Course à la saucisse

In a recent release of three DVDs entitled "Gaumont Treasures", three different early French directors were given their own DVD compilation. On the one for Alice Guy (the first female director), this film is included and it says it was directed by Guy, not Louis Feuillade. I'm not sure if Kino or IMDb is correct about this one.

The film consists of some sort of poodle or poodle-mix stealing a long, long coil of sausages from the butcher shop (though it looks more like a rope). Suddenly, everyone in town is chasing the dog--almost like the people in "The Gingerbread Man" story from our youth. This makes the film unusual for an early Gaumont film, as the scenes change a lot during the course of the film. Not surprisingly for the era, the camera is totally stationary and inter-cutting is used extensively--not a roving camera lens.

It's all very slapstick and frantic. All in all, it's a bit overacted but quite fun--sort of like a French version of a Keystone comedy.

As a director and head of production at Gaumont, Alice Guy likely oversaw numerous chase films, one of the most popular genres of early cinema, of which this, "The Race for the Sausage," is one. Others that remain accessible today include "The Burglars" (1898), "A Story Well Spun" (1905), "An Obstacle Course," "The Game-Keeper's Son" (both 1906) and, to an extent, "The Drunken Mattress" (1906) and "The Rolling Bed" (1907). The significance of all of them to film history is in the development of continuity editing across shots and, thus, the invention of narrative cinema. "The Race for the Sausage" is the purest of the form I've seen of the films oft ascribed to Guy. A fluffy dog steals a chain of sausages, with a chaotic chase of people ensuing after the runaway pooch--taking the picture through 15 shots of exteriors and one of a flimsy interior. Additionally, there are two emblematic shots of man's best friend at the beginning and ending. Guy employed this technique to even better comedic effect throughout in the prior "Madame's Cravings" (1906). Nevertheless, "The Race for the Sausage" features an effective conglomeration of techniques of the day, including by abiding modern rules of character movements between frames, even if the emblematic shot, as distinct otherwise from the narrative linearity, has since been abandoned, for the most part, from the chase.

As highlighted in the documentary "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché" (2018), this Gaumont film was quickly plagiarized by Pathé as "The Policeman's Little Run" (La Course des sergents de ville) (1907).

A dog steals a string of sausages and runs away. He is pursued by half the town. The pursuers stumble over the other half of the town, but they are too busy plucking chickens or riding pigs to join the run.

That pretty much describes the chase comedy in Europe. Simple versions show up in 1904, and otherwise unadorned versions in 1914. The only variations are slight matters of geography -- there are no oceans for everyone to fall into here -- and what is being chased. Sometimes it's people, sometimes it's people on bicycles, and sometimes it's huge wheels of cheese that defy the laws of gravity and inertia. Here, at least, the dog's behavior makes sense, and if the other people behave like that fairy tale in which everyone is stuck to a stolen goose or anyone who is stuck to anyone holding the stolen goose..... Well, it's early days for a full reel of comedy chase.

It's not that the comedy chase died out. In the end, it became part of the grammar of movie comedy, something to end the movie on: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

There's some dispute whether Alice Guy or some one else directed this. While accuracy is always good, the vehemence surprises me.

It would seem from another review that the accreditation of this film has been changed from Feuillade to Guy on account of a Gaumont DVD. Gaumont's record on such ascriptions is extremely poor (Le Frotteur and La Glu, made several months after Guy has left Gaumont, have both at times been ascribed on DVD to Guy), so this is a very bad reason for making a change and in this case that change is almost certainly incorrect.

Alice Guy, in charge of production at Gaumont in 1906, was hugely overworked. By 1906 she had completed her masterpiece La Vie de Christ but her time was very largely taken up by the production of phonoscenes, sound films mainly based on operas and popular songs, which were for Gaumont a priority at this time. His engineers had developed a highly efficient sysem of semi-automated synchronisation and of amplification and Gaumont, believing - twenty years two early - that this was the future of film, intended to launch the "talkies" in a big way in 1907 in the hope (alas illusory) of breaking into the US market. During the year over a hundred such phonoscenes were made and, alhough Guy was not responsible for the sound recording, the playback performances, which required the actors to mime to the recordings, were tricky to make and must have been exceedingly time-consuming.

For the comic shorts, therefore, she relied increasingly heavily on her three new assistants, Louis Feuillade, who was the accredited scriptwriter, Étiene Arnaud and Roméo Bosetti. Although Guy was undoubtedly still in overall control, the content and style of the films increasingly represents the work of these three - particularly a strong emphasis on low comedy, on fashionable chase films (as in this film) and rather dubious toilet humour. There is no sign that Guy objected to any of this. She was no prude and seems rather to have enjoyed the laddish environment in which she now found herself.. She thought well of her assistants, especially Feuillade whom she would eventually designate as her successor when she left for the US.

The "rejuvenated" Guy fell in love with the younger Herbert Blaché in late 1906, the two were engaged on Christams Day and married on March 4th after which Guy immediately resigned her post in order to accompany Blaché who had been given the job of marketing the phonoscenes in the US.

The director of this film is not in fact known. The date can be inferred from the Gaumont catalogue which is chronological. It was made in about March 1907 (two films that immediately precede it in the cataogue are knwn to have been performed in London in April and one of them, Arnaud's La Ceinture Electrqieu, seems definitely to have been made after Guy's departure) and it is therefore most unlikely to have been made by Guy.

The probability then is that this film, written by Feuillade, would have been directed by one of the assistants - Feuillade himself, Arnaud or Bosetti. If my life depended on choosing one of them, I would say, on stylistic grounds, that it was probably directed by Bosetti.