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Robert Florey

Robert Florey
Born (1900-09-14)September 14, 1900
Paris, France
Died May 16, 1979(1979-05-16) (aged 78)
Santa Monica, California, U.S.
Occupation
  • Director
  • screenwriter
  • journalist

Robert Florey (14 September 1900 – 16 May 1979) was a French-American director, screenwriter, film journalist, and occasional actor.

Born in Paris, and at first a film journalist, Florey moved to the United States in 1921. As a director, Florey's most productive decades were the 1930s and 1940s, working on relatively low-budget fillers for Paramount and Warner Brothers. His reputation is balanced between his avant-garde expressionist style, most evident in his early career, and his work as a fast, reliable studio-system director called on to finish troubled projects, such as 1939's Hotel Imperial.

He directed more than 50 movies. His most popular film is likely the first Marx Brothers feature The Cocoanuts of 1929, and his 1932 foray into Universal-style horror, Murders in the Rue Morgue is regarded by horror fans as highly reflective of German expressionism. In 2006, as his 1937 film Daughter of Shanghai was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, Florey was called "widely acclaimed as the best director working in major studio B-films".

Florey grew up in Paris near the studio of George Melies, and as a young man served as assistant to Louis Feuillade. In the 1920s he worked as a journalist, in Hollywood as assistant director to Josef von Sternberg, and shooting newsreel footage in New York, before making his feature directing debut in 1926.

In the late 1920s he produced two experimental (and very inexpensive) short films: The Life and Death of 9413--a Hollywood Extra (1928) co-directed with Slavko Vorkapich, and Skyscraper Symphony the following year.


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