When Tourneur adapted the allegorical plays The Blue Bird (not in the programme) by Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck and Prunella by British playwrights Harley Granville Barker and Lawrence Housman in 1918, they had been successfully staged for many years, opening in Moscow and on Broadway and everywhere. Today, the saccharine charm of these anti-modern fairy tales doesn’t work any more. But undistracted by the meaning or action of the film, we can enjoy the surface of Prunella all the better, the dazzling sets and costumes, silhouettes and painted backdrops created by the great art director Ben Carré in a fashionable Art Déco Neo-Rococo style.
French-born Sosthène Carré (1883-1978) had worked for Opéra de Paris, Comédie française and Gaumont before moving to the USA. His art direction for fellow émigré directors Maurice Tourneur and Albert Capellani contributed an outstanding visual quality to their films. A retrospective of his works would bring together an astonishing combination and include Feuillade’s Le Festin de Balthasar (1910), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Jazz Singer (1927), A Night at the Opera (by the Marx Brothers) and Meet me in St. Louis. Il Cinema Ritrovato 2018 offers a small sampler of three works: Woman and Prunella (both 1918 by Maurice Tourneur) and Lights of Old Broadway (1925, Monta Bell, in the section Rediscovered and Restored), Meet me in St. Louis in the section Technicolor & Co.

Mariann Lewinsky