L'oiseau bleu

Maurice Maeterlinck's wonderful play is transformed into a magical film by Maurice Tourneur, one of the masters of early cinema. Maeterlick's belief, that beauty is to be found in all things, is here given life in a film that works for adults and children.

The visuals are splendid, and the effects gorgeous (reminiscent of Melies in some scenes and German expressionism in others). And the two little children give excellent performances.

The Grapevine Video print is very good, but it does have some nitrate decomposition, which is very sad. I hope there is a pristine print of this masterpiece in an Archive somewhere - it deserves preservation.

It will remind you of the 1939 "Wizard of Oz", especially in costume and sentiment, but pre-dates it by over 20 years. An unmissable silent gem.

The Belgian author and symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck was a very popular literary figure of his day. His play "Pelléas et Mélisande", in fact, inspired at least four well-known musical works by Fauré, Schönberg, Sibelius and, most famously, the full-length opera of the same name by Claude Debussy.

The heavy symbolism of his plays including his "fairy" play, "L'Oiseau Bleu" (The Blue Bird.) from 1909 apparently intrigued the public in the first part of the 20th century. But when his works were placed on the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books, they, naturally, became even more popular!

There have been many film versions of "The Blue Bird", most notably, the unsuccessful 1940 version with Shirley Temple and the 1976 Russian-American disaster with Elizabeth Taylor. The present film is a 1918 silent film by the renowned French director (working in America at this time.) Maurice Tourneur.

The cast of this film is unfamiliar to present-day audiences. The little girl who played Mytyl was Tula Belle (Hollingshead); she was born in Norway (to an American father at least.) and died in California in 1992! The boy Robin MacDougall seems to have made only this one film and the rest of the cast are not likely to be alive in 2007 as they'd mostly have to be well over 100. So this is a fascinating look at long-gone film techniques and acting styles.

The DVD is based on an obviously deteriorated print but restored, as well as possible, at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Various scenes were tinted in accordance with the theories of what each scenes' mood was meant to be. The "special effects" were adequate for the period but obviously not up to modern computer-generated effects.

The characters are generally allegorical with actors portraying the personifications of Light, Night, Dog, Cat, Water, Milk, Bread etc. The lengthy scene with unborn children clearly mirrored the ideology of the time that one has a duty to have many children. A similar scene with the voices of unborn children in the Richard Strauss opera (1918 coincidentally.) "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" (The Woman Without a Shadow"), a similar ode to fecundity, shows the obvious influence of this play and probably mirrors the attitudes against Margaret Sanger and her birth-control followers. (But Sanger largely prevailed, at least in the U.S.)

Another obvious influence of this play is on the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz". In Judy's last speech, she realizes that if happiness can't be found at home "in your own backyard", it can't be found at all. There was also a popular but now rather campy song made popular by Jan Peerce in 1948, "Bluebird of Happiness". (He did an earlier version in 1935.) This DVD is an important reminder of these old attitudes and it certainly has its moments of beauty. On the whole, though, it is, in my opinion, rather of a "hoot". The acting is strictly of the period and everything else about it is quite dated.

As it is well-known among silent film connoisseurs, the fine Arts were an essential influence on silent films in general and Herr Maurice Tourneur's work in particular. His beautiful oeuvres gave him fame and prestige around the world from his French period in the mid 10's to his career in the USA.

"The Blue Bird" (1918) tells the story of two poor children, Mytyl and Tyltyl, who are led by the fairy Berylune in the search, around a fantastic world, for the blue bird of happiness. The film belongs to Herr Tourneur's American silent film period, and in this movie it is possible to watch all his artistic virtues in full display. This early astounding production is striking even today for its great artistic merits. The film was based on a book written by the Belgian poet Herr Maurice Maeterlinck and maybe Herr Tourneur during his young days could have illustrated it due to his earlier career as a book illustrator or… MEIN GOTT!!! Perhaps he even read it! In any case, Herr Tourneur adapted and transferred the fairy tale story to the silent screen in a superb way.

The film exudes classicism and even romanticism, artistic subjects that Herr Tourneur know very well how to employ in the world of fantasy. There is amazing art direction, elaborate decors and costumes and witty technical effects, not to mention the inventiveness that can be seen in every shot of the film and in the beautiful, exemplary photography of Herr John van den Broek and Lucien Andriot that captures the atmosphere of the classical fairy books through a cinema lens in a masterly way.

