He was born in Northampton, England, the son of William Tanner, Member of Parliament for the Heathcote and Avon electorates in Christchurch, and Emily E. Browett.
The next day, Tanner refused to approve the film until changes were made to two intertitles, one that referred to Te Kooti "resorting to faked miracles", the other referring to Te Kooti’s lieutenant Peka McLean as "torture master" and "stage manager of miracles".
[1] The subsequent "storm of publicity" surrounding the film ensured it played to full houses when it premiered a few days later at the Strand Theatre in Auckland on 17 November 1927.
Because New Zealand legislation provided that no film could be approved which "in the opinion of the censor, depicts any matter that is against public order and decency, or the exhibition of which for any other reason is, in the opinion of the censor, undesirable in the public interest", Tanner had broad discretion to consider matters that, in his view, were uniquely relevant to Samoa.
He wrote in 1929 however, that film censoring in Samoa "should certainly be done at Apia" by those sensitive to local colonial conditions: "One of the principal concerns in Samoa is to see that the white man is not brought into contempt by the exhibition of films which would tend to lessen the respect of the natives for the white man, which is so essential.
[3] Tanner's most controversial decision from the sound era remains his banning of All Quiet on the Western Front on 18 June 1930 for "being out of keeping with the unwarlike atmosphere" of the period.