IMDb's title for this French comedy translates as 'The Son of the Devil Spends the Night in Paris'. I saw this film in July 1996 at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna; they screened a print with a French title which translated merely as 'The Son of the Devil in Paris'. The Bologna print was restored from two separate sources: an original French monochrome nitrate print, and an Italian print which had been released with hand tinting. The film's screenplay is credited to Hugues Laurent. The running time of this print was 15 minutes.
This short movie's chief appeal to me is the fact that it stars Andre Deed, who is the earliest known (and probably the very first) film comedian in the modern sense of an actor who repeats the same comic role in a series of films, relying on audience familiarity to build his appeal. Deed typically portrayed a generic simpleton, billed by various names in the different countries where his very popular comedies were exhibited: Cretinetti in Italy, Foolshead in Britain, and so forth.
Here, Deed steps out of his usual characterisation to play the upstart son of Beelzebub himself. One might assume that the Devil's own son would never be bored, but -- as played here by Deed -- he is very bored indeed. Perhaps he's merely waiting to take over the family business. At any rate, when a devil is bored with the pleasures of Hell, there's only one place that can entertain him: oui oui, Paree! Our junior devil sets off for the City of Lights, where he dallies with a peasant girl.
This very early and very crude comedy doesn't stand up to much analysis, but even so I found myself wondering about a few things while I was watching it. For instance: why is Deed's character explicitly identified as the Devil's son rather than the Devil himself? French cinema audiences clearly had no objection to seeing the Devil portrayed on screen, as Georges Melies's films (from this same period) prove. Also, the unbilled actress who plays Deed's dalliance here is plainly portraying a peasant girl from the provinces rather than a Parisienne, so why did the junior devil bother going to Paris instead of, say, the Languedoc region?
It would be unfair of me to compare this crude comedy to the more sophisticated films made even a decade later. On its own merits, compared to other movies being made at the time, I'll rate this slapdash comedy 7 out of 10.
This short movie's chief appeal to me is the fact that it stars Andre Deed, who is the earliest known (and probably the very first) film comedian in the modern sense of an actor who repeats the same comic role in a series of films, relying on audience familiarity to build his appeal. Deed typically portrayed a generic simpleton, billed by various names in the different countries where his very popular comedies were exhibited: Cretinetti in Italy, Foolshead in Britain, and so forth.
Here, Deed steps out of his usual characterisation to play the upstart son of Beelzebub himself. One might assume that the Devil's own son would never be bored, but -- as played here by Deed -- he is very bored indeed. Perhaps he's merely waiting to take over the family business. At any rate, when a devil is bored with the pleasures of Hell, there's only one place that can entertain him: oui oui, Paree! Our junior devil sets off for the City of Lights, where he dallies with a peasant girl.
This very early and very crude comedy doesn't stand up to much analysis, but even so I found myself wondering about a few things while I was watching it. For instance: why is Deed's character explicitly identified as the Devil's son rather than the Devil himself? French cinema audiences clearly had no objection to seeing the Devil portrayed on screen, as Georges Melies's films (from this same period) prove. Also, the unbilled actress who plays Deed's dalliance here is plainly portraying a peasant girl from the provinces rather than a Parisienne, so why did the junior devil bother going to Paris instead of, say, the Languedoc region?
It would be unfair of me to compare this crude comedy to the more sophisticated films made even a decade later. On its own merits, compared to other movies being made at the time, I'll rate this slapdash comedy 7 out of 10.