Probably the story can be considered as affected, even innocent in this modern time but even that has a special value in artistic terms for this film; that baroque taste and out of date atmosphere fit perfectly in the story that moves from the real to the dream world, from the real to the unreal. Herr Tourneur's interpretation of this fantastic universe is a prodigious work, imaginative and inventive and shining with brilliant artistic merits.

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must listen to the gracious caw of the Schloss crows.

Herr Graf Ferdinand Von Galitzien http://ferdinandvongalitzien.blogspot.com/

I found this 1918 version of "The Blue Bird" by accident. The film was based on the show by Maurice Maeterlinck, originally titled "L'Oiseau Bleu", and apparently had success on Broadway.

This silent movie was directed by Maurice Tourneur. The story springboards in the manner of Bunyan's pilgrim's progress as the "similitude of a dream." The shots, employing the rigid camera technique of the day, resemble illustrations in children's books from the era and remain quite beautiful over the course of various monochrome tintings.

So far so good, because this is a ...strange, strange story. The premise for the children's dream is that with help from the Blue Bird of Happiness we can see beyond the apparent nature of the perceived world of material objects and somehow grasp the spiritual essence of the merest of mere things. We will then stop coveting wealth, fame, and power, and discover contentment with the joys of (our existing) home and hearth.

Confined to a verbal description the premise seems more than a little banal, yet on film the concept allows Tourner-Maeterlinck to birth some of the oddest roles in movie history: e.g., check out Charles Craig as Sugar (yes, the real thing) and Sammy Blum as Bread (ditto). I don't know how "method" acting figures in all of this, but the result seems to be an attempted demonstration of Spinoza's view that apparently inert matter is somehow ensouled. Then again, encountering Bread and Sugar as just guys is less surprising after years watching all the animation of the inanimate in television commercials. For good measure the children's dream grants the household pets human speech and personality, revealing the pets' canine and feline characters as noble and sinister, respectively. That for me was about the only unoriginal thing in this one-of-a-kind viewing experience.

If only Maeterlinck could have tried out his idea in the Sixties, maybe with Timothy Leary as technical adviser... But I digress.

The two child leads, the characters named Mytyl and Tyltyl (easy to type on the script?), are effectively, if naively, portrayed. I also remember enjoying the choreographed sequence introducing the "fire" character. And the artistically accomplished use of silhouettes in place of live actors to present a party sequence deepens the credibility of a filmed dream.

The music-only soundtrack on the version I saw was marred by a flutter so bad I simply turned off the sound and missed nothing. Aside from a few brief rough patches in the images the print I saw was gorgeous. Based on the frequent use of tinting to signal mood changes I would even call this black and white movie colorful.

Theatrical adaptations of Baum's "Oz" books were running at about this time (a young Ray Bolger saw one, forming a resolution achieved years later as an adult), along with Barrie's "Peter Pan". In spite of its age you can see ingredients that would later appear in the 1939 production of "The Wizard of Oz". The Blue Bird tale was remade in the sound era in 1940 starring Shirley Temple. Intended to rival MGM's "Oz", it flopped. Another try occurred in 1976 as a U.S. - U.S.S.R. exercise in détente. Maybe Soviet censors saw the lively menagerie of physical things noted above as a creative application of the Marxian principle of "materialism".

There seem to be only a few directors of cinema's infancy whose films are worth much attention; Maurice Tourneur is one of them. His films may not always be the most entertaining, but most of them that I've seen contain something that interests. "Alias Jimmy Valentine", for example, has major story problems, but the heist scene is outstandingly filmed for 1915. Here, too, the allegorical messages (the bluebird is happiness and such) are too sappy at times, but then there's an inspired shot or something else innovative.

The dark, flickering transfer of a deteriorated, bleeding print surely takes away from much of the visual qualities of this picture, but some of the photography and the color tinting shines through. Tourneur had some preparation for the dreamland journey of this film with the dream climax in "The Poor Little Rich Girl" of the previous year. The wonder and imagination of a child are well affected. Despite its age, the film's best element is still apparent; I think that is its awareness. Perhaps, most obviously, this film is comparable to "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), but more so to the 1914 trilogy, which Baum produced. The animal costumes are especially reminiscent, as are the cheap, but nice-looking backdrops and sets. Showing even more awareness are the trick shots in the way of a Méliès fantasy and the final shot where the boy turns to the camera and directly addresses the audience concerning the film's parable. So, to an extent, Tourneur overcomes the wear of age and the kiddy bluntness of the allegory.