The Face Behind the Mask

Robert Florey 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 September 1921. As a director Florey's most productive decades were the 1930s and 1940s, working on relatively... low-budget programmers 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 finished 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".
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Wallace Archibald MacDonald was an Canadian silent film actor, and film producer. Macdonald started as a messenger boy with the Dominion Steel Company in Sydney, Nova Scotia. He later worked up to teller with the Royal Bank in Sydney before the bank transferred him to Vancouver, British Columbia.... From there, he moved to California where he acted on the stage before making inroads into Hollywood. MacDonald initially began as an actor in films in 1914 and starred in almost 120 motion pictures between then and 1932. He had notable roles in such films as Youth's Endearing Charm in 1916 working with Mary Miles Minter and Harry von Meter. Late in World War I he returned briefly to Nova Scotia to enlist in the 10th Canadian Siege Battery where he assisted in recruiting for the Canadian Army. With the advent of sound, MacDonald's acting career diminished, and most of roles between 1927 and 1932 went uncredited. He retired from acting in 1932 to concentrate on script writing. However, by 1937 he had recognized the potential of film production.
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