User Reviews

Not enjoying as much popularity as his contemporary counterparts (perhaps due to his brief career), Gaston Velle made of "Dévaliseurs nocturnes" (one of his earliest directional efforts) one of his very best films, being a rather ambitious one as well.

Its title pretty much gives away the plot of the story, so I won't give anything else away, but it's worth highlighting the bicycle tracking shot, which was quite impressive for a 1904 movie (even though we can now clearly tell the bicycle was standing on some sort of moving platform, possibly a freight car). There's a well-defined storyline where every detail is taken care of. Add the traditional happy ending in order to please audiences, then you've got an entertaining movie.

Don't expect much more about this. As I said, the movie is complex for its day but so were others, and, unfortunately, Gaston Velle doesn't bring anything new to the scene. We could even say this is a good movie we've already seen before, reaching out to the commercial film concept. The actors do a good deed, especially the burglars, looking even quite professional, whereas the good ones look just as clumsy and ridiculous as real clowns.

The movie drags a little in the end but that's just a modern point of view to it. These days, we've got to see so many thief pursuits, I was frankly much more impressed by the beginning rather than the by its end, but I'm sure audiences were thrilled back then. Finally, my favorite scene is an outdoors night scene at the beginning. I believe the atmosphere caused the impact on me but I also believe it turned out that way just by pure chance. Anyhow, the movie is well-paced, well-intentioned and very entertaining (as said earlier). That's why it deserves to rank almost as high as its contemporaries despite its lack in originality.

Gaston Velle and Segundo de Chomon were the two directors at Pathe charged with directing movies in the style of Georges Melies and, using the larger budgets and staffs available to them, eventually drove him out of business.

Neither, however, limited themselves to those movies and in this crime drama from 1904 we have an enormously sophisticated story film in sixteen scenes, using a cyclorama and a film grammar that had clearly evolved into modern film grammar with consecutive action clearly delineated -- compare this to the work that Edwin Porter was doing in the US at the time, works like LIFE OF AN American FIREMAN.

True enough, the acting is clearly stage-bound, the actors flailing around a bit, but for the era the piece is amazingly advanced and even today is understandable and amusing.

This piece of inspired lunacy is one of my favourite films of the early 1900s. It is not, to my mind,"good for its time", "good for 1904"; it is just simply good.

Velle, in making "trick films" did certainly have Méliès in mind and one or two films that he made bear a resemblance to Méliès films. This film is not really a trick film (although it does make use of special effects)but is nevertheless a little reminiscent of Méliès' Sur les toits (1897), again not a trick film but itself a parody version of a "burglars on the roof" film made by Georges Hatot for the Lumières which appeared earlier the same year and which Hatot would remake both when under contract at Gaumont (1898) and later again at Pathé (1901). So it is true that basic theme had been around for a while.

But it is quite wrong to say that Velle adds nothing new. Méliès' films were later lauded by the surrealists who evidently found in them a resemblance to the kind of oneiric "reality" they proposed. To my mind, however, Velle, far more than Méliès, foreshadows surrealism in one or two of his films and it is precisely these added surreal touches that make them good films. Here it is very definitely the elements that Velle adds are the business on the roof (with the burglars "drilling" their way in), the silhouette effects and, above all, the extraordinary bike-ride to fetch the policeman.

There are actually two versions of this films in existence and both are available on youtube (one tinted and one black and white). One must clearly be a longer make of the other (and may therefore date from a couple of year later). Although the scenario remains basically the same, the actors are different, there are small variations here and there in the scenes and the black and white film is nearly twice the length. The tinted version is unquestionably the original 1904 film because it matches the details given in the Pathé catalogue both in terms of length (75m) and in terms of the ending.

In some ways the original ending, with the thieves simply escaping away on the stolen bicycle, is preferable; the second ending (not described in the catalogue) is more politically correct with the peasant and the policeman pursuing the cycling thieves in a car and eventually catching them. The shorter version is better quality and the tinting is attractive and effective but the pleasure of the long version is the greater time devoted to the bicycle ride (indicating that this was always the principal selling-point of the film). The incompetent policeman in an old-fashioned uniform comes from Mèliès but the idea of fetching a policeman on a bike and carrying him on the handlebars while he gives directions to the cyclist who cannot see - and if that is not original, I don't know what is - is entirely Velle's and what a brilliant and bizarre idea it is! It is indeed a sophisticated film, with excellent cutting between the various scenes. The bicycle-ride is beautifully done and not of course intended to be "realistic". "Now we can clearly see that the bike was mounted on some kind of moving platform" says one reviewer, proud of his modern superiority, but does he really think a viewer in 1904 thought any differently. In fact the 1904 audience were almost certainly rather more conscious of the effects used because this would have been one of the talking-points of such films, just as people today discuss the special effects in modern films. Moving platforms had been one of the centre-pieces of the Paris Exposition of 1900 and can be seen in many of the films shot there. Films celebrated technology from their very outset and there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that cinema-goers then were just as techno-wise with regard to the technology of their own time as any audience of the "digital" age.

I don't believe in "rating" films (and certainly not out of ten) but this is one of the films I use in talks - along with Perez/Fabre's delightful Amor Pedestre and Emerson and Loos's superb The Mystery of the Leaping Fish - to try and convince those unfamiliar with early films that there is nothing necessarily in the least bit "primitive" or backward about them. The best still stand up today as fine films (the only allowance that has to be made is for the relative short length to which films were still restricted which obviously does represent a limitation.