With his flair for melodrama and the macabre, Robert Florey was an early movie-mad Frenchman who made films with near-inexhaustible appetite and made them well, even when he was treated as an employee by producer Hal Wallis at Warner Brothers and deliberately assigned to productions that he hadn’t heard of or prepared in any way. Yet this method, which humiliated and bewildered Florey, led to some of his best movies: the Balzacian Girl Missing (1933), which features perhaps the ultimate Glenda Farrell tough-girl performance, Ex-Lady (1933), where Bette Davis explores free love, and The House on 56th Street (1933), a key Kay Francis soap opera where she approached plot machinations with a Zen near-poker face.
An orphan, Florey grew up in Switzerland and worked eventually as an assistant for Georges Méliès and Louis Feuillade. At age 21 he went to Hollywood and did publicity for Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Rudolph Valentino, and he worked as an assistant at MGM before beginning to make his own experimental shorts. In 1929 he made three starry films: The Hole in the Wall with Edward G. Robinson and Claudette Colbert on Expressionist sets in a story of crooks and mediums, The Battle of Paris, which displayed the charm of stage star Gertrude Lawrence better than anything else she ever did on film, and The Cocoanuts, the first movie made by the Marx Brothers, where newspapers had to be wet so that they wouldn’t crackle for the early microphones.
At the very least, Florey had the habit of gravitating towards the starriest or most unique and distinctive company, and he himself was a historian who kept a whole room in his house dedicated to the study of Napoleon, but studios were almost never interested in hearing his own ideas for films. He lost Frankenstein (1931) to James Whale after doing work on the script, a loss that gnawed at him, and his own very sadistic Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) with Bela Lugosi only went some way to repairing that loss.
The Florey touch for the morbid came out best at Warners in The Florentine Dagger (1935), a stylish thriller, and whatever his personal feelings, Florey is one of those assignment directors who always approached any project he was given with zest and enthusiasm, plus an increasing liking for low angles and shots meant to convey seedy atmosphere. His stint at Paramount in the late 1930s did not produce as many worthwhile pictures as his contract work at Warners did, but several films featuring Anna May Wong and Akim Tamiroff have that near-delirious enthusiasm for American pulp that only French directors have to the maximum.
His two Peter Lorre pictures, The Face Behind the Mask (1941) and The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), show his mastery of space and his continued liking for the grotesque, and in Rogues’ Regiment (1948) as a writer he managed to slip in an anti-colonialist political viewpoint on the French in Vietnam, and this was the sort of thing he had rarely managed to do before.
Florey survived into the era of noir and took up television anthology shows with undiminished energy, and he was particularly proud of three episodes he made for Four Star Playhouse with Ronald Colman for their elevated style, plus a very suspenseful episode of Loretta Young’s anthology program called “Earthquake.” Florey also directed perhaps the best episode of Barbara Stanwyck’s anthology series, a nail-biter called “High Tension” that put some of her own greatest frailties to the test as she plays a rich woman who has been thinking of giving back a child she adopted because he is deaf.
Florey’s work could be very expressive. He loves his low angles at all points in his career, but he can switch to a high angle if it will serve some kind of emotional transition, as in a key scene with Peter Lorre in The Face Behind the Mask where his character says he wants to give up crime. But the career of someone like Robert Florey is the sort of career that points up the joyously endless creations of worlds during the classic Hollywood studio system. He himself had greater ambitions for his work as a young man, and he was very unhappy at Universal and particularly at Warners. Yet look at Girl Missing now and it feels lucid, controlled, bone-weary, and inevitable, especially in the moment where Glenda Farrell compares love to a case of indigestion. There is a scene towards the end of that movie where Farrell is seated in front of the shadow of bars behind her, a subtle visual touch, easy to miss, but something that says so much about the position of the predatory, past-everything woman she is playing.
Did Florey think of putting those bars there, or was it some other technician at Warners? After all, this is one of those movies that Hal Wallis assigned Florey to without even letting him see a script. Yet Florey gathered up at least ten or so first-rate pictures, many of-interest items, and he did some of his best and most unimpeded work for television. This is a more-more-more sort of film career that seems to cheerfully posit that watching and making movies never has to end.
PS: Here’s Anna May Wong in a typically atmospheric Florey movie called Daughter of Shanghai (1937), which first alerted me to his style:
Plus: Florey directed all 36 episodes of the first season of The Loretta Young Show, and here is the most memorable, “Earthquake” (1953). Be sure to stay for the outro, where Loretta reads us an enriching passage from the Bible, as was her wont.
Thanks, Dan. I wasn’t familiar with Florey’s work and will now seek his films out on various platforms.
Happy to hear that, Jan-