User Reviews

I've noticed that quite a few films that were apparently directed by Alice Guy (at least according to a DVD released by Kino) are listed on IMDb as having been directed by Louis Feuillade. This film is one of these seemingly misidentified films.

It appears that a guy has been thrown out of his apartment. So, he rolls his bed onto the street and tries to sleep. However, the crowd of people who see him shove the bed down a flight of steps and it begins rolling all over town. It's all very slapstick and is quite similar to some of the Keystone films in America. It's stupid,...but also kind of funny.

A man is evicted from his apartment. The only possession he takes, besides his clothes, is his bed, which moves on wheels or casters. In the steep streets, however, the bed won't stop rolling along, spreading havoc wherever it and he go.

Like the longer-lasting comedy bit about Murphy beds -- which would not appear for another seven years -- the man in a bed rolling down the street was a popular comed trope. Although this short came out in a year when it seemed that every type of item from matress through pumpkin was involved in a comedy chase, I believe the reasn this held on longer because of the absurd tension between the concept of a restful night's sleep and the constant motion of the bed.

A penniless tenant takes to the street with his rolling bed when he is evicted, only to find himself a helpless passenger as it races through the streets. Another good comedy from Alice Guy, whose films for Gaumont always seemed to add something new to cinematic trends that were beginning to grow a little stale because of repetition/duplication. It seems as if every street in France in the early 1900s had at least one stray dog eager to join in the fun...

For the most part, "The Rolling Bed" features decent continuity editing for its day. The set-up for the action across shots is similar to that of the then-popular chase genre, but instead of a bunch of characters chasing after someone, here the movement is instigated by the runaway bed. Whether the man on the bed was evicted from his home and whether the bed is his only possession for him to take with him, I'm not sure, but story particulars are unimportant at this stage; it's the flow of the plot that matters. In this respect, the knockabout comedy works fairly well across its nine shots, with the exception of an awkward cut crossing the axis of action from shot two to three. But, there's a nice reverse angle to make up for that later when the bed is caught on the back of a train.

Since Alice Guy married Herbert Blaché and left for the United States early in 1907 (February), it is rather more probable that this film, which appeared late in the year, is the work of Louis Feuillade, whom she had named as her replacement and who had already been working with her since 1905. In fact, according to her biographer, the film was written by Feuillade and directed by the Italian Roméo Bosetti.

Similarities with Keystone slapstick are purely superficial. This is a very typical havoc-chase type European comedy of a kind that remained popular right up until the First World War (the Italian film Butalin fa i suoi comodi in 1912 is very similar). Such films are slapstcik but in a rather different way. The French and Italian films often have a slightly surreal note and the mayhem is nearly always accidentally caused and there is relatively little of the personal violence that characterises the US variety (beating, kicking, cudgelling, pricking with pins, throwing of bricks, shooting, bombs etc), which was all very much a personal legacy of Mack Sennett (such things are interestingly largely absent from the earlier comedies he made for Biograph under the eye of Griffith).