Maurice Tourneur

Maurice Félix Thomas was born in Paris and came to film by way of the arts: he apprenticed as an illustrator and worked in the studios of the sculptor Rodin and the muralist Puvis de Chavannes before turning to the stage. That training in composition, light, and design never left him, and when he crossed to America in 1914 to make pictures he arrived with an eye no one in the young industry could match.

Tourneur was cinema's great pictorialist. He and his gifted cameraman John van den Broek and art director Ben Carré built films around silhouette, framing, and the expressive use of darkness — theatrical yet painterly compositions that treated the screen as a moving canvas. The Wishing Ring, The Blue Bird (1918), the delicate fantasy Prunella, and a handsome Last of the Mohicans (1920) showed a restraint and visual sophistication rare for the period. He believed in mood and suggestion over spectacle, and rival directors and cameramen studied his work to learn what the frame could do.

He was also, by temperament, an artist ill-suited to the factory the movies were becoming. In 1926, on location for MGM's The Mysterious Island, he walked off rather than submit to a supervising producer looking over his shoulder — a stand on creative independence that effectively ended his American career. He returned to France, where he worked steadily and well through the sound era for decades more. A 1949 car crash cost him a leg and ended his directing, and he died in Paris in 1961. His name faded in the country where he did his most influential work, but his sense of the beautiful passed directly to his son Jacques Tourneur, the poet of shadow behind Cat People and Out of the Past.