Alice Guy-Blaché's The Race for the Sausage might be the pinnacle of the "chase film," that short-lived genre of movies from the very early 20th century that balanced narrative storytelling with delirious spectacle. Perhaps the best known example of the genre is Edwin S. Porter's How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the New York Herald Personal Columns (1904). But Guy-Blaché blows that film out of the water with this madcap story of a pooch who pilfers a string of sausages and leads a group of townsfolk on a chase. Unlike the aforementioned Porter film, the interconnected segments of people running in and out of frame do more than just provide the spectacle of people running. Each segment is also a set-up for slapstick. One segment has them smashing over a street-vendor's wares, another has them disrupting a peasant woman with a cart of animals, another has them running through a nice house, and so on and so forth. There's even a running gag that provides a darkly sinister undercurrent to the film: a woman with a baby carriage gets pulled into the chase and knocked over multiple times. And how does that sub-plot end? With the baby carriage getting run over by a train.
When the woman takes the baby out of the carriage before it gets hit by the train you can clearly tell its the same baby from American Sniper!
ReplyDeleteAlso this short works very well when playing Yakety Sax.
Pfff! Ha!
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