Robert Florey

Robert Florey (14 September 1900, Paris - 16 May 1979, Santa Monica, California) 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".