We conclude our survey of European pre-WWI film comedy for the Slapstick Blog-a-Thon with a look at the comedy troupe, Les Pouics.

Les who? The Pouics are little known as a name now, but they were France’s version of the Keystone Cops – their predecessors, in fact, since the group was formed in 1910, two years before the Keystone company was created. They were formed by the director Jean Durand, who joined the Gaumont company in 1910 as its director of comedy films. He quickly established a troupe of comedy performers with the necessary talents to help feed the conveyer-belt system of one-reel film production, as audiences worldwide demanded their weekly dose of comedy. Les Pouics, or Les Pouites (‘bedbugs’), on occasion billed under this name, supplied a team of comedians with precise acrobatic and pantomimic skills, suitable for all occasions, and with more than a gift for chaos.

Onésime et le dromadaire (1914)

We know the names of several of Les Pouics. Most notable at the time was Ernest Bourbon, who starred in Gaumont comedies 1912-14 as Onésime, films whose penchant for arresting absurdity (camels in living rooms) endeared him to the Surrealists. A Pouic who would work with the Surrealists directly was Gaston Modot. Just another member of the comic team when he first worked for Durand in 1910, Modot appeared in many Onésime and Calino films, before enjoying a notable acting career over many years, working for Abel Gance, René Clair, Marcel Carné (Les Enfants du Paradis), Jean Renoir (La Règle du Jeu) and Luis Buñuel in L’Age D’Or. Other Pouics included Clément Migé, already well-known as Calino, Lucien Bataille, who played the comic character Zigoto (1911-1912), Jeanne-Marie Laurent and Paulos.

Les Pouics were recruited from circus and music hall backgrounds, and specialised in organised mayhem, a wholesale onslaught upon normality. Things existed only that they might be destroyed. Some indication of their working methods can be found in a rare interview with veterans of the troupe reproduced in Georges Sadoul’s Historie Général du Cinéma (1951):

Jean Durand: The set was built on a platform, three metres high, supported by complicated arrangement of beams. On top of that we would build a salon, with sofas, piano, furniture, the whole lot. At a whistle, the stagehands would release the beams. The whole lot would collapse into the room built underneath.

Gaston Modot: Under the floor there would be a ceiling. The fellows and the furniture would crash through it. It was rather like playing water polo. Everyone marked his man. You would say: ‘I’ll take the wardrobe and you the sideboard, and you the seat with the old lady on it’.

Durand: In the salon there would usually be a very proper gentleman who had his top hat on. He would always get the piano. Of course there would be a few newspapers in the hat as protection.

Modot: And those great three-tier scafolds, like we built in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. We’d say, you fall in the mortar, me in the lime and him in the bucket. A motorbike would come and hurl the scafold in the air. We would all fall wherever we had to. It was quite natural for professionals.

Ah, those were the days, when all an actor had to protect him from a falling piano was a top hat with some newspaper stuffed into it.

There was much about Les Pouics that makes one think of the comedy troupe of lasting fame, the Keystone Cops, who created chaos not quite so violent but with the same love of mishap and logical absurdity. But in the fate of the two troupes we see summed up the two histories of slapstick comedy in Europe and America. The European (specifically the French and Italian) comedy of the pre-World War One era, with its roots in the circus, music halls and café concert, delighted audiences around the world but always had an air of the Old World about it. It satirised modernity but was simultaneously at a remove from it. It employed trick effects, magic, and fantasy, a cinema of attractions. The American comic models that were to succeed them, as the war destroyed much of the European companies’ traditional business, were slicker, faster, technically far more accomplished, and imbued with an irresistible flavour of the New World.

So there is a lost world charm about the European comedies of Max, Cretinetti, Onésime, Calino, Kri Kri, Bout-de-Zan, Bébé, Rosalie, Robinet, Little Moritz and Rigadin. Much of the happy spirit, the undying charm of early cinema can be found in their spirited productions, churned out professionally week after week. So many now are lost, just as their reputations have faded, but there are more than enough surviving titles lurking in the archives that really deserve to be brought away from the sole attentions of the specialist and taken to a wider audience. We would all gain a better sense of early film history. And we’d laugh our socks off as well.

This mini-series owes much to the researches of others, especially Richard Abel, Aldo Bernardini, Ivo Blom, David Robinson, and the catalogues of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival.

The third part of The Bioscope’s contribution to the Slapstick Blog-a-Thon continues to look at the less familiar side of silent film comedy, that which flourished in Europe (especially France and Italy) before the First World War. Today we round up our survey of the star performers of the period by name-checking some of the other comedians of the period, as a reference source, and as encouragement for anyone to find out more – certainly to see them if you can.

