"Loving and killing: the two great adventures in life': Maurice Tourneur's 1919 screen version of Joseph Conrad's victory.

It is suitably ironic that Maurice Tourneur should direct the screen version of Joseph Conrad's Victory for Lasky-Famous Players in 1919. The year before, Tourneur had produced The Blue Bird based on Maurice Maeterlinck's stage play, a text Conrad ridiculed as the "Pink Goose" in 1911 (Letters 4, 427). One can imagine Conrad's exasperation that a man who rated the Belgian Symbolist's work so highly should be attracted to his 1915 novel. Regardless of the merits of Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird, Tourneur's film holds, according to silent film historian Kevin Brownlow, a contradictory position, being regarded as the single greatest silent movie ever made by some and totally unwatchable by others. (1) Such contradictions, or at least complications, can be seen to inform Tourneur's life and career: he was a theater actor and director involved in "over four hundred ... stage productions" (Pictures and Picturegoer, 13 September 1919, 322) who became a film director, who left France for America only to return again, a prolific director whose output straddles genres as diverse as crime, war, comedy, melodrama, social issues, and--as in Victory--literary adaptation.

Maurice Tourneur's success as a film director in France led his employer, Eclair studios, to send him across the Atlantic in August 1914 to supervise their subsidiary studio in America, where he worked until the unhappy experience of directing another adaptation Mysterious Island (after Jules Verne). He walked out of the MGM production in 1926 and returned to France for the rest of his days. A British profile of Tourneur, published shortly before the American release of Victory in 1919 describes him as a "great admirer of D. W. Griffith" (Pictures and Picturegoer, 13 September 1919, 322) but also as an artist who "deplores present-day taste in photoplay--wishes he did not have to study commercialism--loves his art--thinks nothing of money--Tourneur--fine gentleman and credit to screendom." The same piece also describes him as "appallingly outspoken--says 'Don't give the public all it asks for-educate it,'" which certainly makes Tourneur sound more like George Bernard Shaw than Conrad.

Most importantly, Tourneur made his cinematic reputation by, according to Harry Waldman, "demonstrating a creative eye for beautiful composition and lighting, the innovative use of off-screen space, highly dramatic editing, and visual solutions to difficulties of deep space" (Waldman, 2). His version of Victory provides fine examples of all of these. Some of the location shots are indeed beautifully composed, one British review wrote: "The scenery is beautiful, with many magnificent photographic effects" (Cinema News 56). For example, one might consider the seascape image of the ship, coast, and fisherman early in the film; the arrival of the gang of three on the beach; or the omnipresent volcano that Conrad describes as Heyst's "indolent" neighbor (Conrad, 19). The lighting of both exterior and interior is excellent throughout whether capturing the tropical heat on Heyst's veranda, the shadows cast over faces by blinds, the sinister firelight of Ricardo's reminiscence or Pedro's gruesome, silhouetted back-breaking murder. All capture the fantastic looming shadows described with such care by Conrad in the original novel. Off-screen space is handled exceptionally well; the viewer always has a sense of the island of Samburan and off-stage characters' proximity. This is excellent for its cinematic context and possibly "innovative," but, I would argue, owes a lot to Tourneur's theatrical background. With regards to deep space, we see Tourneur's meticulous care in his mise-en-scene, and his use of numerous lighting strategies and blocking decisions. One fine example …