User Reviews

The title of this film translates to "The Cruel Mother". At first, I had no idea why, as you see this lady sweeping and caring for her daughter. Then, oddly, she leaves and you see her in another home--who was the guy helping her in the first part of the film and why is she no longer in her humble home but in a nicer place? The film THEN switches back to the original crappy home! I had to watch the film three times until I think I understand the problem. I think (and I could be wrong) that the reel got messed up--edited wrong so that the second scene SHOULD have appeared first. Then the story would make a lot more sense.

The story seems to show a lady with a small child who becomes engaged to a man who has a child of his own. After they marry, she acts sweet in front of the hubby but slaps around his kid when the man isn't looking. Eventually the kid runs away but the nice policeman finds him. When the day and the cops figure out what's been happening, the husband goes home and threatens to throttle the lady if she does that again! Not exactly enlightened entertainment, but enjoyable once you realize what is happening...I think!

Positioned as "La Marâtre" is on Kino's Gaumont DVD set, between Alice Guy's more enjoyable comedies, including the especially excellent "Madame's Cravings," as well as "A Sticky Woman," "A Story Well Spun" and "The Drunken Mattress" (all from 1906), this melodrama about child abuse comes as an unwelcome downer. It's not merely the mood shift, either, as I don't care for these sorts of social-problem dramas anyways. This one in particular is dull, too, as there doesn't even seem to be a clear message along the lines of, say, the teetotalism of R.W. Paul's "Buy Your Own Cherries" (1904) or D.W. Griffith's "The Drunkard's Reformation" (1909). If the lesson is only that women may be brutal, too, it's a lousy excuse for a film.

Despite being short, the pacing across its seven shot-scenes is overly sluggish. A lecture based on a catalogue description would've helped, too, in describing the scenario, as some things seem to happen here without saying, such as the boy's biological mother being dead, apparently (the film's title, "La Marâtre," directly translates as "stepmother" rather than "cruel mother"), which would explain his visiting the cemetery, and an explanation for the woman being in a more posh room for one scene, before the man appears to propose, would've helped. And, I don't know what's up with the lengthy cuts to black between scenes--were there originally title cards, since lost, in these spaces that would've helped describe the film more clearly? Oh well, such minor clarifications probably wouldn't help much for what is a fundamentally flawed film--social commentary without much of a point, cruel and sad for the sake of it.

According to Alison McMahan (author of "Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema"), Gaumont's competitor, Pathé, as they were oft to do, plagiarized this film as "La Mauvaise Mére" (1906).