George Fitzmaurice
George Fitzmaurice was a French-born film director and producer.
Career
Fitzmaurice's career first started as a set designer on stage. Beginning in 1914, and continuing until his death in 1940, he directed a total of over 80 films; several of these were successful, including The Son of the Sheik, Raffles, Mata Hari, and Suzy.At the beginning of his directorial career, Fitzmaurice was astute at directing stage actresses in their initial films with the first wave of great Broadway stars that migrated to motion pictures during the World War I era, including Mae Murray, Elsie Ferguson, Fannie Ward, Helene Chadwick, Irene Fenwick, Gail Kane, and Edna Goodrich. Fitzmaurice's long-time cinematographer, Arthur Miller observed: “Fitzmaurice's specialty was in designing a film beautifully, and in handling women stars with great flair. He could do a beautiful love story very well. He had the ability to get the best out of women, to get along with them.”
The Son of the Sheik is his most famous extant silent film, no doubt aided by the sudden death of its star, Rudolph Valentino. Lilac Time is a classic war/romance film. Fitzmaurice, however, directed scores of silent films of which the majority of them are lost to the ravages of decomposition. Recent discoveries in Gosfilmofond in Russia include 1919's Witness for the Defense with Elsie Ferguson and 1922's Kick In with Bert Lytell. A restoration of his 1928 part-talkie hybrid The Barker is winning praise from many film buffs. Rumors of other Fitzmaurice films in Gosfilmofond include 1920s Idols of Clay and Three Live Ghosts with Norman Kerry, Anna Q. Nilsson, Cyril Chadwick, and Edmund Goulding.
George Fitzmaurice advocated for ranking “serious film productions” among the Beaux Arts, and appraising them critically as such.
Fitzmaurice was meticulous in his preparations prior to shooting and “knew beforehand everything he wanted to see on screen.” Like his filmmaking contemporaries F. W. Murnau and John Ford “he never looked through the camera” to frame his compositions, but nonetheless achieved a widely acknowledged “visual grace” in his pictures.
In his 1916 essay entitled “The Art of Directing,” Fitzmaurice emphasized the importance of engaging in a psychological analysis of the film characters to discover their motivations. He wrote: