Le matelas de la mariée

A plagiarization of Alice Guy's, of Gaumont, prior "The Drunken Mattress" (1906), this Pathé film, Le Matelas de la mariée, is considerably less innovative. Perhaps, the film was ripped off from the scenario instead of being based on seeing the finished film, for none of the crosscutting and other advanced examples of continuity editing, trick effects or gender-based humor of the original remain here. The comparatively basic continuity editing that is here results in only seven shots compared to the 16 in Gaumont's version. A man, instead of the female mattress-mender, carries the drunkard trapped in the mattress back to a couple's bedroom in this one, too.

In the bedroom is the only place where the Pathé imitation improves upon the former film. It replaces the older couple of Gaumont with newlyweds and the consummation that implies, as interrupted by the drunkard inside the mattress. The long shot of the bride undressing to her slip also makes for one of the more blue and erotic pictures from the era. Whereas the man in the mattress helped to symbolically unleash the mattress-mender's sexual desires, as Alison McMahan (author of "Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema") suggests, in Pathé's version, the man in the mattress serves to hinder such lust.

A tramp sees a mattress in front of a shop. He crawls into it for a nap, only to find himself sewn into it and carried about town in this slapstick comedy.

Having just looked at a couple of superior Lepine slapstick movies from the period, I find myself mildly disappointed by this one, but am forced to admit that it is simply standard for the era: a couple of random actions, a couple of long-anticipated gags with slow payoffs by my standards... nothing that any other comedy film of the period wasn't doing. At a time when a film was three or four minutes long, characters were often forced to do nothing for long periods of time, to stand around inside a mattress without protest. Yeah, it's a funny thing to do, but only if there's a reason. At least, that's how I think.

The question of "plagiarism" in the context of early film and modern critics and commentators are a little bit too free in their use of the term. The problem is we often know only the films. But films had many sources and antecedents (graphic strips, waxworks, vaudeville sketches, magic shows, lantern-slides) that extend back long before the films themselves. Because of their short length, early fiction films tended inevitably to be in the nature of "gags" or "tableaux" and such gags and tableaux were equally inevitably common property to be found in any of these earlier sources (and many oher, no doubt, that have not immediately occurred to me (popular songs, pantomime). The Lumière Le Jardinier (also known as L'Arroseur arrosé, used a gag to be found in umpteen nineteenth-century comic illustrations. Finding babies in cabbage-patches is a trope from popular folklore. The famous mirror gag associated with, in reverse order and with different permutations, the Marx Brothers, Max Linder, Charlie Chase and Alice Guy was a famous vaudeville act long before any film was made. Even in terms of film this particular mattress "gag" does not originate with Alice Guy. f Méliès' had made La Cardeuse de matelas earlier the same year and this Pathé version is one of several that followed - De Geheimzinnige Matras (date unknown) and Zijn Eerste Baas (1912). See womenfilmpioneersproject.for some comparisons. But it is very likely that the gag had existed in vaudeville and in magic shows long before......

In 1906 there is something else too that has to be taken into account when considering this question of supposed plagiarism where the two principal French production companies, Pathé and Gaumont, are concerned. The men responsible for thinking up these plots and writing the scenarios, André Heuzé and Louis Feuillade, weer good friends and had been so before they started to work, Heuzé for Pathé under Zecca, Nonguet and Lépine and Feuillade for Gaumont under Alice Guy. Feuillade and his Gaumont olleague étienne Arnaud and Heuzé were all young men' the were all also bullfight enthusiasts and belonged to the same Paris club devoted to that subject that Feulilade and Arnaud )both southerners from a bullfighting part of France) had founded. During this period (before Feuillade became head of production in place of Guy in 1907), the two men wrote virtually everything their respective houses produced. This was quite common at the period. The incredibly prolific Arrigo Frustra wrote virtually everyhthiing for the Italian company Ambrosio in just the same way. And they very obviously engaged in a sort of friendly competition to see who could come up with the best version. They chose, obviously deliberately, the same subjects (in some cases even the same titles - Madame a des Envies, Le Pendu, C'est Papa qui a pris le purge) and each produced their own version. Some series of films (the ones about strikes - La Grève des nourrices, La Grève des apaches etc) went backwards an forwards between Heuzé and Feuillade like a game of piing-pong. So the question of which company produced which film first does not actually have anything like the importance that commentators and critics sometimes imagine. It was more play than plagiarism!