thereafter went to work for Zukor and his production company, which had distribution through Paramount--meaning, for all intents and purposes, he was a Paramount director. His films were no less carefully crafted, but their reception was not quite as high as his Brady/World Film releases had been. Part of this undoubtedly had to do with his moving away from theatrical people turned film makers to working with people who had only worked in the world of motion pictures. A good example of this is his first film for Zukor's Artcraft, which was a co-production of Mary Pickford's company: The Pride of the Clan (1917), which, of course, starred Pickford. The film, set in Scotland and pairing Matt Moore with Pickford, is overtly contrived and really suffers from being a Pickford vehicle (Toruneur had been very taken with both Pickford as an actor and D. W. Griffith as a director--in my humble opinion, he was better than Griffith any day of the week). He stayed with Artcraft and Zukor through the first half of 1918, there after leaving to fulfill his dream of starting his own production company. His last film for Artcraft was A Doll's House, filmed partially on location in Maine; his first film with his own production outfit was the Sporting Life (September 1918). For the film, he found distribution through arms of Paramount domestically and through Pathé Frères in France, the plot can only be called a "boxing melodrama." Tourneur made just one more film in the older "haunts" of the east coast--Woman (filmed in Bar Harbor, Maine)--before heading west to the new established studios in Hollywood. His first west coast film was The White Heather (June 1919), filmed on locations in greater Los Angeles. Though several of his films made through his own production company survive, and are even widely available for viewing, I would say, without a doubt, the most well known of them was his 1920 version of The Last of the Mohicans with Wallace Beery. Tourneur was next hired by Goldwyn in late 1922, while he continued to work through his own production house for a time. His first film for Goldwyn was The Christian, released in January of 1923 and starring Richard Dix and Mae Busch. Released at almost the same time was one of his own efforts under his own production, the horror film While Paris Sleeps, starring the man of a thousand faces: Lon Chaney. In 1925, he remade the Sporting Life starring Bert Lytell and Marian Nixon under the "presentation" of Carl Laemmle through Goldwyn. The first film that he worked on that contained sound was the large partial silent production The Mysterious Island, but he was fired from the production (Benjamin Christensen of Häxan fame was also dismissed) and the film was finished by Lucien Hubbard. Tourneur made just one more film in the decade; The Ship of Lost Men was a German production released in Berlin in September of 1929; was a fully silent film that featured a then unknown Marlene Dietrich. Tourneur had actually become an American citizen in 1921, but with his dismissal from Goldwyn in the late 1920'sa, he left for his birth country of France and got into the film industry there and elsewhere on the continent, making a number of films in Germany and France in the 1930's. His first full sound direction was the French film Accused, Stand Up! in 1930. Of his nearly 100 direction credits, 23 of them came in or after 1930, meaning that the other 75 were silents. Tourneur was involved in a serious automobile accident in 1949 in which he lost a leg, otherwise, he most certainly would have continued to direct films. His last film was the crime thriller Dilemma of Two Angels, released in the fall of 1948. He spent the rest of his life translating English language novels into French; he was also an avid and fairly talented painter. He died where he was born, in Paris, on the 4th of August in 1961 at the age of 85. He is buried at Pére Lachaise cemetery in a family plot that includes both the original family surname and the Tourneur name. His son Jacques would become as good director as his father, and probably more famous--directing, among many others, a number of classic Val Lewton productions in the 1940's
[Source: Michel SCHREIBER (Find A Grave)] 
[Source: NatalieMaynor (Find A Grave)]
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