Léontine on Vacation

In a playful, reflexive take on the familiar “last-minute rescue” formula, a woman and her housekeeper left alone at home miss-read shadows projected from the street outside and fear a violent assault. Male police officers dispatched to rescue them correctly diagnose the situation, with hilarious results, including a late gender reveal. Notable for its early use of triptych.

Léontine helps her pal Rosalie (Sarah Duhamel) race against time to clean up a house after Rosalie’s boss, Baron von Hummen, announces that he and Madame will return home earlier than planned. They recruit workers and poach resources from a nearby construction site. As we see, it takes a village to tidy a house on short notice (or at least it should!), but there’s a limit to the capacities of even collective domestic labor. Accelerated productivity gives way to sheer physical anarchy and irreversible destruction. Dirt and debris pervade every surface—furniture and skin alike—leading to several unfortunate blackening gags.

Léontine cannot resist her desire to sail her new toy boat indoors. She plugs up the drains and turns on the faucets, flooding the house as water rains down through the floorboards and collapses the ceilings.

Anarchic physical destruction

Rosalie is a maid for a wealthy family and receives a letter that her cousin is coming to visit. She assumes that a burglar is her cousin and the mix-up and chaos begins.

Pétronille's husband jockey, Tortillard, face-plants in the middle of the track. She puts on his clothes and mounts his steed, “despite her rotund build” at 100 kilos. She leads the other riders on an off-track equestrian escapade, eventually making it back to the course.

A French silent film serial which follows the exploits of the archvillain Fantômas, who commits crimes while eluding Inspector Juve's tireless persecution.

Rosalie moves into an apartment building, disturbing her neighbors above, below, and next to her.

Pétronille tries and fails to commit suicide, multiple ways, after her boyfriend Casimir dumps her. A morbid but amusing comedy.

The wife of Patouillard begs him for new clothes according to the latest fashion in the newspapers. So they go out for some shopping. Afterwards she is going out in her new dress, which is so tight that she can hardly walk in it. She changes the skirt for a pair of trousers, but finds herself being laughed at, and when the trousers get wet at the seaside, Patouillard finally puts her in a jute bag and makes her hop back home.

Wimpy Little Moritz needs to toughen up to win Rosalie, but ends up smashing everyone and everything in sight when boxing lessons turn him into a mindless fighting machine. (MoMA)

In a last gasp effort to school Titine in domestic labor, her parents entrust her with housesitting. She executes her obligations with catastrophic aplomb, shattering all the dishes in the gesture of cleaning them. She manages to flood and incinerate her entire home simultaneously. In a futile effort to find her baby brother and pet dog, she inherits a horde of stray canines and orphaned babies.

In an effort to secure a promised inheritance, Onésime invents a time machine that speeds up activity on earth, hyper-animates men and machines, and telescopes the human life-cycle.

When Patouillard meets another woman at a street cafe, his jealous wife dresses up as a man in a suit and beard to spy on him.

A jolly housekeeper brings new meaning to the notion of “home entertainment” with a handsome new portable phonograph that causes people, furniture, and buildings to rock and roll through the magic of stop-motion animation. (MoMA)

A pumpkin vendor returns with her loaded car. Two pranksters overturn the car, and what follows is a truly hilarious and eventful pumpkin hunt. (Nouveautés Cinématographiques, February 3, 1908)