Little Moritz aime Rosalie (1911), from Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town

Pacifico Aquilanti – Italian comedian who played Coco (1909-?) for the Cines company, as a response to the success of André Deed’s Cretinetti at Itala.

Lucien Bataille – Gaumont comedian, whose Zigoto character (1911-1912) spoofed the popular detective films of the period; then became Casimir for Eclair (1913-1914).

Paul Bertho – French comedian who created two comic personas for Lux: Patouillard (known as Bill in Britain and the USA), and Gavroche (1912-1914).

Roméo Bosetti – early example of a named comedy series performer, he played the character Roméo for Gaumont (1907-1908), for whom he went on to be a prolific comedy director, before being lured away by Pathé.

Ernest Bourbon – French comedian, adept at combining elegance with acrobatics, who starred in the popular Onésime series (1912-1914) for Gaumont, occasionally being partnered with Calino.

Sarah Duhamel – a former child performer of wide girth who enjoyed much success as Rosalie (1911-1912) for Pathé, in which she was often partnered with Little Moritz. She subsequently played as Pétronille for Eclair (1913-1914).

Marcel Fabre – Spanish clown who worked in France for Eclair and Pathé before moving to Italy with the Ambrosio company and creating the Robinet character (1911-1914), in which he was regularly partnered by Nilde Baracchi as Robinette. His character was known as Tweedledum in Britain and the USA.

Tommy Footit – son of a famous nineteenth-century clown, George Footit (English, but found fame in France), who starred as Tommy for Eclair in 1911.

Raymond Frau – French comedian who established the comic character Kri Kri for the Italian company Cines (known as Bloomer in Britain). In 1916 he returned to France and created the Dandy character for Eclair.

Lea Giunchi – Italian comedienne who played comic foil to Tontolini (played by her brother-in-law, Ferdinando Guillaume) and Kri Kri, but also starred in the Lea series (1911-1914) for Cines. Her son, Eraldo Guillaume, was a child comedian for Cines, Cinessino.

Ferdinando Guillaume – Italian comedian from a circus family who appeared as Tontolini (Jenkins in Britain and USA) for Cines 1909-1911, then as Polidor for Pasquali. Directed many of his films. In later life appeared in a number of Fellini films.

Ernst Lubitsch – one of the great directorial talents in cinema history, Lubitsch began his film career as an actor and made comedies in the character of Meyer (1913-1914)

Clément Migé – French comedian who starred in an early Gaumont comic series, as Calino (1909-1913), a series which demonstrated notable comic invention and delight in chaos. For a short period a rival Calino series was produced by Pathé.

Léonce Perret – a performer and then an important director for Gaumont, he made some sophisticated comic films using the character name Léonce (1912-1914). His comic foil partner was often Suzanne Grandais. He moved to the USA as a director in 1917, returning to France in 1921 to continue a successful career than lasted until his death in 1935.

Moritz Schwartz – diminutive German comedian who played Little Moritz for Pathé (1911-1912), a highly popular series in its time. He was partnered romantically with Sarah Duhamel’s Rosalie for a number of films.

Alma Taylor and Chrissie White – English stars of the Hepworth company’s series of Tilly films (1910-1915), playing gleefully anarchic teenagers (Unity More played Tilly in the first film in the series), as well as many other shorts (dramatic and comic) before both went on to continued success as adults in British feature films.

Ernesto Vaser – Italian performer promoted as the Ambrosio company’s answer to Cretinetti, under the name Fricot (1909-1912?).

And there were so many others, including some female comedians whose character role we know (Cunégonde, Léontine) but not the performers’ names, alas. Countries other than France and Italy produced similar comic series, but these two countries dominated the field – nationally and internationally – up to the First World War. A new kind of comedy was already emerging in America, and would dominate the field in the post-war era.

To find out more, the best place is Richard Abel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (2005), from where much of the information above was taken, especially the entry Comic Series written by David Robinson. Robinson also wrote two classic articles for Sight and Sound, ‘The Italian Comedy’ (Spring 1986) and ‘Rise and Fall of the Clowns’ (Summer 1987), which are wonderfully evocative. An excellent source of detailed information on the French comedians, focussing on extant prints, is Richard Abel’s The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914 (1994).

Online, there’s a good article by film historian Ivo Blom on the Italian comedians, ‘All the Same or Strategies of Difference. Early Italian Comedy in International Perspective’. And this section from the 2002 Pordenone Silent Film Festival catalogue, for a season of ‘Funny Women’, has information on Sarah Duhamel, Lea Giunchi, Alma Taylor, Chrissie White, and Suzanne Grandais.

Maybe a little more tomorrow…

Today, and for the next three days it is the Slapstick Blog-a-Thon, a bloggers’ festival of slapstick organised by Film of the Year. Numerous blogs are taking part, and Bioscopists are warmly encouraged to follow up the other blogs, add comments and so forth.

