Le Torchon brûle ou Une querelle de ménage / [The Rag Is Burning / A Domestic Dispute / Marital Strife]

Roméo Bosetti: Le Torchon brûle ou Une querelle de ménage (FR 1911) starring Sarah Duhamel. Photo from Paul Cuff's blog The Realm of Silence with an excellent photo carousel from this movie.

(Echtelijke Twist) (FR 1911) regia/dir: Roméo Bosetti. prod: Pathé Frères. cast: Sarah Duhamel (moglie/wife). copia/copy: DCP, 5'21"; titolo di testa/main title: NLD; senza did./no intertitles. fonte/source: Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (Desmet Collection).

    Grand piano: Philip Carli.

    Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM): Slapstick Prog. 5 Marriage Rows, 13 Oct 2023.

Steve Massa (GCM 2023): " Domestic battles and mass destruction were frequent subjects for early slapstick comedies, but rarely were they combined or presented as extremely as in this film. It starts with a couple at home fighting over dinner, but it soon spirals wildly and spreads all over town – through the city streets, up steep staircases, and even down the sewers – with a prodigious amount of crockery and furniture destroyed along the way. The Dutch title on the print, Echtelijke Twist, translates as “Marital Strife” – certainly an understatement here! Director Roméo Bosetti was the Renaissance man of the first generation of European comedy – not only did he direct, write, and produce an amazing output of shorts for other people, but also had his own “Roméo” series for Pathé. Coming from music hall and circuses, he joined Pathé in 1906, and soon moved over to Gaumont, only to return to Pathé. With his own Pathé unit, Comica, he turned out shorts with Little Moritz, Léontine, and Rosalie. "

" Other studios he worked for include Lux, Éclair, and Éclipse, where actors such as Paul Bertho, Lucien Bataille, and Clément Mégé essayed a list of characters of the likes of Bombino, Zoé, Casimir, Gavroche, Moustache, Purtin, Bigorno, and Calino. He even found the time to work as a producer, most notably on Feuillade’s Fantômas, and although his film career ended in 1916, said to have been due to injuries he suffered during World War I, he lived to 1948. "

" Often in comedies of this period when a woman was going to be involved in intense physical knockabout, the role would be played by a man in drag. Not so with Sarah Duhamel, who along with later practitioners like Alice Howell and Polly Moran, took and handed out more physical punishment than any other woman in the history of cinema. Although she’s sadly overlooked today, her contribution to early film comedy was immense. Gifted with an amazingly expressive face that was mounted on a roly-poly body, she was sweet-natured but always excitable, and refused to suffer fools gladly (meaning most of the men in her films). "

" Having been a child actress on the stage from the age of three, she almost literally burst on the screen in 1911. Incredibly prolific, she starred in her own “Rosalie” series, and was frequently partnered with Little Moritz and Casimir, and later headlined as Pétronille for Éclair. After marrying actor Édouard Louis Schmitt she retired from f ilms in 1916, but continued working on stage. She made one last appearance in Les Mystères de Paris (1922) before her death in 1926. " Steve Massa

AA: Steve Massa states above that the Dutch title of this movie translates as "Marital Strife” – certainly an understatement here!" Le Torchon brûle belongs to the disaster current of early film comedy. Never in the history of comedy there has been so much appetite for destruction.

She "refused to suffer fools gladly" says Steve about the characters portrayed by Sarah Duhamel. Certainly another understatement here!

The battle of the sexes starts as ein Kammerspiel but quickly escalates into a vicious spiral threatening an entire city.

Roméo Bosetti keeps the hyperbole mode and the escalation structure well in hand.