Le cheval emballé

A deliveryman leaves his horse and cart out in the street while he goes inside to make a delivery. However the horse is hungry and eats his way through an entire bag of oats that was left outside the building for sale. What damage can that do wonders the man and it is not long before he finds the answer to his own question! A simple comedy perhaps but a typical example of the Pathé silent short films doing what they did best – pushing the average higher. In this regard they yet again produce a narrative that spreads over several scenes and several sets. At their best, the company expanded narratives over longer than average films but in this case it is for an extended comedy sketch. The slapstick is not that funny and doesn't have enough imagination and wit to it for my money so if it hadn't been for the historical interest I probably wouldn't have bothered.

Not that great a short then and, in regards seeing Pathé's role in the development of early cinema and techniques, there are better shorts out there.

A laundryman picks up a load of dirty linen and brings it down to his dray. However, his horse is in a rush and the driver is thrown from the cart. The horse runs wild through the streets, spreading havoc and picking up a crowd of angry, pursuing citizens.

Louis Gasnier may be remembered for directing REEFER MADNESS thirty years later, but at this stage in his career, he was an assured young professional. There are some excellent examples of cross-cutting (early on, while the dray-man is pausing for a glass of wine and a piece of cake, the scene cuts to the horse waiting impatiently outside), and some nicely delayed gags (an open-air market with people going about their business is suddenly torn asunder by the racing horse).

In fact, some of the details seem to have been directly lifted by Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith for their early slapstick success, THE CURTAIN POLE two years later, including a shot of the horse running backwards. Slapstick chases were not new. They had been around almost since the beginning of the movies, lifted from the stage, but here was a fine model for the movies. Sennett and his imitators would spend many years elaborating on it.

Another example of the early French chase genre, this film suffers from its familiarity to all the other chase films made around this time, but is OK when judged as a stand-alone film.

The film starts quite slowly with a delivery man parking his horse outside a house, As we see the delivery man climbing every flight of steps in the house, sharing drinks with one of his customers, having a natter with the cleaning lady, etc, the horse is tucking into a sack of oats which seem to have been contaminated with some kind of performance-enhancing drug. No sooner has the delivery man pulled Dobbin away from his fix than the horse is tearing along the streets, running into things and knocking them over. Before long, he has a trail of injured parties giving chase.

The film's not bad, and at least tries to set itself apart by incorporating some trick shots into the mix - at one point we see the horse running backwards along the street with his pursuers giving chase.

The slapstick gets a little over-the-top at times, but this is an amusing little feature, and parts of it were carefully constructed, too. There isn't much of a story, and what there is serves only as a setup for the slapstick. The horse gets all the best moments, and his antics are the source of the best gags. But a couple of the gags were rather involved, and probably had to be set up with a lot of care so that the horse and props worked the right way. There are also a couple of trick shots that work all right. Once this gets going, it's rather amusing and worth watching.

This Pathé Frères film is historically important because it's one of the earliest "chase films"--a type of film that was very important to early slapstick. Unfortunately, it's also a pretty dull film despite being so novel. A horse pulling a wagon eats a whole bunch of food that isn't his and then is chased around the streets by a whole bunch of folks. Oddly, despite being a horse, the people chasing him always seem to be just a few feet behind--something the film crew didn't think about when they made the film. There's a lot of frenetic energy, but not a whole lot to laugh at during the course of the film. I am usually VERY, VERY generous to early films and my expectations are a bit lower due to the newness of the field, but this one just isn't much fun.