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.
© James Travers 2016
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Maurice Tourneur film:
Victory (1919)
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.