A Sticky Woman

Two film versions of this gag were made at this time. This at Gaumont and Lèvres collées at Pathé with Max Linder playing the "kisser". The date of the Pathé film is roughly known (late 1906 or January 1907) but not that of the Gaumont film (the September 1906 date is just a guess by Guy's biographer who believes it preceded the Pathé film. It has very much the air of being based on a vaudeville gag; there is none of the characterisation that was increasingly being used in other film comedies (including Linder's other films of this time).

Since the Gaumont version involves an assault on the woman by a predatory male it is more likely to be closer to a vaudeville version and was probably written, like Le Matelas épileptique of the same year, by Romeo Bosetti who reuses what looks like the same gag in 1913 for Éclair (Casimir et la femme collante). The Linder version suggests a prior romantic connection between the couple kissing (with Lider as he maid's beau)..

There was a strong bonding at this time between the young (male) writers at Gaumont and Pathé. Feuillade and Arnaud, who wrote for and assisted Guy at Gaumont) and André Heuzé who was the lead comic scenarist at Pathé knew each other well because they were all, oddly enough, bullfight fans. Bosetii seems to have been part of e gang and they clearly had a friendly rivalry going with respect to the films they produced - particularly chase films and "toilet" humour. Guy seems to have given the boys plenty of leeway while she herself concentrated mainly on her Passion (in 1905) and on the phonoscenes (more than a hundred of them) which were her boss's principal interest at the time. But the atmosphere must have been a bit laddish and one wonders quite how comfortable Guy felt with it. Her other magnum opus would have been the film version of Mistral's Mireille if it had ever been completed but unfortunately she went gooey about an unscrupulous younger man, Herbert Blaché and allowed him to ruin the film. Blaché was a big mistake from a personal point of view but I suspect she was glad from the professional point of view of the excuse it provided to get away from the taureaux and toilets brigade go off to the US. Feuillade, who she designated as her successor, became something of a reformed character after she left.

Made around the same time as Alice Guy's, of Gaumont, "Madame's Cravings" (1906), "A Sticky Woman" is another early sex comedy of sorts, from the world's first female director. In the single shot-scene, a woman employs her maid to lick stamps. A male passerby begins to watch this display and becomes increasingly aroused. He, then, forces a smooch upon her and gets stuck to her sticky tongue and mouth. A fourth-wall-breaking employee, announcing his proceeding action by gesticulation, must cut them apart with scissors, with the punchline being that the maid now sports part of the man's mustache. Thus, not only do we have the comedy being made out of sexual desire that was becoming more prevalent in Guy's oeuvre, but there's also an element of drag, or transvestism, which was already fairly common in the films of Guy and others, as inherited from theatrical traditions. Guy, herself, dressed as the husband in her 1902 "Midwife to the Upper Class." Of course, queer readings may also include homoerotic considerations to be made of all this gender fluidity. Quite amusing and sophisticated for such a simple shot-scene from early cinema.

Pathé made a four-shot version around the same time--likely after stealing the idea from Gaumont, titled "Lèvres collées" ("Joined Lips") (1906 or 1907).

A cute little scene, directed by the first film director, Alice Guy: a woman's maid is helping her at the post office by licking stamps, and a passing rake decides to steal a kiss with some unexpected results and a good payoff gag.

Although things were beginning to move in terms of film direction by 1906, Miss Guy's direction is simple and straightforward. Even as actualities -- basically, newsreel clips -- would be directed with a lot of cuts and interesting camera angles by Danish film makers, this remains primitive. It is, however, effective as the jokes involved are funny.