The Bioscope’s main contribution to the Blog-a-Thon is a survey of the great European comedians of the early cinema, whose names are sadly known only to the few these days, but whose fame once easily matched that of the Keystone stable and other American comics.

Here’s part one…

André Deed (1879-1935) was a French music hall comedian whose film career started with Georges Méliès in 1901, but took off when he joined Pathé Frères in 1906. He established a comic character, Boireau, appearing under that name in numerous shorts, and enjoyed a growing screen reputation throughout Europe. The success of the character inspired numerous imitators at other studios, and essentially created the star comedy genre. His film career blossomed further when he joined Itala in 1908 and established a new character, Cretinetti (known as Foolshead in Britain and Gribouille in France). Cretinetti was an engaging mixture of dim-wittedness and sharp-wittedness, readily stumbling into chaotic situations but triumphantly working his way out of them. He went back to Pathé in 1911 and resumed the character of Boireau. He made hundreds of comic shorts in his career, whose anarchic quality seems to ally them with Dada and Surrealism. He made some further Cretinetti films in Italy from 1915, before his career faded away in the 1920s.

Read this essay on early film, Cretinetti and the Modernists

There’s a new book on Deed, Jean A. Gili’s André Deed – Boireau, Cretinetti, Gribouille, Toribio, Foolshead, Lehman… (Le Mani-Cineteca di Bologna, 2005), in Italian

Max Linder (1883-1925) was arguably the greatest of all European silent film comedians, and in retrospect the most tragic. He was born Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle but took the stage name Max Linder, and began working in Pathé films, initially in minor roles, from 1905. Gradually he built up the character of Max, a sophisticated, elegant figure with top hat and cane, something akin to the flâneur of literary imagination, who could get caught up in foolery without ever losing his dignity. Max was a natural romantic, though his attempts to win the girl were frequently held up the booby-traps of everyday life. In contrast to the popular European comedians of the day, his style was more subtle, less pantomimic, and his comedy had a touch of grace about it that won his international admirers, none more so than Chaplin. His period of fame started around 1910 and he made hundreds of Max films up to 1914, becoming one of the most popular stars of the screen of that time. The war brought an end to his fame, and though he had a brief period in the USA at the Essanay studios in 1916, he was not a success, and his career gradually petered out. He made a few feature films (such as The Three-Must-Get-Theres in 1922), but he suffered badly from depression, and in 1925 he and his wife committed joint suicide.

There’s a DVD, Laugh with Max Linder, available from Image Entertainment

Find out more about Max Linder on Wikipedia

Fred Evans (1889-1951) was second only in popularity to Chaplin in Britain at the height of his career. He was the nephew of a well-known music hall comedian, Will Evans, and trod the boards himself before entering films in 1910 for Cricks and Martin, with the character Charley Smiler. The films were crudely-constructed affairs, but two years later Evans came up with the character of Pimple, a white-faced clown, perpetually accident-prone. Hundreds and hundreds of Pimple films were made, most of them routine knockabouts, but he also developed a taste of parodies, and in films like Pimple’s Battle of Waterloo (1913) he displays a proto-Pythonesque humour of the absurd while sending up the British epic film The Battle of Waterloo. In many of them he collaborated with his brother Joe. His comedy is sometimes held up by a weakness for punning intertitles, and few of his surviving films raise much a laugh nowadays, but at his best his comic inventiveness does indeed point the way to Python, The Young Ones, The Fast Show and a long British tradition of the gleefully absurd. He continued to make many films through the war years, and ended his film career as an extra in the 1930s.

Find out more about Pimple on Screenonline

There’s an excellent essay on Fred and Joe Evans by Michael Hammond in the book Pimple, Pranks & Pratfalls: British Film Comedy Before 1920 (2000)

Charles Prince (1872-1933) appeared in Pathé films as Rigadin, whose character was generally that of a bashful lover. He already enjoyed some fame as a theatre performer before joining Pathé in 1908, and he went on to appear in over 200 Rigadin films up to 1920, writing the senarios for many of them. In Britain and America he was known as Whiffles. Rigadin’s most interesting films were those that took on contemporay themes, such as Rigadin Peintre Cubiste (1912), where he mocked modern art by appearing as an angular figure, and Rigadin aux Balkans (1912) where he plays a war cameraman who gleefully fakes scenes for the camera in France rather than travel to the Balkan War. He ended his film career playing small roles throughout the 1920s and 30s.

More European comedians tomorrow… and don’t forget to read all the other Slapstick Blog-a-Thon posts.

(Acknowledgments to the Encyclopedia of Early Cinema for some facts and figures).