Watch How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the 'New York Herald' Personal Columns For Free

Sadly Over-hyped

Instant Favorite.

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

"How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the 'New York Herald' Personal Columns" is such a long title for a relatively short film as this one here is a 7.5-minute live action short film from the black-and-white silent era over a century ago, actually almost 115 years now already. Director is legendary American filmmaker Edwin S. Porter from the birth of movies, very prolific and successful director and here we got his work on a French nobleman that all the ladies want. The beginning is solid, the middle part quickly gets repetitive and I was about to give the film a lower rating and negative recommendation, but the cute ending really saved it. It was like (a good version of) Bachelor from the early 20th century. Acting is good enough, doesn't need to be great as charm is where this film eventually delivers the most. Intertitles aren't needed this time although they admittedly could have added some comedic spice at least in the middle of the film. All in all, I give this one a thumbs-up and recommend checking it out.

. . . HOW A FRENCH NOBLEMAN GOT A WIFE THROUGH THE 'NEW YORK HERALD' PERSONAL COLUMNS from 1904 is basically a Sadie Hawkins cross country race with the alleged frog being the first and only prize. Pursued over hill and dale by a posse of 11 fully-dressed women (these were Taliban times in America), the ad placer is soon chased far away from the original Grant's Tomb starting point. Seeing all these chicks running along while holding on to their large fancy dress hats with one hand is a real hoot. The course includes a jaunt across a golf course, with the obligatory detour through a bunker. By the time the running dozen reach the log jump, the pace of the pursuit has picked up markedly (apparently there was a desperate shortage of men in the New York area at the time this 8-minute short was shot). This steeplechase culminates in some sort of pond or crick, into which the quarry is cornered. The eleven ladies stop to confer over which member of the distaff set most deserves the prize (the thrill seemingly all in the hunt, and NOT the kill). The consensus agreement allows the most obese lady harrier to wade into the shallow waters to claim her spoils.

This Edison Company chase film with an overly long title is a plagiarized remake of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company's (AM&B) "Personal", which was made and released earlier the same year. In fact, AM&B unsuccessfully sued Edison over it. Such plagiarism was rampant in early cinema; every distributor did it. For foreign films especially, they generally didn't even bother remaking it, but, instead, simply duped the prints and sold them as their own. The most famous example of this is probably the American distribution of Georges Méliès's "Le voyage dans la lune" (A Trip to the Moon) (1902). American film innovators like Edwin S. Porter, the filmmaker of this remake, essentially learned film technique and were encouraged to produce more complicated story films through the process of duping and remaking the then more advanced films of Europeans like Méliès and G.A. Smith.According to Charles Musser (using both his "Before the Nickelodeon" and "The Emergence of Cinema" as sources), the Edison remake probably sold better than the original "Personal". The remake undermined AM&B's distribution practice of initially exhibiting their films to licensed theatres on the vaudeville market while withholding the pictures up to several months before selling them to everyone else. This system allowed Edison's remake to go to the open market before AM&B's original. After the failed lawsuit, AM&B started selling their films soon after production. (By the way, the reason the lawsuit was ruled in favor of Edison was that AM&B had failed to copyright "Personal" as a dramatic work, in addition to their copyrighting the film as a photograph.) Back then, cinema was still a rather small industry and a new one for which laws were being created and adjusted. Some numbers will give an indication of the size of the movie industry. In the lawsuit, AM&B claimed damages of $3,000. This Edison film was the company's biggest hit of the year, for which they sold 71 prints in six months and 85 complete prints total in 1904-1905 (Musser).Although it's near identical to "Personal", there are some differences between the two films, although I had to look closely at the two to see them (thanks to a handy dual purpose VCR and DVD player). AM&B's film consists of 10 shots and Edison's film consists of nine plus an expositional title card at the beginning. Additionally, "Personal" features nine women pursing the French nobleman (actually, I counted 10 during the scenes at Grant's Tomb, but one of them apparently gave up after that). Porter one-upped the original, with 11 women (although shot 5 appears to discontinuously include only 8 of them). Since both films show every character enter and exit the frame of each shot, the addition of two women is probably the main reason why the Edison remake is close to twice as long (675 feet compared to 371 feet).Because early chase comedies generally repeated the same set-up of the chase in each shot—just changing the obstacle that the pursued and pursuers faced—in addition to showing every character enter and exit the frame in every shot, the scenes were mostly interchangeable, almost self-contained units. Thus, in the Edison film, the characters scale over a steep embankment in shot five; while in 'Personal', the characters perform a nearly identical act, but do so in shot eight. Other near identical scenes include the initial meetings and beginning of the chase at Grant's Tomb, the crossing of a bridge, and the climbing of a fence. For the remake, Porter dropped some of the less interesting shots and added an opening medium shot of the French Nobleman checking for his ad in the personal column while standing in front of a mirror, and he changed the ending. Originally, the nobleman was forced to marry at gunpoint after being caught behind some bushes, which was probably more comedic and certainly more violent. Porter changed this to one of the women being willing to walk through a body of water to catch her soon-to-be-husband: sweeter, if not as funny.Next, Porter and Edison made a near-identical remake of AM&B's chase film "The Escaped Lunatic", re-titled "Maniac Chase".

This short comedy is a pretty amusing version of the kind of idea that was pretty popular material for the one-reel features of the first decade of the 1900s. Besides this Edison feature, there was also a version by American Biograph and Mutoscope, titled "Personal", and a version by Lubin, titled "Meet Me At the Fountain". This Edison version, "How A French Nobleman …" seems to be the easiest to find, and it has been preserved in good condition.The simple story has the Frenchman getting overwhelmed by a group of female suitors outside Grant's Tomb, leading to an entertaining chase scene, which could serve as a scaled-down version of the hilarious sequence in Keaton's "Seven Chances". Though this one is not as inventive as Keaton's sequence (what could be?), it still holds up well enough to provide some entertaining moments.Much of the detail and backgrounds can still be seen clearly, and the photography is good for 1904. It's above average for its era and genre.