F Gwynplaine MacIntyre
In the very early days of film-making, when film distributors typically disrespected film producers' copyrights (especially those of foreign production companies), it often happened that one movie company would produce an unauthorised remake of another company's profitable film: they would copy the set, story, costumes and actors' gestures as closely as possible, passing off the counterfeit as the original.I wonder if that's what happened here. I have viewed a French film with credits which identify it as "L'Ingénieuse Soubrette" ('The Clever Maid'), copyright 1902. IMDb have no such listing, but they do list "La Soubrette Ingénieuse" for 1903. Normally I would brush off such minor discrepancies -- especially for a film made before 1910 -- and assume that these must be the same movie.But in this case I'm not so sure, because IMDb's synopsis (from the Edison catalogue) contains some details which contradict the film I've seen. In "L'Ingénieuse Soubrette", the male servant is clearly a footman rather than a butler, as evidenced by his livery. Also, the 'short-skirted' parlourmaid is in fact wearing a very elaborate skirt (with panniers!) which descends to her ankles. Apart from these major contradictions, the Edison catalogue (an American publication) is accurate ... which makes me wonder if the Edison Company are actually describing an unauthorised American remake of the original French film ... with the European footman changed into a butler, and the maid's skirt shortened, so as to be more palatable to American audiences.The gimmick here is basically the same one used several decades later in 'Royal Wedding' to enable Fred Astaire to dance on the ceiling ... only Astaire performed inside a revolving drum, so that the same set could be rightside up, upside down, or anywhere in between. In this early French film, we have two duplicate sets: one of them a fairly unconvincing trompe l'oeil of a striped wall with a (painted) three-legged table in front of it, the other being the same set rotated 90 degrees, so that the 'wall' is actually the floor, with a camera pointing straight down towards it. The transition from one set to the other is achieved with a jump cut, so that the acrobatic actress impersonating the parlourmaid is able to walk conventionally across a horizontal surface while seeming to walk vertically up a wall.From my modern viewpoint, the most surprising thing about this movie is that the maid actually thumbs her nose, cocking a snook at the audience. It was my understanding that, in the early twentieth century, this gesture was considered so vulgar as to border on the obscene. Perhaps I was mistaken. At any rate, the principal gimmick of this movie -- the maid's human-fly act -- is no longer as impressive as it was in 1902/3. But it was highly clever for its time, so I'll rate this movie 8 out of 10.
