Maniac Chase

Maniac Chase (1904)

** (out of 4)

Edwin S. Porter directs this "chase" picture from Edison, which starts out with a man dressed as Napoleon breaking out of his cell and taking his "guards" on a chase through the woods. As many others have pointed out, seeing how the mentally ill were treated here is probably going to shock quite a few even though this is obviously just a movie. It's presented as a comedy but I'm not sure how many people will be laughing when the guards pretty much beat the guy to a pulp before he heads off. Once the actual chase starts things really don't improve that much. There's never really any excitement going on and I'd argue that there's not anything fun anywhere in the film. On a technical level I thought there were a few good things including the start of the chase when the camera swings around to capture that action as it goes across a small stream. This type of thing wasn't seen too often during these days but it was a nice shot. Outside of this the film is fairly forgettable.

Made by Edwin Porter for the Edison Company this chase film doesn't really have much of a plot to speak of. A stereotypical lunatic - dressed as Napoleon to let the audience know he is completely bonkers - escapes from his cell after receiving a beating from three of his warders. The film, once the prisoner has escaped, consists of a number of scenes which, for the most part, show him being chased through woodland by the warders. The first chase scene is quite good. The positioning of the camera has been chosen with care so that it can show Napoleon chased along a path before running down a river bank to the left of the screen. The camera pans left, following the pursuit over a log bridge across the river and then up the other side and off into the distance. After this scene, it all grows increasingly dull so that the 10 minute running time starts to become something of an ordeal.

The Edison Company's "Maniac Chase" is a nearly identical remake of the American Mutoscope & Biograph (AM&B) film "The Escaped Lunatic". "The Escaped Lunatic", although apparently not released until early in 1904, was produced late in 1903-around the same time that the Edison Company and Edwin S. Porter were making the seminal story film "The Great Train Robbery". Film Historian Charles Musser ("The Emergence of Cinema") credited the films comparable importance as breakthroughs in the development of narrative cinema. In addition to close production dates, the two films were both influenced by recent crime chase films from Britain, such as "A Daring Daylight Robbery" and "A Desperate Poaching Affray". It seems that "The Great Train Robbery" more closely followed the patterns of those films, whereas "The Escaped Lunatic" deviated to the comedic chase. It proved to be a highly successful turn, as chase comedies soon became a staple genre of early cinema, including during the Nickelodeon era.

As Musser has explained, AM&B's distribution scheme at the time was to release its films initially only to licensed venues, withholding sales from the open market for months. The Edison Company forced an end to that system with their near-identical remakes of two popular AM&B chase comedies, the aforementioned "The Escaped Lunatic" and "Personal". Edison and Porter plagiarized "Personal" first, renaming it "How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the New York Herald Personal Columns", for which AM&B sued Edison. AM&B lost the case, though, based on having not copyrighted their film scenario as a dramatic work. The court's ruling allowed Edison and Porter to make another derivative picture, this one, "Maniac Chase".

I've had the opportunity to compare "Personal" and Edison's remake of it, but, unfortunately, "The Escaped Lunatic" appears to only be available at the US Library of Congress. The Library, however, has made "Maniac Chase" available on the web. Edison's remake of "Personal", although very much derivative, did feature some alterations and differences-mostly for the better. For instance, Porter added an expositional title card and an opening medium shot and changed the ending slightly. From viewing "Maniac Chase" and reading Musser's description of "The Escaped Lunatic", however, this remake doesn't appear to contain any significant changes from the original. Unlike the remake of "Personal", which was nearly twice as long as the original, "Maniac Chase" is only around a hundred feet in film shorter than "The Escaped Lunatic". Musser says "The Escaped Lunatic" contains 10 shots, so that means "Maniac Chase" has two additional scenes somewhere. Musser describes the reverse-motion photography and splices for the leaping in one scene and the match-on-action cut and dummy substitution for a guard being thrown off a bridge as being in the original film. In both, the pursued is an insane-asylum patient who dresses like Napoleon and seems to enjoy being pursued by the guards; in fact, the guards only keep up with him because he always does something to keep it close. I didn't see Musser mention such extensive panning as seen in "Maniac Chase", but that doesn't mean it's not featured in both. Although it's derivative and essentially plagiarism, "Maniac Chase" remains an amusing early film; additionally, since I haven't seen the original, it gives me a better picture of what the original is like: the aforementioned innovative match-on-action cut, the use of the chase for wacky humor and the continuity of the action across multiple shots.