Background
Robert Florey was born on 14 September 1900 in Paris, Ile-de-France, France.
Actor director journalist screenwriter
Robert Florey was born on 14 September 1900 in Paris, Ile-de-France, France.
As an adolescent, he acted in Swiss movies—he was schooled privately near Geneva. He went to France and acted in and assisted Feuillade on L’Orpheline (21). Then he went to Hollywood, as a journalist and as publicity man for Douglas Fairbanks. He toured with Valentino handling publicity, from which he retreated to the probably less demanding task of making films. MGM hired him for second-unit and tests work and he assisted King Vidor and John Stahl. Eventually he attained actual credits as assistant director: The Masked Bride (25, Christy Cabanne); Parisian Nights (25, Alfred Santell); The Exquisite Sinner (26, Phil Rosen, after von Sternberg had been fired); The Magic Flame (27, Henry King); and Seventh Heaven (27, Frank Borzage).
He rose to full director and in 1928 made several aggressively “experimental” shorts—especially The Life and Death of 9413—and was in charge of Paramount’s sound studios at Long Island. Perhaps to remove such temptations, Paramount put him to direct. He began more auspiciously than his later credits might suggest: Gertrude Lawrence and Charles Ruggles in The Battle of Paris; Claudette Colbert and Edward G. Robinson in The Hole in the Wall; the Marx Brothers in Cocoanuts.
In 1930 Florey went to Britain to direct French films and collaborated on the script of Frankenstein (31, James Whale). Universal liked that enough to give Florey Bela Lugosi in Murders in the Rue Morgue, a stylish horror film. From 1933-35, Florey worked for Warners and First National and made enough bad films to dash his quirky reputation: notably Bette Darts in Ex-Lady and Stanwyck in Woman in Red. Then he went back to Paramount and made B pictures there until 1940. He proved the director for Akim Tamiroff and directed the little Russian in King of Gamblers, Dangerous to Know, and The Magnificent Fraud. After that, he free-lanced, edging farther out into smaller companies and more lurid rubbish. Even so, he dealt blithely with the tender madness of Peter Lorre in The Face Behind the Mask and The Beast with Five Fingers. In 1947, he assisted Chaplin on Monsieur Verdoux and then, after a jolly Foreign Legion backlot picture, Outpost in Morocco, again with Tamiroff, he retired from movies and worked for TV.
Florey is an idiosyncrat seen fleetingly at the ends of film-world corridors. He is usually presented as a charming dilettante, rather overwhelmed by the few large projects that came his way, but flourishing as an intellectual fed on crazy B pictures. If nothing else, he is an early instance of full- blooded French enthusiasm for American movies; so much so that it is strange that his twilight work at Warners and Paramount should not have been more fully endorsed. In truth, his films are fragments, skillfully arranged to imply disappointed greatness. The films themselves offer little to suggest that Florey had any real idea about how to stick the fragments together. Disarray is the style that expresses him best, despite his various publications on cinema.
He sounds like the sort of man who gathered in experiences with future interviewers in prospect. As a child, he met and observed Melies at work.