How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the 'New York Herald' Personal Columns

This short comedy is a pretty amusing version of the kind of idea that was pretty popular material for the one-reel features of the first decade of the 1900s. Besides this Edison feature, there was also a version by American Biograph and Mutoscope, titled "Personal", and a version by Lubin, titled "Meet Me At the Fountain". This Edison version, "How A French Nobleman …" seems to be the easiest to find, and it has been preserved in good condition.

The simple story has the Frenchman getting overwhelmed by a group of female suitors outside Grant's Tomb, leading to an entertaining chase scene, which could serve as a scaled-down version of the hilarious sequence in Keaton's "Seven Chances". Though this one is not as inventive as Keaton's sequence (what could be?), it still holds up well enough to provide some entertaining moments.

Much of the detail and backgrounds can still be seen clearly, and the photography is good for 1904. It's above average for its era and genre.

How a French Nobelman Got a Wife Through the "new York Harold' Personal Columns (1904)

*** (out of 4)

This Edison short might seem old-fashioned to today's eyes but at the time it was released it was a rather clever movie. What basically happens in a French man puts a personal add looking for a rich wife and when he shows up to Grant's Tomb not expecting much attention, he's soon shocked to see a dozen woman. He takes off running but the women begin to chase him down. This "comedy" doesn't feature any major laughs but you have to admire the film. In today's world you'd expect to see some comic timing and nice editing but this really wasn't around in 1904 so instead of any built up laughs we're instead treated to several long sequences where we see the man running and then the women following. The various places they run include across a bridge, down a cliff, through some water and various other locations. If the idea of a man running away from brides sounds familiar then that's because Buster Keaton would do this nearly two-decades later with his masterpiece SEVEN CHANCES. Director Porter at least shows a nice imagination at work as we get one good scene after another. It's seems obvious that most of the scenes were filmed in one shot so you have to wonder how many goofs are actually in the film as there are a few times when the woman fall flat on their faces while chasing.

This Edison Company chase comedy with an overly-long title is a plagiarized remake of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company's (AM&B) "Personal", which was made and released earlier the same year. In fact, AM&B unsuccessfully sued Edison over it. Such plagiarism was rampant in early cinema; every distributor did it. For foreign films especially, they generally didn't even bother remaking it, but, instead, simply duped the prints and sold them as their own. The most famous example of this is probably the American distribution of Georges Méliès's "Le voyage dans la lune" (A Trip to the Moon) (1902). American film innovators like Edwin S. Porter, the filmmaker of this remake, essentially learned film technique and were encouraged to produce more-complicated story films through the process of duping and remaking the then more-advanced films of Europeans like Méliès and G. A. Smith.

According to Charles Musser (using both his "Before the Nickelodeon" and "The Emergence of Cinema" as sources), the Edison remake probably sold better than the original "Personal". The remake undermined AM&B's distribution practice of initially exhibiting their films to licensed theatres on the vaudeville market while withholding the pictures up to several months before selling them to everyone else. This system allowed Edison's remake to go to the open market before AM&B's original. After the failed lawsuit, AM&B started selling their films soon after production. (By the way, the reason the lawsuit was ruled in favor of Edison was that AM&B had failed to copyright "Personal" as a dramatic work, in addition to their copyrighting the film as a photograph.) Back then, cinema was still a rather small industry and a new one for which laws were being created and adjusted. Some numbers will give an indication of the size of the movie industry. In the lawsuit, AM&B claimed damages of $3,000. This Edison film was the company's biggest hit of the year, for which they sold 71 prints in six months and 85 complete prints total in 1904-1905 (Musser).

Although it's near identical to "Personal", there are some differences between the two films, although I had to look closely at the two to see them (thanks to a handy dual purpose VCR and DVD player). AM&B's film consists of 10 shots, and Edison's consists of nine plus an expositional title card at the beginning. Additionally, "Personal" features nine women pursing the French nobleman (actually, I counted 10 during the scenes at Grant's Tomb, but one of them apparently gave up after that). Porter one-upped the original, with 11 women (although shot 5 appears to discontinuously include only 8 of them). Since both films show every character enter and exit the frame of each shot, the addition of two women is probably the main reason why the Edison remake is close to twice as long (675 feet compared to 371 feet).

Because early chase comedies generally repeated the same set-up of the chase in each shot-just changing the obstacle that the pursued and pursuers faced-in addition to showing every character enter and exit the frame in every shot, the scenes were mostly interchangeable, almost self-contained units. Thus, in the Edison film, the characters scale over a steep embankment in shot five; while in 'Personal', the characters perform a nearly identical act, but do so in shot eight. Other near identical scenes include the initial meetings and beginning of the chase at Grant's Tomb, the crossing of a bridge, and the climbing of a fence. For the remake, Porter dropped some of the less interesting shots and added an opening medium shot of the French Nobleman checking for his ad in the personal column while standing in front of a mirror (a double within a double), and he changed the ending. Originally, the nobleman was forced to marry at gunpoint after being caught behind some bushes, which was probably more comedic and certainly more violent. Porter changed this to one of the women being willing to walk through a body of water to catch her soon-to-be-husband: sweeter, if not as funny.

Next, Porter and Edison made a near-identical remake of AM&B's chase film "The Escaped Lunatic", re-titled "Maniac Chase".