Hello, my name's Justin Kluwer. I'm here today with Will Sloan. And you're listening to

the Important Cinema Club. And today, we're talking about a hugely prolific director in the

early days of cinema that nobody knows about. Yeah, Robert Florey is his name. And when you go on

letterbox to his director's profile, his most popular movie is The Coconuts, which is one of the

less popular Marks Brothers movies. Yes. So this is who we're dealing with. And The Coconuts was the

first appearance of the Marks Brothers in a talky picture, right? Right. And when you talk about how early sound films are really static and move very

slowly and are technically primitive, you're talking about the coconuts. Yes. However, I became

interested in Robert Florey when I watched Murders in the Rue Morg from 1932 at Bella Lagosie

Universal Horror Film. It's very visually striking,

very transgressive for its time. And then I looked up the

director and saw he had also made a very well-known

avant-garde short film called The Life and Death of

9-4-13, a Hollywood Extra. And he'd made the

coconuts, and he'd made all these pre-code movies. And wait a minute, he's also an assistant

director to Charlie Chaplin and Eric von Stroheim. You must have told me about him, did you? Or did I

come to him independently some other way? Because I learned that he was a cinephile and that he had

written books about cinema while he was in early Hollywood.

And even when he retired afterward, he continued to write like biographies of Chaplin.

And speaking of Chaplin, he also was the, what was his credit on Monsieur Verdeau?

He was associate director of Monsieur Verdue.

But we are mentioning all these credits and there's no big solid gold classic that people associate him with.

There almost was, because he was going to direct Frankenstein with Bella Legosi as the monster.

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