E-Mail This Article to a Friend Tints of romance Maurice Tourneur on DVD BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

"The most beautiful shots I ever saw on the screen were in Tourneur’s pictures. He had more on the ball photographically than any other director." So said director Clarence Brown, who got his start in the industry as the assistant of Maurice Tourneur. From 1914 to 1926, the French-born Tourneur was one of the most esteemed directors working in the United States. His reputation has since declined and now seems eclipsed by that of his son, Jacques, the director of Cat People (1942) and Out of the Past (1947). But Kino on Video’s DVD release of two of Tourneur père’s major films, The Blue Bird (1918) and Lorna Doone (1922), make possible a long-overdue reappraisal.

Tourneur made all kinds of films, but he had a predilection for romance, a genre that The Blue Bird brings to heady perfection. Based on a 1909 play by Belgian Symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck, the film portrays the dream voyage of two children in search of the bluebird of happiness. Accompanying them on their quest are anthropomorphized embodiments of fire, water, dog, cat, sugar, milk, bread, and light. These living Platonic forms, together with the prospect that finding the bluebird will mean exposing "the mysteries of Night" to human curiosity, raise the mystical and philosophical stakes of The Blue Bird higher than in The Wizard of Oz, with which its plot has obvious similarities.

Rather than play down the cloying and creepy aspects of Maeterlinck’s play (which reach a disturbing zenith in a sequence involving an army of white-veiled children waiting to be born), Tourneur boosts them with his æstheticism. He’s a director of light that pulses and streams, of shadow plays, of foreground silhouettes in archways, of the graceful interplay of human poses with landscape and architecture. He combines with his love of stylization an interest in special effects that anticipate Cocteau: clothes magnetically put themselves on a young boy’s body; women’s disembodied heads pop into a black frame.

More earthbound than The Blue Bird but just as fanciful, Lorna Doone, based on R.D. Blackmore’s 1869 novel, imagines a valley in the wilds of Devon where highwaymen form an underground society hidden from the civilization they prey on. They kidnap a nobleman’s young daughter, Lorna, who softens the heart of their leader while remaining chastely true to the low-born admirer who stumbles upon the bandits’ lair. Here too Tourneur proves a master of atmospheric effects, shooting through arches, canyons, bowers, and frames-within-a-frame of various shapes to create an unceasing flow of visual contrast.

A great service that home video and DVD provide for silent films is to make them available — in some cases for the first time in decades — with color tints. The original prints of many silent films were tinted, and color is crucial to the effect of both The Blue Bird and Lorna Doone. Clarence Brown said, "Tourneur was great on tinting and toning. We never made a picture unless every scene was colored. Night scenes were blue, day scenes amber, sunsets blue-tone pink or blue-tone green." The electric blue of The Blue Bird’s Palace of Night sequence offers a kind of thrill that’s almost disappeared from cinema.

Tourneur’s æsthetic convictions put him at odds with a Hollywood production system that was becoming ever more rationalized, ever more subject to the bottom line and in repeating what worked before. Having flourished during a period when film was a director’s medium, Tourneur saw the end of this period and predicted what would follow. "The distributor wants to catalogue my picture in his mind, and if I try to tell him that none of his labels will describe it but that it reflects human life, I talk in language he doesn’t understand," he said in 1920. And as early as 1924, he condemned the blockbuster syndrome that some historians of cinema seem to think started with Jaws. "The only way the financial backer of a motion picture can get his money back, to say nothing of a profit, is to appeal to the great masses. And the thing which satisfies millions cannot be good." Eight decades later, Tourneur’s critique is just as valid, and so are his films.