Directing

Edmond T. Gréville

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Edmond T. Gréville (real name Edmond Gréville Thonger, 20 June 1906 Nice – 26 May 1966, Nice) was a French film director. The son of Franco-British parents, his father a Protestant pastor, Gréville began his career as a film journalist and critic. In parallel with a few acting performances in some silent films and in the first talkie of René Clair, Sous les toits de Paris (1930), he directed his first short films. His first experience of directing had been on the shooting of Abel Gance's Napoléon in 1927. He had then worked as an assistant director, notably on the English film Piccadilly, L'Arlésienne (directed by Jacques de Baroncelli), Augusto Genina's Prix de beauté ( with Louise Brooks) and Abel Gance's La Fin du Monde. Between 1930 and 1940 he directed several French films - Le Train des suicidés (1931), Remous (1934) with Françoise Rosay (a social-realist film on the sensitive sexual issue of impotence),  and two comedy musical films Princesse Tam Tam (1935) with Josephine Baker, and Gypsy Melody (1936), with Lupe Velez. In Britain again, he filmed Mademoiselle Docteur with Dita Parlo and John Loder, and Menaces (1938) with Mireille Balin and Erich von Stroheim, playing an Austrian refugee who commits suicide following the Anschluss. With a heavy atmosphere charged with eroticism which characterises his films, Gréville imposed his independence and original style on the cinema of the time.